Exploring the Impacts of ‘Risk’ Thinking: Community Experiences of Sex Offender Notification in New Zealand

• In Event: Critical Criminology 3: Labelling, Harms and Community Responses

Abstract

‘Risk’ thinking increasingly drives legislation and policymaking throughout the Anglophone liberal democracies, and has become a staple of capitalist modernity in its neoliberal form. The conceptualisation of ‘risk’ by governments and the subsequent actions taken by them to contain and eliminate it create cascading social harms within communities. These harms can be particularly severe when governments seek to contain or remove individuals who they consider ‘risky’. In New Zealand, successive populist governments seeking to avoid the reputational risk associated with being branded as ‘soft on crime’ have employed increasingly bespoke legislative and policy tactics to be seen to contain and remove individuals they deem to pose a ‘risk’ to the community. Though by nature these risk-driven responses are communicated to the public as effective harm prevention interventions, the lived experience of communities shows that they cause their own social harms. This paper critiques risk-driven law and order policy and its harms in the context of settler-colonial New Zealand, and examines risk management within criminal justice as a colonising tool of the state, considering the implications of this for communities. Focusing on the introduction of civil detention, sex offender registration, and restrictions on bail, this paper unpacks the lived reality of community experiences of risk-driven policy, demonstrating how it significantly departs from the rhetoric of politicians and the media, helping us to understand the true nature of the harms caused by these approaches.

Author

• Jordan Anderson, Swansea University