Submerged : An exploration of how a marginalised urban community interacts with aspects of the New Zealand judicial system

Abstract

The intention of this project is to investigate and consider the experiences of a marginalised urban community - transgender/transsexual Street-level prostitutes in central Auckland, who are reliant on drugs and alcohol - in relation to the police, judiciary and the contemporary world in which they live. The MtF (male to female) prostitutes who conduct their business on a section of Auckland’s Karangahape Road, colloquially known as K Rd, have pursued life pathways through life chances influenced and shaped by the isolating influences of discrimination, stigma, violence and on-going marginalisation. The intention is to observe through participant observation and to describe how things happen in the MtF community, particularly in respect of power relations as embedded in the police. The police are a recurrent and ever-present influence in the participants’ lives and within whom the dissemination and exercise of state power resides. Social and cultural work processes, which embody particular knowledges and reinforce society’s ruling relations, influence the lives and the life chances of those who make up this closely-knit community. The prostitutes’ perspectives and narratives can offer resistance to such dominant relations and can provide a marginalised group with some voice concerning processes over which they have virtually no long-lasting influence. Therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ), in respect of this community and the use of drugs and alcohol in a landscape of social dereliction, is also a major component of my research. My overseas fieldwork shows that TJ, in the form of the Drug Treatment Court (DTC), could be a possible way to ameliorate social dislocation and powerlessness through rehabilitation, the fostering of self-accountability, the promotion of self-esteem and thus the empowering of a voice to the marginalised. TJ has become established in a number of places overseas as a workable alternative in treating adults who are substance users through the Drug Treatment Court process. This judicial construct has not gained any long-term traction for adults caught up in the New Zealand criminal justice system. Current conventional judicial processes have become a revolving door for the socially compromised and the penalties imposed do not address the drug and/or alcohol problems that help cause their offending and help promote on-going marginalisation.