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Purpose – This study explores legal justifications for applying an enhanced criminal sanction to wrongs committed before, during, and after disasters.

Design/methodology/approach – This study uses recent social science evidence to evaluate the need for criminal statutes covering looting, price gouging, and other disaster-related offenses. Further, this study considers a broader historical context, identifying intersections of disaster crime and the common law's treatment of riots and public disorder.

Findings – Although individual disaster victims and communities are vulnerable to criminal harm, and this vulnerability often appears to motivate the punishment of disaster-related crimes, it is not the only or even the strongest justification available. As an alternative approach, one could focus on the public dimension of the harm – disaster-related crimes are particularly pernicious because they threaten to undermine the legitimate governing authority of the state.

Originality/value of paper – The public-order thesis yokes current legal doctrine to longstanding common law themes and, in so doing, departs from conventional justifications for the enhanced punishment of disaster-related crime. The critical perspective offered here could be extended to criminal penalty enhancements more generally. Moreover, because the rationale for identifying and punishing wrongful conduct is the fundamental question of criminal law, even a modest reassessment has potentially far-reaching implications.

In recent years, access to schooling for children orphaned and made vulnerable by AIDS has emerged as a major humanitarian concern, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. International discourse largely fails to define what “vulnerability” means, while also depicting “orphans and vulnerable children” as passive victims of complex social processes. This ethnographic study of a “typical” secondary school in semirural Lesotho investigates the research question: At the secondary level, how does “vulnerability” shape the educational participation and home life of young Basotho? Through extended observation, in-depth interviews, and student diaries, the study reveals that “vulnerable” children in Lesotho, who are locally defined as those without strong adult caregivers, actually exercise a high degree of autonomy that is often manifested through “stubbornness.” “Stubborn” students resist adult control and are closely associated with early sexual debut and high-risk behaviors. As a result of their resistance, they are often singled out by teachers for corporal punishment, increasing the likelihood that they will drop out of school. This chapter adds to the literature on youth agency by demonstrating that “acting stubborn” is one way in which “vulnerable” children can exercise control over their own lives and resist the status quo. In addition, the findings point to the failure of the school model, which is highly authoritarian, to retain “vulnerable” students and teach them valuable life skills, including HIV/AIDS prevention. Finally, this study demonstrates that local and culturally inflected definitions of “vulnerability” may not always align with international definitions and policy prescriptions.

Abuse and misuse of Substitute Decision-Making (SDMg) authority impacts the lives of children and adults with decision-making disabilities. The concerns raised in this paper amplify previous attention addressed by advocacy agencies and law reformists such as the Law Commission of Ontario. I analyse problems associated with Plenary Guardianship from both the lived experience of the non-guardian perspective and from the authority bestowed to the Guardian pursuant to the Guardianship and Administration Act 1990 of Western Australia legitimating the unintended capacity to abuse one’s substitute decision-making authority. Substitute decision-making arrangements enable decisions to be made on behalf of a person with a decision-making disability; usually made when such arrangements are necessary and subject to safeguards. Detrimentally, the substitute decision-maker (SDM) can assert broader powers beyond sensible measures that include thwarting investigations undertaken by family members; removing family members from the life of the person for whom an order is made; inappropriately applying a paternalistic or ‘best interest’ approach to decision-making where other approaches are required; failing to consider the individual’s wishes or making decisions contrary to those wishes; having insufficient contact with the individual; and, sharing insufficient or incorrect information. Moreover, they may subject the individual for whom an SDM order is made to experimental medical treatment in tandem with imposing or condoning severe and harmful restrictive-practices. Consequently, the second issue addressed in this paper concerns normalising both chemical and physical restrictive-practices that are both morally abhorrent and clinically highly questionable. Furthermore, often undertaken by service providers and their contracted psychiatrists and treating teams, endorsed under authority of a collaborating Guardian or SDM.

According to the social justice model of disability, inclusion is about securing civil and human rights for individuals with disabilities. To that end, supported decision-making is a person-centred process that allows individuals to take control of their own choices and increases their ability to live self-determined lives. Utilizing a case-study approach, this chapter examines the differences between guardianship and supported decision-making and explores how one individual who had been placed within a guardianship format, embraced a more supported decision-making framework through self-selecting a group of family, friends and professionals to serve in an advisory capacity. Through this approach, he regained control of decision-making, assumed the ‘dignity of risk’ associated with decision-making and restored his right to self-determination.

Intergenerational confinement is an under-recognized, policy-driven issue which greatly impacts Indigenous and racialized peoples in countries with ongoing colonial legacies. Numerous policy solutions enacted over colonial history have exacerbated instead of mitigated this situation. This chapter advances an improved understanding of the impacts of carceral legacies, moving beyond the dominant focus of parental incarceration in the literature. Focusing on Indigenous peoples, multiple generations in families and communities have been subjected to changing methods of confinement and removal. Using critical policy analysis and interview research, this chapter interrogates these intergenerational impacts of carceral policy-making in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 124 people in the three case countries, this chapter centers perspectives of people who have been intergenerationally confined in carceral institutions. With a goal of transformation, it then explores an alternative orientation to policy-making that seeks to acknowledge, account for, and address the harmful direct and indirect ripple-effects of carceral strategies over generations.

This chapter approaches the question of government and surveillance through a comparison between the control practices observable in two types of places. First, we focus on international airports, specifically the French international airport of Orly. Airports are maximum security zones where persons perceived as having no legitimate business are expelled and where suspicious objects are destroyed. The second kind of places are the ones labeled as “no-go areas”, violent pockets within urban space. Social housing projects located in the bleak suburbs of French cities are such dangerous zones. Both kinds of places – airports and no-go areas – have very different time and space features: people briefly pass through anonymous airports where relationships are kept at an impersonal minimum, whereas the population of a housing estate area is made of “permanent transients” pinned down by a shared fate of which there seems no escape.

Special education today in the Ukraine is dramatically different than its early origins which stressed communal guardianship for persons with disabilities to its current movement to inclusive education. The journey to inclusive education was inconsistent due to a variety of elements such as the collapse of the Russian Monarchy, a series of different governments and social-political structures, World War II and membership in the USSR which stressed a unification of the education system. However, special education professionals who worked at the Special Education Pedagogy Institute of the National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences continued to research and develop a philosophical instructional framework to educate students with disabilities that includes theoretical and practical aspects of inclusive education. This chapter provides a detailed description of this framework as well as prevalence and school placements aspects, classification and assessment parameters, and the impact of legislation for free public education. The chapter concludes with challenges to inclusive education such as attitude modification, infusing necessary teacher instructional strategies, and the incorporation of best practices from special education to regular education settings.

The re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, with education in schools being a devolved area, meant that school education would be area of focus for the labour–liberal democrat coalition. The consequent impact on Teacher Education of changes to school education is explored. This chapter will consider changes such as Curriculum for Excellence to discuss how Initial Teacher Education (ITE) at universities was impacted and, additionally, how changes to teacher conditions, following the McCrone Agreement, effected change in teachers' working conditions, and which influenced a range of professional standards under the guardianship of the General Teaching Council for Scotland. These factors engendered a fundamental shift in teachers' professional development. The chapter also explores the context of ITE with its locus firmly in Higher Education Institutions and how operational and strategic issues impacted the discipline of ITE within universities. In relation to ITE specifically, the two-stage review is discussed but the chapter concludes that the most change and innovation occurred at the post-qualification level rather than within ITE in universities. The reasons for this are explored.