"Complex, emotional and difficult" encapsulates both the experiences of the professionals involved in the three research cases as well as the experience as a research student while conducting this small-scale qualitative study. The research focuses upon three British violent crime cases in the late 1980s and early 1990s, case one being that of the murder of a student, case two being the torture and murder of a woman by multiple perpetrators and case three being the case of a multiple rapist. Using in depth interviews and documentary analysis of newspaper and court transcripts, the thesis deconstructs the partially closed world of the criminal case through the eyes of the professionals involved. It focuses on the role of the researcher and the impact of their relationship with their subjects in the interview situation. The difficulty and unpredictable nature of access negotiations is also explored as well as other methodological processes. The thesis examines the interplay of notions of masculinity, truth and evil as they figure in the personal, cultural and situational properties of the police, legal professionals and media. It examines the gendering of the criminal justice system and the media. It is argued that masculinity is very important in understanding the construction of the cases. The thesis explores the constructions of criminal masculinity produced by the different professionals. The police and other professional give ample demonstration in their interviews that they operate with logics of binary opposites, contrasting their own masculinity with the deviant masculinity of the offender. Truth is seen as an essentially contested concept to be approached through the lens of particular value systems and power structures. Dominant perspectives emerge on the development of procedural truth in the construction of the cases. The research also examines the use of the idea of evil to explain violent criminality, finding it being used as a catch-all term questioning the validity of criminological explanations by those who deal with violent crime professionally. Overall the thesis seeks to help the reader understand the complex process involved in constructing criminal cases from the police investigation through to the legal trial.

Peckham (2007) has argued that people with learning disabilities are at a greater risk of abuse than members of the general population however, no research has investigated paid carers' responses to allegations of sexual abuse. The current research aimed to investigate: factors affecting care staff responses in this situation, the relationship between attributions, emotions and helping responses, and test predictions derived from Weiner's (1985; 1986) cognitive-emotional model of attributions. A vignette methodology was used. Sixty four residential services support staff (32 females, 32 males) answered a questionnaire describing a scenario in which a service user alleged they had been sexually abused. The characteristics of the person making the allegation were varied across eight versions of the scenario according to gender, whether they were known to be sexually active and if they had reported being abused before. Participants were asked to describe what they thought the most likely cause (or causes) of the claimant's behaviour was, and then made judgements on 7- point rating scales as to the cause of the allegation, their own emotional response and their willingness to offer help. The data was analysed using 4-way ANOVAs and correlational techniques. Important results included: 1) the most common causal explanation given overall was that the claimant had been sexually abused and absolute levels of willingness to provide help for the service user were high across all situations; 2) all independent variables affected at least some part of attributions, emotions or helping behaviour; 3) there was evidence for gender differences in the treatment of sexual abuse allegations, with participant gender becoming a unexpected fourth variable; 4) the analysis indicated support for Weiner's (1985; 1986) model with the effects of willingness to help being mediated by emotions and optimism. Implications for learning disability practice, attribution theory and vignette methodology are discussed.

This thesis examines medical approaches to sexual offenders in England between 1919 and 1959. It explores how doctors conceptualised sexual crimes and those who committed them, and how these ideas were implemented in medical and legal settings. It uses medical and criminological texts alongside information about specific court proceedings and offenders' lives to set out two overarching arguments. Firstly, it contends that sexual crime, and the sexual offender, are useful categories for analysis. Examining the medical theories that were put forward about the 'sexual offender', broadly defined, and the ways in which such theories were used, reveals important features of medico-legal thought and practice in relation to sexuality, crime, and 'normal' or healthy behaviour. This broad category has often been overlooked in favour of research into much more specific sexual identities, acts, or offences. Secondly, this thesis argues that clinical theories in relation to sexual offenders were remarkably diverse, but that this diversity and resultant flexibility were key to their usefulness for doctors and the judiciary alike. Doctors did not hold firmly to any single aetiological model, nor claim that all sexual offenders could be cured. The legal and penal systems could deploy medical approaches to justify extremely varied decisions, individualising responses to sexual crime insofar as the legal system would allow. The ways in which medical theories were incorporated and shaped by the legal system, and the flexible nature of these theories themselves, extended the variety of possible outcomes for sexual offenders without fundamentally altering their status. These medical approaches, established over the early to mid-twentieth century in England, laid important foundations for later years. This project opens up new ways of understanding medico-legal theory and practice as they relate to a wide range of human sexual behaviour.

This thesis explores how non-governmental organisation (NGOs) and the police operate as part of an ever-growing network of actors in the governance of sex trafficking in England and Wales. Drawing upon data generated through semi-structured interviews with 24 NGO actors and 18 police officers – ranging from Case Workers and Police Constables to CEOs and Chief Constables – this thesis focuses upon how anti-trafficking policy translates into practice in a field defined by ‘hyper-politicisation’. It examines how interrelationships within the anti-trafficking policy domain are structured and maintained through service delivery; how anti-trafficking policy and practice is shaped by the interests and priorities of anti-trafficking actors; and how anti-trafficking actors construct trafficking victimhood. In so doing, the thesis responds to the increasing international political attention cast onto sex trafficking in recent years and seeks to counter the rise of research in this field which has tended towards sensationalism, mythologisation and polarised feminist debate. Addressing the dearth of research on anti-trafficking service providers, the findings from this research demonstrate that trafficking is a social issue that is enveloped in, and conditioned by, moral struggles and divergent political agendas, which manifest in the control of womyn’s bodies and state borders. It therefore offers new empirical evidence to advance understanding of how sex trafficking has been taken up, both by state and non-state actors, as a noble guise through which to pursue draconian policy and practice.

This thesis examines the relationship between violent young offending that has no clear political motive and state fragility. It does so by conducting an in-depth evaluation of crime, underdevelopment and crime control systems in Yemen, using existing theories of criminology and international development to suggest new ways of understanding and responding to violent criminal behaviour in that country and elsewhere. While one of the stated goals of this thesis is to generate new theoretical understandings of criminal violence in Yemen, its main contribution to knowledge is that it brings criminological theory into the discourse on international socio-economic underdevelopment in order to open up a new conduit for the academic analysis of fragility. In so doing, it merges criminological theory with the study of international development and state fragility, where the two academic disciplines have previously remained quite separate. The above aims are achieved through an extensive study of the Yemeni development context, based upon a combination of field research interviews conducted with prominent stakeholders in Yemen, distance research by phone and online conducted with Yemeni stakeholders, and expert consultations conducted with important analysts working either on Yemen directly or more broadly in the area of security and justice reform. The research itself, meanwhile, also provides a detailed overview of relevant theory and literature on criminology, justice reform and state fragility, while being supported by Yemeni criminal justice statistics. In light of the theoretical emphasis of this investigation, the findings of this thesis are suggestive rather than empirical. The author argues that the absence of state services, legitimate opportunities and socialising activities for young people, along with their exposure to significant levels of violence, produces extreme economic, psychological and socio-cultural stresses that lead to their increased aggression and rejection of state legitimacy, all of which combine to raise the likelihood of violent young offending in Yemen. It is argued that these trends yield a coherent analytical framework with relevant lessons for other fragile states, notwithstanding that Yemen's cultural specificities and tribal communities have produced unique influences that distinguish it from other fragile settings.

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It is recognised that women who have offended comprise a vulnerable group having commonly experienced trauma and abuse. However, the dominant risk paradigm and assessment tools used within the Criminal Justice System have excluded women offenders in the research base. Similarly, current approaches to desistance, which is concerned with the cessation of offending, have neglected the perspective of women offenders. This study explores an alternative approach, based upon women offenders perspectives, to inform upon intervention and support which encourages desistance from offending. Resilience theory provides a broad framework for the study, in which in depth interviews were conducted with a purposeful sample of 15 ethnically diverse women drawn from probation services and third sector agencies. Documentary records which included offence history and Probation assessment records were utilised to provide a rich context to the research. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to explore the women’s experiences and understandings of their offending behaviour, as well as how they found meaning in the support and interventions received from these services. Findings revealed complex histories of childhood neglect and abuse, interpersonal violence in adult relationships, including rape and mental health needs. Of particular importance was the value placed by the women on interventions and approaches that focussed on enabling them to build resilience, through relational resources and self-efficacy beliefs. Barriers to building resilience were related to adaptive behaviours, including the understanding that trust in relationships was paradoxical. Another barrier was posed through lack of self-efficacy beliefs. The study concludes that desistance from offending is underpinned by the process of building resilience for recovery in women offenders. It is recommended that building resilience to support the recovery journey is translated into policy and practice and that the way in which women offenders are assessed based on risk to the public is reconceptualised to inform this.

Hong Kong is a highly developed, neoliberal and post-British-colonial region. It has a history of being a trafficking hub for both opium and humans, which includes the enslavement of girls and women for sexual exploitation. The aim of this thesis is to use a Feminist, Bourdieusian framework to explore the local environment, the experiences of women selling sex, and the relationship between the two, in order to explain the persistence of control of women by third parties in the sale of sex in Hong Kong. The research can be described as pragmatic, utilising a predominantly qualitative, mixed-methods approach to answer the research questions, within the aforementioned framework. This approach includes the life ‘herstories’ of eight women who are legal residents of Hong Kong and involved in the sale of sex, in order to allow for deeper exploration of their feelings and experiences; expert interviews with five community workers from different NGOs to share their knowledge from the ground; participant observation from volunteering with a civil society group and living in Hong Kong to explore the local environment; qualitative content analysis of six Hong Kong newspapers; and a survey with 189 respondents on social attitudes. Findings suggest that control persists, and it does so because the political and business elite are maximising their interests, via inaction, in terms of structural challenges and symbolic violence against women. This suggests that symbolic struggle and collective action are needed to change social attitudes and press the government of the Hong Kong SAR for social and political change.

Genocide is the most devastating form of state violence. Yet, the prevalence of genocide is not reflected in our understanding of its causes: Key questions such as the relationship between governments and citizens, the effect of civil war on genocide occurrence, the incentives for the escalation of state violence, or the causes of selective violence remain largely unexplored. This dissertation aims to answer these questions and to advance our understanding of the determinants of state violence in general, and genocide in particular. Using comprehensive data on state violence, I analyse how political opportunity structures and actors char- acteristics pose incentives for governments to escalate violence. This dissertation consists of three core chapters. The first chapter of my dissertation examines the escalation of state-led violence. It focuses on the political opportunity structures and the types of dissident groups that oppose the government. Drawing on a sample of countries with records of physical repression, the study finds that state violence spirals into genocide and mass killings when the government confronts violent dissent in situations of civil war. The second chapter offers a cross-national study of the conditions under which civil war fosters genocide. It examines the characteristics of the rebel groups and their association with the civilian popula- tion. Analysing cases of civil war, it shows that governments resor~_ to genocide during periods of intense armed dispute when rebels have close ties to the civilian population. Finally, the third chapter offers the first systematic analysis of the variation in the timing and severity of genocide. Considering cases of genocide in civil war, this study finds that goveruments resort to genocide at different conflict stages in relation to the source of the dispute, the rebel groups' strength, and their civilian support base. The study also finds that genocide severity is affected by the government's perception of threat and the size of the excluded population. Overall, the three studies 011 which this thesis is based significantly improve our understanding of the determinants of state violence and its escalation. The disser- tation greatly contributes to scholarly research on political violence and suggests several promising directions for future research.

This thesis critically examines how the organ trade fits into the anti-trafficking framework, its link to organised crime and the wider political economy. The organ trade involves diverse actors and consists of various practices, including organ trafficking, transplant tourism, organ sales and organ harvesting. Nevertheless, the organ trade is predominantly defined in terms of organ trafficking and discursively framed as a law enforcement issue. Although organ trafficking is considered a major international concern, it is not representative of the phenomenon as a whole. Evidence based research, including empirical work carried out by the author, indicates that the organ trade is better characterised by organ sales and transplant tourism. The majority of individuals who are compelled to sell an organ, for various reasons, do not conform to the elements of trafficking outlined in anti-trafficking legislation, broadly defined under Art 3(a) of the United Nations (2000) Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons. This means that as a consequence of a worldwide prohibition of organ sales, organ sellers are more likely to be prosecuted for committing a criminal offence than recognised and/or assisted as trafficked victims. The core aim of this thesis is to provide a critique of the anti-trafficking framework, explicating the theoretical and practical implications of the prevailing law enforcement model, in response to the organ trade. I argue that co-opting the organ trade into the meta-narrative of human trafficking suspends a wider critique of the phenomenon, linking the emergence of a global market in organs to broader socio-economic conditions and inequalities. Further, I argue that the organ trade is not a direct consequence of a global shortage of organ supplies; rather, it is causally related to the transfer of transplant capabilities to the global South. The rhetorical positioning of the organ trade as an object of law enforcement diverts critical attention away from the transplant industry and the