Essay: The Crime and Punishment of Shamima Begum

Most teenage girls who dream in their bedrooms of becoming famous think they may be pop stars, perhaps actors or models, a few of them like Malala and Greta Thunberg do it through activism. Very few teenage girls dream of becoming a terrorist. However this is what happened to Shamima Begum, a 15 year old …

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Crime in Culture Round Up: The Unforgotten and Villan or Victim?

We do women no favours if we discount their violence, their crimes or the great damage we can do and only see them as victims. More importantly we compound the damage they have done to their victims. We, however also do wrong if we don't take into account the fact that we live in a society where it is all to easy for impressionable, vulnerable women to be manipulated by older, more powerful men. My answer to the question that we should never be asking, if these women are victims or villian, is instead to let go of the pervasive "perfect victim," fallacy and accept that a great deal of the time, people can be both.

The Cruelty: A Child Unclaimed. A podcast unravelling one of Scotland’s best known mysteries.

This is not the only time we see this behaviour, as wherever the cold clamy hand of colonialisim has touched, we find "experiments" of this sort, from the forced assimilation of Australian Aboriginals, to cutting First Nations People from their land and placing their children in residential school, we see this pattern repeated across history and continents.

Better the Blood: A Crime Fiction Book set in New Zealand

The surface question of this book is "Who is killing these people?" but as a book of layers, readers who choose to dig down further find other questions, many of which will be uncomfortable. Like it's antipodean counterpart, Dust off the Bones, we are seeing an emergence in crime fiction of narrative which deeply engages with crime. Not just the crime that propels a reader to turn the page to find out who dun it. Rather crime that is rooted in great injustices, crimes of nations and states, crimes for which no one person can be jailed, so we can easily say justice is done and move on. Crimes which are so large, that they ripple throughout history, and on the level of time are still present, happening and, ongoing, before our very eyes.

Father Wants Us Dead: A True Crime Podcast about John List

For those who enjoy delving into the aberrant psychologies behind some of the worst true crime, you will soon come to notice that it reflects the same biases and inadequacies as the rest of society. It's serious nature does not lead it to be immune from the fact that humans are inherently flawed no matter …

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