Sharon Hayes

• BA (Hons), MA, PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Queensland University of Technology

Sex, Love and Abuse intervenes in a timely way on some important issues that have become 'elephants in the room' for academic and policy considerations around sexual violence and abuse. In so doing, this book draws upon a range of literatures and novel empirical sources to encourage critical thinking about the relationship between sex, love and abu...

It is essential for those employed within the justice system to be able to competently and confidently work at the borders between ethics and the law. Criminal Justice Ethics offers a fresh new approach to considering ethical issues in a criminal justice context. Rather than simply offering a range of ethical dilemmas specific to various justice pr...

Over the last few decades, there has been a marked increase in media and debate surrounding a specific group of offences in modern Democratic nations which bear the brunt of the label ‘crimes against morality’. Included within this group are offences related to prostitution and pornography, homosexuality and incest and child sexual abuse. This book...

This paper explores notions of harm in sex work discourse, highlighting the extent to which essentialist ideas of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ sex have pervaded trafficking policy. In a comparative examination of Australian Parliamentary Inquiries and United States congressional hearings leading to the establishment of anti-trafficking policy, we identify t...

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the relationship between crime and morality, with a specific focus on crimes against morality. While we argue that all crimes have a general moral basis, condemned as wrong or bad and proscribed by society, there is a specific group of offences in modern democratic nations labelled crimes against morality....

This paper draws on the theoretical arguments outlined in Hayes (2014) to frame critical analyses of two real life domestic violence narratives. The authors are both academic criminologists and victims/survivors of domestic violence, but within differing contexts – one a conventional heterosexual relationship, the other a female same-sex relationsh...

This paper draws on the theoretical arguments outlined in Hayes (2014) to frame critical analyses of two real life domestic violence narratives. The authors are both academic criminologists and victims/survivors of domestic violence, but within differing contexts one a conventional heterosexual relationship, the other a female same sex relationshi...

Romantic Terrorism offers an innovative methodology in exploring the ways in which domestic violence offenders terrorise their victims. Hayes and Jeffries employ a collaborative auto-ethnographic approach to analyse their own lived experiences of domestic violence, particularly how romantic love is employed and distorted by abusers. Its focus on th...

This paper aims to analyse the way in which the media reports of sex offences tend to reinforce traditional sexual scripts and gender identities. Compared to investigations into male sex offenders, female sex offending is relatively under-researched, under-theorised and misunderstood (Hayes and Carpenter, 2012). We argue that the media’s reinforcem...

This paper reports on a study of unreported sexual assault of women in everyday situations. While serious sexual assault in the form of rape has had much attention over the past several decades, there has been little attention paid to minor sexual assault such as groping, flashing, inappropriate touching, and masturbating. Using Laura Bates’ Everyd...

Violence has a profound and damaging impact on its victims and on the community as a whole. When women are physically assaulted by male partners or ex-partners, or forced into sex, or constantly threatened and abused, this leaves deep physical and psychological, scars. Domestic violence has negative and long-lasting costs to female survivors includ...

This article explores the contradictory ways in which adolescents just under the age of consent are represented in illegal sexual relations with both men and women who are over the age of consent. We are specifically interested in the ways in which the gender of the adolescent and the adult affect public perceptions, legal responses and perceptions...

This book offers a unique insight into the moral politics behind the making of human trafficking policy in Australia and the United States of America. As governments around the world rush to meet their international obligations to combat human trafficking, a heated debate has emerged over the rights, wrongs, and harms of prostitution, and its relat...

This paper explores how different discourses of intimate partner abuse (IPA) may impact women’s decisions to stay or leave their partners. More specifically, we ask: 1) what narratives are available to and used by heterosexual and non-heterosexual female survivors of IPA to make sense of their experiences? 2) How might these narratives impact women...

This article explores legal, scholarly and social responses to women identified as sex offenders. While much has been written on the male paedophile, rapist and sex offender, little research has been done on the role of gender and sexuality in sex offending. This article examines the ways in which the female sex offender is currently theorized and...

This paper explores how different discourses of intimate partner abuse (IPA) may impact women’s decisions to stay or leave their partners. More specifically, we ask: 1) what narratives are available to and used by heterosexual and non-heterosexual female survivors of IPA to make sense of their experiences? 2) How might these narratives impact women...

At the turn of the twenty-first century, interest in human trafficking exploded, with activists, scholars and policy makers rushing to understand the causes of and solutions to this problem, broadly characterised as a ‘modern form of slavery’. Such concerns centre primarily on the fear that vulnerable women from developing countries are being lured...

Considering sex work is often claimed to be the ‘oldest profession’, it is surprising how much debate continues to surround its legitimacy as a form of labour. Contemporary scholarly literature abounds with many arguments for and against legalising, decriminalising or abolishing sex work. Such diverse understandings can roughly be divided into thos...

The scope of the problem of human trafficking is consistently disputed among government departments, non-government organisations and international agencies. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, tasked with monitoring the world’s response to human trafficking, declared in the 2009 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons that the magnitude...

The politics of sex trafficking is, in the simplest terms, an old war being fought on a new battlefield. In both Australia and the United States of America, the development of trafficking legislation has been the new setting for a persistent debate about the asserted harms of sex work and the legitimacy of the sex industry. In this book, we have ex...

Causes of trafficking are typically characterised as either ‘push’ or ‘pull’ factors. Socio-economic factors in source countries such as poverty, gender inequality and lack of employment opportunities (Farr 2005) are seen as ‘push’ factors that not only encourage the migration of women, but also support a profitable market for a trade in human labo...

The moral imperative that sex trafficking is a problem might appear to be something that should be intuitively understood. However, as we have already begun to demonstrate, perceptions of the ‘problem’ of trafficking differ depending on your value judgements about the harm of sex work. This chapter extends these discussions about the ‘problem’ of t...

It is clear throughout this book that trafficking discourse has often been characterised by vicious debate about the moral harm of sex work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the United States, where abolitionists have sought to construct and defend this moral imperative. In this chapter, we demonstrate how this moral imperative about the inherent ha...

The use of stories to illustrate the problem of trafficking to decision-makers was not divorced from a wider attempt to understand the scope of the problem. However, there are significant limitations on the ability of researchers to produce reliable statistics about the reality of trafficking. Consequently, some researchers rely on prosecution data...

This paper discusses the relationship between law and morality. Morality does not necessarily coincide with the law, but it contributes to it. An act may be legal but nevertheless considered to be immoral in a particular society. For example, the use of pornography may be considered by many to be immoral. Nevertheless, the sale and distribution of...

The social construction of sexuality over the past one hundred and fifty years has created a dichotomy between heterosexual and non-heterosexual identities that essentially positions the former as “normal” and the latter as deviant. Even Kinsey’s and others’ work on the continuum of sexualities did little to alter the predominantly heterosexist per...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is not only a problem for heterosexual couples. Although research in the area is beset by methodological and definitional problems, studies generally demonstrate that IPV also affects those who identify as non-heterosexual; that is, those sexualities that are typically categorized as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgend...

Heteronormative discourses provide the most common lens through which sexuality is understood within university curricula. This means that sexuality is discussed in terms of categories of identity, with heterosexuality accorded primacy while all 'others' are indeed 'othered'. This article draws on research carried out by the authors in a core first...

This article explores why developed nations and their citizens have a moral obligation to assist the disadvantaged in both local and global contexts. Contemporary international relations policies tend to propose action that is based on national selfinterest in providing aid and assistance to third world nations. Theorists such as Pogge and Singer h...

This chapter outlines the major ethical theories underpinning the applicaiton of ethics in a social context, particularly in legal and criminal justice contexts.

Social Ethics for Legal and Justice Professionals examines the ethical and moral issues which impact upon those who work in, and those who access, the justice system. The text places particular focus on the Australian criminal justice system, and ensures that students have a sound grasp of the social and ethical context of the justice system by c...

Heteronormative discourses provide the most common lens through which sexuality is understood within university curricula. This means that sexuality is discussed in terms of categories of identity, with heterosexuality accorded primacy and all ‘others’ indeed ‘othered.’ This paper reports on research carried out by the authors in a core first year...