Good Sex, Bad Sex: Sex Law, Crime and Ethics

How do we regulate and seek to deter sex crime? How do we support victims, prosecute perpetrators and encourage lawful and discourage unlawful sexual conduct? Should our startegies for perpetrators be rehabilitation, punishment or deterrence and what are the implications of elements of each? What about when the law prosecutes ‘victimless crimes’ or seems unjust in relation to particular sexualities? Or fails to adequately protect the innocent or regulate the guilty? How does law relate to ethics and our understanding about what good and bad sex are? What ethical grounds do we have for distinguishing good sex and bad sex?

These sorts of questions lie at the centre of this project, which seeks to explore the terrain around sex law, sexual ethics and sex crime with a critical edge that moves beyond simple disciplinary attentions to policy, laws, social conventions or values to recognise the complexities and contested questions around the way states and social institutions regulate sexual conduct in contemporary societies and on what basis of principles.  The project will explore the role of law and ethics in guiding prohibitions, permissions and regulations of different sexual conduct and sexualities. It will explore the way in which law and other forms of regulation have been used to police and repress desire and pleasure, and the ways in which such prohibitions and regulations have been changed, subverted, challenged or transgressed. This project seeks to generate inter-disciplinary work that has a definite and critical engagement with both sex law and sexual values and conventions in contemporary societies, and collectively represents intellectual work for the betterment of sexual ethics in sexual conduct in society and more informed and just regulation of different sexualities.

The project will critically engage with a number of core themes;