Mid Sweden University

This chapter will provide a critical analysis of the highly influential Playable Teaser (P.T.) for the now-canceled game Silent Hills. The aim of this chapter is to critically examine the narratives of domestic violence in P.T., interrogating the portrayal of perpetrators of such violence and how this relates to the public imaginary of domestic violence. This chapter will argue that not only is domestic violence central to the narrative of P.T., but by rooting domestic violence in the mundane, the game also provides a critique against the Othering of domestic violence perpetrators commonly found in popular culture narratives. Drawing on popular criminology and inspiration from ghost ethnography, this chapter will also explore the lingering societal impact of P.T. as a cultural text, particularly considering the precariousness of P.T. as a canceled and deleted game. Overall, P.T. provides an important critique against the Othering and demonization of domestic violence perpetrators commonly found in the public imaginary of such violence, allowing for a critical, more nuanced understanding of offending behavior. 

Using the spectral as a conceptual metaphor, we explore narratives within Sweden’s welfare institutions and policy discourses surrounding vulnerable EU citizens. We aim to provide a new understanding of vulnerable EU citizens as the social ghosts of our time by exploring how the concept of the social ghost and hauntology can be used to perform ethical critique of social injustice. By excavating examples from already gathered material, we explore the unseen within the already seen to critically examine how vulnerable EU citizens are constructed in social welfare narratives. We argue that the terminology of vulnerable EU citizens not only is constructed as uncanny and abject but also as social ghosts, denied a social and political identity and forced to haunt the margins of societal life. Moreover, we argue that the Swedish state becomes a site for necropolitical power, enabling but also perpetuating lingering violent effects on Roma people.

This study examines homicide trends in seven European countries – Denmark, Estonia, Finland, the Netherlands, Scotland, Sweden and Switzerland – all of which manifested a substantial drop in homicide mortality between 1990 and 2016. By using data from the European Homicide Monitor, a coding scheme created to enable cross-country comparisons, combined with the national cause-of-death statistics, we explore generality versus specificity of the homicide drop. We examine changes in the demographic structure of victims and offenders and disaggregate homicides by different subtypes of lethal incidents, such as family-related homicides referring to conflicts between family members, and criminal milieu homicides occurring in the context of robberies, gang-related conflicts or organised crime. Results point to the generality of the drop: in most of the countries studied, the declining trend included all homicide types. The overall decline in homicide mortality was driven mostly by the decline in male victimisation and offending. In most of the countries, the gender distribution of victims and offenders changed only slightly during the study period, whereas the development of the distribution of homicide types manifested greater diversity. Our findings illustrate the benefits of disaggregated analyses in comparative homicide research.

Intimate partner homicide (IPH) constitutes the most extreme form of intimate partnerviolence. While this violent crime affects many of women all around the world, little isknown about this phenomenon when perpetrated against young victims. To date, no studyhas investigated trends of IPHs involving young victims. This study therefore aimed toinvestigate trends of IPHs in Sweden between 1990 and 2017, disaggregated by age-groupand gender. Using register data, this study compared opposite-sex relationship IPH com-mitted against young (≤ 25 years) and against adult (≥ 26 years) individuals, disaggregatedby gender. Using poisson regression modelling, our study demonstrates that while ratesof IPH against adult women has declined, the rate involving adolescent and young adultwomen has not. Our study also indicated a decreasing trend of IPH against adult men,albeit not significant. In conclusion, while IPH committed against adult women demon-strated a decrease over time, our findings suggest that IPH against young female victimshas remained stable the past 27 years. As youth IPH has been a neglected subject of re-search, these findings suggest that the policies to combat IPV and IPH may not be adaptedand tailored for the younger population

Objectives: Intimate partner femicide (IPF) is a public health issue with far-reaching and extreme consequences. As previous research mainly has treated IPF as an adult phenomenon, young victims of such violence have been rendered invisible . Consequently, youth IPF is not well understood and little is known about factors specific to IPF against adolescent and young adult females. Purpose: The aim of this study is to examine factors related to youth IPF (≤ 25 years) and to compare cases of youth IPF with cases of adult IPF (≥ 26 years) regarding these factors. Victim and perpetrator characteristics are explored, as well as factors related to the relationship and circumstances of the crimes. Methods: This epidemiological study is based on a national dataset that involves all homicides in Sweden between 1990 and 2017. Incidents of male-perpetrated femicide in which the perpetrator and victim were or had been in an intimate relationship were analyzed. Descriptive and multivariate analyses with odds ratios (OR) were conducted in order to make group comparisons between young (n = 62) and adult (n = 320) IPF. Results: Our study reveals interesting differences between youth and adult IPF, in which youth IPF is more likely to be motivated by relationship break-up, involve strangulation of the victim and drug use. Conclusions: Our study sheds light on the factors and circumstances that play an important role in youth IPF, and could be fruitful to target in future prevention and intervention efforts that aim to combat severe violence against adolescent and young adult females.

Although violence among youth remains an important, global issue, little research has been conducted regarding how young people themselves define violence and what practices in relation to violence that are evident in their everyday lives. Using an intersectional gender perspective, specifically exploring the intersection of gender, age, and class, this paper therefore aims to explore how young people define violence, as well as to explore what practices in relation to violence that are evident in young people’s everyday lives. By using a photovoice methodology, 11 focus groups of young boys and girls (17–19 years old) living in two municipalities in northern Sweden were interviewed and asked to take photographs representing themes that were discussed. Overall, three main themes in the young peoples’ stories were identified: Violence as ubiquitous, Easy prey and dangerous predators, and The way forward. The findings demonstrated that violence is pervasive, all-encompassing and normalized in young people’s everyday lives, and that this violence is moderated by intersecting power orders of gender, age, and class. Any future theoretical frameworks or prevention strategies should therefore aim to include an intersectional perspective as well as including the voices of the youths themselves. 

Homicide: Towards a Deeper Understanding offers an in-depth analysis into the phenomenon of homicide, examining different types of homicide and how these types have changed over time. Based on original analysis on Scottish data, this book draws upon an international body of research to contextualize the findings in a global setting, filling an important gap in the homicide literature pertaining to the relationship between trends in homicide and violence. Examining homicide from gendered as well as Gothic perspectives, this book also relates homicide to novel, critical theory. The book covers a thorough description of different types of homicide, including sexual homicide, and provides an explorative approach to the identification of homicide subtypes. The book also explores how these findings relate to current homicide theory, and proposes a new theoretical framework to gain a deeper understanding of this crime. The main argument of the book is that if homicide and its relationship to wider violence is to be fully understood, theoretically as well as empirically, this crime needs to be disaggregated in a way that reflects the underlying data. Overall, this book therefore fills an important gap in criminological literature, providing an in-depth understanding of one of the most serious violent crimes. 

More than mere entertainment, video games can be studied as cultural texts, relevant for the interpretation and understanding of the public imaginary relating to crime. Drawing on ideas of Gothic and popular criminology and using a critical lens of hauntology, this study aims to explore themes of carcerality in the video game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. By constructing the text of Majora’s Mask as a horror game, and a cultural text ‘in distress’, encompassing a crypt incorporating a phantom of past trauma, this paper identifies themes of carceral violence within the text as symptomatic of a deep, haunting disillusionment of carceral justice. Relating back to the culture and context in which the game was created, we argue that this cultural text is ‘haunted’ by the trauma of lost ideals in relation to punishment; a deep disillusionment towards a carceral machinery producing the socially dead instead of rehabilitating them.