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When discussing the term “technology-facilitated violence” (TFV) it is often asked: “Is it actually violence?” While international human rights standards, such as the United Nations' Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (United Nations General Assembly, 1979), have long recognized emotional and psychological abuse as forms of violence, including many forms of technology-facilitated abuse (United Nations, 2018), law makers and the general public continue to grapple with the question of whether certain harmful technology-facilitated behaviors are actually forms of violence. This chapter explores this question in two parts. First, it reviews three theoretical concepts of violence and examines how these concepts apply to technology-facilitated behaviors. In doing so, this chapter aims to demonstrate how some harmful technology-facilitated behaviors fit under the greater conceptual umbrella of violence. Second, it examines two recent cases, one from the British Columbia Court of Appeal (BCCA) in Canada and a Romanian case from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), that received attention for their legal determinations on whether to define harmful technology-facilitated behaviors as forms of violence or not. This chapter concludes with observations on why we should conceptualize certain technology-facilitated behaviors as forms of violence.

Technology-facilitated violence and abuse is a truly global problem. As the diverse perspectives and experiences featured in this book have shown, the deep entanglement between technologies, inequality, marginalization, abuse, and violence require multi-faceted and collaborative responses that exist within and beyond the law. When this chapter was written, society was (and continues to be) facing an unprecedented challenge in COVID-19 – a global pandemic. At the same time, a renewed focus on racist police and civilian violence has occurred following the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor in the United States. As we describe in this chapter, these two major moments are ongoing reminders of the profound social inequalities within our global communities, which are grounded in systemically discriminatory oppressions and their intersections. This chapter draws together some thoughts on technology-facilitated violence and abuse in an era of COVID-19 and antiracist protest. It explores these within the context of the book as a whole, highlighting the importance for improved understanding of, and responses to, technology-facilitated violence and abuse as part of a broader push for social justice.

This chapter examines the relationship between neocolonialism, neoliberalism and the overrepresentation of Indigenous women and girls in Canada's criminal justice system. Indigenous women are 60% more likely to be convicted of violent offences than non-Indigenous women and they make up 42% of all federally sentenced women – while First Nations people represent approximately 5% of the total Canadian population. With an abolition feminist and decolonial theoretical framework, we argue that even when Indigenous women do commit violent crimes, their criminalisation is contingent on the legacy of colonialism. This includes the ongoing genocide against Indigenous women and girls and a neoliberal criminal justice system that reproduces gendered racial state violence and perpetrates the portrayal of stereotypes about Indigenous women, rendering them as inherently violent and ‘risky’. We examine why and how such a disproportionate number of Indigenous women end up involved in cycles of violence, with subsequent disputes with the law. This chapter advances the field of feminist criminology by building on feminist analyses of penal abolition to critique global neoliberalism and the interlocking systems that sustain the ongoing violence in which First Nations women and girls are involved.

This paper documents the case of a young girl who went missing from a country track in 1972. It considers the function of roads in her disappearance, and the importance and terror of roads generally in Australia. For roads have a role in Australia that is vastly different to smaller, more populous nations. Roads in Australia are absolutely crucial to the maintenance and sustenance of society. So too are the cars and other vehicles we use upon them, but they are just as paradoxical in their effects. As Elizabeth Jacka and Susan Dermody (1988, p. 113) put it so plainly: ‘our cars kill us, and without them we would die’. The case of the girl who vanished from a road is not an unusual event in Australia. However, it has led to a conjunction of long-lasting effects, particularly on the community of Mackay, that are. The case has never been solved, not due to a desire to solve it, but ironically because of the very methods initially employed to do so.

Inpatient violence can have a major impact in terms of traumatic experiences for victims and witnesses, an unsafe treatment climate, and high-financial costs. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to gain more insight into patterns of violent behavior, so that adequate preventive measures can be taken.

Data on inpatient violence in a Dutch forensic psychiatric hospital between 2008 and 2014 were extracted from hospital files on 503 patients.

More than half of all the patients (n=276, 54.9 percent) displayed verbal aggression on at least one occasion, whereas 27.2 percent of all patients (n=137) exhibited one or more incidents of physical violence. Female patients were responsible for more physically violent episodes than male patients. Patients admitted with a civil court order exhibited more violent behavior than patients with a criminal court order. Violent patients with a civil commitment had a significantly longer length of stay than non-violent patients with a civil commitment. More violence was found to take place on the earlier days of the week.

This study points at important differences between groups of forensic inpatients in frequency and type of inpatient violent behavior and in temporal factors. Interventions aimed at reducing the number of violent incidents should take these differences into account. Further research is necessary to gain more insight into the background of inpatient violence.

This article provides an overview of the opportunities enforcement has to undertake activities to reduce harms caused by drug markets. Four pathways are open to the police in relation to drug harm‐reduction: reducing the amount of drug use; reducing the harm that drug users experience; reducing the harms that drug users impose on others; and reducing the harms caused by drug markets. It is the latter pathway that is the main focus of this article, which draws on a range of international examples. After highlighting that ‘not all dealers are equally destructive’ it is argued that one aim for enforcement could be to shape the drug market by making the most noxious forms of selling uncompetitive relative to less harmful practices.

The association between motorcycles and sex, and motorcycles and action, is highly gendered and very few action films star women on motorcycles. This chapter examines little-known Australian film, Shame (1988) and the American made-for-television remake Shame (1992) as rare examples of films starring heroic women on motorcycles. The protagonist of both films is a motorbike-riding lawyer (Cadell) who rides into a country town blighted by an endemic rape culture. The film(s) have been largely overlooked in critical discussions about gender and action films. This chapter utilises scholarship about gender and action films, and about the rape revenge genre to explore how Cadell is cast as feminist avenger and agent of change. Rather than being a bombshell or a babe, in the tradition of Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor, Cadell is a tough action chick who embodies (female) heroism. She, as Sara Ahmed (2017) would describe it, snaps, and that snap prompts viewers to examine misogyny, rape, revenge and shame.

In the 30 years since Giroux (1983) named schools as a site of resistance, little has happened to sustain and embed that practice in schools. The contexts, structures, and policies in schools do not foster opportunities for resistance, and schools of education do not prepare teachers to support students’ critical actions in schools, ensuring the reproduction of inequity and injustice. While this is true for all historically marginalized groups, the specific legacy of discrimination (i.e., threats of deportation) faced by Latinx students and communities in the western United States often serves to silence their voices and efforts at resistance (Darder, Noguera, Fuentes, & Sanchez, 2012). In this chapter, we examine data from a student voice research project, including weekly observations (n = 102) for the school year across three public school classrooms, teacher reflections, and student work. This work is framed by the theory of sociopolitical development, implicating both teachers and students in the process of resistance and liberation. The data we explore captures (1) early conversations between students and teachers about issues of racial and economic injustice, (2) the initial resistance of students to having those conversations, (3) increasing trust between teachers and students supporting engagement with the issues, (4) students’ active resistance toward the issues that impacted them, (5) teachers and students working together to challenge unjust policies – at the school, district, and state level.