Editorial
| Date | 01 December 2012 |
| Author | Julie Stubbs,Kate Fitz-Gibbon |
| Published date | 01 December 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865812458052 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
Australian & New Zealand
Journal of Criminology
45(3) 316–317
!The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865812458052
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Editorial
Kate Fitz-Gibbon and Julie Stubbs
This special issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology focuses on
legal responses to lethal violence. This is not an area that is settled or where there is a
prevailing moral, legal or criminological consensus. On the contrary, as the articles in
this issue attest, there is much ongoing debate about the boundaries of homicide, rele-
vant laws and their affects, and the divergent directions of law reform. As Oliver Quick
and Celia Wells demonstrate in their analysis of recent homicide law reforms in England
and Wales, especially concerning the new partial defence of loss of control, homicide
laws remain contested, complex, and in some aspects incoherent.
As we prepared this issue of the journal, debates surrounding legal responses to homi-
cide have reignited in several Australian jurisdictions. For instance, in New South Wales,
a Parliamentary Inquiry into the partial defence of provocation was established in June
2012. In Victoria, an internal government review is underway into the operation of
defensive homicide. In Queensland, following the election of a new government, there
has been renewed activism seeking to prevent the use of provocation where a man has
killed another man following a non-violent homosexual advance. Thus, the publication
of this special issue is particularly timely.
This special issue is not a comprehensive coverage of the area, nor could it hope to be.
However, it has taken as its main focus key concerns that have underpinned recent
debates and developments in homicide law reform. Gendered violence is one such
concern. Taking the social context of gendered violence seriously continues to challenge
and unsettle conventional legal understandings of homicide; it has implications for the
substantive law of homicide, defences and evidential rules, and sentencing laws and
practices, and demands attention to how these different aspects of homicide laws
interact.
Our article begins the issue by offering an account of divergent directions in reforms
to homicide laws and of different approaches to law reform across jurisdictions, which
have been shaped by particular local histories and high-profile cases. Jenny Morgan
examines the value of placing the social context of homicide at the centre in order to
drive progressive reforms, in contrast to reform that is framed by traditional legal
categories. She considers the engagement by formal agencies of law reform with feminist
ideas in discussions surrounding the laws of homicide, and the shifting attention given to
violence against women over time.
Heather Douglas examines specific provisions recently introduced in Victoria –
‘defensive homicide’ – and Queensland – ‘killing for preservation in an abusive domestic
relationship’ – which were motivated, in part, by a concern for battered women who
had killed an abusive partner. Her analysis of the cases in which these new provisions
have been raised suggests that the statutory provisions themselves may be less significant
in shaping outcomes than evidence of the social context of domestic violence. With
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