Violence, Trauma and Human Rights

This subject is not offered in 2014.

120 hours

Criminology at Undergraduate level

For the purposes of considering request for Reasonable Adjustments under the disability Standards for Education (Cwth 2005), and Students Experiencing Academic Disadvantage Policy, academic requirements for this subject are articulated in the Subject Description, Subject Objectives, Generic Skills and Assessment Requirements of this entry.The University is dedicated to provide support to those with special requirements. Further details on the disability support scheme can be found at the Disability Liaison Unit website: http://www.services.unimelb.edu.au/disability/

Calls to institute human rights, truth commissions, international justice and even legalising torture are responses to injuries inflicted on peoples around the world. This subject considers legal forms and practices, including the mechanisms and rhetoric of human rights, respond to traumatic events.The subject employs psychoanalytic theory and practice to consider what it means to be traumatised and what it means to seek remedies from law. Legal practices will be discussed as methods of responding to the rage, pain and mourning that trauma demands, in this sense law is understood as a symptom of the injury. Understood in this way law can be seen to also cause further damage if it functions as a kind of 'acting out' of the mourning. To consider these ideas we will look at incidents in Africa, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Australia and Nazi Germany, where law has been applied as a response to traumatic events such as genocide, terrorist acts, female circumcision and war.

On completion of this subject students should be able to:

•understand the effects of torture on a body and on a society;

• consider the application of law, torture and conflict resolution in relation to theories of justice;

•create an understanding of the role of human rights rhetoric in its relation to practices of punishment, prohibition and incarceration;

•develop an understanding of psychoanalytic theories of trauma;

•explore the notion of an international law and the implications of this for possibilities of plural justice.

A 1000-word reflective essay (20%) due during the semester, and a 4000-word research essay (80%) due during the examination period.

Hurdle Requirement: As this is an Intensively-taught subject, seminar attendance is compulsory on all 4 days. Regular participation in class is required.

Assessment submitted late without an approved extension will be penalised at 10% per working day. In-class tasks missed without approval will not be marked. All pieces of written work must be submitted to pass this subject.

A Subject Reader will be available for purchase from the University Bookshop.

• Agamben, Giorgio Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans) Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
• Brown, Wendy (2004) 'The Most We Can Hope For....: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism'. South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3, Spring/Summer. Duke University Press.
• Douzinas, Costas The End of Human Rights: Critical Legal Thought at the Turn of the Century Hart Publishing: Oxford., 2000.
• Simpson, Gerry War, Law and Crime: War Crimes, Trials and the Reinvention of International Law, Cambridge. Polity Press, 2007.
• Freud, Sigmund 'Mourning and Melancholia' Standard Edition Vol XIV (1914 - 1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, Trans. James Strachey, Vintage 2001, Great Britain.
• Scarry, Elaine Body in Pain: the making and unmaking of the world, New York, Oxford 1985.

This subject is not available as a breadth subject.

On completion of this subject students should:

• have highly developed cognitive, analytical and problem-solving skills;
• have an advanced understanding of complex concepts and the ability to express them lucidly in writing and orally;
• have sophisticated awareness of cultural, ethnic and gender diversities and their implications;
• have an ability to plan work and to use time effectively.