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95 books match the query 'Crimes against' and 10 start with s

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Sanctuary

Exclusion, Violence, and Indigenous Migrants in the East Bay

Cruz Medina

The Ohio State University Press, 2024

In Sanctuary, Cruz Medina presents a powerful counterstory to dominant narratives surrounding Latin American and Global South im/migration by bringing attention to the displacement of Indigenous Guatemalan Maya people who seek refuge in the United States. These migrants have exchanged gang and narcotrafficker violence for the dehumanizing and exclusionary rhetoric of US political leaders, militarized immigration enforcement, false promises of empowerment through literacy, and further displacement from gentrification. Medina combines decolonial critical race theory with autoethnography to examine white supremacist policies that impact US and transnational Indigenous populations who have been displaced by neocolonial projects of capitalism.

Taking a Northern California community of migrants from Guatemala as a case study, Medina demonstrates the ways in which immigration policy and educational barriers exclude Indigenous migrant populations. He follows the community at the “Sanctuary”—a Spanish-speaking church in the East Bay Area that serves as a place of worship, English language instruction, and refuge for migrants. Medina assembles participant observations, interviews, surveys, and other data to provide points of entry into intersecting issues of immigration, violence, language, and property and to untangle aspects of citizenship, exclusion, and assumptions about literacy.

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Scapegoats of September 11th

Hate Crimes & State Crimes in the War on Terror

Welch, Michael

Rutgers University Press, 2006

From its largest cities to deep within its heartland, from its heavily trafficked airways to its meandering country byways, America has become a nation racked by anxiety about terrorism and national security. In response to the fears prompted by the tragedy of September 11th, the country has changed in countless ways. Airline security has tightened, mail service is closely examined, and restrictions on civil liberties are more readily imposed by the government and accepted by a wary public.

The altered American landscape, however, includes more than security measures and ID cards. The country's desperate quest for security is visible in many less obvious, yet more insidious ways. In Scapegoats of September 11th, criminologist Michael Welch argues that the "war on terror" is a political charade that delivers illusory comfort, stokes fear, and produces scapegoats used as emotional relief. Regrettably, much of the outrage that resulted from 9/11 has been targeted at those not involved in the attacks on the Pentagon or the Twin Towers. As this book explains, those people have become the scapegoats of September 11th. Welch takes on the uneasy task of sorting out the various manifestations of displaced aggression, most notably the hate crimes and state crimes that have become embarrassing hallmarks both at home and abroad.

Drawing on topics such as ethnic profiling, the Abu Ghraib scandal, Guantanamo Bay, and the controversial Patriot Act, Welch looks at the significance of knowledge, language, and emotion in a post-9/11 world. In the face of popular and political cheerleading in the war on terror, this book presents a careful and sober assessment, reminding us that sound counterterrorism policies must rise above, rather than participate in, the propagation of bigotry and victimization.

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School Zone

A Problem Analysis of Student Offending and Victimization

Pamela Wilcox, Graham C. Ousey, and Marie Skubak Tillyer

Temple University Press, 2022

Schools should be safe—but they are not always safe for everybody. Authors Pamela Wilcox, Graham Ousey, and Marie Skubak Tillyer studied crime among students located across diverse middle- and high-school settings to investigate why some students engage in delinquency—but others do not—and why some students are more prone to victimization. School Zone focuses on the three key interactional elements—context, victims, and offenders—to understand and explain the impact of common crimes such as theft, weapon carrying, drug possession and the verbal, physical, and sexual harassment of classmates.

The authors also consider how individual students and schools respond to crime and threats. They analyze the variables that schools can control in planning and practice that explain why some schools have higher crime rates. School Zone uses empirical studies to provide a comprehensive understanding of the patterns and causes of variation in individual- and aggregate-level school-based offending and victimization experiences while also addressing the adequacy of wide-ranging criminological explanations and crime prevention policies.

In their conclusion, the authors assess the extent to which currently popular strategies of school crime prevention align with what they have discovered through their problem-analysis framework and scientific understandings of student offending and victimization.

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Secret Signs

T. J. Waters

Gallaudet University Press, 2010

Former golf pro Amy Kellen, recently widowed and the mother of a three-year-old daughter, hoped that her new job as a video relay service interpreter for deaf clients would bring stability into her life. She also wished to stay close to the Deaf community that meant so much to her late husband, who was deaf. Little did she know, however, that her new profession would cause her to witness the vicious killing of a deaf client during a video call. In this way author T. J. Waters thrusts Amy into a murder mystery that catches her up in intersecting worlds of intrigue—Internet scams, burglaries, and presidential politics—all connected through the rich Deaf community in Washington, DC.

During the investigation, Amy meets local detective Mike Seer and Secret Service agent Heath Rasco. Despite Seer’s insistence, she refuses to violate her professional ethics and discuss the content of the fatal call. Agent Rasco, who is hard of hearing, admires her commitment to her deaf clients. Amy admits her own attraction to the agent, but her first concern is to learn more about how her client, a respected deaf political strategist, was killed. Her pursuit causes her to witness two more murders and discover a third. She also finds herself and her daughter the targets of assassins. Secret Signs brings these extraordinary elements together in an electrifying combination that promises to surprise and satisfy.

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Seeking Justice for Gendered Violence

Courts, Communities, and Care in Guatemala

Erin Beck and Lynn Stephen

Duke University Press, 2026

Guatemala is one of the first countries in Latin America to codify femicide as a crime and to establish separate victim-centric institutions of justice to address Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG), including specialized courts and public prosecutors. Despite these pathbreaking legal reforms, Indigenous women in Guatemala face formidable barriers to seeking justice for and escaping the multiple overlapping forms of violence that they confront. Seeking Justice for Gendered Violence dissects the efficacy of VAWG legislative reforms, examining how they both challenge and perpetuate vicious cycles of impunity and gender-based violence on the ground. Drawing on extensive case studies developed over Erin Beck and Lynn Stephen’s ten years of ethnographic research with an Indigenous research team focused on Indigenous communities, activists, public prosecutors, and government officials, Seeking Justice for Gendered Violence investigates how VAWG reforms in Guatemala interact with preexisting societal structures and local communities, exposing the advances and limits of state-driven solutions while illuminating how Indigenous women leverage grassroots knowledge to survive and resist violence, and to support one another in reformed but flawed systems.

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Semiotics of Rape

Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India

Rupal Oza

Duke University Press, 2023

In Semiotics of Rape, Rupal Oza follows the social life of rape in rural northwest India to reveal how rape is not only a violation of the body but a language through which a range of issues—including caste and gender hierarchies, control over land and labor, and the shape of justice—are contested. Rather than focus on the laws governing rape, Oza closely examines rape charges to show how the victims and survivors of rape reclaim their autonomy by refusing to see themselves as defined entirely by the act of violation. Oza also shows how rape cases become arenas where bureaucrats, village council members, caste communities, and the police debate women’s sexual subjectivities and how those varied understandings impact the status and reputations of individuals and groups. In this way, rape gains meaning beyond the level of the survivor and victim to create a social category. By tracing the shifting meanings of sexual violence and justice, Oza offers insights into the social significance of rape in India and beyond.

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Showdown in Desire

The Black Panthers Take a Stand in New Orleans

Orissa Arend

University of Arkansas Press, 2009

Showdown in Desire portrays the Black Panther Party in New Orleans in 1970, a year that included a shootout with the police on Piety Street, the creation of survival programs, and the daylong standoff between the Panthers and the police in the Desire housing development. Through interviews with Malik Rahim, the Panther; Robert H. King, Panther and member of the Angola 3; Larry Preston Williams, the black policeman; Moon Landrieu, the mayor; Henry Faggen, the Desire resident; Robert Glass, the white lawyer; Jerome LeDoux, the black priest; William Barnwell, the white priest; and many others, Orissa Arend tells a nuanced story that unfolds amid guns, tear gas, desperate poverty, oppression, and inflammatory rhetoric to capture the palpable spirit of rebellion, resistance, and revolution of an incendiary summer in New Orleans.

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Silent Victims

Hate Crimes Against Native Americans

Barbara Perry

University of Arizona Press, 2008

Hate crimes against Native Americans are a common occurrence, Barbara Perry reveals, although most go unreported. In this eye-opening book, Perry shines a spotlight on these acts, which are often hidden in the shadows of crime reports. She argues that scholarly and public attention to the historical and contemporary victimization of Native Americans as tribes or nations has blinded both scholars and citizens alike to the victimization of individual Native Americans. It is these acts against individuals that capture her attention.

Silent Victims is a unique contribution to the literature on hate crime. Because most extant literature treats hate crimes—even racial violence—rather generically, this work breaks new ground with its findings. For this book, Perry interviewed nearly 300 Native Americans and gathered additional data in three geographic areas: the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest, the Great Lakes, and the Northern Plains. In all of these locales, she found that bias-related crime oppresses and segregates Native Americans.

Perry is well aware of the history of colonization in North America and its attendant racial violence. She argues that the legacy of violence today can be traced directly to the genocidal practices of early settlers, and she adds valuable insights into the ways in which “Indians” have been constructed as the Other by the prevailing culture. Perry’s interviews with Native Americans recount instances of appalling treatment, often at the hands of law enforcement officials. In her conclusion, Perry draws from her research and interviews to suggest ways in which Native Americans can be empowered to defend themselves against all forms of racist victimization.

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Somalia - the Untold Story

The War Through the Eyes of Somali Women

Edited by Judith Gardner and Judy El Bushra

Pluto Press, 2004

Somalia came to the world's attention in 1992 when television and newspapers began to report on the terrifyingly violent war and the famine that resulted. Half a million Somalis died that year, and over a million fled the country. Cameras followed US troops as they landed on the beaches at Mogadishu to lead what became an ill-fated UN intervention to end hunger and restore peace.

In this book, Somali women write and talk about the war, their experiences and the unacceptable choices they often faced. They explain clearly, in their own words, the changes, challenges – and sometimes the opportunities – that war brought, and how they coped with them.

Key themes include the slaughter and loss of men, who were the prime target for killings; rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war; changing roles in the family and within the pastoralist economy; women mobilising for peace; and leading social recovery in a war-torn society.

This book is not only an important record of women's experience of war, but also provides researchers and students of gender and conflict with rare first hand accounts highlighting the impact of war on gender relations, and women's struggle for equal political rights in a situation of state collapse.

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Survival under Dictatorships

Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes

László Borhi

Central European University Press, 2024

A complex array of individual responses to the abuse of power by the state is represented in this book in three horrific episodes in the history of East-Central Europe. The three events followed each other within a span of about ten years: the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews in Nazi death and labor camps; the Arrow Cross terrorist rule in Budapest; and finally the Stalinist terror in Hungary and East-Central Europe. Through the prism of survival, László Borhi explores the relationship between the individual and power, attempting to understand the mechanism of oppression and terror produced by arbitrary, unbridled power through the experience of normal people.

Despite the obvious peculiarities of time and place, the Hungarian cases convey universal lessons about the Holocaust, Nazism, and Stalinism. In the author's conception, the National Socialist and Stalinist experiences are linked on several levels. Both regimes defended their visions of the future against social groups whom they saw as implacable enemies of those visions, and who therefore had to be destroyed for sake of social perfection. Furthermore, the social practices of National Socialism were passed on. And although Stalinism was imposed by a foreign power, some of the survival skills for coping with it were rehearsed under the previous hellish experience.

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