Emotionalised criminalisation: Between the harvesting of moral panic, reasonable governance and legislative harms

Emotion plays an increasing role in contemporary law and policy making. While it may sometimes appropriately motivate legislative action, it can also significantly interfere with justice and reasonable governance. Taking the punitive response to ‘reborn dolls’ in Brazil as a case study of a recent harmful sideway of emotion-based criminalisation, we contend that any emotion-based criminalisation must be socially understood, deconstructed and positioned against legitimate criminalisation criteria. Drawing on the scholarship on legitimate criminalisation, punitiveness, (gendered) legal moralism and the social harm perspective, such emotionalised criminalisation is, firstly, contextualised and, secondly, contrasted to the more reasonable type of governance that includes public sentiment as a relevant factor in the criminalisation process. It is further argued that similar cases of criminalisation are not only normatively illegitimate, but that they can also amount to ‘legislative harm’, which has tangible adverse consequences on the lives and human rights of many.