Author: Alexandra Louise Anderson Baxter
Baxter, Alexandra Louise Anderson, 2021 Oversimplified narratives: Australian judges’ construction of women’s victimisation and offending in human trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation, Flinders University, College of Business, Government and Law
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This thesis examines all ten Australian Commonwealth cases of human trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation involving adult, women offenders with histories of victimisation, which occurred between 2005 to 2019. A qualitative research design is undertaken, including a thematic content analysis of court documents pertaining to each offender. These include sentencing remarks, appeal transcripts, and pre-sentence reports in conjunction with semi-structured interviews with selected judges and anti-trafficking experts. Deploying an original examination of these cases through court documents, this thesis examines the judge’s construction of the narratives contained within the sentencing remarks to add to the understanding of the ways in which women offenders’ narratives are constructed during sentencing. A critical legal feminist (Smart 1990; Hunter 2019) lens is combined with Anthony Giddens’ (1979) theory of structuration to highlight the judge’s construction of the relationship between structure and agency within these ten offenders’ lives. Applying this framework enhances the understanding of the offending women’s’ choices when made within constraint, highlighting the space for agency and structure to co-exist. Four distinct layers of constraint are identified: situational constraints in the women’s lives; constraint imposed by judges; systemic-level constraints; and finally, additional constraint imposed by judges due to systemic constraints. The minimisation of these elements, however, renders an understanding of the victim-offender cycle absent from the narrative within the sentencing remarks.
Keywords: Human trafficking, sexual exploitation, victim-offender overlap, women offenders, sentencing, judicial narratives, agency/structure
Subject: Law thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2021
School: College of Business, Government and Law
Supervisor: Associate Professor Marinella Marmo