Journal articles on the topic 'Child witness credibility'

This article looks at the problems presented by admitting statements made by young children at trial. Over time, presumed chronological thresholds for incompetence have all but disappeared in favor of general rules of competence that are agnostic about the reality of children’s susceptibility to develop false memories. Although the standard of competence requires a witness to understand the burden to tell the truth of what was witnessed, it does not adjust to accommodate the suggestibility of young children and their susceptibility to rumor, which has been shown in numerous studies in the field of developmental psychology. Especially troubling is a common rule that allows leading questions to be asked of children to elicit specific witness statements. Widening the scope of incompetence to react to social science understandings of the reliability of children’s statements poses too high an administrative burden. Instead, expert witnesses and jury instructions—which speak to credibility instead of competence—should be available to address social science findings.

The child complainant of sexual abuse is widely regarded as the paradigmatic vulnerable witness who is most likely to encounter difficulties in giving evidence. Most adversarial jurisdictions have introduced a range of statutory measures designed to protect and support child complainants throughout the legal process and to assist them to give evidence to the best of their ability. Nonetheless, critics claim child complainants still face a culture of disbelief, largely sustained by continuing adversarial practices intended to protect the rights of the accused. Tis accounts for persistent representations of children as tending to fabricate, exaggerate, or imagine the abuse that they allege, despite the recognition of their needs as complainant-witnesses. Such representations indicate a disjuncture between progress in policy and in law reform and the appearance that it is business as usual within the courts. Tis paper explores this disjuncture. It acknowledges that, while the terms for the reception of children's evidence into the courtroom have changed, the repositioning that has occurred has not yet eliminated misgivings toward children's evidence. The lightest of inferences can call up a history of doubt––a powerful reminder of the tenacity of the dynamics of discounting in sexual offenses. Even so, the paper argues that the judicial language used to describe child witnesses is more nuanced and balanced than in previous decades, suggesting a more complex appreciation of the child's capabilities is developing, one which holds the potential for an enhanced accommodation of the conflicting interests surrounding adversarialism and vulnerability.

Currently, there is no standardized protocol for the evaluation of situations of sexual abuse. Thus, this study investigated the techniques used by psychologists in forensic examinations in cases of suspected child and adolescent sexual abuse in the context of the criminal investigation. Semi-structured interviews, which were qualitatively analyzed using the WebQDA software, were applied with twelve psychologists who work as expert witnesses in the Medical-Legal Institute of six Brazilian capitals. The results showed a diversity of actions taken in the forensic examination practice, as well as consensus and controversy regarding the use of psychological testing and the credibility assessment of the report. Flexibility in conducting the forensic examinations by the teams was also observed, with the techniques used adapted according to the needs. The importance of the diversity of techniques was highlighted, as these aim to assist the expert witness to come to reliable conclusions, as well as maintain the rigor and technical quality of the evaluation.

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether juror gender, male-to-female or female-to-male abuse, eyewitness age (8, 12, and 16 years old), and type of intimate partner violence witnessed (physical, sexual, and emotional) influenced mock jurors' decision-making. Mock jurors (N = 1,162) read a trial transcript where the child of a married couple witnessed one of the three types of intimate partner violence, perpetrated by the husband against his wife or the wife against her husband, and answered related questions. Mock jurors were asked to render a dichotomous verdict, continuous guilt rating, and rate their perceptions of the victim, defendant, and eyewitness. Male jurors were more likely to find the defendant guilty when the defendant was female and the witness was 16 years old; additionally, female mock jurors assigned higher guilt ratings for the male defendant compared to the female defendant. Mock jurors also assigned higher guilt ratings when the abuse was physical compared to both sexual and emotional; abuse also influenced perceptions of the defendant, victim, and eyewitness. Mock jurors also were more likely to hold positive perceptions of the eyewitness when she was 16 years old compared to 8 years old. The results of the current study suggest that gender of the defendant and victim may combine to influence mock jurors' perceptions of a case involving intimate partner violence; moreover, the type of abuse witnessed by a child also may impact the child's perceived credibility.

In the case of sexual violence crimes stipulated in the 'Sexual Violence Punishment Act', in the case of a victim under the age of 19 recorded in a video, when the authenticity of the establishment is recognized by a court statement of a trusted person or a person who was a witness during the investigation process. It is related to the special provision that limits the defendant's right to cross-examine the original affidavit by stipulating that evidence can be recognized even in the present case. According to the Constitutional Court, preventing secondary harm to minor victims is an important value that cannot be given up in forming criminal procedures for sexual violence crimes. Even though a harmonious method can be assumed, the provision for judgment excessively restricts the defendant's right of defense by practically excluding the defendant's right to cross-examine the original speaker in the statement of the minor victim included in the video. Balance of legal interests, Violation of the principle of excessive prohibition, such as the minimum of infringement, infringes the right of the accused to receive a fair trial. The current law provides various witness support systems that can prevent and guarantee the defendant's right to cross-examination in consideration of the various secondary damages that can occur to minor victims during the testimony process. In the case of witness interrogation of minor victims of sexual violence through sexual assault, there is no choice but to appear in court again and make a statement, so the effect of reducing secondary damage caused by repeated statements will not be significant. As a way to reduce the secondary damage through direct face-to-face, we intend to review the video trial by means of a video relay as an improvement method. In the case of the witness interrogation system by means of a video relay system, the victim does not have to attend the courtroom or face the accused in person because the victim attends the testimony room outside the court and testifies through the relay device. However, if reference is made to the standards that can limit the defendant's right to face through the Craig Test on the remote witness interrogation procedure in the United States, it is possible to operate witness interrogation using video and other relay devices without infringing direct attention and the defendant's right to face. will be. In other words, if the right to face the accused and the right to cross-examination cannot be fully guaranteed, a significant public interest must exist. In addition, the credibility of the testimony must be secured in such a way that the underage victim can take an oath, cross-examination is possible, and the form of testimony can be confirmed in front of a judge, jury, and the accused.

Children with mental retardation are more likely to be abused than the general population, yet are often denied access to the justice system. Research on children without mental retardation has revealed skepticism as to their reliability as witnesses in the court of law. Even more so, children with mental retardation face the issue of credibility because of their age and disability. This study assesses attorneys' perceptions of child witnesses with mental retardation. Thirty-nine criminal attorneys completed a 33-item questionnaire designed to assess their opinions of the abilities of adults and of children with and without mental retardation to recall and communicate information in the forensic context. Results revealed that attorneys perceived child witnesses as less credible and more suggestible than adult witnesses. Moreover, analyses indicated that child witnesses with mental retardation were also perceived as less credible and more suggestible than child witnesses without mental retardation.

Purpose – Interviewing victims of child sex abuse requires considerable care in order to minimise error. Due to children’s heightened suggestibility any question asked of a child could potentially incite error that could undermine the witness’s credibility. A focus group was conducted in order to facilitate the development of guidance for interviewers around the circumstances in which it is necessary to ask children follow-up questions in an interview. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Seven Crown prosecutors representing every Australian state and territory (with the exception of one small state) were issued with 25 hypothetical narrative accounts of child abuse and asked to indicate what information, if any, required follow-up in the child’s narrative. Their responses and rationale for requiring following up in some cases and not others were discussed. Findings – Thematic analysis revealed three recommendations to guide questioning: whether the case involved identification or recognition evidence; the presence of contextual features that may influence the witness’s memory, or that should trigger a particular line of questioning; and whether the information can or should be sought at a later stage by the trial prosecutor, rather than by the interviewer. Practical implications – The recommendations are discussed within the context of their implications for interviewing, that is, how each recommendation could be implemented in practice. Originality/value – The present study extends prior literature by elucidating principles to guide decision making across interview topic areas. The need for such guidance is highlighted by research suggesting that topics such as offender identity, offence time and place, and witnesses are a source of overzealous questioning in interviews.

Fuzzy-trace theory (FTT) provides well-researched scientific principles that explain worrisome forms of false memory in the law. False memories are of great legal concern because memory reports are frequently the evidence that determines guilt/innocence and are sometimes the only evidence that crimes have been committed. FTT’s principles reveal errors in commonsense theories that jurors use to judge the credibility of witnesses’ memory reports. This science versus commonsense disconnect is salient in cases involving child witnesses, eyewitness identifications, and confessions. The consequences of this disconnect for justice could be ameliorated by a simple change in federal rules of evidence.

In 2012 the International Criminal Court (ICC) celebrates its ten-year anniversary since its establishment. It is fair to say that the current age of the Court reflects its present maturity. At the time of writing, the Court has finally rendered its first verdict, by condemning the Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga for the conscription of child soldiers after a rather wobbly trial that took 6 years. In May 2011, the Court faced another unprecedented challenge. Four witnesses transferred from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to testify in the Lubanga and Katanga & Ngudjolo Chui (hereinafter: Katanga) trials, applied for asylum in the Netherlands. This matter, which was not anticipated in the Statute or secondary sources of ICC law, raises issues concerning the cooperation between the ICC, the Netherlands as host state and the DRC, and raises intriguing questions about the interaction of international criminal law and international refugee law.

The article estimates the issues of quality control, credibility and accuracy of testimonies of minor witnesses and victims. The scheme of psychological analysis developed by the authors of the testimony of minors in criminal proceedings based on the research and experience of both foreign and domestic experts is presented. The practice of psychological support for the investigation of crimes by psychologists of the Main Department of Criminalistics (Forensic Center) of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation showed that a psychological analysis of the testimony is in top-requested in two cases in particular: as may be required as a quick assessment of the testimony of minors for urgent procedural decisions and when investigating crimes against sexual integrity, when the testimony of a child are key evidence. The article provides examples of the use of this analysis scheme in the investigation of specific criminal cases and the consideration of materials of pre-investigation checks.

Adults’ perceptions of children’s disclosures have important implications for the response to that disclosure. Children who experience adult transgressions, such as maltreatment, often choose to disclose this experience to a peer. Thus, peer disclosure recipients may transmit this disclosure to an adult or provide support for the child’s own disclosure. Despite this, the influence of peer disclosure on a child witness’s credibility, as well as on the perceptions of peer disclosure recipients, is unknown. The present study examined how child witnesses’ and peer disclosure recipients’ credibility is impacted when the peer either confirms or contradicts the witness’s disclosure (or concealment) of an adult transgression. Participants listened to a child witness and peer being interviewed by an adult in one of four disclosure patterns (consistent disclose, consistent conceal, witness disclose/peer conceal, or witness conceal/peer disclose). Participants rated both the witness and the peer on dimensions of credibility (honesty and cognitive competence). Results revealed that both the witness and peer were more credible when their reports were consistent with one another. When inconsistent, the witness/peer who disclosed was considered more credible than the one who concealed. The findings indicate the potential importance of peers in the disclosure process as they may support the witness’s report and even be a credible discloser when the witness is reluctant to disclose.

Child sexual assault (CSA) cases reliant on uncorroborated testimony yield low conviction rates. Past research demonstrated a strong relationship between verdict and juror CSA knowledge such as typical delays in reporting by victims, and perceived victim credibility. This trial simulation experiment examined the effectiveness of interventions by an expert witness or an educative judicial direction in reducing jurors' CSA misconceptions. Participants were 885 jurors in New South Wales, Australia. After viewing a professionally acted video trial, half the jurors rendered individual verdicts and half deliberated in groups of 8–12 before completing a post-trial questionnaire. Multilevel structural equation modeling exploring the relationship between CSA knowledge and verdict demonstrated that greater CSA knowledge after the interventions increased the odds ratio to convict by itself, and that the judicial direction predicted a higher level of post-trial CSA knowledge in jurors than other expert interventions. Moreover, greater CSA knowledge was associated with heightened credibility perceptions of the complainant and a corroborating witness. At the conclusion of the trial, the more jurors knew about CSA, the higher the perceived credibility of both the complainant and her grandmother, and the more likely jurors were to convict the accused.

She lies helpless and fragmented, limbs leaden with story, forced ever further into herself by the viscous shame that suffocates and disables her. Fleshed lips cling to each other, tongue recoils from the sharp taste of the narrative of her body. Within the impotent portal of her mouth, her story sits, an impenetrable oral hymen. — Brenda DowningRape is, without doubt, a catastrophic experience.When rape is experienced in childhood and is also silenced, it can have devastating consequences that carry through to adulthood.In what ways then can the catastrophic memory of silenced childhood rape be coaxed from its hiding place in the female body? How is it possible to make the transition from silenced experience to public articulation? Can creativity fill the body with courage in the face of helplessness and create breath in the suffocating and silencing space of the aftermath? Can creativity help facilitate the personal expression of muted experience?In this paper we will each reflect on the complexities and enabling capacities of the creative and collaborative processes present when negotiating the landscape between the private memory of silenced childhood rape and public articulation and performance. Brenda will retrace the steps of her academic research. She will identify two paths that have taken her from personal and social silence to public voice, and the articulation of her embodied trauma experience through differing modes of creative expression. Alice will reflect on the ways in which preparing Brenda for the journey from articulation and expression to public performance sometimes required moments of freefall full of risk yet also full of creative forces. Images from Brenda’s solo performance aperture will accompany these reflections. aperture is a companion piece to Brenda’s doctoral research and is the creative result of our collaboration.BrendaIn 2008, I completed my feminist and autoethnographic Honours research. This work explored the multiple and significant ramifications of my silenced and silencing experience of childhood rape. Commencing this research as a mature aged woman inevitably involved a movement back through time to revisit 1971, the year of my rape experience, gathering recollections of the aftermath along the way. My memories of the events of that year, folded tight within me since I was eleven years old and enveloped in a shroud of secrecy for decades, had nonetheless been held with full consciousness and silenced in an act of pragmatism that allowed me to function. These were not uncovered or recovered memories; rather they were suppressed and revisited. I didn’t experience a sudden cracking open of lost memory, instead I stepped easily, though not without discomfort, into the archives of my body and reached with outstretched hand. In the gesture, I offered my memories the opportunity to speak, and speak they did.From within my body, stored memories were unleashed and hurled themselves at me. I caught these memories and held them close. I turned them over, set them down, reached again. I reflected, I explored, paused, considered. I sat alongside them. I got angry. I wept. It was as though these embodied memories, these lived subjective experiences, had been crouching impatiently just beneath the surface awaiting release from the repressive silence that had contained them for so many years.But what had helped facilitate this release? Was it simply the opportunity to be immersed in self-reflective and reflexive research? Following the conventionally written academic-style opening chapters of my Honours thesis, sits my autoethnographic chapter. It was no accident of method that I explored my personal experience through creative writing. I didn’t stumble into this medium; I had a compelling and irresistible urge to express my experience creatively. It seemed the only way. When I sat down to write, the sentences were expelled from my body like a series of long-held but desperate exhalations. They emerged as my memories had sat since childhood, blunt, raw and panting, filled with barely-contained energy. They revealed the chaos and disconnection of the body and mind in the aftermath of silenced childhood rape. They disrupted chronology and mirrored shattered identity. Temporally and spatially they were restless birds, unable to perch for too long, nor in one place. Slipping in and out of the first and third person, they struggled to sustain a fixed identity, or perhaps, refused one. Relational threads appeared transparent but were as strong as lines that support the weight of thrashing fish.In the laying down of the multiple layers of my story, I soon realised the writing was serving an additional purpose. It had evolved to become a critical factor in not only the actualisation of my story but also a means of making sense of my experience by locating it within wider familial, social and cultural contexts. The grounding of my experience through reflexivity and the piecing together of my tenuous sense of self became intimately entwined in the creative process. I recorded each evocative exhalation with frantic diligence, as though I mustn’t lose a word. I felt my visibility, my credibility reliant on each syllable and every nuance. I intuitively sensed that the creative re-capturing of my story would liberate my memories from the smothering folds of corporeal darkness in which they had reluctantly huddled and in that liberation, I would also find freedom from the dragging and stultifying weight of their heavy presence. Helene Cixous talks of moments when we are “unwoven weft” (38), when writings or “songs of an unheard-of purity flow through you [...] well up […] surge forth” (39). I’m certain the liberation of story and self I experienced through the creative writing medium, at a point when I too was unwoven weft, gave me the courage to walk in the night shadows of my embodied childhood memories, the light of creativity guiding my way. In making the transition in 2009 from Honours to doctoral research, I carried with me the knowledge that to ignore or pay cursory attention to the materiality of the raped body is to deny its cellular intelligence and its abundant creative reserves. While the researching and writing of my Honours project was deeply satisfying, what emerged for me during that process was an intense desire for a more three-dimensional aesthetic and embodied engagement with my PhD project. I felt the poetics of embodied language and my moving body would satisfy this desire.With the addition of a performance modality I was convinced I could lift the words off the thesis page in order to, literally, bring the information to life. Through performance I knew I could give the bones of the written language of sexual trauma a heartbeat, a pulse, give them breath. I believed a performance held the potential to drape flesh on the words and pump blood through their sentences. I wanted the narrative of sexual trauma to move and sweat, collapse and stand rather than remain in stasis. I wanted the unresolved nature of silenced sexual trauma to permeate the flesh and speak with more than written language. I wanted my raped female body to be fully present. A performance seemed the only way to convey the three-dimensionality of my muted experience. “Performance is a promissory act,” Della Pollock tells us, “not because it can promise possible change but because it catches its participants—often by surprise—in a contract with possibility: with imagining what might be, could be, should be” (2). When I came across these words, I felt certain that I could create for an audience Pollock’s contract with possibility. Through a performance modality a portal would open to the reality of how it is to live with silenced and unresolved sexual trauma. Beyond that portal an invitation would await for others to engage with the difficulties and compromises of this reality through embodied imagination and somatic empathy. A performance, I felt, could act as a physical, emotional and intellectual bridge of communication between those who have experienced sexual violence and those who have not. In the actualisation of this PhD project my role would be multiple. I would take up the position not only of the researcher but also the researched. Through an engagement with the somatic work of Body-Mind Centering® (BMC®), my still traumatised body would become the primary focus of the research. Additionally, I would present this work in the solo performance aperture. My body then, would become the site of somatic inquiry, providing the embodied text for the research, scribing the work in symbolic language and articulating the emotional landscape of the aftermath of my trauma through performance. As Tami Spry notes, “words can construct, but cannot hold the weight of the body” (170). The words of my thesis then would construct my story from the findings of my somatic inquiry as well as shape my research but the performance would hold the weight of my flesh in the embodied articulation of my story. But I couldn’t do this alone.Help arrived in mid-2010, when I was introduced to and entered the world of BMC® and the work of Alice Cummins. At times the BMC® work and the creative development phase of aperture felt a little like attempting a base jump with a parachute that might, or might not open. However, with Alice’s depth of knowledge and experience guiding me, I have taken what has been an extraordinarily profound journey of somatic exploration resulting in personal healing, revelation, illumination and embodied performance. AliceAs a dance artist and somatic movement educator, my teaching and choreography are influenced by post-modern dance practices and feminist philosophy. My interests have engaged me with socio-political concerns and how the poetics of the moving body articulates our humanity. In my somatic movement practice I draw on BMC®, the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, with whom I studied in Massachusetts, 1995-98. BMC® evolved in the post-modern dance scene of New York City in the early 1970s and belongs to the lineage of moving research pioneered by Rudolph Laban, F.M. Alexander, and Mabel Todd.Bainbridge Cohen writes:Body-Mind Centering® (BMC®) is an ongoing, experiential journey into the alive and changing territory of the body. The explorer is the mind – our thoughts, feelings, energy, soul, and spirit. Through this journey we are led to an understanding of how the mind is expressed through the body in movement. (1)In June 2010 Brenda participated in a three-day BMC® workshop. During an integrative practice of Authentic Movement she experienced pleasure in moving for the first time. This experience was profound for Brenda after a lifetime of repressing sensation and feeling as a way to contain the memory of her rape. To unravel a torment you must begin somewhere. — Louise BourgeoisSo we began.Before embarking on the creative development of performance making it was critical that Brenda did private work with me. Her history was too traumatic to venture into making work from the body without prior therapeutic hands-on work. When trauma has occurred, the tissue holds this frozen as a way to contain the terror. But it lies in wait and erupts unexpectedly when the circumstances stimulate or provoke memory. As BMC® teacher Phoebe Neville (1996) says: “Memory remains in the tissue until we are ready to feel it”. During her two years of private sessions this hands-on work gave Brenda the capacity to feel and helped her develop somatic and personal insight. This provided the leverage for her understanding, and eventually the making involved in the collaborative process. A BMC® hands-on technique I used during the therapeutic process was cellular touch. This dialogue through touch invites the cells to breathe—to receive and process new information. This exchange supported and stabilized Brenda’s nervous system and perceptual response cycles and helped cultivate endurance. Through the BMC® work we created a visceral bond of attachment and trust that allowed risk as provocation towards realization not as re-stimulus and withdrawal. This allowed Brenda to go from a withdrawn physicality to a dynamic performance presence. Without this capacity to be present, we could not have found a vocabulary that might unearth and express her story through embodied performance making. Brenda’s capacity to be “100% available to be seen” (Hay), would allow meaning to touch her audience. I make work with and through the bodymind and for Brenda’s “voice” to be heard I knew she needed to be able to access the intelligence and imaginary life of her body ... to make, to grasp, to reveal her experience. As artistic director of aperture it was my role to discern how the creative met the psychodynamic and became new realisation and transformation. The BMC® philosophy “support precedes change” (Cohen) infused the collaborative process. Our collaboration also involved a constant flow and exchange of ideas, feelings, intuitive responses and imaginings in both verbal and somatic conversation. This process enabled Brenda’s experience of childhood rape to become a way of exposing the silence and silencing that surrounds rape in our culture.One of the specific research skills we practiced in the creative process was Authentic Movement. Developed in the 1950s by Jungian analyst, Mary Starks Whitehouse, it is a practice that relies on moving and being witnessed. As Brenda moved I, as witness, provided the space of containment and safety, both physical and psychological for the moving exploration to occur. It was in the intersubjective space between us that material arose that might otherwise remain held in the tissue. As Starks Whitehouse says: “Movement, to be experienced, has to be ‘found’ in the body, not put on like a dress or a coat […] it is that which can liberate us” (53). This practice gave Brenda the creative and therapeutic space to explore her experience. In crafting the work I guided Brenda’s movement and emotional states through improvisation and experimentation. In paying close attention to the emergent language and meaning of the nuanced moving, I identified moments of creative potential. Risk and provocation, critical to the transformative act of contemporary performance making, was now possible.As Brenda and I moved to performance making, I was unable to maintain the relationship of client/practitioner. Shifting from the clear perimeters of client and practitioner to an arts practice entails risk. I felt I had to choose at specific moments in our work together to step across the line and transgress, though what it is I transgressed I’m now unsure of. I’ve allowed Brenda into my private realm; she’s shared meals with me, met my friends and partner and slept at my studio home. We’ve spent many hours together and the intimacy of the creative process and the material itself forged our friendship as well as the work. I don’t know if this intimacy was necessary to make this work with Brenda. It is what happened. Brenda’s story touched me deeply and I was participating in its evolution. The work is the result of our private work and our creative relationship, coloured by all its variables. Brenda’s experience of being raped as a child is the catastrophe that we mined to make aperture. The ordeal of this experience shaped her life and her relationships. Its aftermath destroyed her capacity to interact in the world with any agency. When someone has lost their voice and their agency how do we help them find it? During a private session in 2010, Brenda experienced re-stimulation of the trauma. This experience became the “aperture” through which Brenda’s healing has come about. She entered the wound and slowly found her voice and her agency. Both literally and metaphorically, Brenda found her self and her story gathered fleshed substance.The making and performing of aperture was a collaborative process made possible through Brenda’s deep desire for healing and understanding. She led and I followed. Sometimes the path felt perilous and yet it was in these moments that I also felt most certain. These were the risks critical for her realization and empowerment. In both the private and the performance work I practiced a state of love that was self-reflexive and dispassionate. In the moments of greatest distress and disturbance I felt a certainty that was irreducible. The dance we were in was one of survival and I felt the certainty of her innate capacity to survive, and my own capacity to follow her. This was not a certainty constructed of ideas but a felt experience based on every skill and nuance I embodied at that moment. I employed my whole life to work with Brenda and the work also moved my life. What I know and don’t yet know is present in aperture. I am privileged to have witnessed Brenda finding her way to “step into the light”, as Antonio Damasio would put it, and move “through a threshold that separates a protected but limiting shelter from the possibility and risk of a world beyond and ahead” (3).ConclusionThe work of traversing the landscape between private memory and public performance has taken us across some difficult terrain. The adoption of a creative approach has been intrinsic to the navigation of this terrain and central to the storying of this catastrophic experience. The creative process has coaxed, shaped and articulated the complexities and sensitivities of this experience in multiple ways, encouraging voice where once there was silence. This story now speaks and moves. ReferencesBainbridge Cohen, Bonnie. Sensing, Feeling, and Action: The Experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind Centering. 2nd ed. Northampton: Contact Editions, 2008. Bourgeouis, Louise. What Is the Shape of This Problem. Detail. 1999 Cixous, Helene. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Ed. Jenson, Deborah. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1991. Cohen, Bainbridge. Personal Communication. 28 Jun. 1995.Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens. London: Heinemann & Vintage, 2000. Hay, Deborah. Personal Communication. 20 Jul. 1985.Neville, Phoebe. Personal Communication. 4 Jul. 1996.Pollock, Della. "Introduction: Remembering." Remembering: Oral History Performance. Ed. Pollock, Della. Gordonsville: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 1-17.Spry, Tami. Body, Paper, Stage: Writing and Performing Autoethnography. Walnut Creek: Left Coast, 2011. Starks Whitehouse, Mary. "Physical Movement and Personality (1963)." Authentic Movement: A Collection of Essays by Mary Starks Whitehouse, Janet Adler & Joan Chodrow. Ed. Pallaro, Patrizia. London: J. Kingsley, 1999. 51-57.

IntroductionThe 2009 American film Trash Humpers, directed by Harmony Korine, was released at a time when the hipster had become a ubiquitous concept, entering into the common vernacular of numerous cultures throughout the world, and gaining significant press, social media and academic attention (see Žižek; Arsel and Thompson; Greif et al.; Stahl; Ouellette; Reeve; Schiermer; Maly and Varis). Trash Humpers emerged soon after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis triggered Occupy movements in numerous cities, aided by social media platforms, reported on by blogs such as Gawker, and stylized by multi-national youth-subculture brands such as Vice, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters and a plethora of localised variants.Korine’s film, which is made to resemble found VHS footage of old-aged vandals, epitomises the ironic, retro stylizations and “counterculture-meets-kitsch” aesthetics so familiar to hipster culture. As a creative stereotype from 1940s and ‘50s jazz and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in the twenty-first century as a negative embodiment of alternative culture in the age of the Internet. As well as plumbing the recent past for things not yet incorporated into contemporary marketing mechanisms, the hipster also signifies the blurring of irony and authenticity. Such “outsiderness as insiderness” postures can be regarded as a continuation of the marginality-from-the-centre logic of cool capitalism that emerged after World War Two. Particularly between 2007 and 2015, the post-postmodern concept of the hipster was a resonant cultural trope in Western and non-Western cultures alike, coinciding with the normalisation of the new digital terrain and the establishment of mobile social media as an integral aspect of many people’s daily lives. While Korine’s 79-minute feature could be thought of as following in the schlocky footsteps of the likes of Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2006), it is decidedly more arthouse, and more attuned to the influence of contemporary alternative media brands and independent film history alike – as if the love child of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Vice Video, the latter having been labelled as “devil-may-care hipsterism” (Carr). Upon release, Trash Humpers was described by Gene McHugh as “a mildly hip take on Jackass”; by Mike D’Angelo as “an empty hipster pose”; and by Aaron Hillis as either “the work of an insincere hipster or an eccentric provocateur”. Lacking any semblance of a conventional plot, Trash Humpers essentially revolves around four elderly-looking protagonists – three men and a woman – who document themselves with a low-quality video camera as they go about behaving badly in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, where Korine still lives. They cackle eerily to themselves as they try to stave off boredom, masturbating frantically on rubbish bins, defecating and drinking alcohol in public, fellating foliage, smashing televisions, playing ten-pin bowling, lighting firecrackers and telling gay “hate” jokes to camera with no punchlines. In one purposefully undramatic scene half-way through the film, the humpers are shown in the aftermath of an attack on a man wearing a French maid’s outfit; he lies dead in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor with a hammer at his feet. The humpers are consummate “bad” performers in every sense of the term, and they are joined by a range of other, apparently lower-class, misfits with whom they stage tap dance routines and repetitively sing nursery-rhyme-styled raps such as: “make it, make it, don’t break it; make it, make it, don’t fake it; make it, make it, don’t take it”, which acts as a surrogate theme song for the film. Korine sometimes depicts his main characters on crutches or in a wheelchair, and a baby doll is never too far away from the action, as a silent and Surrealist witness to their weird, sinister and sometimes very funny exploits. The film cuts from scene to scene as if edited on a video recorder, utilising in-house VHS titling sequences, audio glitches and video static to create the sense that one is engaging voyeuristically with a found video document rather than a scripted movie. Mainstream AlternativesAs a viewer of Trash Humpers, one has to try hard to suspend disbelief if one is to see the humpers as genuine geriatric peeping Toms rather than as hipsters in old-man masks trying to be rebellious. However, as Korine’s earlier films such as Gummo (1997) attest, he clearly delights in blurring the line between failure and transcendence, or, in this case, between pretentious art-school bravado and authentic redneck ennui. As noted in a review by Jeannette Catsoulis, writing for the New York Times: “Much of this is just so much juvenile posturing, but every so often the screen freezes into something approximating beauty: a blurry, spaced-out, yellow-green landscape, as alien as an ancient photograph”. Korine has made a career out of generating this wavering uncertainty in his work, polarising audiences with a mix of critical, cinema-verité styles and cynical exploitations. His work has consistently revelled in ethical ambiguities, creating environments where teenagers take Ritalin for kicks, kill cats, wage war with their families and engage in acts of sexual deviancy – all of which are depicted with a photographer’s eye for the uncanny.The elusive and contradictory aspects of Korine’s work – at once ugly and beautiful, abstract and commercial, pessimistic and nostalgic – are evident not just in films such as Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy (1999) and Mister Lonely (2007) but also in his screenplay for Kids (1995), his performance-like appearances on The Tonight Show with David Letterman (1993-2015) and in publications such as A Crackup at the Race Riots (1998) and Pass the Bitch Chicken (2001). As well as these outputs, Korine is also a painter who is represented by Gagosian Gallery – one of the world’s leading art galleries – and he has directed numerous music videos, documentaries and commercials throughout his career. More than just update of the traditional figure of the auteur, Korine, instead, resembles a contemporary media artist whose avant-garde and grotesque treatments of Americana permeate almost everything he does. Korine wrote the screenplay for Kids when he was just 19, and subsequently built his reputation on the paradoxical mainstreaming of alternative culture in the 1990s. This is exemplified by the establishment of music and film genres such “alternative” and “independent”; the popularity of the slacker ethos attributed to Generation X; the increased visibility of alternative press zines; the birth of grunge in fashion and music; and the coining of “cool hunting” – a bottom-up market research phenomenon that aimed to discover new trends in urban subcultures for the purpose of mass marketing. Key to “alternative culture”, and its related categories such as “indie” and “arthouse”, is the idea of evoking artistic authenticity while covertly maintaining a parasitic relationship with the mainstream. As Holly Kruse notes in her account of the indie music scenes of the 1990s, which gained tremendous popularity in the wake of grunge bands such as Nirvana: without dominant, mainstream musics against which to react, independent music cannot be independent. Its existence depends upon dominant music structures and practices against which to define itself. Indie music has therefore been continually engaged in an economic and ideological struggle in which its ‘outsider’ status is re-examined, re-defined, and re-articulated to sets of musical practices. (Kruse 149)Alternative culture follows a similar, highly contentious, logic, appearing as a nebulous, authentic and artistic “other” whose exponents risk being entirely defined by the mainstream markets they profess to oppose. Kids was directed by the artist cum indie-director Larry Clark, who discovered Korine riding his skateboard with a group of friends in New York’s Washington Square in the early 1990s, before commissioning him to write a script. The then subcultural community of skating – which gained prominence in the 1990s amidst the increased visibility of “alternative sports” – provides an important backdrop to the film, which documents a group of disaffected New York teenagers at a time of the Aids crisis in America. Korine has been active in promoting the DIY ethos, creativity and anti-authoritarian branding of skate culture since this time – an industry that, in its attempts to maintain a non-mainstream profile while also being highly branded, has become emblematic of the category of “alternative culture”. Korine has undertaken commercial projects with an array skate-wear brands, but he is particularly associated with Supreme, a so-called “guerrilla fashion” label originating in 1994 that credits Clark and other 1990s indie darlings, and Korine cohorts, Chloë Sevigny and Terry Richardson, as former models and collaborators (Williams). The company is well known for its designer skateboard decks, its collaborations with prominent contemporary visual artists, its hip-hop branding and “inscrutable” web videos. It is also well known for its limited runs of new clothing lines, which help to stoke demand through one-offs – blending street-wear accessibility with the restricted-market and anti-authoritarian sensibility of avant-garde art.Of course, “alternative culture” poses a notorious conundrum for analysis, involving highly subjective demarcations of “mainstream” from “subversive” culture, not to mention “genuine subversion” from mere “corporate alternatives”. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the roots of alternative culture lie in the Western tradition of the avant-garde and the “aesthetic gaze” that developed in the nineteenth century (Field 36). In analysing the modernist notion of advanced cultural practice – where art is presented as an alternative to bourgeois academic taste and to the common realm of cultural commodities – Bourdieu proposed a distinction between two types of “fields”, or logics of cultural production. Alternative culture follows what Bourdieu called “the field of restricted production”, which adheres to “art for art’s sake” ideals, where audiences are targeted as if like-minded peers (Field 50). In contrast, the “field of large-scale production” reflects the commercial imperatives of mainstream culture, in which goods are produced for the general public at large. The latter field of large-scale production tends to service pre-established markets, operating in response to public demand. Furthermore, whereas success in the field of restricted production is often indirect, and latent – involving artists who create niche markets without making any concessions to those markets – success in the field of large-scale production is typically more immediate and quantifiable (Field 39). Here we can see that central to the branding of “alternative culture” is the perceived refusal to conform to popular taste and the logic of capitalism more generally is. As Supreme founder James Jebbia stated about his brand in a rare interview: “The less known the better” (Williams). On this, Bourdieu states that, in the field of restricted production, the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies are inversed to create a “loser wins” scenario (Field 39). Profit and cultural esteem become detrimental attributes in this context, potentially tainting the integrity and marginalisation on which alternative products depend. As one ironic hipster t-shirt puts it: “Nothing is any good if other people like it” (Diesel Sweeties).Trash HipstersIn abandoning linear narrative for rough assemblages of vignettes – or “moments” – recorded with an unsteady handheld camera, Trash Humpers positions itself in ironic opposition to mainstream filmmaking, refusing the narrative arcs and unwritten rules of Hollywood film, save for its opening and closing credits. Given Korine’s much publicized appreciation of cinema pioneers, we can understand Trash Humpers as paying homage to independent and DIY film history, including Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton (1973), Andy Warhol’s and Paul Morrissey’s Lonesome Cowboys (1967) and Trash (1970), and John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), all of which jubilantly embraced the “bad” aesthetic of home movies. Posed as fantasized substitutions for mainstream movie-making, such works were also underwritten by the legitimacy of camp as a form of counter-culture critique, blurring parody and documentary to give voice to an array of non-mainstream and counter-cultural identities. The employment of camp in postmodern culture became known not merely as an aesthetic subversion of cultural mores but also as “a gesture of self-legitimation” (Derrida 290), its “failed seriousness” regarded as a critical response to the specific historical problem of being a “culturally over-saturated” subject (Sontag 288).The significant difference between Korine’s film and those of his 1970s-era forbears is precisely the attention he pays to the formal aspects of his medium, revelling in analogue editing glitches to the point of fetishism, in some cases lasting as long as the scenes themselves. Consciously working out-of-step with the media of his day, Trash Humpers in imbued with nostalgia from its very beginning. Whereas Smith, Eggleston, Warhol, Morrissey and Waters blurred fantasy and documentary in ways that raised the social and political identities of their subjects, Korine seems much more interested in “trash” as an aesthetic trope. In following this interest, he rightfully pays homage to the tropes of queer cinema, however, he conveniently leaves behind their underlying commentaries about (hetero-) normative culture. A sequence where the trash humpers visit a whorehouse and amuse themselves by smoking cigars and slapping the ample bottoms of prostitutes in G-strings confirms the heterosexual tenor of the film, which is reiterated throughout by numerous deadpan gay jokes and slurs.Trash Humpers can be understood precisely in terms of Korine’s desire to maintain the aesthetic imperatives of alternative culture, where formal experimentation and the subverting of mainstream genres can provide a certain amount of freedom from explicated meaning, and, in particular, from socio-political commentary. Bourdieu rightly points out how the pleasures of the aesthetic gaze often manifest themselves curiously as form of “deferred pleasure” (353) or “pleasure without enjoyment” (495), which corresponds to Immanuel Kant’s notion of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement. Aesthetic dispositions posed in the negative – as in the avant-garde artists who mined primitive and ugly cultural stereotypes – typically use as reference points “facile” or “vulgar” (393) working-class tropes that refer negatively to sensuous pleasure as their major criterion of judgment. For Bourdieu, the pleasures provided by the aesthetic gaze in such instances are not sensual pleasures so much as the pleasures of social distinction – signifying the author’s distance from taste as a form of gratification. Here, it is easy to see how the orgiastic central characters in Trash Humpers might be employed by Korine for a similar end-result. As noted by Jeremiah Kipp in a review of the film: “You don't ‘like’ a movie like Trash Humpers, but I’m very happy such films exist”. Propelled by aesthetic, rather than by social, questions of value, those that “get” the obscure works of alternative culture have a tendency to legitimize them on the basis of the high-degree of formal analysis skills they require. For Bourdieu, this obscures the fact that one’s aesthetic “‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education” – a privileged mode of looking, estranged from those unfamiliar with the internal logic of decoding presupposed by the very notion of “aesthetic enjoyment” (2).The rhetorical priority of alternative culture is, in Bourdieu’s terms, the “autonomous” perfection of the form rather than the “heteronomous” attempt to monopolise on it (Field 40). However, such distinctions are, in actuality, more nuanced than Bourdieu sometimes assumed. This is especially true in the context of global digital culture, which makes explicit how the same cultural signs can have vastly different meanings and motivations across different social contexts. This has arguably resulted in the destabilisation of prescriptive analyses of cultural taste, and has contributed to recent “post-critical” advances, in which academics such as Bruno Latour and Rita Felski advocate for cultural analyses and practices that promote relationality and attachment rather than suspicious (critical) dispositions towards marginal and popular subjects alike. Latour’s call for a move away from the “sledge hammer” of critique applies as much to cultural practice as it does to written analysis. Rather than maintaining hierarchical oppositions between authentic versus inauthentic taste, Latour understands culture – and the material world more generally – as having agency alongside, and with, that of the social world.Hipsters with No AlternativeIf, as Karl Spracklen suggests, alternativism is thought of “as a political project of resistance to capitalism, with communicative oppositionality as its defining feature” (254), it is clear that there has been a progressive waning in relevance of the category of “alternative culture” in the age of the Internet, which coincides with the triumph of so-called “neoliberal individualism” (258). To this end, Korine has lost some of his artistic credibility over the course of the 2000s. If viewed negatively, icons of 1990s alternative culture such as Korine can be seen as merely exploiting Dada-like techniques of mimetic exacerbation and symbolic détournement for the purpose of alternative, “arty” branding rather than pertaining to a counter-hegemonic cultural movement (Foster 31). It is within this context of heightened scepticism surrounding alternative culture that the hipster stereotype emerged in cultures throughout the world, as if a contested symbol of the aesthetic gaze in an era of neoliberal identity politics. Whatever the psychological motivations underpinning one’s use of the term, to call someone a hipster is typically to point out that their distinctive alternative or “arty” status appears overstated; their creative decisions considered as if a type of bathos. For detractors of alternative cultural producers such as Korine, he is trying too hard to be different, using the stylised codes of “alternative” to conceal what is essentially his cultural and political immaturity. The hipster – who is rarely ever self-identified – re-emerged in the 2000s to operate as a scapegoat for inauthentic markers of alternative culture, associated with men and women who appear to embrace Realpolitik, sincerity and authentic expressions of identity while remaining tethered to irony, autonomous aesthetics and self-design. Perhaps the real irony of the hipster is the pervasiveness of irony in contemporary culture. R. J Magill Jnr. has argued that “a certain cultural bitterness legitimated through trenchant disbelief” (xi) has come to define the dominant mode of political engagement in many societies since the early 2000s, in response to mass digital information, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and the climate of suspicion produced by information about terrorism threats. He analyses the prominence of political irony in American TV shows including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Simpsons, South Park, The Chappelle Show and The Colbert Report but he also notes its pervasiveness as a twenty-first-century worldview – a distancing that “paradoxically and secretly preserves the ideals of sincerity, honesty and authenticity by momentarily belying its own appearance” (x). Crucially, then, the utterance “hipster” has come to signify instances when irony and aesthetic distance are perceived to have been taken too far, generating the most disdain from those for whom irony, aesthetic discernment and cultural connoisseurship still provide much-needed moments of disconnection from capitalist cultures drowning in commercial hyperbole and grave news hype. Korine himself has acknowledged that Spring Breakers (2013) – his follow-up feature film to Trash Humpers – was created in response to the notion that “alternative culture”, once a legitimate challenge to mainstream taste, had lost its oppositional power with the decentralization of digital culture. He states that he made Spring Breakers at a moment “when there’s no such thing as high or low, it’s all been exploded. There is no underground or above-ground, there’s nothing that’s alternative. We’re at a point of post-everything, so it’s all about finding the spirit inside, and the logic, and making your own connections” (Hawker). In this context, we can understand Trash Humpers as the last of the Korine films to be branded with the authenticity of alternative culture. In Spring Breakers Korine moved from the gritty low-fi sensibility of his previous films and adopted a more digital, light-filled and pastel-coloured palette. Focussing more conventionally on plot than ever before, Spring Breakers follows four college girls who hold up a restaurant in order to fund their spring break vacation. Critic Michael Chaiken noted that the film marks a shift in Korine’s career, from the alternative stylings of the pre-Internet generation to “the cultural heirs [of] the doomed protagonists of Kids: nineties babies, who grew up with the Internet, whose sensibilities have been shaped by the sweeping technological changes that have taken place in the interval between the Clinton and Obama eras” (33).By the end of the 2000s, an entire generation came of age having not experienced a time when the obscure films, music or art of the past took more effort to track down. Having been a key participant in the branding of alternative culture, Korine is in a good position to recall a different, pre-YouTube time – when cultural discernment was still caught up in the authenticity of artistic identity, and when one’s cultural tastes could still operate with a certain amount of freedom from sociological scrutiny. Such ideas seem a long way away from today’s cultural environments, which have been shaped not only by digital media’s promotion of cultural interconnection and mass information, but also by social media’s emphasis on mobilization and ethical awareness. ConclusionI should reiterate here that is not Korine’s lack of seriousness, or irony, alone that marks Trash Humpers as a response to the scepticism surrounding alternative culture symbolised by the figure of the hipster. It is, rather, that Korine’s mock-documentary about juvenile geriatrics works too hard to obscure its implicit social commentary, appearing driven to condemn contemporary capitalism’s exploitations of youthfulness only to divert such “uncool” critical commentaries through unsubtle formal distractions, visual poetics and “bad boy” avant-garde signifiers of authenticity. Before being bludgeoned to death, the unnamed man in the French maid’s outfit recites a poem on a bridge amidst a barrage of fire crackers let off by a nearby humper in a wheelchair. Although easily overlooked, it could, in fact, be a pivotal scene in the film. Spoken with mock high-art pretentions, the final lines of the poem are: So what? Why, I ask, why? Why castigate these creatures whose angelic features are bumping and grinding on trash? Are they not spawned by our greed? Are they not our true seed? Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash? We’ve created this lot, of the ooze and the rot, deliberately and unabashed. Whose orgiastic elation and one mission in creation is to savagely fornicate TRASH!Here, the character’s warning of capitalist overabundance is drowned out by the (aesthetic) shocks of the fire crackers, just as the stereotypical hipster’s ethical ideals are drowned out by their aesthetic excess. The scene also functions as a metaphor for the humpers themselves, whose elderly masks – embodiments of nostalgia – temporarily suspend their real socio-political identities for the sake of role-play. It is in this sense that Trash Humpers is too enamoured with its own artifices – including its anonymous “boys club” mentality – to suggest anything other than the aesthetic distance that has come to mark the failings of the “alternative culture” category. In such instances, alternative taste appears as a rhetorical posture, with Korine asking us to gawk knowingly at the hedonistic and destructive pleasures pursued by the humpers while factoring in, and accepting, our likely disapproval.ReferencesArsel, Zeynep, and Craig J. Thompson. “Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How Consumers Protect Their Field-Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing Marketplace Myths.” Journal of Consumer Research 37.5 (2011): 791-806.Bourdieu, Pierre. 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