Suchergebnisse

Since the naming of hepatitis C in 1989, knowledge about the disease has grown exponentially. So too, however, has the stigma with which it is linked. Associated with injecting drug use and tainted blood scandals, hepatitis C inspires fear and blame. Making Disease, Making Citizens takes a timely look at the disease, those directly affected by it and its social and cultural implications. Drawing on personal interviews and a range of textual sources, the book presents a scholarly and engaging analysis of a newly identified and highly controversial disease and its relationship to philosophies of health, risk and harm in the West. It maps the social and medical negotiations taking place around the disease, shedding light on the ways these negotiations are also co-producing new selves. Adopting a feminist science and technology studies approach, this theoretically sophisticated, empirically informed analysis of the social construction of disease and the philosophy of health will appeal to those with interests in the sociology of health and medicine, health communication and harm reduction, and science and technology studies.

'Alcohol-fuelled violence' has been a concerted focus of recent criminal justice policy debates and legal reform. This study was motivated by the prominence of an essentialised paradigm that claims a direct causal relationship between use of alcohol and other drugs (AOD) and crimes of violence and other offending, and asserts that AOD should routinely be regarded as an aggravating factor. This approach belies the wide variety of ways in which AOD 'intoxication' features in the content and operation of Australian criminal laws. The study analysed more than 500 crime-related statutory provisions which attach significance to a person's 'intoxication', and more than 300 court decisions involving evidence that the accused, the victim or a witness was 'intoxicated' at the time of the alleged offence. These analyses found that significance is attached to 'intoxication' for a wide variety of criminal justice purposes – including to enliven police powers, to evaluate the veracity of witness testimony, to assess criminal responsibility and to determine punishment. In both statutory formulations and criminal court adjudication, there is a widespread problem of under-definition and imprecision as to meaning. 'Intoxication' is often assessed on the basis of highly subjective criteria – in contexts as diverse as public order policing and assessments of victim credibility in sexual assault trials. In the absence of legislative guidance, courts tend to assign only a relatively marginal role to medical/scientific expert evidence, and frame the question of whether a person was relevantly 'intoxicated' as one that can be answered by applying 'common knowledge' about AOD effects. Given the magnitude of the consequences that can flow from criminal justice decisions, the study recommends that consideration be given to standardising definitions of 'intoxication', with greater attention paid to evidence-based insights drawn from the scientific and social scientific literature.

Australian criminal law is being actively reconfigured in an effort to produce a more effective response to the problem of alcohol-related violence. This article uses the Safe Night Out Legislation Amendment Act 2014 (Qld) as a case study for two purposes: i) to introduce a set of conceptual tools and typologies that can be used to investigate the relationship between 'intoxication' and criminal law; and ii) to raise a number of concerns about how the effects of alcohol and other drugs are implicated in laws governing police powers, criminal responsibility and punishment. We draw attention to the different and sometimes inconsistent ways in which significance is attached to evidence of the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, as well as to variations and ambiguities in how legislation attempts to capture the degree of impairment or effects that are regarded as warranting the attachment of criminal law significance.