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Since the establishment of community care, policy towards offenders with learning disabilities has changed. Previously those individuals would have been admitted to locked wards. With the closure of these wards this option is largely unavailable. In relation to sex offenders there is now a need to identify individuals who are at risk of offending and to establish the most appropriate placement and treatment for these individuals. Recent literature suggests that cognitive factors play a crucial role in the sex offending process. One method of predicting the risk of sexual offending behaviour is to measure anti social sexual attitudes consistent with sexual offending behaviour. Research indicates that the recognition of offenders' attitudes and attributions are pivotal in bringing about change in their offending behaviour. There has been little research in developing methods of assessment in the field of learning disabilities. To data, there is no valid, reliable, self report questionnaire which assesses cognitive factors in these individuals. Some research has identified various problems in using assessment tools devised for non learning disability populations when assessing the sexual attitudes of individuals who have learning disabilities. These measures are often too complicated and open to suggestible and acquiescent responding. This thesis aims to develop a valid, reliable self report questionnaire to assess anti-social attitudes and attributions consistent with sexual offending behaviour in individuals who have mild learning disabilities. Male sex offenders with mild learning disabilities and control groups were tested. The reliability and validity of the questionnaires was examined. Additional questionnaires and vignettes were constructed to aid understanding and investigate response biases. The groups were compared and results discussed. The limitations, potential uses of the questionnaires and directions for further research are proposed.

This thesis develops a conceptual framework - based on the work of Erving Goffman - to understand the practical exercise of police suspicions. In so doing, it generates provisional insights about how the police decide to stop and search members of the public, and assesses the role of broader influences on officer decision-making. The thesis draws primarily on extensive observations of police patrols, and face-to-face interviews with operational officers. These data were gathered as part of a mixed-methods study carried out for the Home Office on the reforms to stop and search introduced following the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. It is argued that police suspicions are generated through two related processes, which are also to be found in everyday social interactions. On the one hand, social information about a person's identity is 'signalled' to other people, which results in them adjusting their conduct towards that person. Understanding this communicative process in the context of policing helps to identify the physical, categorical, and behavioural signals which are ascribed meaning, and prompt suspicions. On the other hand, the police are also seen to use interpretative schema - through a tacit cognitive process of 'framing' - to locate social information and define it as suspicious. Importantly, because signals are patterned temporally and geographically, and frames are influenced by the organisational and social context, there is a need to develop a systemic understanding of police decision-making. In examining these processes, 'methodical suspicion' and 'categorical suspicion' are found to be pervasive in police work. The thesis shows that suspicions tend to fall on the socially marginal - particularly young men, those from ethnic minority backgrounds, and people who are 'known' to the police - and concludes that routine police decisions and encounters are central to the production, and reproduction, of social order.

This thesis will examine a range of contemporary debates around the possible causes and impact of fear of crime'. It will also critically examine the manner in which the extent of the fear of crime 'problem' has been measured by a range of survey based approaches. Using a range of recent critical literature which has problematised many of the assumptions which underpin the fear of crime debate, this thesis will propose a new approach to understanding the potential impact of fear of crime on the 'everyday life' of individuals. Employing an in-depth ethnography of a group of older adults (one of the sections of the population routinely identified as most 'fearful'), this thesis will argue that organised social networks and a range of other formal and informal activities provide a potentially effective means of minimising the impact of fear of crime on the lives of older adults. It will also argue that the media, often identified as a significant 'cause' of fear of crime, are engaged with in a much more complex fashion by this group than traditional theories which posit a causal link between the media and fear of crime would suggest.

The thesis explores the experiences of women who had contact with the Magistrates' Court process as a result of violence and intimidation from men in past and existing relationships. Drawing on understandings and appropriations of feminist standpoint theory (Harding: 1987; 2004), an interpretive variation of grounded theory (Charmaz: 2007) and features of structuration theory (Giddens: 1984), the empirical study aimed to provide space for women to speak and be heard, in order to provide a more in-depth portrayal and understanding of women's experiences of their interface with the criminal court system, addressing a specific under-researched area in criminological and socio-legal discourses. Areas of convergence and divergence between the views of the women and professionals are also identified and a thematic discussion considers how the women's experiences of the law are structured and reproduced. The study found that most women wanted contact with some aspect of the criminal justice system, if not necessarily the court process, but on their terms: their experience assessed by their own notion of appropriateness. Women were shown to be knowledgeable agents strategising and attending to their more immediate priorities, which were not limited to judicial concerns. Women's agency was compromised and constrained throughout their experience, with their own legitimate victim status being questioned. The women reported a disconnection with the court process, and an absence of a sense of ownership, while the structural demands of the system and pressures brought by involvement were shown to bring additional complications in women's lives. The experience was deemed isolating, resulting largely from a dissonance between the women's frameworks of meaning, and those of the court professionals they came into contact with. The thesis concludes by identifying implications for addressing the normative gendered processes and culture of the criminal legal system, proposing an alternative approach centred on the needs and rights of abused women.

Recent years have seen the development of a body of research on stalking behaviour. However, this research has primarily focused on the experiences of female victims creating an identifiable gap in exploring the experiences of male victims. This thesis seeks to address this gap by examining the experiences of 23 male victims of stalkers. In examining the experiences of male victims, this thesis begins by identifying the dominant discourses that have evolved around stalking. Then, by the adoption of a grounded methodological framework, common meanings and understandings in the male participants' narratives are identified. These themes reveal that the men's understanding and experiences of being stalked are at odds with the view that being stalked is not a problem for men. This perspective is confirmed by the participants' experiences within the criminal justice system as they seek to accomplish victimisation. By drawing on a constellation of sociological theories, my study reveals the problematic experiential nature of being stalked. This includes the effect a stalking experience can have on a masculine identity, so much so that a man may respond by 'reclaiming' his masculinity. For some men, a stalking experience can threaten their identity even to the point that their identity can appear to be on the verge of collapsing. My study also shows how men try to make sense of their stalking experiences by drawing on stalking discourses from popular culture. As my study reveals the problematic nature of being stalked for men, there is the need for all those researching and developing policy for stalking victims to adequately take into account the experiences of male as well as female victims.

This thesis describes and analyses the policing of female street prostitution in Edinburgh. In particular, it provides an analysis of the construction of prostitutes’ identities through policing. My approach attempts to dispel some of the myths, misunderstandings and ambiguities which surround contemporary understandings of female street prostitution, thereby making a contribution to more general theorising about the female body. Structured around the central concept of identity, the chapters of the thesis are organised around my understanding of the use of values, norms and beliefs by members of society in the construction of social order, identity and the formal and informal policing of the body. These three themes run throughout. In addition, on-going analysis of the data collected throughout the fieldwork period revealed two further themes: (i) the ability of female street prostitutes to negotiate their power(s) through the regulatory function of shame and the negotiation of “truth” and, (ii) consequently, the fact that sex workers’ identities are shaped through their own ability to draw on and generate knowledge(s). The thesis also shows how power relations of gender and social structure dominate the day-to-day life of the red light area in Leith. In particular, the data presented demonstrate how power in “red light culture” rests in a delicate equilibrium in which the women themselves exert some power, not simply as the stereotypical “Madame”, but as working women who have made conscious decisions to enter the sex industry. Indeed, in this version of sex-for-sale, the data show how prostitute women can frequently invert power by “taking control of the street” through the construction and management of their personal and professional identities. In circularity, power becomes knowledge which in turn preserves power.

This thesis presents an analysis of the evolution of drug policy that challenges the fundamental understanding of state power and its monopoly regarding drug problems. The research both mapped the changing nature of drug control in Edinburgh and reassessed how and where this policy was formed. The source of the major argument revolves around the twin themes of local governance and techniques of social control, namely in this case technologies of the self and criminalisation. The realisation of the importance of local governance and study research complicates our understanding of drug control. Policy formation becomes a problematized factor in deliberations on how and from where drugs are controlled. This research as designed to redress this important limitation. Governance here is not to be equated solely with government but can be exercised by any number of social bodies, departments, organisations and professional bodies, often with contingent rather than final results. The second organising theme of this thesis is similarly designed to enhance understanding of the character and meaning of the social control of intravenous drug use. The study is intended to demonstrate that drug control policy has a diverse nature neither found in the exclusive embodiment of repression or liberation; neither exercised by a single agency or a sole representative within one. Social control here is divided into an analysis of techniques of the self, directed towards the transformation of the individual, and criminalisation, aimed at the repression of the individual drug user. Chapters Three through to Four provide a detailed analysis of the evolution of intravenous drug policy in Edinburgh. The chapters are chronologically based on three distinct phases of the intravenous drug problem and policy. From a small problem in the seventies, through to the expansion of use and drug control in the eighties, the research finishes this triptych with an elaboration of policy in the age of AIDS and after. The last chapter, Five, details the use of similar techniques of drug control in other jurisdictions. Additionally, the notion of trans-local governance, existent between a number of European cities, extends understanding of developing sub-national arrangements concerning policy deploying outside, and sometimes in conflict with, the domain of national governments.

Questions are never asked without a reason, and whenever a question is made, it becomes a vehicle for another action. Questions, on their most basic level, endeavour to strike up an epistemic balance between the interlocutors in that the questioner appears to be seeking information. This study builds on the body of existing literature on questioning in interaction. It explores questions and questioning through a corpus of police interviews recorded in a police station in a Montenegrin city, with a particular focus on how the participants to interrogations are managing questions with purpose in Serbo-Croatian. Similar to other types of institutional interaction in the literature, this study shows that when asking questions, detectives have in mind completing a range of smaller 'jobs' as well as solving the project in general. Thus, chapter 4 shows how while performing these jobs, close connection is exhibited between the linguistic form, epistemics and action. The detectives, for instance, select from different linguistic forms of 'do you know' interrogatives in order to perform different actions, such as asking for information, asking for confirmation or preparing the ground for another activity. Moreover, the roles of participants in interrogations heavily affect the language and interactional techniques they are using. Thus, certain interactional techniques are noted to be tied only to certain types of interviews and to certain tasks of the detectives. Chapter 5 indicates that the detectives use the technique of repeating a part or the whole of the received answer only when speaking with suspects and in order to express doubts about their answers. At the same time, chapter 6 shows that only those interlocutors, who in the course of interrogation realise they are being treated as suspects use rhetorical questions as a defensive technique specific of this interactional identity. This study generally supports the thesis that questioning is never done without a specific action in mind and that a range of possible activities can be performed through the question-answer pairs in interrogation.

This thesis reflects on Pakhtun men's perceptions of the conditions promoting domestic violence against women in their culture. The existing literature on domestic violence in Pakistan, the primary focus of which is the women victims of such violence, shows some staggering and skewed statistics, owing to the deeply embedded patriarchal social structure, gender-prejudiced attitudes prevailing at every level of society as well as poverty, illiteracy, a strict pattern of gender- specific roles and spaces, socio-economic dependence of women on men supported by religion. However, men's views on this issue have rarely been addressed in Pakistan in general and Pakhtun society in particular. I examine how the social and cultural environment of Pakhtun society influences the construction of (violent) masculinity and gender-power relations. These create the potential for violence, specifically domestic violence against women. The research was carried out in four different locations of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Data was generated through semi-structured and in-depth interviews of 32 male respondents, eight in each of the selected areas, on the basis of three categories, i.e. ethnicity, age, and educational status of the respondents. Drawing upon my respondents' views I show that Pakhtunwali, the core of the Pakhtun social structure, is a key contributing factor offering potential for the construction of violent Pakhtun masculinity particularly through the notions of badal (revenge), gherat (self-honour or Pakhtun honour), and nang (Pakhtun pride). It also encourages a strict pattern of gender hierarchies and spatialization, which leaves women marginalized at all levels. Thus in Pakhtun society one learns to be aggressive in order to dominate and control, and one way this aggression is expressed is through violence against women. I argue that the joint family structure, the general perception of women's issues including domestic violence as a highly personal and private matter, the absence of an effective and competent criminal justice system, and lack of domestic violence laws provide the perpetrators with considerable impunity.