Jacob Zuma’s relentless attack on the judiciary had a setback when the constitutional court sentenced him to 15 months for contempt. But will this achieve its purpose?
crime
Posted inNews/Politics
Please minister explain the disconnected SAPS and the banning of guns for self defence
A dishonest police leadership has no concrete strategy for dealing with crime and corruption within its own ranks
Posted inNews/Politics
Criminal justice system not designed to net Big Fish like Zuma and Magashule
Criminologists argue that prisons deflect attention away from the goings-on of the wealthy and the powerful
Posted inNews/Politics
Political elites, not foreigners, are to blame for South Africa’s problems
What if we told foreigners to voetsek? We have fallen victim to the illusion of scarcity. And we are led to wrongly believe immigrants are a threat.
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Peacemaking criminology as ubuntu: A reply to Thuli Madonsela
If the rich and powerful are afforded amnesty, then so too must the poor who are often pushed into lives of crime
Posted inEquality, Gender violence, General, Health, Media
Criminality of the brutal variety
By the term, ‘criminality’, I don’t simply mean the perpetration of crime, or criminal acts; I have in mind something far more fundamental, even primal, in the sense of that which remains behind when criminologists, sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists have exhausted all avenues of causal explanation when it comes to the ‘grounds’ or causal antecedents […]
Posted inGender violence, General, Health, Lifestyle
Modern neuroscience-based therapies can help resolve trauma faster than ever
By Terence Watts Contact crime continues to increase in SA, up by 2.6% in 2019. Debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is often the aftermath and it can be difficult to understand what’s going on, in order to help the affected person, despite this having to do with the way an ancient part of the brain […]
Posted inGeneral, Health, Media
Season 2 of True Detective — A ‘noir’ reflection of our broken society?
When the first season of True Detective was broadcast — with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as two detectives out to solve a case that seemed intractable in the extreme, with a gritty cinematic style and refusal to compromise itself for the sake of satisfying the usual Hollywood saccharine, sentimentalist demands regarding plot structure — […]
Posted inGeneral, Media
‘In Bruges’: Film-making at its best
Martin McDonagh’s dark crime-comedy In Bruges (Universal Studios 2008) represents film-making at its best. Without excessive reliance on the special effects with which Hollywood is infatuated (and infected), and simply by employing the basics of cinema – successive images and sounds – it manages to draw its audiences into the unlikely world of professional assassins, […]
Posted inEnvironment, General
Our troubled world
A number of things have struck me since we arrived in Europe to attend a number of conferences, travelling from Ghent in Belgium through Munich in Germany to beautiful Venice in the Veneto of Italy, and they do not augur well for the future of human society or the planet. These range from observations in […]
Posted inGeneral, Media, Tech
The cyber-war(s) being fought right under our noses
Time magazine invariably has very clever, multi-faceted covers, the latest one being no exception. It shows the White House – the American president’s residence and workplace, all in one – being slowly but surely devoured by Saint Basil’s Cathedral, with its red brick walls and colourful onion domes, which stands on the Red Square and […]
Posted inGender violence, News/Politics
The horror of how our children die, I see it every day
Last week we heard of a teenager who went missing while running with her dog and family in Cape Town and was found murdered a few hours later. It’s a terrible story, the stuff of every parent’s absolute worst nightmare. We have all briefly lost sight of our children in a supermarket, at the park, […]