Thomas Crofts

City University of Hong Kong | CityU · School of Law

Children who do not understand the serious wrongness of their actions lack criminal capacity and cannot be convicted. At common law, children under seven are deemed to lack criminal capacity, children over 14 possess full capacity and children between seven and 14 are rebuttably presumed to lack capacity; the prosecution must prove capacity beyond...

In this article, we consider the reforms to non-consensual sexual offences that the Law Reform Commission of Hong Kong (‘LRCHK’) has recently advocated in its Final Report about the law relating to sexual offending in that jurisdiction. We argue that a comparison between the LRCHK's proposals and those supported in recent years by Law Reform Commis...

Children receive sentences underpinned by deterrence theory in many jurisdictions, as demonstrated by recent cases in Australia and England and Wales. This article explores whether deterrent sentencing is justified from a legal, criminological and neuroscientific perspective. Analysis of international instruments suggests that deterrent sentencing...

Sexting by young people is a complex issue concerning the interplay between the participants’ exploration and representation of their developing sexuality, and their use of new communication technologies to socialize in a digital age. Added to this complexity is the way in which the law deals with such sexting, with some jurisdictions allowing pros...

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) police liaison programs were established around Australia from the late 1980s onwards to ameliorate discriminatory relationships between LGBTIQ people and police. With specialized training to better understand LGBTIQ issues, police liaison officers can provide support to LGBTIQ people as vic...

A decade has passed since changes to the Homicide Act 1957, section 2 (under section 52 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009) were implemented. The issues that have arisen since implementation have resulted in significant role confusion in the operation of the partial defence, with the real risk of inconsistent outcomes in practice. The article arg...

Queer criminological work is at the forefront of critical academic criminology, responding to the exclusion of queer communities from criminology, and the injustices that they experience through the criminal justice system. This volume draws together both theoretical and empirical contributions that develop the growing scholarship being produced at...

Many jurisdictions have enacted laws in recent years to criminalize the use of image-based technologies to non-consensually observe a person’s private parts or a person engaging in a private act (voyeurism), to record images of a person’s private parts (‘upskirt photography’), or to possess, disseminate, or threaten to disseminate intimate images (...

Police liaison programs that support LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex) people might go by many names (including GLLOs, LGBTI police liaison officers, etc.), but they have become the key model for providing police service enhancements for LGBTI people. These programs now dominate approaches used by police to build relationships b...

The ability to distribute private intimate images across public networks including social media through smart devices or computers has emerged as a serious 21st century concern. Initially, legal systems and operators within criminal justice systems were slow to respond to the reported harms associated with the non-consensual distribution of intimat...

The criminalisation of ‘revenge porn’ offending responds to the non-consensual distribution of intimate images. By smart device or computer, the ability to distribute images assumed to be private across public networks including social media has emerged as a serious twenty-first-century concern. Individual victims present as particularly vulnerable...

There has been a long-standing debate throughout Australia about the age at which a child should be subjected to criminal proceedings for wrongful behaviour. In February 2019, an Attorneys-General Working Group was formed with the task of reviewing the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR) and making recommendations for reform across Austra...

This chapter explores the laws that frame sexting with a particular focus on Australia and Europe. International concerns over the impact that new technologies have had on child pornography and child abuse have led to countries strengthening laws to protect children. The chapter analyses how such reforms have impacted on children who engage in sext...

How far do adults truly understand youth? How do their conceptions inform interventions into young lives or implicate young people’s experiences? Centrally exploring adults’ ideas about youth, Youth, Technology, Governance, Experience seeks to tackle these questions. Specifically, this timely volume uses the four central concepts of youth, technol...

This article maps the important albeit under-researched relationship between young people, social network sites, and surveillance practices they encounter or engage with in their digital lives. Based on original empirical research, this article unpacks the complexities of young people’s digital identities, and explores strategies of surveillance, c...

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) police liaison programs were established around Australia from the late 1980s onwards to ameliorate the historically discriminatory relationships between LGBTI people and police. Police liaison officers are trained to know about LGBTI issues and are typically available for LGBTI people to se...

The term sexting has come to be associated with media, political and public concern over young people’s involvement in the sending and/or receiving of nude or semi-nude images and/or videos of one another. Public discourses around sexting have framed the practice as problematic, reflecting long-held – and often very real – anxieties over young peop...

This article explores how Australian jurisdictions came to have an approach to the age of criminal responsibility similar to that which existed in England and Wales until 1998. It discusses recent debates in Australia about reforming the minimum age of criminal responsibility and the presumption of doli incapax. This shows that while there has been...

This article discusses the age at which criminal responsibility should begin and whether there is still a need for the rebuttable presumption of doli incapax. It clarifies the various meanings given to the concept of the age of criminal responsibility and considers its importance. Some common law countries have moved away from the traditional posit...

This chapter examines the DIY chalk rainbow crossing movement which developed in response to the removal of the rainbow crossing on Oxford Street, Sydney. In particular, it explores why this activity did not attract police attention despite the availability of a range of criminal, public order and road transport offences, and policing powers that c...

Since the 1990s, there has been amove towards an academic articulation of the nexus between queer and criminology. This move is significant because previously criminology and queer theories/methodologies have been somewhat awkward and perhaps dangerous bedfellows (Ball forthcoming). This is not to say that criminological research has not engaged wi...

This book explores young people's practices and perceptions of sexting and how sexting has been represented and responded to by the media, education campaigns, and the law. It analyses the important broader socio-legal issues raised by sexting and the appropriateness of current responses. © Thomas Crofts, Murray Lee, Alyce McGovern and Sanja Milivo...

A report released by Amnesty International in May 2015 highlights the alarming overrepresentation of Indigenous young people in detention in Australia. It calls on the Australian Commonwealth Government to make a number of legislative changes to address this issue, which the report argues are necessary to ensure Australia's compliance with its obli...

What has been problematically termed ‘sexting’ has attracted considerable legal, political, public, media and academic attention. Concern has focused on sexting between young people who may experience emotional and reputational damage and are at risk of being charged with child abuse or pornography offences in many jurisdictions. Recent research ha...

While sexting between young people has become a significant cultural phenomenon, a topic of popular media discussion, and the target of concern from law and policymakers, when it comes to young people themselves our knowledge of their practices and perspectives in relation to sexting is still relatively limited. The little we do know of young peopl...

While discourses around the legal response to sexting have tended to centre on the appropriateness of the application of child pornography offences, as discussed in Chapter 4, sexting is a complex behaviour that cannot be reduced to simplistic (legal, social, media) narratives. Taken in their entirety, the results of our research demonstrate that y...

Prosecution of young people under child pornography offences has increasingly been the subject of public, media and academic debate. This is interesting, given that there are many other possible civil and criminal law responses, as well as non-legal responses, to sexting by young people. In civil law it is possible to bring an action for breach of...

The review of the laws relating to child pornography in the previous chapter shows that while there are differences across jurisdictions in how child pornography is defined and criminalised, in recent years most jurisdictions have extended the definition of ‘child pornography’ beyond depictions of children engaged in a sexual act or pose or witness...

Sexting is a phenomenon that has ‘outstripped’ (Richards and Calvert 2009, p. 3) and ‘outpaced’ (McLaughlin 2010, p. 137) the law, with little agreement among legal scholars and academics on how to deal with sexting cases both before and after they find their way to the courtroom. As Richards and Calvert (2009, p. 3) put it, prosecutors are often ‘...

This chapter explores the current educational responses to sexting. While education ‘remains a key component of how society should respond to sexting’ (Australian Privacy Foundation 2012, p. 2), not all educational campaigns are equally valuable. Moreover, it could be argued that, despite a plethora of educational campaigns across the developed wor...

How should we understand both the nature and context of acts of sexting and socio-legal concern about such acts? In this chapter we discuss the conceptual frameworks through which this book views these different aspects of sexting. First we discuss the conceptual tools we use to understand the construction of sexting as a socio-legal problem, then...

In line with the critical approach of this book, it is useful to precede our own contribution to the field of research with a discussion and evaluation of the methods and approaches to researching sexting that have been used in research to date. This chapter starts with a critical analysis of the existing surveys into sexting practices by young peo...

Young people integrate online and digital technologies into their everyday lives in increasingly complex ways. As McGrath (2009, p. 2) notes, ‘[y]oung people…see technologies (especially the internet) as a vital part of their social life and the building of their identity’. As mechanisms for socialising, education, relaxation, gaming, romance or co...

In recent years, sexting as a concept has gained traction in popular and media discourse, becoming one of a suite of issues canvassed by the media that come under the umbrella of cyberporn, cyberbullying and other technologically facilitated ‘harms’. While a growing body of work has begun to emerge about the experiences, understandings and percepti...

Taking our qualitative and quantitative evidence together, we can identify many contradictions, qualifications and conflicted meanings around the perceptions and motivations of sexting for young people. It is clear that in public discourse, as demonstrated by our media analysis, and in legal discourse, sexting behaviours have provided a significant...

This chapter and the following detail the responses of young people in focus group interviews about sexting. Eight focus group interviews were conducted with young people aged 18 to 20. Respondents were drawn from the student body of the University of Sydney, University of Western Sydney, and a Technical and Further Education (TAFE) NSW Institute....

Over 160 years ago, Harvey Kellogg outlined what he saw as the dangers of a childhood sexuality out of control. Some contemporary political statements and educational campaigns on childhood sexuality echo him: [A] new danger arises to children from corrupt communication of companions, or in the boy from an intense desire to become a man, with a fal...

This book presents thought-provoking research and data about pornography that will prompt readers to reconsider their positions on a highly controversial and current issue. Why do people use pornography? Is porn addiction a fact or myth? What is revenge porn and is it illegal? Can pornography be more diverse? This interdisciplinary collection prese...

Local government Community Safety Officers (CSOs) are now common in many jurisdictions. While their roles are diverse, most CSOs are actively engaged in various partnership approaches. This article discusses the nature and scope of inter-agency partnerships CSOs participate in or coordinate in the Australian jurisdiction of New South Wales (NSW). T...

In many jurisdictions around the world, community safety and crime prevention activity is supported by interagency committees. In the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), local government Community Safety Officers (CSOs) lead, support or participate in a range of interagency and 'whole of government' networks, most of which were established t...

Following a high profile and controversial case in which the defendant successfully invoked the provocation defence, the NSW Government established a select parliamentary committee to review the defence and its operation. The Committee recommended that the current defence be "relabelled" a defence of "gross provocation", which was structured substa...

This article explores the criminalisation and governance of sexting among young people. While the focus is on Australian jurisdictions, the article places debates and anxieties about sexting and young people in a broader analysis around concerns about new technologies, child sexual abuse, and the risks associated with childhood sexuality. The artic...

In recent years, the prosecution of teenagers who use digital and online technology to produce and circulate erotic imagery (‘sexts’) under child pornography statutes has been the subject of sustained controversy. Debates over sexting have foregrounded the harms of criminalisation as well as the role of sexts in cyber-bullying and online child soli...

Over the past three decades, the law of homicide has been the subject of much academic debate, parliamentary review and various law reform commission reports throughout Australia. Such activity is largely a response to concerns about the availability and operation of the defences to homicide for women who kill in the context of family violence. The...

This paper discusses Australian controversies over defences and excuses to homicide that serve partly to normalise violence in fatal conflicts between men. The ‘homosexual advance defence’ (HAD), describes a specific use of the provocation plea to seek a reduction of murder charges to a finding of manslaughter in cases of alleged male on male sexua...

Many local authorities (or councils) now routinely assume some responsibility for crime prevention. Much of this work is managed by Community Safety Officers (or related positions). To date, there has been limited analysis of, or commentary on, these roles, certainly in New South Wales (NSW) (Australia) where Community Safety Officers (CSOs) have b...

Over the past few years, news media in Australia, North America and other Western countries have reported with concern on cases of ‘sexting’ where minors have used digital cameras to manufacture and distribute sexual images of themselves and/or other minors, in some cases falling foul of child pornography laws. Populist responses to this behaviour...

This collection of essays explores current developments in privacy law, including reform of data protection laws, privacy and the media, social control and surveillance, privacy and the Internet, and privacy and the courts. It places these developments into a broader international context, with a particular focus on the European Union, the United K...

As part of the ‘Law and Order’ campaign in the run up to the 2008 State elections in Western Australia, the Liberal Party of WA proposed the introduction of ‘Prohibited Behaviour Orders’ to combat the alleged rapidly falling standards of behaviour and increasing feeling of insecurity in the community. These orders, which were introduced in December...

In early 2004 both the United Kingdom (UK) and Western Australia (WA) introduced reforms aimed at avoiding the harms associated with minor cannabis offenders appearing before the courts. As the reforms involved different approaches available to police to divert someone who had committed an offence and one of the reforms – the Cannabis Infringement...

This edition has been substantially revised to increase overall clarity and to ensure a balanced examination of the criminal law in the 'Code' states, Queensland and Western Australia. The work has been brought up-to-date in all areas and provides valuable comment on the recent wide-reaching reforms to the law of homicide in Western Australia. Sign...

In 2005, the English Law Commission was asked to review the law of Homicide in an attempt to bring coherency to this area of law. After conducting its review, the Commission found the dual structure of murder and manslaughter unfit for purpose, and recommended, among other things, applying a three-tier structure to the general homicide offences. In...

This article explores the mental element in rape in Australia. It briefly examines the position in the common law jurisdictions, which require mens rea, and the code jurisdictions, which do not. Although the Northern Territory (NT) is a code jurisdiction the approach to the offence of sexual intercourse without consent fits more appropriately with...

This paper considers the different paths taken in the United Kingdom (UK) and Western Australia (WA) to cannabis law reform. In both jurisdictions significant changes were introduced in early 2004 to the way in which minor cannabis offenders are dealt with. Contrary to the shrill cries of those opposed to these reforms, in neither jurisdiction do t...