Securing the home: Gender, CCTV and the hybridized space of apartment buildings

Abstract

This article explores gendered narratives of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in apartment buildings. Drawing on primary data from a study with a diversity of women in Toronto, Canada, the authors foreground women’s experiences with apartment living and situate it as a profoundly feminized domestic arrangement. Consideration of the workings of CCTV in apartment buildings troubles both security and surveillance studies, especially in the context of the dominant legal and ideological configuration of ‘the home’. The apartment is at once ‘the home’ and neighbourhood; it is simultaneously a private space that must be secured from external threats and a public space that inhabitants have little power to secure.

Getting at Equality: Research Methods Informed by the Lessons of Intersectionality

“…These methods are effective for examining conceptual spaces that are complex and admit multiple characterizations or are understood from a variety of lived perspectives. Thus, for example, van der Meulen and colleagues (van der Meulen & Glasbeek, 2013;Wright, Glasbeek, & van der Meulen, 2015;Wright, Heynen, & van der Meulen, 2015) used concept mapping techniques to explore conceptualization of closed-circuit camera surveillance in order to compare how the various aspects of/reactions to this surveillance identified through the concept mapping exercise (e.g., "invasive and intrusive," "assistive and supportive") were rated across different groups of women (e.g., sex workers, racialized, and older women; club-goers and low-income women). Q-sorting has been used to examine privacy perspectives among younger (Morton & Sasse, 2014) and older (Morton, 2014) adults, identifying a variety of different positions on informational privacy issues.…”

Regulating private sector security provision for victims of domestic violence

“…Of relevance, in particular, to domestic violence, Wright et al (2015: 96) argue that there is a ‘general lack of systemic attention to gender’ in discussion of security consumption and use a study of experiences of apartment-living in Canada to show how CCTV in domestic spaces can ‘be the very things that make (women) unsafe in their living spaces’ (2015: 106). Such circumstances did arise within the private security response to victims of domestic violence.…”

“…Such a body could address the multiple concerns of scholars such as Loader (1997; see also Loader et al, 2014) and Zedner (2003, 2006) that private security requires more democratic control, while also attending to the specific concerns about security-technology consumption. The ‘morally troubling’ aspects to security purchases (Loader et al, 2014) and the potentially counter-productive anxieties of security technology anticipated by Maher et al (2017), Wright et al (2015) and Zedner (2003) can be monitored, recognized and actively addressed.…”

“…Moreover, private security is also critiqued at the level of consumption. A number of scholars identify the ‘troubling’ aspects of ‘buying and selling’ security (Loader et al, 2014), the counter-productive pursuit of security through commodities and private contracts (Zedner, 2003) and the gender-specific experiences of domestic security measures (Wright et al, 2015). In contrast to such work, this article will use a combination of data from original, empirical research in Australia and scholarly literature review to contest the current conceptualizations of private security in the criminological literature.…”

Ched Evans, rape myths and Medusa's gaze: a story of mirrors and windows

“…1 In combination, they help to ensure that the state can maintain its occupation of a privileged vantage point, not only to exert power, but furthermore to ensure that it can avoid becoming in turn the object of observation. In this vein, critics have attributed political and cultural significance to devices such as the inscrutable surface of the police officer's mirrored sunglasses or the CCTV camera lens (Schept, 2014, p. 199) through which the state can observe others whilst obstructing a clear view of its own actors and operations (Wright et al , 2015, p. 106) 2…”