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There has long been recognition that the criminal legal system has great difficulties in ascribing responsibility to corporations for harms caused and crimes committed. This article turns to the film Aliens (1986) to enrich the corporate criminal law imaginary. This article argues that the film Aliens delivers a complex representation of the evil corporation Weyland Yutani and a depressing, realistic depiction of our (low or lack of) expectations of law and justice for corporations. The film portrays the dehumanizing effect of the corporate form, an entity with legal personality but with almost no interest in humanity except as a means of labor and profit. Aliens depicts the routinization of harms, whereby the harms of Weyland Yutani are rendered banal and normal and not even categorized as criminal but just part of doing business. Despite holding up untrammeled rapacious inhuman exploitativeness for critique, no solution is proffered or even suggested. Aliens bleakly portrays the consequences of the legal failure of imagination in conceptualizing and attributing corporate responsibility. If law continues to regard corporations as monstrous, incomprehensible and capable of great systemic harms, then law can and should import the insights of horror and use extreme measures to resolve the corporation. Alternatively, we can recognize corporations as a fiction of our own creation and move the story and genre of corporations away from horror, and rewrite the corporation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recently concluded Australian Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry presented evidence of malfeasance, malpractice, and unethical and criminal behaviour by the banks. This article analyses the narratives proffered by the banks that were reported on the front pages of Australian media during the Royal Commission. This article analyses the strategies of denial and neutralisation used by the banks, including literal denial (nothing happened), interpretive denial (something happened but it's not what you think) and implicatory denial (it happened but action is not needed and/or possible), and provides insight into the ways powerful institutions and individuals intervene in, construct, and support moral and legal codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores inhuman/human constructions that feature in state responses to refugees. We move beyond straightforward normative claims that dehumanizing or demonizing refugees is unfair, unjust or bad to ask: what kind of inhuman monsters are refugees characterized as when they are 'demonised'; and, what are the consequences of such a characterization? Our argument is that reading the demonised refugee as the contemporary zombie monster and inversely, reading the resurgence of the zombie monster through the prism of the so-called refugee and migrant crisis, reveals the precise anxieties brought about by refugees and asylum seekers. In particular, we claim that both figures represent the transgression of borders, as well as the failure of containment, borders and border walls as a response to crisis. We also argue that the contemporary zombie, as a race-less catchall monster figure, mirrors the erasure of colonial histories, race and race relations in the casting of refugees as dehistoricized, invading and disorderly bodies. We analyse these themes through the 2013 blockbuster film World War Z (dir. Marc Foster). In the film, the United Nations, US Navy, World Health Organisation, and Gerry Lane (a former UN employee) combine to fight a global zombie war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Reponses to Child Sexual Abuse negotiates the figure of the pedophile as monster through the horror genre. It analyses the resonance of the category of pedophiles as monsters or monstrous and the ways in which this impacted upon witnesses’ responses to sex offenders, based on assumptions that monsters are outsiders or strangers who are instantly recognizable. I go on to explore the claim that one of the main effects of regarding sex offenders as monsters is that these offenders are construed as having extraordinary powers so that ordinary measures to stop them would be ineffective – accordingly, this reading underplays the significance of institutional responsibility. I conclude that although the Royal Commission consistently undermines and rejects the idea of sex offenders as monsters, a horror reading is still appropriate and insightful. The true “horror” of the Royal Commission is aroused not by the figurative monsters but by the institutions themselves, and their failures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1999, the Uniting Church opened a Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) at the Wayside Chapel in the inner Sydney suburb of Kings Cross. The Uniting Church justified this overt act of civil disobedience against the State's prohibitionist model of drug usage by invoking the ancient right of sanctuary. This invocation sought to produce a specific sort of spatialisation wherein the meaning of the line constituting sanctuary effects a protected 'inside' governed by God's word - civitas dei - 'outside' the jurisdiction of state power in civitas terrena. Sanctuary claims a territory exempt from other jurisdictions. The modern assertion of sanctuary enacts in physical space the relationship between state and religious authorities and the integration and intersections of civitas terrena and civitas dei. This article draws upon conceptions of sanctuary at the intersection of the Catholic Christianity tradition and the State since medieval times to analyse the contemporary space of sanctuary in the MSIC, exploring the shifting and ambiguous boundaries in material, legislative, and symbolic spaces. We argue that even though the MSIC has now been incorporated into civitas terrena, it remains and enacts a space of sanctuary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has demonstrated serious long-term failures to prevent and adequately respond to child sexual abuse by institutions. Rather than regarding the law as a system of responsibility, this article argues that it can be read instead as organising irresponsibility, drawing upon Scott Veitch's ideas in Law and Irresponsibility. His key argument is that legal institutions operate as much to defect responsibility for harms suffered as to acknowledge them. This article focuses on the ways in which the criminal justice system is complicit in organising irresponsibility for systemic failures through an analysis of the Royal Commission Case Study No 6: The responses of a primary school and the Toowoomba Catholic Education Office to the Conduct of Gerald Byrnes. Through concrete examples, this article analyses the ways in which criminal law organises irresponsibility through the individuation of responsibility and the emphasis upon subjective culpability. These practices ensure irresponsibility for actors for systemic failures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Exorcistis an exemplar of the classic horror film trope of possession in the 1960s–70s. In the film, Regan's gradual possession by the devil is depicted by signs of transformation. This article explores how the criminal law would categorise and respond to a case of possession. How does the criminal law conceptualise out-of-control bodies? And who (if anyone) is to blame for harm done? The film suggests that Regan's transformation takes place through an agency that lies outside Regan's will, upsetting the Cartesian assumptions that underlie both the law and mainstream culture, concerning the division between mind/body and the supremacy of the mind in its regulation of physical states. Bodies out of control are categorised at law as involuntary. The concept of voluntariness is itself transgressive of organising concepts within criminal law, including the oppositional structures ofactus reusandmens rea, and offences and defences. Additionally, I highlight the ways in which voluntariness operates at the fissures of structural distinctions of criminal law, including the therapeutic and the punitive, tort and crime, and the structural separation of suffering and wickedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the legal concept of wickedness through the 16th century case of Saunders and its representations by treatise writers. Saunders had tried to kill his wife by giving her a poisoned apple. Not knowing it was poisoned, his wife gave the apple to their daughter, who died. Saunders was charged with murder but argued that he did not have malice against his daughter, and therefore should not be found guilty. Treatise writers drew upon different sources to construct a persuasive model of legal wickedness including evil intention, harmful consequences, manifest criminality, and the religious imagery of the apple. Saunders is a reminder of alternative models of legal wickedness that have been neglected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging research in sexuality and space outlines the diverse forms of spatial governmentality used to discipline non-normative sexual behaviours, exploring how exclusion, concealment, and repression combines to ensure that 'immoral' sexualities are out of the sight of the 'moral majority'. In this paper, we explore this contention in relation to planning for sex service premises (brothels) in New South Wales, Australia. Though such sex service premises are now legal, our analysis nonetheless considers the way that these premises have been subject to forms of planning constraint that reflect planners' assumptions about the appropriate manifestation of sex premises within the urban landscape. By exposing the assumptions written into planning law that sex premises are legal but potentially disorderly, we demonstrate the evidential power of planning to reinforce dominant moral geographies through instruments which, at first glance, appear to be focused on objective questions of amenity and the 'best use of land'. This paper hence explores the ways in which planners have translated assumptions of disorder into categories of visibility and distance, meaning that brothels have become hidden in plain view so as not to disturb the integrity of residential 'family' spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literatures on the regulation of conduct have tended to focus on the role of policing and the enforcement of criminal law. This paper instead emphasizes the importance of planning in shaping conduct, using the example of how planning shapes sexual conduct to demonstrate that planning can, in different times and places, exercise police-type powers. We illustrate this by analysing the regulation of brothels in Sydney and Parramatta, NSW, Australia, providing a case study of spaces of sexuality that historically were constructed and regulated as criminal, but have since become lawful. This paper examines the ways in which these transitions in law have been differently expressed and accomplished through local planning enforcement. In making such arguments, the paper emphasizes not only the potential for planners to act like police, but also the capacity of planning to supplant policing as a key technique of governmentality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary criminal law tends to regard malice through the lens of act, intention and consequence. I argue that this modern reading of malice through contemporary patterns of blameworthiness is a misreading, and loses alternative (legal) ways of organising wickedness. Historical accounts of malice can and should be regarded as a (legal) resource by which to critique and enrich modern accounts of blameworthiness. To this end, I explore the construction of malice as a cogent, resonant concept of legal wickedness by treatise writers in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Treatise writers aimed to ensure that malice was sufficiently broad and malleable so that wickedness would not escape the law. Saunders' case was integral to the construction of malice, and it was used by treatise writers to claim and demonstrate the malleability of malice. Saunders had malice because he caused the death of a subject of the Queen, with premeditation and through the uncanny act of poisoning. The slippage across modern patterns of blameworthiness should not be regarded as a failure to settle upon a pure definition of malice, but as integral to the function of malice to persuade that wickedness would not escape the law. Treatise writers also drew upon Saunders' case to express and excite fear and repugnance of wickedness and included an emotional account of wickedness. The poisoned apple provided an image to assist treatise writers to develop and clarify malice. I conclude by arguing that Saunders' case also highlighted the limits of law, its shaky foundations and the contingency of the construction of malice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines 284 resident submissions to sex premises planning processes, and a survey of 401 residents living near sex premises in New South Wales, Australia, to investigate resident concerns about the effect of sex premises on local environs, and how these concerns inform resident views on the spatial ordering of sex premises. The investigation found that there was a discrepancy between the views of the broader residential population and the views of participants in planning processes. The investigation suggests that geographers need to consider more deeply the connections between residents, planning and the geographies of this controversial land use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with the question of whether or not sex work in the home should be regulated in the same way as large commercial brothels or as home occupations. Underlying concerns about sex services premises generally are that they are criminogenic, disorderly and exploitative of women. This article draws upon original research of surveys of people living in the vicinity of sex services premises, interviews with sex workers and service providers, and council records of complaint to argue that, on the contrary, home occupations (sex services) can operate lawfully with minimal amenity impacts, and that this type of business can provide a positive work environment. We recommend that sex work in the home in New South Wales should be regulated in the same way as other home occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Illegal waste disposal is an increasingly significant and costly problem. This paper considers a specific hot-spot for illegal dumping in Sydney, Australia from criminological perspectives. We contribute to the developing criminological literature that considers environmental harms as a crime. This draws upon the symbolic aspect of criminal law, contributing to the notion of environmental harms as wrongs worthy of sanction, and facilitates analysis through the prism of criminological literature. We apply theories of crime prevention to the site and argue that these techniques of crime prevention would be cheaper and more effective long-term than current council responses of simply reacting to dumping after it has occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, sex services premises in New South Wales, Australia were regarded and regulated as illegal and disorderly entities; they were policed as outlaws. The Disorderly Houses Amendment Act 1995 [NSW] bestowed legal status, providing an opportunity to regulate sex services premises as legal subjects. Despite these reforms, in many areas brothels continue to be regulated more restrictively than other businesses. I argue that this is because, for many, brothels continue to be perceived as outlaws. They are regarded as inherently unlawful, disorderly, and hence warranting and requiring exclusion from the community. I argue that this conception of brothels as outlaws is constructed and reinforced through regulation. In contrast, some local councils and Land and Environment Court decisions have taken up the opportunity to regard and regulate sex services premises as legal subjects or citizens. The conception of sex services premises as citizen imports an existing legal framework, with associated accountabilities, rights and responsibilities. This shift in conception results in people viewing sex services premises differently, experiencing them differently and regulating them differently. [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]

This article reports on outcomes of an Australian pilot school-based early intervention program called Got It! (Getting On Track In Time!). Findings contribute to evidence for the effectiveness of interventions for children with early-onset conduct problems. The Got It! program incorporates universal and targeted components for children ages five to eight years with emerging conduct problems, during their first three years of schooling (K-2). A mixed methods research design entailed pre- and postintervention measures of child behavior and of parenting practices for 60 families who completed the targeted intervention. In addition, qualitative data were gathered in parent and carer interviews. Significant improvements on outcome measures were supported by qualitative findings. Improved scores were maintained by 85 percent of children at the six- to eight-months follow-up. This early evaluation research indicates positive impacts from Got It! for many of the families participating in the targeted intervention. A partnership between health and education is fundamental to the program model. The school context for program delivery was found to support engagement with families who would not otherwise access services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Premises associated with commercial sex--including brothels, striptease clubs, sex cinemas, and sex shops--have increasingly been accepted as legitimate land uses, albeit ones whose location needs to be controlled because of assumed 'negative externalities'. However, the planning and licensing regulations excluding such premises from areas of residential land use are often predicated on assumptions of nuisance that have not been empirically substantiated. Accordingly, this paper reports on a survey of those living close to sex industry premises in New South Wales, Australia. The results suggest that although some residents have strong moral objections to sex premises, in general residents note few negative impacts on local amenity or quality of life, with distance from a premise being a poor predictor of residents' experiences of nuisance. These findings are considered in relation to the literatures on sexuality and space given regulation which ultimately appears to reproduce heteronormative moralities rather than respond to genuine environmental nuisances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the experience of undergraduate speech-language pathology students at one university chosen for the implementation stage of the Palliative Care Curriculum for Undergraduates (PCC4U) Project. Funded by a government department for health and ageing through a national palliative care programme, the project was managed by a team of researchers from the discipline of nursing. The PCC4U project championed the inclusion of palliative care education as an integral part of medical, nursing, and allied healthcare undergraduate training. Of the pilot sites chosen for the PCC4U project, only one site, reported here, included both speech-language pathology and social work disciplines, providing an important opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration on novel curriculum development in an area of mutual interest. This synergy served as an excellent foundation for ongoing opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching and learning in the university. Speech-language pathology students reported that the project was an invaluable addition to their education and preparation for clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The paper explores the relevance of social enterprise to social work practice and policy development. Social enterprise refers to a broad set of approaches that use business acumen to address social goals. A marginal activity in social work for a long time, recently social enterprise has been thrust into the spotlight in debates about the future of social policy and community services. It is important that social workers understand the meaning and implications of social enterprise if they are to apply it critically and reflectively in practice and participate in contemporary debates about its relevance in promoting individual and community empowerment. The paper provides an overview of the meaning of social enterprise, outlines the reasons for the renewed focus on social enterprise and related concepts in social policy debates, particularly community economic development, and examines its underlying values. It concludes with a discussion of questions and concerns surrounding the implementation of social enterprise in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]