The Politics of Punishment: Rape and the Death Penalty in Colonial Australia, 1841–1901

Kaladelfos, Amanda

doi:10.1080/14490854.2012.11668407

Cited by 21 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Why, he asked, should NSW retain the death penalty for attempted murder, rape and seven other crimes as capital offences, when England had reduced its application to treason and murder decades earlier? In 1901, the execution of a man for the offence of carnal knowledge (the sexual assault of a girl under 10) in the NSW town of Queanbeyan dredged up memories of the 1888 execution of four men for the pack rape of a 16-year-old girl in Sydney (Kaladelfos 2012;Walker 1986). Still shocked by that event, Haynes hoped his 1902 bill would remove the death penalty for sexual offences and split the definition of murder into first and second degrees, with only planned and deliberate murders punishable by death.…”

Section: Labour and The Death Penalty In A Former Penal Colonymentioning

confidence: 99%

Ambivalent Abolitionism in the 1920s: New South Wales, Australia

Strange

2022

Int J for Crime, Justice & Social Democracy

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In the former penal colony of New South Wales (NSW), a Labor government attempted what its counterpart in Queensland had achieved in 1922: the abolition of the death penalty. Although NSW’s unelected Legislative Council scuttled Labor’s 1925 bill, the party’s prevarication over capital punishment and the government’s poor management of the campaign thwarted abolition for a further three decades. However, NSW’s failure must be analysed in light of ambivalent abolitionism that prevailed in Britain and the US in the postwar decade. In this wider context, Queensland, rather than NSW, was the abolitionist outlier.

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Section: Labour and The Death Penalty In A Former Penal Colonymentioning

confidence: 99%

Ambivalent Abolitionism in the 1920s: New South Wales, Australia

Strange

2022

Int J for Crime, Justice & Social Democracy

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“…In colonial Australia, rape was a ‘violation of female purity’ punishable by death: politicians insisted this was necessary to keep Aboriginal and ‘disreputable’ (poor) white men under control (Kaladelfos, 2012: 159). The vulnerable bourgeois white woman was central to accounts of insurrections such as the Indian Mutiny and the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica (Ware, 1992: 39–42): fear of rape was fear of revolution.…”

Section: White Tears White Rage White Personhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism

Phipps

2021

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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Using #MeToo as a starting point, this paper argues that the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears. This in turn depends on the dehumanisation of people of colour, who were constructed in colonial ‘race science’ as incapable of complex feeling (Schuller, 2018). Colonialism also created a circuit between bourgeois white women’s tears and white men’s rage, often activated by allegations of rape, which operated in the service of economic extraction and exploitation. This circuit endures, abetting the criminal punishment system and the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ by the various border regimes of the right. It has especially been utilised by reactionary forms of feminism, which set themselves against sex workers and trans people. Such feminisms exemplify what I call ‘political whiteness’, which centres assertions of victimhood: through these, womanhood (and personhood) is claimed to the exclusion of the enemy. Through legitimating criminal punishment and border policing and dehumanising marginalised Others, claims to victimhood in mainstream feminism often end up strengthening the intersecting violence of racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy.

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“…However, capital punishment was more restricted and rarely inflicted after Federation. Aside from one man who was hanged for carnal knowledge (an assault on a nine-year-old girl) in 1901, the only individuals executed in NSW prior to abolition in 1955 were men convicted of murder – 21 in total (Kaladelfos, 2012).…”

Section: Murder and Its Punishment In Early-twentieth-century New South Walesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inter-gender murder in NSW, 1901–1955: Reconsidering the laws of the fraternity

Strange

Fraser

Payne

2020

Journal of Criminology

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Contemporary studies that focus on intimate homicide assume that patterns of policing, prosecution and punishment were uniformly disadvantageous to women before feminist activists intervened in the 1970s. This article tests that assumption by drawing on the Prosecution Project’s digitisation of Australian criminal trial records. Using this resource, we selected all prosecutions ( n = 314) of men for murders of women and of women for murders of men in New South Wales, from Federation (1901) to 1955, the year the state abolished the death penalty. By coding victim–offender relationships and analysing them in relation to case outcomes, we found that men were far more likely than women to be convicted of murder, including seven men executed for intimate femicides. By contrast, women were more likely than men to be acquitted outright, rather than plead guilty to manslaughter of male intimates, a trend that feminist research has identified recently. This research provides new findings of use to critical appraisals of the charging and sentencing reforms that were meant to remedy ‘the laws of the fraternity’.

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The Politics of Punishment: Rape and the Death Penalty in Colonial Australia, 1841–1901

Cited by 21 publications

References 0 publications

Ambivalent Abolitionism in the 1920s: New South Wales, Australia

Ambivalent Abolitionism in the 1920s: New South Wales, Australia

White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism

Inter-gender murder in NSW, 1901–1955: Reconsidering the laws of the fraternity

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