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Intersectional stigma converges with criminalization to produce sexual health disparities. The convergence of socially marginalized identities constrains sexual rights, as well as provides opportunities for resilience, resistance, and solidarity. This presentation explores how an intersectionality lens helps to elucidate the ways that criminalization shapes sexual health across diverse populations and contexts. This presentation draws from three community-based studies. Applying a multiple case study design to these studies provides the opportunity to examine broader themes of intersectionality and criminalization and how these shape sexual health across global contexts. A qualitative study was conducted with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) persons in Lesotho, a country where same-sex practices were recently decriminalized but there remains no legal protection from discrimination for LGBT persons. A mixed-methods study was conducted with LGBT youth and gender diverse sex workers in Jamaica, where sex work and same sex practices are criminalized. Finally, a quantitative study was conducted with urban refugee youth in Uganda, where sex work is criminalized. We found that managing and negotiating sex—and in turn sexual health—was constrained by intersectional sexual rights violations. The ways by which persons were affected by criminalization differed based on intersectional identities, including gender, sex work and sexual orientation. By examining contexts of constrained sexual rights, we found that survival challenges included pervasive violence—including from police, limited healthcare access, employment & housing barriers, barriers to accessing prevention tools, and barriers to healthy relationships. Participants across contexts discussed awareness of, and strategies to navigate, these barriers to sexual health. Criminalization of sex work and LGBT identities constrains negative and positive sexual rights. An intersectional lens provides insights into both intercategorical complexity—shared and differential experiences across populations and contexts—and intracategorical complexity of lived experiences within socially marginalized groups. Findings can inform intersectional, structural-level sexual health interventions.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

In times when migration flows are increasing considerably on a global level, Greece has become a focus as a key entry country into the European Union for significantly high numbers of asylum-seeking individuals, including unaccompanied migrant minors escaping unsafety and aiming for international protection. Currently, by Greek law, unaccompanied children are required to be temporarily placed in a protective environment upon unlawful entry into the country, pending referral to suitable accommodation. However, in practice, they are most commonly subjected to detention procedures that cannot be understood as being protective in line with the requirements of the national legal framework and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Greece is a signatory. This raises crucial questions in the field of children's rights and migration policing. Specifically, the reality that unaccompanied minors experience during detention remains under-researched. Hence, this study will use Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis in order to explore the lived experiences of unaccompanied children within detention facilities in Greece and to provide a rich in detail picture of the context that these minors are currently being subjected to. Towards understanding these conditions, voice will be given to participants, who will share their perspectives and emphasise the discrepancy between the law and practice. Based on the above, this study will be revealing unexplored issues as regards detention for unaccompanied children in Greece, which include hygiene concerns; matters concerning the general detention setting; lack of services and incidents of abusive treatment. The research analysis concludes that unaccompanied minors in Greece are criminalised through detention processes, while being deprived of the right to be heard. As a result, this study makes a meaningful and novel contribution to contemporary research with a view to safeguarding the fundamental rights of unaccompanied minors who experience detention upon arrival in Greece.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have played a crucial role in conducting Search and Rescue (SAR) operations off the Libyan coast, assisting almost 120,000 migrants between 2014 and 2019. Their activities, however, have been increasingly criticized. The accusation that NGOs facilitate irregular migration has escalated into investigations by Italian and Maltese courts and various policy initiatives restricting non-governmental ships and their access to European ports. Although all NGOs investigated to date have been acquitted, the combination of criminal investigations and policy restrictions that has taken place in Italy since 2017 has severely hindered non-governmental SAR operations. Given the humanitarian repercussions of reducing NGOs’ presence at sea, the merits and shortcomings of the arguments underlying the criminalization of non-governmental maritime rescue warrant in-depth research. To that end, this article fulfils two interrelated tasks. First, it provides a genealogy of the accusation against NGOs and the ensuing combination of legal criminalization, policy restrictions, and social stigmatization in restraining their activities. Second, it uses quantitative data to show that empirically verifiable accusations like the claim that NGOs serve as a pull factor of migration, thereby causing more people to day at sea, are not supported by available evidence. By doing so, our study sheds new light onto the criminalization of humanitarianism and its implications.

This Article explores how rape is criminalized through the design of criminal provisions, with particular attention to offense-construction principles. While criminalization theory typically asks whether conduct should be criminalized, this study examines the equally important question of how a criminal provision should be structured. Using a comparative legal and empirical analysis of legislative materials from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, the article identifies the principles that guide legislators in shaping the prohibition, legal classification, and sanction of rape. The analysis shows that legality, coherence, internal subsidiarity, effectiveness, guilt, retrospective proportionality, and legitimating principles such as harm, wrong, and legal interest play central roles, though their relative importance differs across jurisdictions. The actus reus receives the most detailed legislative attention, especially where consent-based models replace coercive ones. The study also finds that explanatory memoranda are most effective when principles are used in combination rather than in isolation. Overall, the article argues that offense-construction principles can improve the clarity, accessibility, and internal consistency of rape legislation, while also ensuring that legal labels and penalties better reflect the seriousness of the offense.

Globally, HIV criminalisation continues to exacerbate and perpetuate HIV stigma and discrimination. Over 70 countries have laws that specifically criminalise HIV non-disclosure, exposure or transmission, and 39 countries have used existing criminal laws to prosecute people living with HIV. Society and criminal justice systems have failed to keep up with scientific advances of recent years and, in particular, our understanding of the powerful impact anti-retroviral therapy has on reducing HIV transmission risk. We now know that individuals on effective HIV therapy with an undetectable viral load do not transmit the virus to their sexual partners. This knowledge has not, as yet, translated into any significant change to the application of criminal law. The era of U=U (Undetectable = Untransmittable) should support our ability to use scientific evidence to end the criminalisation of HIV and the disproportionate impact this has on marginalised communities and those less able, for whatever reason, to achieve and maintain an undetectable viral load.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

This essay examines the intertwined nature of seemingly neutral immigration laws that illegalize certain immigrant groups and the socially constructed attitudes and stereotypes that associate the same legally targeted groups with “illegality,” to produce the racialization of illegality. These complementary factors are further sustained by other social forces, including media discourses that reify those associations. The racialization of illegality is a fundamentally situational, relational, dynamic, and historically and context-specific process. Today, Latino groups are the preeminent target group of both the social and the legal production of illegality. Thus, this essay examines Latinos’ racialized illegality across geographical contexts, within their group, and in relation to other contemporary immigrants. Although expressions of racialized illegality and specific targeted groups will vary across time and space, the contours of the phenomenon will be present across contexts and times (and produce specific outcomes) because they are shaped by existing racial hierarchies.