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In February 2000, Katherine Mary Knight killed, then skinned, decapitated and cooked her lover in rural Australia. Knight pleaded guilty to murder and received a life sentence, against which she unsuccessfully appealed in Knight v R [2006] NSWCCA 292. I consider the way in which the majority judgments organised and expressed Knight's culpability in accordance with a model of monstrous wickedness, arguing that models of wickedness articulated and applied in criminal law should be evaluated critically. The judgment of the court constructed and responded to Knight as bad, a monster who is (and will always be) dangerous (especially to men) and ultimately irredeemable. Not only do monsters justify and require extreme measures, they also contaminate and undermine systems of orders - the judgments of Knight thus read more consistently with the genre of horror than that of law. The model of monstrous wickedness ostensibly works particularly well for women who kill, as it preserves the law's tendency to organise women as lacking agency. However, this model also generates a clash of binaries when applied to women. The monster/victim binary ascribes agency to the monster, generating difficulties for the law to reconcile the notion of a female monster with legal assumptions of the absence of female agency. This results in the problem of the female monster. The judicial creation of a horror movie monster that lacks basic humanity facilitates an abdication of the legal (and moral) task of judging a human being as human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents Midgley's theory on social development to an Australian social work audience. It explores the concept and theory of social development, examines the relationship between social work and social development, and discusses the relevance of social development to social work in Australia. The paper suggests that although social work and social development may share similar broad goals, their strategic approaches differ, with the former cast within a professional model concerned with welfare broadly conceived and the latter directly concerned with the alleviation of poverty in the less-developed parts of the world. The paper concludes with thoughts on the Australian face of social development and suggests changes that would need to be made if social work were to embrace social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]