Human trafficking is a crime that can result in both acute and chronic physical and mental health problems for victims. Additionally, victims are often faced with various social challenges. In recent years, many countries have recognized victims of human trafficking as a target population for their social and health services. In the Netherlands, the number of victims of human trafficking that seek shelter has more than doubled in the last decade and 3% of placements in shelters for victims of violence are now for victims of human trafficking. Despite the increasing relevance of victims of human trafficking for the Dutch social and health services, there is a dearth of evidence on how to best facilitate recovery for this population, both in the Netherlands and internationally. This thesis makes a contribution to redressing this knowledge deficit and explores the Dutch post-trafficking social and health services from the viewpoints of service users and service providers. By analysing their experiences with post-trafficking service provision and by building on theories of both service needs and system development, the thesis provides insight into these services from different empirical and theoretical perspectives. Its findings are based on data collected from interviews, observations, literature reviews and documentary analyses, mainly making use of qualitative methods of analysis. The thesis is situated in the field of social and health services research and makes two main contributions to this field. First, it advances insight into how recovery is conceptualized and experienced by victims themselves. Second, it provides lessons about how that recovery can be best facilitated by countries’ social and health services. Finally, the thesis also contributes to the qualitative research methods literature by reflecting on the challenges that were encountered in interviewing victims of human trafficking.

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Since the early 1990s, political rhetoric concerning the victim’s role in the criminal justice process has shifted. The formation of Witness Care Units was the cornerstone of the government’s new strategy to provide additional support to victims and witnesses during their journey through the criminal justice system (CJS). From the outset, the Units were envisioned as being ‘multi-agency’: that is, representatives from the Police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) were obliged to become involved in victim work, and through such co-operation it was envisaged that victims and witnesses would be better informed, protected and supported. Such measures defined the Witness Care Units in a formal, procedural sense: at the same time, the Units would become arenas relating to the care of victims and witnesses. Therefore, a dispassionate description of a unit – the witness care officers, and their shared values that manifested themselves in the practices of the Witness Care Unit – might expose an attitude towards witness care that differed from that embodied within the national strategy. Through a detailed ethnographic study of the lived experiences of the practitioners of a Witness Care Unit, this thesis contributes to learning by using new data to examine some of the enduring challenges faced by them as they responded to the changing socio-political context. The study attempts to show that practitioners had differing role perceptions, and three ideal-types of witness care officer (humanitarian, performance-led and disaffected) were derived from the analysis which were a convenient way of making sense of this phenomenon. The competing demands of various organisational, personal, and societal factors was just one example of the contradiction between the ‘reality’ and the government’s declared vision for Witness Care Units. These findings corroborate the commonly held assumption amongst academics that the CJS is plagued by ambiguity (for example, Rock, 2004). Despite the use of the term ‘care’ in the implementation of government policy, the thesis highlights that the primary goal of Witness Care Units was to meet the government’s imperative to get more offenders brought to justice. Thus, government language purporting to put victims at the heart of the system was more likely to give victims the impression that they would have a more significant participatory role than they actually were being given.

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Violence is a considerable burden on society; the costs incurred through treating victims and apprehending the perpetrators combine with economic costs, the emotional victim costs and costs to the community through increased fear of crime to suggest the costs of violence are significant. A growing number of studies seek to quantify the economic and social impact of crime by assessing the aggregate social costs incurred by criminal offending or by examining the consequences of crime at the individual level, focusing on its effect on the general welfare. Regardless of the approach, tangible and intangible costs are always identified, with the first referring to those directly observable and the latter to the unobservable costs that refer to the physical and emotional impact on crime victims. Despite the importance of both, the available estimates of the intangible costs of violence are very limited, especially in the UK context. This research set out to investigate this gap and provide a new insight into violence costs with a special focus to the intangible losses incurred by pain and suffering. Stated preferences techniques were developed and applied for this purpose, aiming to determine the monetary values of risk reduction of assault-related injuries as assigned by a UK sample to victimisation risks, contingent on the injury severity and psychological outcome. Novel epidemiological research carried out with British Crime Survey and Accident and Emergency data assisted this application, as the drawn evidence formed the basis for constructing plausible scenarios with a representative description of violent victimisation outcomes. The analyses identified that socio-demographic characteristics (gender, age, ethnicity), quality of life indicators (self-rated health, income, marital status, educational qualifications) and offence-specific characteristics (use of force/violence, sustained injuries, injury severity, severity of the emotional effect, alcohol consumption prior to the incident) were not only linked to victimisation risks but also predicted severe emotional responding. Altogether, results suggested a two-dimensional structure underlying victims’ emotional reaction and a similar two-dimensional severity-based structure underpinning the physical aftermath of a violent assault. This research concluded with an array of comparable values that denote public's perception of victimisation risks in monetary terms while it highlighted the issues emerging from such an application. The estimation exercise showed that WTP varied extensively across respondents: women were willing to pay more to reduce victimisation related risks and WTP increased with education, age, income and fear of crime. Previous victimisation and difficulty in answering the valuation questions were negative influences on WTP. The numerical findings reflect the importance of victims' costs and provide metrics useful in assessing the cost-effectiveness of crime interventions. Although the contingent valuation method was effective for analysing intangible victim costs providing support for continuing this line of research, further work is required to substantiate its application and strengthen its methodology within the crime context.

This thesis contributes to the literature seeking to reconceptualise human security from a critical feminist perspective. It argues that security is a field of power, implicated in context-specific ways in the (re)production of gendered violences, and that human security must account for how such violences are (re)produced in and through the everyday. It explores how socially and historically embedded security institutions, discourses and practices are implicated in ‘the (violent) reproduction of gender’ (Shepherd 2008), taking as a case study Delhi Police’s initiatives to address violence/crime against women, in response to the city’s notoriety as India’s ‘rape capital’. Drawing on 86 in-depth interviews and 6 months of observational fieldwork with Delhi Police, the thesis shows that Delhi Police have found innovative ways of doing ‘security’ which depart from its association with (masculinist) authority and protection, and which apprehend violences embedded in the everyday. However, the effects are contradictory and ambivalent. Despite challenging some aspects of gender relations, the policing of violence/crime against women also reproduces conditions which enable and sustain the violence. The thesis explores how police discourses construct violence in terms of vulnerability and responsibility, in ways which both normalise and exceptionalise certain violences, and map gendered safety onto normative ideas of sexual integrity such as to reproduce the heteronormativity of marriage as a compulsory institution for women. It investigates the spatial and temporal distancing through which violence/crime against women is constructed, and the consequent reproduction of class differentiation and identification, and normative gender and sexuality. It considers how the unstable gendering of policing, and police work, intersects with and contributes to such constructions of violence/crime against women, and their discursive effects. The thesis concludes with a qualified and partial recuperation of human security as emancipatory – where emancipation is conceived as transforming oppressive power relations, and power is understood in a Foucauldian sense as pervasive, unstable and productive. It highlights the limits of security, and the relativity of its achievability.

This thesis constitutes a criminological study of the fear of crime as a public reaction to crime and victimization. Its key objectives are to enhance the theorization of the fear of crime, and to develop an integrated methodological approach to its empirical exploration. To achieve the former, the construal-level theory of psychological distance (CLT) is applied to the study of the fear of crime. To achieve the latter, observational and experimental methodologies are combined to evaluate empirically the research hypotheses. The starting premise of the CLT approach to the fear of crime is that people do not often experience crime directly in their daily lives as victims; yet, they are capable of expressing reactions to the risk of crime. The current thesis explores cognitive processes that help transcend the ‘crime-free’ ‘here and now’ to enable experience and expression of fear of crime reactions to the distal event of crime. Based on the CLT, two such processes are examined. First, psychological distance from crime, which relates to how far in time, space, social distance and probability, crime is psychologically experienced to occur. Second, crime construal, which relates to the abstractness or concreteness of mental representations of crime. Overall, the findings indicate that experiencing crime as psychologically distant, and mentally representing it abstractly rather than concretely ‘cool off’ fear of crime reactions. One of the main theoretical implications of the current work is that adopting a theory-driven interdisciplinary perspective in the study of the fear of crime improves its theorization. The key methodological implication is that such a perspective renders plausible the use of integrated research. The key policy implication of this work is that its findings can be conducive to the development of public discourses of crime and justice, crime-related narratives and strategies for the public communication ofcrime that keep people informed about crime, but ‘free from fear’.

Since the issue of dating violence emerged onto the research agenda in the 1980s, researchers have focused upon measuring the prevalence of physical violence occurring in young people’s intimate relationships, using quantitative methods. Surveys, which have limited young people’s reporting to stating whether or not they have perpetrated or sustained any of a fixed range of predetermined violent acts, have formed the dominant methodological approach. In the main, dating violence studies have focused on researching university students in the United States of America, and young people not attending American universities are an under-researched population in the dating violence literature. The dearth of qualitative approaches to past studies of dating violence has meant that young people’s own accounts of their experiences, attitudes and perceptions of dating violence and abuse have been afforded minimal focus. Feminist theoretical approaches to dating violence research are now emerging, contributing a valuable gendered analysis of the issues. Through qualitative interviews with forty five young people aged 16-21 (23 men and 22 women), recruited primarily from a Further Education college and an organisation working with young people not in education, employment or training, this thesis explores young people’s attitudes, perceptions and experiences of violence and abuse in intimate dating relationships, through a feminist theoretical lens. The study is couched in a rich body of feminist empirical and theoretical literature, which conceptualises intimate partner violence as primarily an issue of men’s violence against women, perpetrated with the rationale of maintaining power and control. The impact that popular theoretical discourses of gender equality and female empowerment may have upon young people’s capacity to acknowledge ongoing gender inequalities is also considered in this thesis. The findings of the current research indicate that young people’s dating relationships (and experiences of heterosexuality in general) reflect ongoing gender inequalities which are influenced to a great extent by patriarchal modes of power and control. The accounts of young men and women in this study established dating relationships as sites of imbalanced gender power, with many modes of men’s power control, surveillance and monitoring of their girlfriends described as ‘normal’ and acceptable. There was a widespread perception among the participants that dating violence is an issue of ‘mutual combat’ where women are just as likely as men to be perpetrators, even though their experiences of dating violence largely reflected the pattern of female victims and male perpetrators. In regard to violence against women by men, many of the participants perceived men’s violence to be understandable in the face of women’s provocation, particularly in cases where women are perceived to be ‘cheating’. For a significant minority of young people, intimate relationships are sites of violence and abuse, with women disproportionately the victims. The findings from this study indicate a lack of awareness of the avenues of support that can be accessed by young people experiencing dating violence and abuse. The findings also highlight a requirement for direct educative strategies to challenge some young people’s support for men’s violence against women.

The central question guiding this study is, how can Liberia's historical context of colonial state formation and reformation help explain public discourses surrounding gender violence in the postwar decade, 2003-2013? This question is addressed using original data from mixed qualitative methods including participant observation, visual methods, and semi-structured interviews. The research identifies narratives and meta-narratives produced by liberal institutions (including the Government of Liberia and international agencies), as well as informal discourses from adult Liberians of different backgrounds living in Greater Monrovia. Using critical discourse analysis, the argument identifies connections between the narratives that recur, the social realities they recall, and the power dynamics they perpetuate. These discourses are best understood in reference to liberal and colonial/imperial dynamics from Liberia's settlement period. Liberal institutions addressing gender violence in the postwar period face dilemmas in which universalist humanitarian ideals work in tandem with, and provide justification for, imperialism as a set of discursive and material relations. Nonelite Liberians instrumentalise and subvert both privileged donor discourses as well as long-standing colonial hierarchies of 'civilised' and 'country'. Additionally, the thesis examines how liberal institutions, traditional institutions, and Liberian citizens interact as agents of discursive construction. It will be shown that this pattern of discourse production is at times harmonious, as in the interactions around promoting male head-of-household responsibilities, and at other times adversarial, as in conflicts surrounding excision as an initiation practice for girls. Liberal institutions, non-elite Liberians, and traditional authorities both collude and compete in this era of dynamic normative contestation. Both the major discourses and the interactions that produce them can be explained in part by the liberal imperialism and its specific form of settler colonialism that propelled the founding and subsequent stages of state formation in Liberia. The consequences of that residual history indicate inherent - though, not irredeemable - structural limitations to a robust institutional response to gender violence. In this manner the study demonstrates the utility of historicising Liberia's contemporary gender violence discourses, and how doing so can address the longstanding bifurcation between rights and culture in international development and transnational feminist geography.

Power imbalances and gender-based violence (GBV) have increasingly been cited as important determinants putting women at risk of HIV infections. Studies have shown that globally one in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime. The study explored working women’s perceptions of power, gender-based violence and HIV-infection risks. A qualitative, explorative study was conducted among female employees in an airline business in Namibia. Five women participated in in-depth, face-to-face interviews. The findings show that all of the participants experienced power imbalances and GBV in their intimate relationships. All of the women reported emotional or psychological abuse, whilst the majority were subjected to economic abuse, followed by physical abuse, and two alleged having been sexually abused. The study concludes with specific recommendations for the development and successful implementation of workplace policy and programmes to protect and promote women’s rights. / Social Work / M.A. (Social Behaviour Studies in HIV/AIDS)