Crime, Violence and Visibility: Gendering Understandings of Violence, Disorder and Protest in England and Wales 1784-2010

Though there has been much work on the change in attitudes towards violence since the late eighteenth century, little attention has been paid to the gendered profile of its development or the consequent differential cultural understandings of criminality manifested by men and women, as well as the wider contextualization of violence within society.

This book examines the gendering of violence from the late eighteenth century onwards and reflects on the extent to which gender expectations have continued, into the twentieth century at least, to shape the attitudes of legislators, legal personnel, and the criminal justice process towards types of violence and types of perpetrators of that violence.

Judith Rowbotham is a full-time independent scholar based in London, co-founder and Director of SOLON, and one of the General Editors of the Routledge SOLON series and Honorary Research Fellow at Plymouth University in the Plymouth Law School. Her research interests include the presentation or reportage of the legal process, including the criminal justice system, in various non-fiction and fiction formats, and issues of gender, violence and cultural comprehensions of the law in action, from the late-eighteenth century to the present. Recent publications include the afore-mentioned Crime News in Modern Britain. Press Reporting & Responsibility, 1820-2010 (Palgrave, 2013) and Shame, Blame, and Culpability: Crime and violence in the modern state [edited with Marianna Muravyeva, and David Nash] (Routledge, 2012).