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My thesis is that local police in Eugene and Lane County, Oregon, have been integral parts of a process of governmentality which was directed at the constitution and reconstitution of various forms of social order. In terms of class relations we find police mediating and managing a number of antagonisms. This management role took both coercive and consensual forms and was largely concerned with the historical regulation of the proletariat. We witness a more passive role for police in the field of patriarchy. Here law enforcement strategies were non-interventionist vis a vis domestic violence, rape and prostitution. This passivity tended to reproduce the sovereign powers of men over women. In order to grasp the historical function of policing I argue that we must consider its utility in terms of both class and gender relations. While selective policing served to ensure the ongoing governability of the increasing numbers of male wage workers, it also allowed men in general to remain as sovereigns within families. In Section I I draw upon Marxism, Feminism, Poststructuralism and Phenomenology to make explicit my theoretical and methodological approach. My recognition of the importance of human agency is reflected in my use of qualitative sources such as oral histories, government documents, newspapers and court archival material. These sources are augmented by a guarded quantitative analysis of census data, crime statistics and police annual reports. Sections II and III provide historical outlines of national, state and local levels of class (II) and gender (III) relations respectively. In Section IV I discuss the rise of local policing and its relationship to other forms of governmentality. This leads me into a detailed appreciation of the policing of class (V) and gender conflict (VI).

It is well documented that female rape victims are blamed to some extent for their assault. However, there is a lack of research investigating attitudes towards other types of sexual assault, such as sexual assaults on adult males, or sexual assaults committed by women. This thesis aimed to extend research by investigating judgements of sexual assault when victim gender, sexual orientation, and perpetrator gender were varied. Study I investigated judgements of victim blame and perceived severity of the assault towards victims of male perpetrators in a depicted stranger rape. Results revealed that men made more negative judgements towards gay male victims than other victim groups. Study 2 extended this work by investigating judgements towards male victims when perpetrator gender was varied in a depicted sexual assault between acquaintances. Results showed that men made more negative judgements of the victim when he was either a gay male assaulted by a man or a heterosexual victim assaulted by a woman. Study 3 partially supported the findings of Study 2, such that male victims were more negatively evaluated when sexually assaulted by a female acquaintance, although there were no significant sexual orientation effects in this study. Study 3 also found attributions towards female victims were not affected by perpetrator gender. Study 4 investigated judgements towards male and female victims of a drug related sexual assault. This study also used trait adjective scales to investigate character assessments of the victim and perpetrator. Results were consistent with the previous studies, such that heterosexual male victims of female perpetrators were judged more negatively than other victims were. In addition, female perpetrators were attributed more positive character assessments than male perpetrators were. Study 5 investigated attitudinal correlates of judgements towards male and female victims of a drug related sexual assault. Results showed that homophobia, hostile sexism and attitudes towards male toughness correlated with judgements towards gay male victims of male perpetrators, heterosexual male victims of female perpetrators and heterosexual female victims regardless of perpetrator gender. Results are discussed in relation to the application of traditional gender role beliefs, defensive attributions, and empathy towards specific victim groups.

This social learning analysis of Community Safety Partnerships in Scotland will develop two sets of arguments – one empirical and one epistemological. The empirical argument is that the well-documented difficulties in partnership working (largely a result of the very different occupational cultures, structures, roles and functions of the agencies generally brought on board) are not only very much in evidence but that current ways of organising and structuring partnership working in Scotland are also very often not conducive to overcoming them. It will be argued that viewing partnership working through the lens of a relational social learning perspective (Etienne Wenger’s theory of communities of practice) provides a clear set of recommendations for resolving these problems. These empirical arguments shall form the main focus of the thesis but, given the theoretical perspective employed, a related epistemological argument also emerged and shall be developed. It is generally accepted in theoretical criminology (and elsewhere in the social sciences) that the ideas and mentalities of the discipline have been shaped by the institutional contexts in which actors were doing criminology or criminal justice work (whether as practitioners or as scholars). Therefore, it will be argued that Community Safety Partnerships are important not only as sites of criminal justice practice but also as new institutional spaces in which ways of thinking about crime and community safety have the potential to be transformed. The empirical and epistemological arguments are interrelated because it will only be where the problems of conflict and communication within partnerships can be positively resolved that their potential to become sites of thinking that transcend traditional criminal justice mentalities will be fulfilled.

Jack the Ripper has been described as the 'archetypal rapist' (Frayling 1986), a killer who committed what seemed like 'the ultimate rape' (Marriner 1992), yet he raped no-one. The mutilation and disembowelment of his victims is analogised as rape. This violence was murder, not any legally defined form of sexual assault. This is an aspect to these crimes that is given little, if any attention. Rape is a real social problem and the high attrition rate this offence attracts is the subject of much concern and research interest. A key problem highlighted in previous research has been the skewed public and criminal justice perception of what constitutes a 'real rape' (Kelly et al. 2005). To analogise disembowelment as rape creates or indicates a very skewed perception of the offence. This research proposes that the offences of rape and murder, when they are committed against women by men, have in some contexts become culturally conflated. The key aims are to examine to what extent the discourse of sexual murder produces a conflation, whether the meaning made of the violence in the discourse is used to rationalise other forms of violence against women by men and what the effect of a conflation could be for women and for the criminal justice system. Multiple methods were used, to extract data across three key institutional sites, under three headings - cultural representation, news reporting and police operational practice and include data obtained from examination of news reports of the rape and/or murder of women, Jack the Ripper film/TV and interviews with police from a serious crime team. All data was analysed using the unifying theoretical framework of Foucauldian discourse analysis. It was found that in some contexts the conflation exists and has real effect. There are five key findings: firstly that perceptions of what constitutes a 'real rape' are more closely aligned to a potential sexual murder than a legally defined or aggravated rape; secondly it was found that murders of women are routinely gendered and sexualised by both the media and the police which powerfully links fatal or potentially fatal violence with sexual assault and vice versa; thirdly it was found that because of the symbolic value of rape, murders of women can be and are considered, in some circumstances to be 'virtual rapes', which links closely to the fourth observation that indicates that instead of understanding rape as a form of violence, we can understand violence against women as a form of rape; finally, it was found that fear of rape could realistically be associated with fear of death because of the meaning made of rape in sexual murder discourse and this could have significant repercussions for those women experiencing a rape assault, those women who fear rape assaults, those who deal with victims of rape and the prosecution of rape and murder in the criminal justice system.

Using longitudinal data from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime and findings from qualitative interviews, it was found that the Children's Hearings system, in relation to young people referred on offending grounds, had no significant effect on the levels of self-reported offending in those referred to the Children's Hearings system, compared with a matched sample who had no contact with the system. In addition, no differences were found between a smaller matched sample who were placed on a Supervision Requirement and those with no contact with the system. The interventions provided within Supervision Requirements are argued to be ineffective and do not reflect the contemporary literature on effective practice. Interactions with the Children's Hearings system were not found to support labelling or deterrence theories. However, the gatekeeping practices of the police appeared to be biased and labelling in effect. The diversionary approach of the Children's Hearings system was supported through the finding that the majority of cohort members desisted from offending without requiring formal measures. It is argued that the functioning of the system could be improved by diverting more young people with offending behaviours prior to their referral to the Reporter (on the basis of their low risk and low levels of criminogenic needs). The small number of high risk offenders with high levels of criminogenic needs, who are unlikely to desist naturally, should receive structured interventions that reflect current findings in relation to effective practice.

Between the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, criminal anthropology was a very influential theory for criminologists throughout the western world. Proposed by the Italian alienist Cesare Lombroso, its theoretical core centred on the figure of the “criminal man,” a character atavistic instinct forced to live a life of crime. By filling a gap in the literature, this work deals with the historical and sociological circumstances in which criminal anthropology emerged and prospered, and concentrates on the impact Lombroso’s theory had on the development of scientific policing in Italy since the beginning of the twentieth century. A detailed account of the causes that favoured the rise of Lombroso’s scientific police provides an explanation for the appeal criminal anthropology exerted on western political elites. In Italy, the Lombrosian approach left his mark on the development of highly specific forensic tools like fingerprinting, and this had a strong impact on their utilisation by fascist authorities as the account of a famous case of identity fraud occurred in Italy in 1927 revealed. As a result, it is argued that the production of Lombrosian scientific policing was shaped by the wider cultural and social goals of the actors involved, as it is of any other form of knowledge. By choosing to sideline Lombrosian techniques, fascist authorities favoured the exploitation of un-scientific methods of crime prevention that, it is argued, were not perceived as inferior, anachronistic, or unreliable. Such a choice was dictated by specific social goals that favoured the implementation of constitutional anthropology on Lombrosian science of the deviance. Finally, it is suggested that this socio-historical reading of the Italian case could cast more light on the complex relationship between totalitarianism, technology, and forms public surveillance.

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