A brown bag book talk with Professor Susan Shepler
(American University, Washington DC)

Childhood Deployed:
Remaking Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone
(NYU Press, 2014)

Continue reading Childhood Deployed brown bag at Barnard, Oct 20 →

25 years of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC):

The relevance of children’s rights in a
higher education context

It is 25 years this November since the UNCRC was internationally agreed. Join us to celebrate and reflect upon the UNCRC, children’s rights, and higher education: Continue reading 25 years of the UNCRC →

Researching and Reporting on Human Trafficking with a Particular Focus on the Trafficking of Minors

Thursday 16 October 10.30-12.00, room Z-113, Metropolitan Building, VU University Amsterdam

Ieke de Vries

Researcher at the Office of the Dutch National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children

There is increasing awareness of human trafficking in the Netherlands and at the international level. To tackle a hidden problem such as human trafficking, it must be made visible. A complicating matter is that human trafficking can take different forms, it can occur for different reasons, and individual traffickers as well as criminal organizations may be involved. The way governments or non-governmental organizations assess the criminal component also determines what measures will be taken to combat it. And even though there is more awareness, questions remain like: What is the role of researchers (both quantitative and qualitative) studying human trafficking and how do they contribute to the question of visibility? By means of concrete examples on human trafficking – with a focus on the trafficking of minors, the seminar will look into the various ways for researching the phenomenon.

VU University is located at a 10-minutes’ walk from Amsterdam Zuid railway station. The Metropolitan Building is located opposite the University’s main building, across the tramway. Tram stop ‘De Boelelaan / VU’ is served by tram lines 5 and 51.

Feel free to communicate information of this seminar to other people who might be interested.

Could you confirm your participation in the 16 October seminar to us? childrenseminar@hotmail.com

Connect Centre for International Research on Interpersonal Violence and Harm
University of Central Lancashire – School of Social Work

4 November 2014, 4-5.45pm, Brook Building room 8

Intersectionality in Young Men’s Accounts of Domestic Violence

Professor David Gadd

Director of the Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice Manchester University Law School

This paper argues for approaches to explaining domestic violence that are sufficiently nuanced enough for most men to be able to see both similarities and differences between themselves and other men who have described perpetrating assaults on women. It begins by outlining the instrumentalist assumptions that continue to inform key feminist approaches to explaining perpetrator behaviour. It then elaborates on how conceptual developments in the study of masculinities have challenged instrumentalist explanations without fully transcending the social determinism implicit in them. Using three young men’s narrative accounts the paper shows how domestic violence can be both instrumental and expressive at the same time – controlling and defensive – and that the meaning of such behaviours can often only be grasped by being alive to the gendered nature of social discourses, many of which are easily infused with racialized, disablist and class-based assumptions.

Professor David Gadd is Director of the Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice at Manchester University Law School. David has 15 years of experience of conducting and analyzing in-depth interview research with offenders, and has written extensively on the subjects of domestic abuse, masculinities and crime, racial harassment, offender motivation and desistance from crime. His first book, Psychosocial Criminology (co-written with Tony Jefferson) was published by Sage in 2007. His second book, Losing the Race (co-written with Bill Dixon) was published by Karnac in 2011. David is lead editor of the (2012) SAGE Handbook of Criminological Research Methods (co-edited with Susanne Karstedt and Steven Messner).

Seminar is free. All welcome. Brook Building room 8. Refreshments provided.
To reserve a place go to EventBrite at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/connect-centre-seminar-intersectionality-in-young-mens-accounts-of-domestic-violence-tickets-13026190687