Book Review: Drug mules: Women in the international cocaine trade

• DOI: 10.1177/1057567715580984
• Date: 01 September 2015
• Published date: 01 September 2015
• Author: Robert J. Durán
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

especially successful because they involve case studies that highlight the validity of the authors’

contentions. Chapter 7 turns to discussions of the creation of an anti-bullying industry, specifically

through the news production process and various big business advertising strategies with anti-

bullying rhetoric. The final chapter highlights the cyclical structure of news media accounts of

bullying as having returned to a focus on the individual. Cohen and Brooks argue that this return

to the origins of constructions of bullying has resulted in social control measures that are largely

problematic and unproductive.

The structure of the book promotes a fluid reading of the main concepts and arguments, but the

perpetual focus on specific examples of media depictions of bullying is redundant. The notion that

most individuals are bullied as a part of childhood and adolescence is noted, but there remains a need

to further investigate whether differing typologies of bullying create different responses in individ-

uals and, more importantly, the nuanced dangers inherent in typologies of bullying. Specifically,

Chapter 6 discusses the gay victim of bullying, and does so with great success, but something is lost

in the brief mentioning of bullying because of sexuality versus bullying because of ethnic or reli-

gious differences. Cohen and Brooks specify the alarming rate with which gay youth commit suicide

as a result of bullying, but fail to adequately develop a discussion of the post-9/11 ramifications of

anti-Muslim bullying in regard to the effects such bullying has at the macro level. Bullying that leads

to suicide and bullying that leads to hate, animosity, and violent responses do receive attention from

Cohen and Brooks, but they miss an opportunity to explore how children and adolescents of a par-

ticular community, population, culture, religion, and so on, perceive their being bullied at institu-

tional macro levels. Is there a difference in associated levels of harm when considering a White

gay youth who commits suicide in comparison to an African American teenager who feels bullied

by law enforcement and perpetuates a violent stereotype?

Criticisms aside, this book provides a sound starting point for understanding the effects of media

treatments in promoting specific social movements. Additionally, Cohen and Brooks’s argument for

a restorative justice mechanism in combatting schoolbullying is strong. The authors’ ability to disen-

tangle social control mechanisms and negative impacts on bullying highlights issues with traditional

political and legal quick fix, fast-paced, all-or-nothing responses to issues that are, arguably, better

dealt with by highlighting the voice of victim and understanding the reasoning and rationale of the

bully.

Fleetwood, J. (2014).

Drug mules: Women in the international cocaine trade. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. 208 pp. $95.00,

ISBN: 978-1-137-27189-1.

Reviewed by: Robert J. Dura

´n, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

DOI: 10.1177/1057567715580984

With an ongoing global war on drugs, obtaining access to the social world of drug markets can be

plagued with difficulty. Moreover, many studies on the trafficking of drugs have ignored or not con-

sidered the experiences of women. The studies that have included women have portrayed them either

as victims or as participants in emancipation. Fleetwood sets out to change these ‘‘dualisms’’ or gen-

dered binaries in the literature by studying male and female drug mules (someone who carries drugs

across international borders for someone else) in order to make women sociologically visible. The

context for gathering insights were produced by interviewing and observing foreign women and men

incarcerated in two Ecuadorian prisons. Rather than being a lone ethnographer, she was part of team

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