Japan is often said to have one of the lowest rape rates in the world, and Japanese police claim to solve 97 percent of rape cases. But in reality, only 5–10 percent of rape victims report it to police, and police record half or less of reported cases while prosecutors charge about one-third of recorded cases. The result of this process of caseload attrition is that for every 1,000 rapes in Japan, only 10–20 result in a criminal conviction – and fewer than half of convicted rapists are incarcerated. Similar patterns characterize Japan's criminal justice response to other sex crimes. This article shows that impunity for sex offenders is extremely common in Japan, and it argues that patriarchal social and legal norms help explain this pattern.

To date the mainstreaming of equality and human rights law into public sector organisations has been underwhelming with the implementation of these norms being ad hoc and inconsistent. Existing research on factors that influence implementation has been either too general or too disjointed. This article has two aims to advance research on the implementation of equality and human rights: (i) to outline factors that influence the implementation of these norms and (ii) provide a more settled foundations for future research on equality and human rights implementation. It does this through interviews, undertaken in 2018–2019, with individuals responsible for leading the implementation of equality and human rights law within public sector organisations (specifically regulators, inspectorates and ombudsmen) in England and Wales. On the basis of this, the article makes suggestions for how the implementation of equality and human rights can be advanced further through changes to the regulatory environment.

This article studies Western (primarily Anglophone) representations of the Dan people (boat people) and the boat clusters on which they lived, relative to the mainland, in the island city of Guangzhou, focusing on 1842–1900. A change occurred over time, as the Dan went from being in close interaction with Westerners prior to the Opium Wars to being peripheral to Western interests and activities. This shift is evident in Western writings, and negative representations of the Dan came to dominate in the late nineteenth century. This mirrored changing sociospatial power relations between Westerners and the terrestrial Chinese, as Westerners increasingly gained access to the onshore city of Guangzhou itself, in part from the colonial island enclave of Shamian. Changing crosscultural interactions affected how the Chinese Others were perceived and ultimately how the Chinese whole was intertextually constructed in Western colonial discourse.

Measurement was vital to nineteenth-century engineering. Focusing on the work of the Stevenson engineering firm in Scotland, this paper explores the processes by which engineers made their measurements credible and explains how measurement, as both a product and a practice, informed engineering decisions and supported claims to engineering authority. By examining attempts made to quantify, measure and map dynamic river spaces, the paper analyses the relationship between engineering experience and judgement and the generation of data that engineers considered to be ‘tolerably correct’. While measurement created an abstract and simplified version of the river that accommodated prediction, this abstraction had to be connected to and made meaningful in real river space despite acknowledged limitations to measuring practice. In response, engineers drew on experience gained through the measuring process to support claims to authoritative knowledge. This combination of quantification and experience was then used to support interventions in debates over the proper use and management of rivers. This paper argues that measurement in nineteenth-century engineering served a dual function, producing both data and expertise, which were both significant in underpinning engineering authority and facilitating engineers’ intervention in decision making for river management.

These volumes conclude a series initiated in 1974, marking almost fifty years of effort by a huge cohort of scholars. This review is thus a valedictory for the whole series as well as an account of what we have learned from the most recent volumes about Darwin's final years (1879–82). The project was begun by Frederick Burckhardt, who shared the editorial role for the early volumes with Sydney Smith and a rolling sequence of assistant editors and advisers who eventually comprised a significant fraction of the leading members of what used to be called the ‘Darwin industry’. Smith passed away in 1988 (volume 7 notes his legacy). Burkardt too left this world in 2007 – volume 16, part 1 includes an obituary, but his name has been retained and Cambridge University Press still ask that the series be cited as ‘Burkhardt et al.’ Duncan Porter took over for volumes 8–15, again with a sequence of fellow editors and assistants, after which James Secord became head of the project through its final years. The dedications of successive volumes record the efforts of individual scholars who have aided the teams and the involvement of the many institutions and foundations that have leant moral and material support over the years. For those of us with Cambridge connections, the University Library will not seem the same without the presence of the team it supported.

Although “urban” and “fisheries” are not commonly paired in the analyses of either urbanism or fisheries governance, today’s large-scale fisheries are often closely organised in connection with cities. In this paper, I build on a feminist perspective and urban studies to examine the makings of a city through contemporary fisheries. Drawing upon observations and interviews conducted in Tromsø, Norway, which is a key site for Arctic fisheries, I review how fish and fisheries are simultaneously made visible and invisible in urban spheres. By analysing the gendered structures and valuations that organise the city–fisheries relations, I introduce three “fishy” windows to demonstrate the kinds of development and future pathways for fisheries that are considered relevant and rational in and for the city. In particular, I discuss how the historical, techno-masculine narratives of mastering Arctic nature frame and legitimise fisheries practices as they expand throughout Tromsø. The study builds on the emerging research on Arctic urbanism to highlight the need to better integrate gendered analyses of the “urban” into social science research on natural resource extraction.