By Olivia Mitchell,
Leeds Beckett University.
This dissertation explores the relationship between Islamophobia and terrorism, focusing on the way Islamophobia shapes how Western societies view terrorism. The media, policy and gender have all played a role in creating the Muslim terrorist stereotype. This dissertation is a literature-based project. This dissertation is a narrative-based review and the findings are thematic. The researcher analysed scholarly articles published around this topic then identified relevant key themes. The review of literature revealed that the media contributes to the Muslim terrorist stereotype, as media representations often link Islam with terrorism. It revealed that terrorists have been constructed through policy, as policy often has an overwhelming focus on Muslim communities. It also revealed that islamophobia can be gendered and that Muslim women often face brutal anti-Muslim aggression due to their religious clothing identifying them as Muslim in public. This dissertation also highlighted the impact that the Muslim/terrorist construction has had on Muslims and identified that Muslims are often impacted in educational settings. This study has highlighted the need for a change in counterterrorist policy in England and Wales. Additionally, this study highlights a need for more positive representations of Islam in the Western media, to counteract the high levels of Islamophobia.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17277643
By Beth Allcock,
Loughborough University
The disenfranchisement of prisoners is a contentious debate within the court of public opinion. Despite longstanding controversy, there has been little in the way of study into the public opinions and attitudes towards prisoners accessing their ‘protected’ human rights; the right to vote and the right to marry. This paper explores whether contextualised information surrounding the interpersonal characteristics of prisoners holds any influence over public opinions and attitudes as to whether it is appropriate to strip prisoners of their human rights. Although previous research has explored public views on prisoner disenfranchisement, it fails to understand how individual prisoner circumstances can influence public views in relation to access to their rights. Purpose-built vignettes were created to investigate whether public opinions and attitudes towards prisoner rights hold up in practice, and to understand whether certain characteristics hold more weight than others. Although the public sample (N=53) displayed opinions supporting the enfranchisement of prisoners, the results from the contextualised vignettes displayed that the interpersonal characteristics of prisoners were more influential when applying these opinions in practice. This paper identifies that the contextualisation of prisoners as individuals does hold influence over public opinion towards prisoner disenfranchisement. However, this cannot be applied as a one-size-fits-all approach. Each interpersonal characteristic was found to hold different weighting within each human right explored and these findings were further considered within the age, gender, and occupation of the sample base. The findings of this study shed light onto the ongoing controversy and debate surrounding prisoner disenfranchisement and establish the importance of interpersonal characteristics of prisoners in settling the public discourse surrounding prisoner rights.Â
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17219286
By Anya Gwen Innes Hutin,
UWE Bristol (University of the West of England).
This dissertation examines out-of-court-disposals practice in England & Wales in relation to drugs-related offending and harms, particularly ahead of the new Two-Tier Plus Framework proposed by the s.98-121 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act 2022 c.32. The paper considers the provenance of ideological crime-control politics visible in the Misuse of Drugs Act c.38 and its siphon into policing, causing discriminatory practices still present today. The paper outlines how orthodox retributive and utilitarian approaches to punishment have led to the current courts backlog and prison crisis, thus setting the stage for innovative methods, such as out-of-court-disposals (OOCDs), to better address the exegesis of drugs related offending. The paper considers current concern over OOCDs application within England and Wales, employing both doctrinal and sociolegal analysis to present as fuller picture as the limited commentary allows. To enable discussion of ‘what works’ the author provides a systematic analysis of jurisdiction-wide out-of-court-disposal pilots, providing evidenced critique for the draft Code of Practice (Ministry of Justice, 2023) on the new Community Cautions and Diversionary Cautions, has been waiting to be administered by the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act for some time. The new framework has the potential for a fresh start in evidence-gathering assisting further innovation in this area of criminal justice.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17146220