A Closer Look in Unusual Times
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A Closer Look in Unusual Times: Criminological Perspectives from Crim 862 June 2020 Cover art by Ashley Peckford Copyright is held by each of the individual authors contained herein Table of Contents Author Title Page Steff King “Let’s Have a Chat”: The State of Repatriation in the United 1 States and Canada Ryan Sandrin Sour Grapes: Exploring the Experiences of Minority Hockey 19 Players in Their Battles Against Racism Taline Blakley Foster Parent Perspectives on Successful Placements in Care 35 Noelle Warkentin In Their Own Words: A Thematic Analysis of the ‘New Members 51 Introduce Yourselves’ Sub-forum on Stormfront Ashley Peckford Right Wing Extremism in a Video Game Community? A 65 Qualitative Content Analysis Exploring the Discourse of the Reddit GamerGate Community r/KotakuInAction Yuxuan (Cicilia) Zhang “Cyber Bullying Stays with You”: A Textual Analysis of a 81 Subreddit Involving Cyberbullying Victims Raven Lam Don’t Sugarcoat It: An Analysis of Sugar Dating Culture on Reddit 97 Andrea Reagan Wong Business as Usual: A Thematic Content Analysis of the Online Sex 109 Work Experience through the Clients’ Lens and the Impact of the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act Becca Wood ‘Hormonal Women Who Stared at the Moon Too Long’: 127 Assessing the Impact of Me Too on Young Women’s Perceptions of Sexual Violence in England Kayleigh McDonald Sexual Harassment in Restaurants 143 Kevin Siery Understand Where We Went Wrong: A Content Analysis 159 Comparing Two “Year(s) of the Gun” in Toronto i Preface First of all, welcome to this book that has been produced by the Criminology 862 class of Spring/2020. Our title for this book – A Closer Look in Unusual Times: Criminological Perspectives from Crim 862 – encapsulates well both what you will find here and the social and cultural context in which it was produced. The “Closer Look” is basically what qualitative research is supposed to do – focus in on particular cases and examples of social phenomena to try and discern the social dynamics that make some niche in the world tick, and uncover the social meaning that actors in those realms attach to what they believe and do. The “Unusual Times” comes in part from the fact that a third or more of our semester together was wiped out by the historic COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, which meant that it was at exactly the time when students were in the process of gathering the last of their data and beginning to draw all the methodological strands of their work together that the world changed so dramatically and life became dominated by working at home and what seems an endless series of Zoom chats. One impact of the virus was that we were unable to do what has become a tradition in Crim 862 – hosting an end-of- semester symposium of presentations. A fortunate side effect is that it encouraged us to consider other ways of celebrating a productive semester completed under trying circumstances, and hence this book that will allow everyone in the cohort to have a better look at what their colleagues have been up to. A more unfortunate side effect involved who we were able to include in this book, and we regret that, through no fault of their own, not everyone could participate in this effort. The end of in-class meetings and everyone working at home played out in different ways in different households where responsibilities for children, immuno-deficient family members and other life circumstances played havoc with time and left some class members unable to complete their work by the time we were going “to press,” or producing work that was less well developed than they would have hoped. We wish them well and hope they, too, enjoy reading what their colleagues were able to bring to fruition. But the “unusual times” in our title also refers more broadly to the unusual times in which the corona virus is playing out. Our neighbour to the south has become so incredibly and dysfunctionally polarized that the virus and governmental response to it has become part of the broader cultural wars. Institutions and concepts many of us grew up taking for granted as part of a progression to a better world – concern for human rights, the rule of law, equality and social justice, and a rational social order guided by science and evidence – are under threat. Taken together we see the juxtaposition of a world- wide pandemic that reminds we are all connected and interdependent on this tiny little planet while other forces are simultaneously tearing us apart and building walls – both conceptual and literal – to protect a social order that is based on all the negatives that capture our interest in criminology – xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, intolerance, injustice. Indeed, it is perhaps very criminological of us to be spending more time trying to understand the negative things that are happening around us. But from what I have come to know of this year’s 862ers, it is ground in the belief that it is only by understanding what gives rise to these negatives that we can generate reasonable law and social policies to keep us from descending further into and perhaps even bringing us back from those negative places. ii So while Steff King laments the extent to which Indigenous artifacts have been stolen from the people and peoples who are their rightful owners and stored in museums along with the body parts of their ancestors, Steff’s focus is on the positive changes that are occurring in this realm and on the policy and legal shifts that see more and more of these artifacts being repatriated and contributing to a broader commitment to finding a more just relationship between Indigenous and settler peoples. Ryan Sandrin, in turn, looks at “Canada’s game” – hockey – and focuses on the experience of visible minority players who continue to love and play the game despite every one of them being told at one time or another that they do not belong, not because of a lack of talent, but simply because they are different. His article reminds us of how the game itself loses when we restrict the diversity of talent who can play, and the unjust treatment that the game is only now beginning to address in any substantial way. Taline Blakley next takes us to foster care in her home province of Saskatchewan, where she surveyed and interviewed a sample of foster parents about some of the challenges of foster parenting and how different families cope with these in situations where children may or may not be there for a significant period of time. The next two articles by Noelle Warkentin and Ashley Peckford both scrutinize aspects of right wing extremism (RWE) through analyses of the discourse associated with two different forums frequented by those who have taken that path. For Noelle, the question is what brought these people to the movement in the first place, which she assesses by scrutinizing their explanations in a forum where people explain exactly that. Ashley focuses on the language and concepts that are embedded within right wing extremism by looking at how these played out when an RWE group took over an online discussion among members of a video gaming community. Yuxuan (Cicilia) Zhang takes us into the realm of cybercrime with her analysis of a subreddit where victims of cyber bullying share their experiences. Her interest is in understanding both the dynamics of the bullying experience and its impacts on victims in order to prevent that behaviour and mitigate its impacts. Raven Lam and Andrea Reagan Wong next take us into the world of sex work, although one of the key questions of Raven’s work is whether that is the appropriate label to affix to what her participants – sugar babies – do, which is to trade occasional sexual favours and companionship for being treated with gifts from the basic (e.g., shelter, tuition) to the more luxurious (jewelry, gourmet dining, holidays). Andrea’s research looks at more “traditional” sex work that falls more squarely into the realm of prostitution. Her interest is in scrutinizing the ways that digital online culture and social media have impacted the world of prostitution, as well as understanding those changes in the context of the legal changes that came with implementation of the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act. Becca Wood and Kayleigh McDonald give us the next two articles that focus on issues surrounding sexual harassment. While media attention regarding the Me Too movement has been on celebrities and the powerful, both researchers turn their focus on the experiences of everyday women whose lives are just as important and would provide better evidence of real cultural change. Becca completed interviews with a sample of British young adult women over the general question of whether they had seen any changes in their interactions with men in the wake of the Me Too movement. Kayleigh’s project saw her re-visit a job she had prior to grad school, which was working in a restaurant. Her interviews with a sample of women about the varying ways that sexual harassment manifests itself in iii that occupation led her to consider harassment not only by customers, but also among workers and by employers, and she finishes by considering some of the policy options that restaurants can consider to manage that phenomenon. We close with an article by Kevin Siery whose interests lay in policing, but whose project focused on the intersection of policing and media portrayals, particularly with respect to gun violence. His analysis of newspaper articles from both 2005 and 2018 – two years that saw spikes in gun violence in Toronto – focused on where blame was laid and the types of solutions that were offered.