This chapter addresses complexities and continuing concerns in thinking about feminist perspectives and contributions to criminology. The chapter charts feminist contributions to criminology over time, dwelling on the paradigmatic shifts in criminology in both substantive and epistemological and methodological terms, extending both the terrain of criminological theorizing and understanding of knowledge forms. The notion of feminist criminology as a transitional phase towards a more humanistic stance in relation to crime and justice in a globalized context is also explored. The chapter considers synergies between feminist contributions and other work which has focused on inequalities before the law and addresses the issue of migrant offenders and victims, criminal behaviour, and criminal justice, as well as victims of human trafficking, these being examples of the problematic dichotomy between victims and offenders.
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Michele Burman and Loraine Gelsthorpe
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Margaret Malloch and Gill McIvor
This chapter, which examines the relevance of gender to an understanding of criminal justice responses to offending and victimisation, covers: gender differences in criminal involvement; gender and sentencing; gender and punishment; gender and ‘victimisation’; and gender and the criminal justice professions.
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Gavin Dingwall
This chapter examines sentencing policy and practice. The discussions cover the evolution of sentencing policy 1991–2011; consistency in sentencing; providing guidance to sentencers; ethnicity and sentencing; and gender and sentencing.
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Jo Phoenix
This chapter explores current characteristics and contexts of women’s involvement in prostitution and sex, particularly as they have evolved during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, before describing criminological knowledge about prostitution and sex workers. The final sections of the chapter review current regulatory frameworks governing women’s involvement in prostitution. Running throughout the chapter is the question: what is the relationship between how prostitution is theorized and the politics of prostitution policy and its reform?
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Michele Burman and Loraine Gelsthorpe
This chapter addresses complexities and continuing concerns in thinking about feminist perspectives and contributions to criminology. It charts feminist contributions to criminology over time, dwelling on paradigmatic shifts in substantive, epistemological, and methodological terms, and the ways in which feminism has transformed criminological research and practice. The chapter explores contemporary feminist research agendas focused on issues of powerlessness, justice, and inequality, addressing research on violence against women, digital technology, human trafficking, migration, and criminal justice. The notion of feminist criminology as a transitional phase towards a more humanistic stance in relation to crime and justice in a globalized context is also explored.
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Jo Phoenix
This chapter explores current characteristics and contexts of women’s involvement in prostitution and sex work, particularly as they have evolved during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, before describing criminological knowledge about prostitution and sex workers. The final sections of the chapter review current regulatory frameworks governing women’s involvement in prostitution. Running throughout the chapter is the question: what is the relationship between how prostitution is theorized and the politics of prostitution policy and its reform?
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Course-focused and comprehensive, the Textbook on series provides an accessible overview of the key areas on the law curriculum. This chapter examines theories on female offending, which include biological, hormonal, and psychological theories; learning theories; masculinity/femininity theories; strain theories; and control theories. Traditional mainstream criminology views male criminality as ‘normal’ and something that merely needs to be kept within reasonable bounds. Female criminality is, however, abnormal, unexpected, and portrayed as pathological and irrational. It is argued that mainstream criminology fails to use social explanations of criminality to explain why women offend or are more conforming than their male counterparts. The most promising ideas so far come from control theories and strain theories, so long as these are applied in a gender-neutral manner.
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Dianne Otto
This chapter examines women’s rights and new developments related to gender identity. It describes the treatment of women in international law prior to the adoption of the UN Charter, in order to highlight the significance of the subsequent shift to the promotion of women’s equality. It examines the non-discrimination approach favoured by the drafters of the founding human rights instruments, highlighting the importance of the approach as well as some of its limitations. The chapter goes on to examine the innovative approach taken in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which promoted a strong version of women’s substantive equality. The strategy of ‘gender mainstreaming’, adopted in the 1990s, sought to reinterpret mainstream human rights to be inclusive of women’s experiences. The chapter concludes by highlighting some continuing obstacles presented by the law itself, which prevent women and other gender identities from successfully claiming and enjoying human rights.
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This chapter considers those provisions of the Equality Act 2010 that deal with equal pay. These include equality of terms and the sex equality clause (s 66); equal work (s 65), ie like work, work rated as equivalent and work of equal value; the defence of material factor (s 69); sex discrimination in relation to contractual pay (s 71); the maternity equality clause (s 73); discussions about pay (s 77); and gender pay gap reporting (s 78). Also covered are rules on jurisdiction (s 127); burden of proof (s 136); time limits (s 129); remedies (s 132); death of a claimant; and backdating awards.
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This chapter examines the principle of equal pay for equal work enshrined in the Equality Act 2010 (EA). It first considers the stubbornness of the gender pay gap in the UK and the EU, as well as the justifications for intervention in the labour market via the auspices of equal pay laws. It goes on to discuss the legal machinery in the EA, which confers an entitlement on employees of one sex to the same remuneration as suitable employee comparators of the opposite sex. The focus then turns to the content of the ‘sex equality clause’—a term imposed into every employee’s contract of employment by virtue of section 66 of the EA. This is followed by a discussion of the material factor defence for employers in section 69 of the EA.
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All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing able students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter begins with an overview of families and family law in England and Wales today. It then discusses themes and issues in contemporary family law, covering rules versus discretion; women’s and men’s perspectives on family law; sex and gender identity; sexual orientation; cultural diversity; and state intervention versus private ordering, including the role of the family court and of non-court dispute resolution in family cases, and challenges facing the family justice system.
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All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing able students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter first considers demographic data on family relationships in England and Wales, and then examines the treatment of ‘trans’ people in this area of family law; and the history of legal recognition of intimate relationships between parties of the same gender, culminating in same-sex marriage and ensuing debates about the future of civil partnership. This is then followed by discussions of status-based relationships (marriage and civil partnership); creating a valid marriage or civil partnership; grounds on which a marriage or civil partnership is void; grounds on which a marriage or civil partnership is voidable; and non-formalized relationships (cohabitants and other ‘family’).
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Pamela Ugwudike
This chapter focuses on criminological studies of gender, particularly women’s experiences as offenders and victims, and the extent to which women’s offending and victimisation are interlinked. It begins with an overview of how gender features in criminological studies then considers the origins and principles of feminist criminology, which is a strand of criminology that has heavily influenced criminological studies of gender and crime. The chapter also explores the main theoretical traditions within feminist criminology and the philosophical orientations that influence feminist research. This exploration includes the criticisms levelled against feminist criminology. Finally, the chapter examines how more recent strands of feminist thought have tried to respond to these criticisms.
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Mia Rönnmar
This chapter discusses a number of key EU labour and equality law issues. These include restructuring of enterprises; information, consultation, and worker participation; how national collective labour law is affected by the four freedoms; flexible work and working conditions; the EU and national labour law in times of economic crisis; and gender equality, comprehensive equality, and protection against discrimination on other grounds.
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All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter discusses EU anti-discrimination law, which, over the past decade and a half, has expanded significantly to cover a wide range of grounds and contexts. In addition to requiring equal treatment for women and men, the Treaty provides legislative competence to combat discrimination on a range of grounds. The Charter of Fundamental Rights, which has a chapter devoted to equality, has been incorporated into the EU Treaties. Article 21 of the Charter prohibits discrimination on any ground. Articles 8 and 10 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) contain horizontal clauses requiring the EU to promote equality between men and women, and to combat discrimination based on certain grounds, namely sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age, or sexual orientation in all of its policies and activities. The UK version contains a further section analysing issues concerning EU discrimination law and the UK post-Brexit.
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All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter discusses EU anti-discrimination law, which, over the past decade and a half, has expanded significantly to cover a wide range of grounds and contexts. In addition to requiring equal treatment for women and men, the Treaty provides legislative competence to combat discrimination on a range of grounds. The Charter of Fundamental Rights, which has a chapter devoted to equality, has been incorporated into the EU Treaties. Article 21 of the Charter prohibits discrimination on any ground. Articles 8 and 10 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) contain horizontal clauses requiring the EU to promote equality between men and women, and to combat discrimination based on certain grounds, namely sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age, or sexual orientation in all of its policies and activities. The UK version contains a further section analysing issues concerning EU discrimination law and the UK post-Brexit.
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David Gadd
This chapter outlines the key definitional and aetiological issues surrounding domestic violence perpetration. It begins with international estimates of the prevalence of domestic violence, many of which confine themselves to assessments of the percentage of women worldwide who have ever been physically or sexually assaulted by a partner. The second section of the chapter reviews the British historical literature to show how Victorian concern with the protection of respectable women from ‘wife-beaters’ yielded to a medical-psychiatric discourse that blamed hysterical women for provoking men with quick tempers. It then outlines how twentieth-century feminist accounts reframed the problem of ‘wife-beating’ variously in terms of ‘domestic violence’, ‘domestic abuse’, ‘intimate partner violence’, ‘coercive control’, and ‘gender-based violence’ in efforts that exposed the roles of sexism, inadequate legal protection, and gender inequality in perpetuating a ‘continuum’ of abuse against women under patriarchy. The third part of the chapter appraises the critique of gender-based perspectives provided by: psychological studies, some of which point to ‘gender symmetry’ in the perpetration of domestic violence and some of which reveal personality differences between perpetrators and non-violent men; and sociological studies that expose how the intersections between gender and ethnicity, sexuality and age manifest themselves, both in incidents of domestic violence and in official reactions to them. The chapter concludes by pointing to the challenge of finding a common voice capable of capturing the collective experiences of those in need of protection from domestic violence as well as the need to find ways of responding to perpetrators whose attitudes, motives, backgrounds are not necessarily identical to each other. These challenges are rendered more acute when the law is revealed as unpredictable in its capacity to determine the culpability of the small minority of men who perpetrate grievous assaults on their partners.
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Joanna Shapland and Anthony Bottoms
Most of those who offend, even those who offend persistently, stop committing offences as they grow older. The process of stopping to commit crime—desistance—is affected by people’s own decisions, attitudes, and self-identity but also by their social context and by relationships with people close to them. In this chapter, we explore theories of how desistance occurs, in terms of the individuals themselves, their own agency, and social structures and relationships. The research evidence from around the world on what affects desistance is then examined. Finally, we consider how the criminal justice system may affect desistance through the effect of criminal records and opportunities for rehabilitation. Because social context is important, pathways to desistance can also vary according to gender and cultural background (e.g., the importance of family differs in different cultures).
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This chapter deals with feminist criminology and the critique of a traditionally masculine-driven discipline. It considers feminist arguments about the relationship between the criminality of women and their subordinate position and life experiences and the role of gender in theories of crime and deviance. It first considers Carol Smart’s views, as well as those of other theorists such as O. Pollak, W. I. Thomas, L. Gelsthorpe, and A. Morris. It then examines substantive areas where significant work has been accomplished in the field of feminist criminology: the ‘female emancipation leads to crime’ debate; the invalidation of the ‘leniency’ hypothesis; the relations between gender, crime, and social control; gender-specific crime; the increased prominence of the female victim in political and academic analysis; the gendered nature of victimization and criminalization; male violence; and intersectionality of class-race-gender inequalities. It concludes with a review of criticisms against feminist criminology.
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This chapter addresses the process by which directors are appointed and remunerated, the various board structures, and the importance of board diversity. All companies are required to appoint a director, with the Companies Act 2006 (CA 2006) providing that a private company must have at least one director, and a public company at least two directors. Every public company must also appoint a company secretary. Before a person is appointed as a director, that person and the company will usually negotiate to determine the new director's remuneration package. Remuneration practices tend to differ markedly depending on company size. The two most common board structures in the world are the unitary board and the two-tier board. Meanwhile, in recent years, board diversity has become a major governance topic. The focus to date has been on increasing gender diversity in the boardroom, but recent attention has also focused on ethnic diversity.
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