Crime,Media,Culture: An International Journal

Paul Nizan (1905–1940) is also known in France as the ‘impossible communist’, for his long-term allegiance to the Party and the abrupt cancellation of his membership, in the late 1930s, following the Nazi–Soviet pact. This paper discusses a number of his writings, focusing particularly on his best known novel, The Conspiracy, where a revolutionary cell plans illegal political action. Conflict, nihilism, suicide and betrayal are among the topics stemming from the novel, which will be examined from a criminological perspective. The analysis will primarily address ‘cultural’ aspects of crime and refer to notions such as ‘thrill’ and ‘seductions of crime’ among others. These notions, it will be argued, require some revision in the face of the imagined or actual criminality described in the novel.

In 2009 in Hobart, Australia, a 12-year-old ward of the state was advertised in a metropolitan newspaper as an 18-year-old prostitute. The decision to prosecute only one of the 100-plus men alleged to have paid her for sex made national headlines and gave rise to allegations of a conspiracy involving the highest levels of government and the judiciary. It also resulted in reform of the state’s laws relating to the ‘mistake as to age’ defence. This paper examines news coverage of the institutional responses to this criminal matter in order to theoretically understand the relationship between contemporary journalistic representations of crime and politicised controversy about social problems such as child sexual exploitation. Drawing on an analysis of problem framing in news coverage and interviews with journalists and their sources, it investigates how the news value of the story was identified and seeks to identify the point at which news coverage tipped beyond social usefulness towards public outrage and conspiracy.

Copycat crimes have not been identified or measured in a coherent manner. To forward the study of copycat crime, a methodology was developed to empirically score crimes that are suspected of being copycat crimes on a scale from “unsubstantiated” to “substantiated”. The copycat crime measure utilized seven factors culled from the extant literature to differentiate and score a demonstration set of 51 candidate copycat crimes associated with commercial entertainment films. Two examples of analysis and research questions that can be subsequently pursued utilizing the scoring approach are provided. A means of measuring copycat crime will provide interested researchers the capability to examine research questions related to copycat crime trends, media content and copycat crime, social media and copycat crime, and different types of copycat crime.

The damaging effects, for both the victims and perpetrators, of photographing sexual assault should be self-evident. However, in the cases of Rehtaeh Parsons, Jane Doe and Audrie Pott, photographs of sexual violence seem to have been taken and digitally disseminated without regard for the possible consequences. Thus, these cases pose disturbing questions about the ways that sexual violence is normalized and legitimized in western culture and the ways that new media is implicated in this process. These cases demonstrate how the ubiquity and permanence of digital photographs create new concerns for victims of sexual violence and new questions regarding the interpretive matrix of photographs. Using Judith Butler’s theory on photography, torture and framing, I argue that these cases are an example of what Butler refers to as the digitalization of evil. Through this framework, I will discuss the ways that new media exacerbates experiences of sexual violence and examine issues surrounding the interpretation of photographs of sexual violence.

Albert Pierrepoint was Britain’s most famous 20th-century hangman. This article utilises diverse sources in order to chart his public representation, or cultural persona, as hangman from his rise to prominence in the mid-1940s to his portrayal in the biopic Pierrepoint (2005). It argues that Pierrepoint exercised agency in shaping this persona through publishing his autobiography and engagement with the media, although there were also representations that he did not influence. In particular, it explores three iterations of his cultural persona – the Professional Hangman, the Reformed Hangman and the Haunted Hangman. Each of these built on and reworked historical antecedents and also communicated wider understandings and contested meanings in relation to capital punishment. As a hangman who remained in the public eye after the death penalty in Britain was abolished, Pierrepoint was an important, authentic link to the practice of execution and a symbolic figure in debates over reintroduction. In the 21st century, he was portrayed as a victim of the ‘secondary trauma’ of the death penalty, which resonated with worldwide campaigns for abolition.

In the aftermath of severe and unprecedented riots in a small Dutch town, local inhabitants express a broad and contradictory set of interpretations of what had happened and opinions on who should be held responsible. In order to understand this variety, we reinterpret Ewald’s theory on the transformations in the modern attitude towards risk and responsibility. Instead of distinct historical phases, the three attitudes identified by Ewald are simultaneously at play: punishment of delinquents, protection of victims, and precaution by the authorities. Only by taking all attitudes into account can we explain the variety of interpretations and the following, often contradictory, political responses. My findings also suggest that these three attitudes can be used as a model to make sense of contemporary security policies, which simultaneously emphasise punishment, protection, and precaution.