This chapter introduces the main topic of this book, inducing intimacy, and explains that the focus is deceptively induced sex and intimate relationships (i.e., sex and sexual and/or romantic relationships). It then sets out the book’s core aims, that is, to examine how the law has responded to inducing intimacy as a form of wrongdoing and source of harms and what can this tell us about the justifiability and desirability of using law to respond to these practices in the present age. The chapter also outlines the scope of the book and the sources used before introducing the theoretical framework that informs the analysis in the remaining chapters, which is based on the cultural significance of sex and marriage, including their significance for self-construction. The chapter closes by outlining the main arguments of the book, including the potential for its historical analysis to inform contemporary debates about whether and how to respond to inducing intimacy via law today.

This chapter explores the civil wrong of seduction to establish its nature and parameters and draw out its associations with deception. It argues that, as the earliest legal response to deceptive sex, seduction is in some senses the civil law analogue of later criminal laws. The chapter then shows how the action of seduction was rooted in the idea that deception was wrongful because it was one way of leading a woman off the ‘right’ path and that the harms it caused reflected the gendered significance of marriage and other ‘moral’ forms of intimacy. Furthermore, it highlights how these features of the action provided a framework within which the range of qualifying deceptions was limited and the temporal dimensions of the wrong were set. Finally, the chapter offers some reflections on how the distinctions between private and public introduced in Chapter 1 bore on the decision to keep seduction a civil wrong before foregrounding how these observations, and those made throughout the rest of the chapter, are pertinent to contemporary discussions about criminalising deceptive sex.

This chapter analyses crimes involving procuring sex, including procuring sex by deception. It argues that to appreciate the nature of these offences, and their place within this book, it is necessary both to understand how the verb ‘to procure’ was interpreted, including when and why it required deception, and to pay attention to the acts whose procurement was proscribed by law. The chapter provides elucidation on both fronts, showing how the procuring offences were geared towards prohibiting ‘illicit’ (i.e., immoral) sexual activities and therefore criminalised the use of deception to lure others into committing such acts. In demonstrating this point, the chapter argues that a culturally sensitive vision of what makes intimacy valuable shaped and constrained the use of the procuring offences. Finally, the chapter argues that the demise of the procuring offences set the stage for the expansion of the crime of rape by deception and that examining how the procuring offences worked yields important lessons for those attempting to engage critically with this development.

This chapter summarises the overarching narrative of this book and argues that as was as being intrinsically valuable it can inform contemporary debates about using law to regulate the practices of inducing intimacy. The discussion is organised around three sets of issues: the public and private dimensions of sex and intimate relationships, including the interests protected by law, the form of response (i.e., state or non-state), and the variety of legal response (i.e., public or private); the structure of legal responses, the meaning of consent and its relation to deception, targeted modes of deception, culpability matters, the requirement for a causal link between deception and ‘outcome’, and the temporalities of the legal wrong; and the substance of deceptions, including the dynamics governing the range of topics about which transparency has been expected. Drawing the discussion together, the chapter concludes by offering a new framework for constructing legal responses to deceptively induced intimacy, which builds on the core insight and these responses have historically been predicated on temporally sensitive associations between self-construction and intimacy.

The chapter gives a detailed account of inter-state corporations in combatting cybercrime and its limitations. The chapter situates the current negotiations of a new legal instrument to counter cybercrime within the UN’s historical framework of efforts to enhance co-operation against general organised crime and cybercrime. In particular, it analyses the main issues that have held back progress in enhancing co-operation. It then proceeds to examine the current negotiation process and the prospects for effective co-operation once the negotiations come to an end, highlighting the potentially impactful legal implications of the work of the UN ad hoc committee on cybercrime.

This chapter summarises the findings from relevant national and international research studies exploring neurodevelopmental impairment among young people who offend and describes the potential role of these disorders in developmental pathways for the onset of antisocial behaviour. In particular, we consider the increased exposure to social and environmental risk for offending resulting from neurodevelopmental impairment and disabling and criminalising processes that these young people are subjected to, including within the criminal justice system. Dismantling these barriers requires recognition, understanding, resources and awareness. Age-appropriate accommodations are needed to ensure that children affected by impairments have their rights respected, protected and fulfilled in criminal proceedings.

This chapter examines the first fundamental legal concept of international criminal law, the international crime, and the ideas of persons and of social relations that it expresses. The legal category of international crime determines legally defined socially injurious conduct under international law. The chapter examines the construction of this legal category by tracing the modern criminalisation of conflict-related sexual violence under international law. It then sets out international crimes of sexual violence under customary international law and examines current definitions of sexual violence offences. It analyses how sexual violence as an international crime expresses the concept of the injured person and the ‘injured public interest’ of ‘international society’ in the new legal category of the international crime. The chapter shows that sexual violence offences criminalise injury to the bodily, personal, and sexual integrity of the individual and violation of positive law and universal values of ‘international society’. However, they also reveal a set of unresolved doctrinal and conceptual problems in the legal category. These include the grounds of criminalisation, gender-based or gender-neutral offences, the sexual or violent nature of the crime, and the connection of sexual violence to illegal international violence.

Mary Spiers Williams offers the reader a provocative invitation to reflect on the centring of State law and to critically engage with its impact on First Peoples and more broadly its facilitation of dispossession and its structural bias against First Peoples in Australia. She asks readers to reconsider the nature and authority of law and legal systems transplanted to effect colonisation. Focussing on Australian criminal law, she challenges assumptions about its lawfulness and just–ness, and insists that the reader see its inherent violence against Indigenous people, ways of being and law. This provocative and uncomfortable essay endeavours to create the possibility that readers will gain some insight into Aboriginal Peoples’ perspectives. It does so first by sharing stories of First Peoples experience of state law and their practice of their own law. It also does so by offering another way of understanding what is lawful. Williams asks readers to consider what it might mean to shift their perspectives: what might happen if we assumed that all law derives from Country, not from courts or legislators? and that lawful behaviour, at minimum, requires us to recognise that everyone and everything is interrelated? At base it would require the state to stop claiming the primacy of its law, and to recognise instead, that, in Australia, two laws (First and State) exist under, and are subject to, one law (derived from Country).

Chapter 5 articulates recommendations for responding to orphanage trafficking as a form of child trafficking. The chapter advocates for a comprehensive multi-sector framework that focuses on both anti-trafficking and child protection mechanisms to combat orphanage trafficking using the three pillars for addressing human trafficking that are found in the Trafficking Protocol: prosecution, prevention and protection. Using this framework, the chapter recommends that countries respond to orphanage trafficking through criminalising and prosecuting orphanage trafficking as a form of child trafficking; preventing orphanage trafficking through addressing vulnerability, demand, corruption and complicity; and providing protection and assistance for child victims and survivors of orphanage trafficking focusing on identification, reintegration and access to remedies. The chapter advocates that a child-rights-based approach with a focus on prevention and protection, as opposed to just prosecution, must be at the centre of implementation of this framework.

Chapter 4 examines the experiences of young, black, urban-based, and predominantly male civic and political activists, who were pervasively persecuted by the police through violent arrests and inhumane conditions in detention. For ZANU-PF, the stages of arrest and detention offered a public platform on which to perform the party’s portrayal of activists as ‘criminals’. Framing the physical violence, mental torment and isolation that marked their treatment at the hands of the police as an experience which would not occur in a ‘normal’, ‘rule-bound’ and ‘democratic’ society, activists in turn refused to accept these efforts to criminalise them. ZANU-PF’s use of the law, activists argued, could not grant it authority. Activists were confronted, however, with the fact that their understandings of their arrest and detention as ‘illegitimate’ were not universally shared. In the eyes of certain family members they were still ‘criminalised’, despite the fact that they were targeted for arrest due to their political activities, rather than for, for example, committing petty theft. This highlights the existence of multiple legal consciousnesses in Zimbabwe, some of which are built less on notions of how the law should work, and more on a recognition of the power of law itself.

Chapter 4 considers what is required for an ‘act of aggression’ to amount to the State act element of the crime of aggression – namely that it constitutes, by its character, gravity and scale, a manifest violation of the UN Charter. The chapter analyses the manifest violation threshold in order to provide meaning to it. A number of criticisms associated with the definition are rebuffed, particularly that the definition violates the nullum crimen sine lege principle and that the definition has given a green light to ‘lesser violations’ of the UN Charter. At the same time, on the basis of an exhaustive survey of State practice and opinio juris, it is demonstrated that the definition of the State act element of the crime of aggression under the Rome Statute is inconsistent with the crime’s customary definition, and that it will require the judges of the ICC to resolve controversies associated with unclear rules surrounding the prohibition of the use of force. The chapter finally considers the grounds for excluding criminal responsibility under Article 31 of the Rome Statute in relation to the crime.

A range of social forces shape women’s distinct experiences of crime and criminal justice. This chapter explains the significance of gender in the historical development of criminology and some of the key phenomena and institutions it studies, such as patterns of violence, victimisation and punishment. Women’s ‘deviance’ has been historically constructed within criminological discourse and is mediated along lines of class and race. Moreover, women are subjected to particular forms of social control that impact how they are viewed and treated as victims and/or offenders. In particular, a closer examination of women’s imprisonment and responses to women’s victimisation highlights how gendered ideologies structure (and are structured by) crime and criminal justice. These issues are illuminated by key concepts used within feminist criminology, such as patriarchy and intersectionality, and the impacts of feminist scholarship on criminology cannot be understated. In rescuing the discipline from its sexist essentialising of women and overt biases, feminist criminologists have significantly reshaped the whole enterprise in a relatively short space of time.

This chapter deals with male-on-male homicide and serious interpersonal violence in Europe, 1500–1800. Although it uses a global perspective, the evidence for the non-Western world in this period is very limited. In much of Europe homicide rates declined markedly and since male-on-male fighting accounts for the great majority of these rates, it means that this type of violence declined as well. In the south, however, in particular in Italy, homicide rates did not begin to fall until the end of the seventeenth century. Everywhere high homicide rates went hand in hand with widespread value being laid upon the traditional concept of honour which obliged a man to uphold his reputation by violence. In Europe, again less so in the south, notions of honour gradually changed, while homicide became more fully criminalised. The traditional concept of male honour held sway in many regions of the non-Western world, in 1800 no less than in 1500. From this we may hypothesise that violence was endemic in these regions throughout the early modern period. A final feature of non-Western interpersonal violence, in contrast to Europe, was its being affected by ethnic differences and slavery.