By Ann M. Nurse.

Knowledge to Action . This book describes the forces that shape our views of victims and offenders, while also providing an in-depth look at prevention efforts and current research. Topics include the prevalence of abuse, the impact of abuse on victims and families, offender characteristics, abuse in institutions, and the efficacy of treatments. Nurse’s book offers new public policy ideas as well as practical suggestions on how to engage in prevention work. Interactive links to studies, videos, and podcasts connect readers to further resources.

Lever Press (2020) 319 pages.

By Havelock Ellis.

The “science” of criminality as presented by the famous psychiatrist Havelock Ellis. Lavishly illustrated with empirical and physical evidence to support his theories, findings and other truth claims. In this 4th edition (1910) of The Criminal first published in 1890, Ellis is pleased that there is “an approximation to general agreement” concerning his findings.

London. New York. Walter Scott Publishing. (1910) 494 pages.

Arcus Foundation.

Killing, Capture, Trade and Conservation. The illegal trade in live apes, ape meat and body parts occurs across all ape range states and poses a significant and growing threat to the long-term survival of wild ape populations world- wide. What was once a purely subsistence and cultural activity, now encompasses a global multi-million-dollar trade run by sophisticated trans-boundary criminal networks. The chal- lenge lies in teasing apart the complex and interrelated factors that drive the ape trade, while implementing strategies that do not exacerbate inequality. This volume of State of the Apes brings together original research and analysis with topical case studies and emerging best practices, to further the ape conservation agenda around killing, capture and trade.

Cambridge (2021) 410 pages.

Arcus Foundation.

Killing, Capture, Trade and Conservation. The illegal trade in live apes, ape meat and body parts occurs across all ape range states and poses a significant and growing threat to the long-term survival of wild ape populations world- wide. What was once a purely subsistence and cultural activity, now encompasses a global multi-million-dollar trade run by sophisticated trans-boundary criminal networks. The chal- lenge lies in teasing apart the complex and interrelated factors that drive the ape trade, while implementing strategies that do not exacerbate inequality. This volume of State of the Apes brings together original research and analysis with topical case studies and emerging best practices, to further the ape conservation agenda around killing, capture and trade.

Cambridge University Press. (2021) 410 pages.

By Nicola Delvino.

In March 2019, local newspapers in Miami reported that Mabel – a Nicaraguan woman who had reached out to the Miami-Dade Police Department (MDPD) after suffering a sexual offence – was arrested and detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Mabel was reported to ICE by MDPD officers while she was still in the police station and cooperating with them in the investigations. A month earlier, The Nation reported the story of Nancy, a victim of rape who was deported from the United States to Mexico after reporting the crime to the police, testifying in court, and cooperating with US law enforcement authorities to ensure the prosecution and expulsion of the perpetrator. In 2018, it was reported that Maria, a Colombian survivor of domestic violence, was briefly arrested by immigration authorities at the Mecklenburg County Courthouse, in North Carolina, where she appeared for a hearing related to her case. Maria’s case is not isolated, as it is widely reported that immigration arrests at courthouses in the United States in the recent past have been targeting crime victims as often as perpetrators. In all these cases, the victims had suffered a crime while in the United States with an irregular migration status.

Oxford, UK: School of Anthropology, University of Oxford, 2019. 49p.

By Mary Wakeham.

This study adopts a feminist methodology to explore the coexistence of animal abuse and domestic abuse. This study builds on the growing body of research in this area that to date has largely been situated in the US, Canada and Australia to provide new knowledge. There were three phases of data collection in this research which included a national online survey, semi-structured interviews with victim-survivors of domestic violence and abuse and interviews with professionals.

The research findings provide compelling evidence that animal abuse is a strategy of coercive control and an act of animal cruelty. The oppression of women, children and animals are intertwined in patriarchal systems, and nowhere is this interconnection more apparent than in the co-occurrence of animal abuse and domestic violence and abuse. A human-centric approach dominates definitions and the prevailing public story about domestic violence and abuse across society. This conceptualisation focuses on the human victim-survivor in isolation but undermines the status of the animal and the importance of the animal in the dynamics of abuse. We need to extend our construction of domestic violence and abuse to include animals as victim-survivors. Animals are the silent victim- survivors of domestic violence and abuse.

The oppression of animals is compounded by the dominant status of animals in society as ‘less important’ than human beings and ‘property’ that is ‘owned’ by humans. This conceptualisation of animals is underpinned by animal welfare legislation in the UK that provides a platform for perpetrators of domestic abuse who abuse animals to justify and continue the abuse of animals often with little consequence or challenge. This research highlights the many parallels between the abuse of animals and people in the context of domestic abuse and the implications of the abuse for all victim-survivors – humans and animals.

Bristol, UK: University of Bristol, 2021. 261p.

By Pankhuri Agarwal.

Working with a simplistic notion of release from bondage as “freedom”, mainstream anti-trafficking activists focus on rescue. They argue that victims of trafficking are “free” once removed from their employers. Critics contest this approach and argue that significantly less attention is paid to the role of the state and the NGOs in producing conditions due to which people remain vulnerable. This research lends empirical support to this critical position through a multi-sited ethnography of informal migrant workers, sex workers, and law enforcement officers, traversing through courtrooms, police stations, district welfare offices, worksites, shelter homes, and offices of NGOs, in New Delhi, India. It corroborates that the authority of law is compromised ‘on ground’ and is actively negotiated within the legal space of anti-trafficking efforts. Instead of being instantly transported to “freedom”, the workers end up in protracted legal proceedings, ranging two to thirty-seven years, to seek justice and rights. Their rights are neglected due to a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Their mobility is restricted due to improper documentation. Their suffering is intensified through an evasive legal system. The result – arbitrary, unjust legal outcomes after an endless wait and dependence on intermediaries. In fact, their journey through the system, with cost and time overruns, has no direct or precise chronology, and often moves in a circle rather than reaching an end. The workers resemble the class of people that Denise Ferreira da Silva (2009) describes as “nobodies”. They continue to struggle to achieve the rights and recognition that would allow them to escape this status. The combination of empirical data, doctrinal analysis, and socio-legal theory in this research provide an insight on the harm and limits of the anti-trafficking discourse with reference to India.

Bristol, UK: University of Bristol, 2021. 233p.

By Fabio Armao.

The post-Cold War era was characterised by both the recurrence of state wars and the spread of forms of organised violence other than wars. Asymmetric warfare between alliances led by the USA and groups of insurgents, such as those witnessed in Afghanistan and Iraq, coexist alongside domestic conflicts, such as that of former Yugoslavia and, more recently, Libya and Syria; and still other conflicts involving gangs, mafias or narco-traffickers. The massive military-industrial complexes conceived in the context of the threat of nuclear Armageddon are still there of course, but they now coexist with irregular armies of insurgents carrying out massacres through the use of light weapons and improvised explosives devices. This book oppose the idea that this situation prefigures the return to an anarchical, pre-political condition, by assuming that new wars are rather the product of the blurring of the public-private divide, induced by the end of the Cold War, together with globalisation. As a consequence, also the internal and external factors are blurred; and ever more permeable and elusive is becoming even the border between war and crime. Inside War goes beyond a state-centered analysis and adopts an interdisciplinary and multilayered approach, and is intended to foster the dialogue among researchers from different fields. It places war at the core of analysis, assuming that the reality of war is what we make of it; and that the only insurmountable limit to our comprehension of war is our way of knowing and representing it. Fabio Armao teaches courses in Politics and Globalisation Processes, and Criminal Systems. He has been Visiting Professor at Cornell University, and co-convenor of the Standing Group on Organized Crime, European Consortium for Political Research. Founding member of T.wai (Torino World Affair Institute), he is also member of the Editorial Board of ‘Global Crime’. His research interests and publications focus on international wars and geopolitics, on violent non-state actors and transnational organised crime, and on urban security.

Warsaw, Poland: deGruyter, 2015. 224p.

By West Africa Commission on Drugs.

After looking at the evidence, consulting experts from the region and around the world, and visiting some of the most affected countries and communities in West Africa, the Commissioners of the West Africa Commission on Drugs detail their conclusions in this report about how the problems of drug trafficking and consumption in the region should be tackled.

Geneva: WACD, 2014. 64p.

Edited by Sandra J.T.M. Evers, Catrien Notermans and Erik van Ommering.

“Children should be seen, and not heard. The above maxim, though representing a Victorian value, was commonly pronounced in family homes up until a half century ago. It is based on the principle that a well-behaved child is a child who does not bother adults or disrupt their conversations. While such approaches have evolved considerably since then, in mainstream social science theory, children’s voices usually are not heard. Wallowing as it were in a phase of innocence, immaturity and dependence on adult care and protection, children continue to be largely deemed unfit as sources of scientific inquiry.”

Leiden. Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

By E.. Bähre.

From the eighties onward, when apartheid was crumbling, more and more Africans migrated to Cape Town, South Africa. They did not leave their homes in the Eastern Cape because they liked the city like the many tourists who, not unlike the Dutch East India Company of the colonial past, enjoy its revitalising qualities. To the Xhosa migrants Cape Town was, and still is, a hostile city. People fear murder, rape, and theft. They do not know their neighbours and friends are scarce. They have no family there, either living or dead, and racist attitudes are ever present. The Xhosa migrants have only one motivation for plunging themselves into the unknown and hostile squatter camps of Cape Town and that is money. This ethnography concerns the way in which Xhosa migrants in the townships of Cape Town collectively manage their money in financial self-help groups, also known as financial mutuals.1 The migrants organise a myriad of groups in which the participants collectively save, borrow, lend, or use their hard-earned money to form insurances. Some mutuals consisted of only a few neighbours who met each month at a member’s home, with each giving about R200 to the host member until all members had had a turn. Other mutuals were complex arrangements where members saved money together, mostly for Christmas, but also issued loans to each other. There were also many insurance arrangements involving up to a couple of hundred members that made sure that money was available to attend the funeral of a relative back home, or to prevent a burial in Cape Town itself. One could join a group voluntarily and the social constraint of fellow members would make sure that not all the money would be spent but would be used for the contribution to the financial mutual.

Leiden/Boston: Brill Academic Publisher, 2007. 205p.

By Rachel Money-Howes.

Exploring the Politics of the Personal in the Age of Digital Media. This book examines the nature, use and scope of online spaces for anti-rape activism, offering a critical commentary on its limitations and potentials.

Emerald Publishing (2020) 185 pages.

By Cesare Lombroso.

From the Preface: “Just as giants pay a heavy ransom for their stature in sterility and relative muscular and mental weakness, so the giants of thought expiate their intellectual force in degeneration and psychoses. It is thus that the signs of degeneration are found more frequently in men of genius than even in the insane.”

NY. Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1891) 403 pages.

Edited by Zeb Tortorici and Neil L. Whitehead.

Ethnopornography collects essays that both develop and critique the concept that gives the book its name. Ethnopornography, a term first coined by British anthropologist Walter Roth in the late nineteenth century, refers to the often eroticized observation—for supposedly scientific or academic purposes—of those deemed “other” by the observer. In Roth’s case, he was concerned that the descriptions and images he recorded of the bodily and sexual practices of the Aboriginal people he studied were inappropriate for lay readers who might find them vulgar—or worse, titillating. The editors of this collection focus on what it is that creates the slippage between the pornographic and the scientific. In particular, they attend to the importance of race within the colonially created and maintained worlds of both research—ethnography in particular—and pornography.

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020. 281p.

Edited by Sara Polak and Daniel Trottier

.History, Affect, and Effects of Online Vitriol. “Trolls for Trump', virtual rape, fake news - social media discourse, including forms of virtual and real violence, has become a formidable, yet elusive, political force. What characterizes online vitriol? How do we understand the narratives generated, and also address their real-world - even life-and-death - impact? How can hatred, bullying, and dehumanization on social media platforms be addressed and countered in a post-truth world? This book unpicks discourses, metaphors, media dynamics, and framing on social media, to begin to answer these questions. Written for and by cultural and media studies scholars, journalists, political philosophers, digital communication professionals, activists and advocates, this book makes the connections between theoretical approaches from cultural and media studies and practical challenges and experiences 'from the field', providing insight into a rough media landscape.”

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 267p.

By M. J. L. Hardy.

And the Payment of Blood Money in The Middle East. The classic text on feuding, violence and the rules of engagement. “…traces the history of a distinctive legal institution in Arab society, that of settling of blood feuds and the payment of blood money following cases of violent death of physical injury.”

Beirut (1963) 101p.

By Elizabeth T. Hurren.

In this discipline-redefining book, Elizabeth T. Hurren maps the post-mortem journeys of bodies, body parts, organs and brains, inside the secretive culture of modern British medical research after WWII as the bodies of the deceased were harvested as bio-commons. Often the human stories behind these bodies were dissected, discarded or destroyed in death. Hidden Histories of the Dead recovers human faces and supply-lines in the archives that medical science neglected to acknowledge. It investigates the medical ethics of organ donation, the legal ambiguities of a lack of fully informed consent and the shifting boundaries of life and re-defining of medical death in a biotechnological era. Hurren reveals the implicit, explicit and missed body disputes that took second place to the economics of the national and international com modification of human material in global medical sciences of the Genome era. This title is also available as open access.

Cambridge University Press. (2021) 350 pages.

By Gregg Barak.

Th author takes a broad-gauged cultural studies approach to understanding the "trial of the century." A ground-breaking work on the cultural study of news reporting, entertainment, and the administration of criminal justice. This book defined the field in the emerging area of news-making criminology.

NY. Harrow and Heston Publishers. 2012. 382p.

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By Sarah Stoner and Jenny Feltham.

‘Wildlife trade on e-commerce sites in China, with a focus on mammoth ivory: A Rapid Assessment’, analysis of this research reveals that the majority of advertised wildlife products are legally permitted for sale. However, the prevalence of mammoth ivory found legally for sale raises concerns about perpetuating demand for elephant ivory products which is now illegal in China. Our research looked at e-commerce platforms like Alibaba and 1688, allowing us to conclude that measures taken by these platforms and by the Chinese government have helped curb online sales of illegal wildlife products. The research identified 4,297 advertisements of wildlife, parts and derivatives, in total, 637 (15%) advertisements were identified as referring to the sale of Protected species, while a minimum of 3,657 (85%) of the identified advertisements were classified as Not Protected and therefore are deemed to be legal. Items derived from mammoth ivory were the most common type of wildlife product for sale on these platforms.

The Hague: Wildlife Justice Commission, 2021. 35p.

By Cathy Haenlein.

This paper argues that large-scale illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing takes place on an organised, systematic scale across multiple jurisdictions, and must therefore be recognised as transnational organised crime. Such IUU fishing endangers food security, threatens livelihoods, undermines the rule of law and deprives states of revenues. It also intersects with other crimes, further amplifying the threat to security. Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing is conventionally treated by governments worldwide as the result of technical regulatory infringements. As such, it is often deemed a matter for industry regulators and dismissed as a trivial issue insofar as it relates to national security. This diagnosis is flawed. Certainly, IUU fishing is often small in scale and conducted by artisanal fishers out of ignorance of laws, or opportunism. Yet there is also evidence that much of today’s IUU fishing activity takes place on an organised, systematic scale across multiple jurisdictions. Testament to this are the volumes involved. Although numerous difficulties affect such calculations, global losses to IUU fishing have been estimated at some $10–23.5 billion annually – equivalent to 11–26 million tonnes of fish per year. The result is the plunder of the world’s oceans, threatening not only marine ecosystems, but also the security of human populations. Large-scale IUU fishing endangers food security, threatens livelihoods, undermines the rule of law and deprives states of revenues. It also intersects with other crimes, further amplifying the threat to security. Yet research on these security dimensions is limited and fragmented; our understanding of their dynamics remains partial. Policy and practical responses, meanwhile, remain ill-suited, failing to keep pace with the complexity of the threat posed.

London: Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), 2019. 56p.