Custody abductions and filicides-suicides are not every day occurrences and typically become ‘media events’. Through an analysis of newspaper representations of two custody abductions and one filicide-suicide, this article examines the role played by fathers’ rights discourse in the construction of the separated father in each case. It argues that fathers’ rights discourse played a...

Addressing the dynamics of interpersonal violence, institutionalised abuses and prisoner isolation, this article consolidates critical analyses as challenges to the essentially liberal constructions and interpretations of prisoner agency and penal reformism. Grounded in long term research with women in prison in the North of Ireland, it connects embedded, punitive responses that undermine women prisoners’ self‐esteem...

Drawing on interview research with compliance staff from the Australian Department of Human Services, this paper critically explores how the rationality of risk figures in the process of welfare surveillance in Australia.

As audio visual communication technologies are installed in prisons, these spaces of incarceration are networked with courtrooms and other non‐contiguous spaces, potentiallyfacilitating a process of permeability. Jurisdictions around the world are embracing video conferencing and the technology is becoming a major interface for prisoners’ interactionswith courts and legal advisers. In this paper, I draw on...

Presented within this article is a systematic discourse analysis of the arguments used by the then Australian Prime Minister and also the Minister for Indigenous Affairs in explaining and justifying the extensive and contentious intervention by the federal government into remote Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.