Australian Violence Crime, Criminal Justice and Beyond

Almost three decades have passed since a series of gun massacres shocked the nation and led to a major inquiry into Australian violence. Its ground breaking report unveiled the centrality of violence in our history and society – violence that commonly occurs in the routines and practices of everyday life – and the failings of the criminal justice system to deal with much of it. Australian Violence reflects shifts in our understanding of violence and debates issues surrounding it. It offers contemporary analyses of violence in the lives of women and girls, male drinking violence, prison violence, gun debates and gun-owning culture, and more recent concerns with hate crime, rural crime, harm directed at animals, risky and 'dangerous' offenders, and borders and detention, as well as new forms of community prevention and alternative criminal justice. It acknowledges state violence in Australia’s history and present, in the dispossession of Indigenous people and the denial of Indigenous knowledge, and the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. The book engages with international theory, research and practice but also offers a distinctive Australian approach that considers what it means to be a settler nation in the global south. The authors include scholars and researchers who have led critical study and national debates about these topics and perspectives on violence.

Foreword (Raewyn Connell) Australian Violence: Then and Now (Julie Stubbs and Stephen Tomsen) 1. Shooting, Spanking, Punching and Other Matters: Recollections on the Work and Impact of the National Committee on Violence (Duncan Chappell) 2. Guns and Massacres: The Politics of Firearms Control in Australia (Mark Finnane) 3. Violence in Rural Australia (Kerry Carrington and Russell Hogg) 4. Women, Girls and Gendered Violence (Julie Stubbs) 5. Penal Violence (David Brown) 6. Re-considering the Relationship Between Indigenous People and Violence (Chris Cunneen and Simon Rowe) 7. Violence as Hate Crime: The Emergence of a Discourse (Gail Mason) 8. The Death of Reza Barati and the Violence of Australian Border Policing (Michael Grewcock) 9. Risk, Dangerousness and Violence (Mark Brown) 10. Inter-Species Violence: Humans and the Harming of Animals (Rob White) 11. Nightlife Ethnography, Violence, Policing and Security (Stephen Tomsen and Phillip Wadds) 12. Safety in the Suburbs: Social Disadvantage, Community Mobilisation, and the Prevention of Violence (Rebecca Wickes, Ross Homel and Renee Zahnow) 13. Restorative Justice as an Innovative Response to Violence (Janet Chan, Jane Bolitho and Jenny Bargen)

Julie Stubbs is a criminologist and Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales. Her research is largely focused on gender and criminal justice. She has published widely on domestic violence, homicide, battered woman syndrome, sexual assault, restorative justice, bail, women’s imprisonment and justice reinvestment. Her recent publications include Justice Reinvestment: Winding Back Imprisonment (Brown et al, 2016, Palgrave Macmillan). She was a member of the NSW Criminal Justice Sexual Assault Taskforce and the NSW Advisory Panel on Domestic and Family Homicides and an advisor for the National Community Attitudes to Violence against Women surveys and the VicHealth violence against women program. Stephen Tomsen is Professor of Criminology at Western Sydney University. He is a sociologist and criminologist with decades of experience researching issues of socio-legal inequality, violence, masculinity, sexuality, drinking, drug use, urban order and criminal justice. His previous books include Violence, Prejudice and Sexuality (Routledge, 2009), Crime, Criminal Justice and Masculinities: a Reader (ed, Ashgate, 2008) and Lawyers in Conflict: Australian Lawyers and Legal Aid (co-author, Federation Press, 2006).