On the evening of 31st October 2003, North London, four hours and six miles separated two homicides. A man ran over his fiancée meanwhile a woman stabbed her lover. The circumstances of these murders are different but both involve the death of intimate partners. This research examines whether there is any difference in the way men and women kill their lovers. The question is answered through three levels of analysis. Firstly an assessment of quantitative gender differences by examining 207 intimate partner homicides committed in London between 1998 and 2009. Secondly through a series of nonparametric tests on victim, suspect, relationship and offence characteristics to establish any variables are associated with or predictive of perpetrator gender. Finally results were considered in light of feminist criminology and evolutionary psychology, the preeminent theories of intimate partner homicide. The answers were not as simplistic as the question. Female offending was associated with quarrels, intoxication, self-defence, killing by stabbing and the presence of step-children. Male offending was motivated by infidelity or separation. Men exhibited more varied means of killing and were likely to kill themselves and others. A couple’s age discrepancy and level of intoxication were key elements of intimate partner homicide. What was unexpected was the non-significant influence of precursor relationship violence. The results were at odds with both feminist and evolution theory which seat female violence within on-going male abuse. This study placed female offending within an immediate situational context rather than antecedent violence. This study is unique as it is based on privileged access to original Metropolitan Police case files. Such detailed analysis providing a view of London’s Intimate Partner Homicide landscape had never conducted prior to this study. It is therefore of value to those professionals operating within the fields of domestic violence and homicide investigation as well as those who research it.

This thesis explores the pre-trial barriers to justice women potentially face upon killing their abusers. Legally, socially and politically, increased attention has been paid to domestic aouse in the UK in recent years, but less attention has been paid to women who kill their male abusers. Elsewhere, commentators have discussed women's use of self-defence in this context, pointing to pre-trial decision making as key in terms of potentially accessing this defence. Despite this, neither self-defence nor pre-trial procedures have been the focus of any work which has examined the issue of women who kill their abusers in the UK. This thesis aims to illuminate this gap in knowledge, with a focus specifically on Scotland because of its unique legal system and requirements of self-defence in particular. This research draws on thirty qualitative interviews with criminal lawyers with experience advising women who have killed their abusive partners. It has specifically examined the difficulty women encounter in having their actions deemed justifiable through a successful application of self-defence. This has been done from the perspective of lawyers' willingness to go to trial on this basis (rather than its success at trial level, due to the high number of cases of this nature which are resolved by a guilty plea being tendered to a reduced charge of culpable homicide). What will be argued is that barriers to justice for women who kill their abusers are evident at both structural and individual levels. At a structural level, the criminal justice system itself incentivises trial avoidance, whilst criminal law understandings of self-defence are based on male conceptions of (public) violence. At the level of individuals; decision making for many lawyers is driven by an understanding of domestic abuse which is based on stereotypes and an inability to conceptualise women's actions in this context as legitimate - meaning that ultimately the social and legal context of the offence may remain hidden. The result is that legal practice serves to narrowly conceptualise female perpetrated homicides. This has very significant implications for women's engagement with pre~trial criminal justice processes, their access to self-defence and more widely, for how domestic abuse is understood by and translated to wider society.

This thesis examined influences on the decision making process of police officers attending the scenes of sudden and unexpected death in England and Wales. It was initiated following concerns raised by Home Office Registered Forensic Pathologists (HORFPs) in some parts of England and Wales that their services were not being appropriately utilised to assist in the decision as to whether a death was ‘suspicious’ and possibly involving a third party, or a non-suspicious community death. Failure to properly assess the scene of the death can deny the investigation of processes to forensically determine a cause of death, and to lose forensic trace evidence from the body. There were three parts to the research; i) an examination of homicide statistics and forensic post mortem data which showed inconsistency in decision making between some police forces; ii) a case study of 32 real deaths where HORFPs had taken over the conduct of a post mortem procedure where the police had made a decision that the case was not suspicious but where the non-forensic pathologists felt that the case was a suspicious one; and iii) focus groups interviews with key individuals involved in the operational decision making process at the scene of sudden and unexpected death which revealed a lack of training and standardisation in dealing with sudden and unexpected deaths. Overall it was found that homicide cases may be missed due to poor decision making and that this phenomenon is not a new one. The mind-set of police officers dealing with these cases may influence the decision to treat cases as non-suspicious, and thus the services of a HORFP is not utilised to give an expert medical opinion. A major factor appeared to be the vulnerability of the deceased, as well as budgetary pressures. Recommendations are made to address the quality of death investigations, including a national policy, training of front line officers and supervisors and a standard operating procedure. The wrong decision – a ‘fatal call’ – can lead to a failed investigation and someone ‘getting away with murder’.

No description available.

The research is both a study of the social organization of an under-researched community in London, the Alevi Kurds, and of the relatively high incidence of suicide amongst its young men. Drawing on Durkheim's theoretical postulate that suicide is a product of a lack of integration and regulation (anomie) it looks at how the institutions that came to integrate and regulate the first-generation in Turkey and London ceased to function for the second generation.

This thesis places men at the centre of an examination of child murder in England between 1860 and 1900. Drawing on over 1400 newspaper articles from The Times and a further 3500 from the provincial press, this study investigates the various representations of men who killed their own, or other people's, children. It examines the varied responses to their crimes by the legal system and argues that such a study can reveal much about the cultural constructions and representations of gender, fatherhood, and crime. After examining the historiography of infanticide and child murder and identifying the main changes in the law affecting the care and treatment of children in the late nineteenth century, this thesis moves on to scrutinise the sources available for this previously neglected area of gender and crime history . In addition, it also addresses some of the issues surrounding the recent, and growing, availability of primary sources via the internet. Chapter Three continues with the main theme of newspapers and provides a detailed analysis of the dissemination of paternal child murder narratives in the second half of the nineteenth century. Chapter Four uses a microhistory to reconstruct and explore a case of paternal child murder and the related issues of male insanity. The subsequent chapter examines the success and failure of insanity as a defence in cases of paternal child murder.

This thesis considers the use of latent class analysis to examine both static and dynamic typologies of homicide. A baseline analysis develops a model based typology of homicide convictions in England and Wales that occurred between 1978 and 1998. This is compared to the homicide typologies in two other jurisdictions. Firstly, homicide typologies in England and Wales were compared to those found for the Netherlands, a country with a similar homicide rate, both countries have a homicide rate of about 1.5 homicides per 100 thousand population.

The focus of this thesis is substance-related homicide in England and Wales. The research examines the extent and nature of homicides involving intoxication (alcohol and/or drugs) as well as those involving a broader drug link (motivated by the economic demands of a costly drug habit or drug market activity). Homicide is an under-researched area of criminology in the UK and this research contributes to a developing body of knowledge. Recent research has drawn attention to the association between intoxication and homicide; highlighting that significant proportions of offenders and victims have histories of substance misuse and/or are intoxicated at the time of the event. However, no research in the UK has specifically addressed the nature of such homicides or explored the concept of drug market-related homicide.

This thesis examines the experiences of relatives of those accused or convicted of serious offences such as murder, manslaughter, rape and sex offences. Relatives' accounts focus on the discovery of the offence as traumatic and life-changing, comparable in many ways to bereavement. Accounts of life before this point polarised and were either problem-identifying or normalising. Participants passed through several stages after discovering the offence as they began to feel they were coping and as the criminal justice process progressed. Responsibilities within the family were renegotiated and new responsibilities emerged which particularly revolved around the offender and his or her needs. Female relatives, and primarily mothers and wives, tended to take on these new tasks. Relatives experience secondary stigma because of their kin relationship to a serious offender, but this is more than just a stigma by association. Relatives are themselves subject to a 'web of shame' on the basis of contamination and blame. The thesis explores the accounts that relatives construct about the offence and about their own actions. When accounting for the offence, relatives were found to use 'actor adjustments' and 'act adjustments' of various types. Many participants were searching around for reasons and trying to understand why the offence had happened; formulating these accounts was part of that process. The thesis considers why relatives use self-help and what it offers. It is argued that self-help provides a 'collective narrative' for understanding experience which relatives use as a resource along with other sources to understand their circumstances. Most participants in the research were female, as are most participants in self-help services for relatives of offenders, and reasons for this are considered. The thesis is based upon in-depth interviews with 32 relatives of serious offenders and participant observation of a self-help organisation for families of serious offenders over several years.

No description available.