Zemiology and Decoloniality: Panoptification of Victimhood and Epistemic Violence in Anti-trafficking Reporting

Zemiology is an evolving critical perspective that focuses on understanding and responding to social harm, particularly the ‘lawful but awful’ acts and/or omissions by powerful actors such as states, both locally and globally (e.g., Hillyard et al., 2004). Therefore, it challenges the doxas of mainstream criminology, which hold that legally defined crimes depict and address the most serious harms in each society. Zemiology underscores the socially constructed nature of ‘crime’, pointing to the importance of discourse and knowledge production in shaping public perceptions, reinforcing and reflecting power structures, dominant ideologies, and political interests, rather than an objective assessment of harm (see Copson et al., 2025). As such, zemiology explores both criminalised and non-criminalised harms with a particular focus on state and corporate power in legitimising, recognising, silencing, or ignoring particular harms.