Towards a Criminology of the Domestic

Abstract

Criminology has paid insufficient attention to the 'domestic' arena, as a locale that is being reconfigured through technological and social developments in ways that require us to reconsider offending and victimisation. This article addresses this lacuna. We take up Campbell's (2016) challenge that criminology needs to develop more sophisticated models of place and space, particularly in relation to changing patterns of consumption and leisure activity and the opportunities to offend in relation to these from within the domestic arena.Criminological theory and empirical work have drawn upon concepts of space and place across the history of the discipline and many of its traditions. Important and useful though much of this work is, we argue that there has been a problematic tendency to focus largely or entirely on the public realm. Criminology, we argue, needs to take up challenges from social geography that require space and place to be considered in more complex ways, beyond a flat two-dimensional cartography, and understand the social, cultural, and lived experiences that give territory meaning. Technological change provides another set of reasons to develop a more sophisticated appreciation of space and place, since it transforms sites of offending and victimisation such that personal and private places can become as criminologically significant as those public domains that have been the traditional focus of disciplinary enquiry.The domestic environment has largely been conceptualised as private space and criminology has tended to dwell on the problem of crime, order, and incivilities in public places and spaces: domains that have been the focus of criminal justice policy and practice. Tapping into this broader critique of criminology's failure to be sensitive to the important linkage between crime and place, we are proposing a criminology of the domestic.Here we begin to illustrate how the home and the domestic environment more broadly is the site and relational nexus for a much wider range of harms, victimisation, and criminal activity.

From paradise to prison: The disrupted spatial imaginaries of victimised female British migrants in Australia

“…By considering IPV as the event with the potential to both disrupt the victim's biography and shape their spatial imaginaries, the work contributes to the “criminology of the domestic,” which examines the relationship between domestic crime and space (Davies & Rowe, 2020, p. 143). While these authors argue that spatial imaginaries need to be considered in examinations of domestic crime, they focus on this within the intersection/s of online and offline private (domestic) spaces.…”

Extreme dwelling: Assembling domus horribilis

“…They enjoin us to question the dualistic thinking which has underpinned much of the criminological scholarship on domestic space, and reject a wide range of binary terms – private/public, safe/unsafe, feminine/masculine – which position the ‘home’ in an ideological ghetto of socio-spatial isolation, disconnected from structural shifts in political economy and changing modes of production, consumption and leisure. In so doing, they acknowledge the porosity and open-endedness of the concept of ‘home’, and re-imagine it as a site of multiple forms of offending and victimisation in which the boundaries between inside and outside, online and offline, familial and civic worlds are blurred and rendered ‘ever more fuzzy’ (Davies and Rowe, 2020: 154). Facilitated in large part by an exponential growth in technological infrastructures, cyber-investments and digital innovation, Davies and Rowe carefully delineate how variegated forms of online abuse and virtual violences, identity thefts, scamming and phishing frauds, computer hacking and trades in illicit, unsafe and dangerous goods, open up and expand the criminogenic (and victimogenic) propensities of domestic space.…”

“…My point of departure is to revisit the Schatzkian site, drawn upon by both Campbell (2016) and Davies and Rowe (2020), with a particular emphasis on its practice analytics. Relational theorists, such as Schatzki, 4 bring into view the centrality of practices, ontologised as the ‘primary generic social thing’ (Schatzki, 2001: 1) and the origin and locus of meaning-making, social analysis and critical exposition.…”

“…Relational thinking in criminological research of the 'home' has been recently taken forward by Davies and Rowe (2020) who argue for a criminology of the domestic, and call for the recognition of the 'home' as a 'zone of entanglement' (Ingold, 2008(Ingold, : 1797 which enfolds and unfolds as a dense and rhizomatic network of harms and comforts, abuses and healings, conflicts and calms. Following Campbell's (2016) injunction to take space seriously, and informed by Schatzki's (2002) site ontology, these authors challenge the notion of 'home' as a static, bounded spatial entity, and embrace the idea of domestic worlds which are dynamic, nonlinear and processual.…”