Penal Boundaries: Banishment and the Expansion of Punishment

We use this article to argue for greater recognition of legally imposed spatial exclusion—banishment—as a (re)emerging and consequential social control practice. Although the new social control techniques that entail banishment are buttressed by a blend of civil, administrative, and criminal law, they are best understood as punitive in nature. This argument is supported by two empirical findings. First, interviews with the banished indicate that spatial exclusion often has significant negative consequences akin to those identified by Sykes (1958 ) in his seminal account of the pains of imprisonment. Second, court data show that the growing use of civil and administrative banishment has increased the number of criminal cases involving allegations of noncompliance. These findings suggest that analysts of punishment might usefully broaden their focus to include phenomena that combine civil, criminal, and legal authority, and are not defined as punishment by their advocates.     

HMG, AIOC and the Anglo-Iranian oil crisis: In defence of Anglo-Iranian

At the interface of big business and government, with whom does influence and responsibility lie? Rarely is the answer clear-cut, yet accounts of the Anglo-Iranian oil crisis of 1948-54 have often roundly blamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) for British mishandling of it. This article seeks to redress the balance. Whilst no apologia for AIOC policy, it contends that HMG should shoulder much more responsibility than hitherto allowed. From clandestine partnership through to sacrificial pawn, the government used the company as an instrument of foreign policy as it sought to marry the protection of AIOC interests in Iran with wider concerns for combating communism and promoting the Anglo-American 'special relationship'.     

Women’s perspectives on the value of a father’s initiative in shifting gendered practices within families

This paper explores the qualitative perspectives of women about a community embedded fathers’ initiative in Northern England. Projects to improve the well-being of men and their children are less common within the landscape of parent and child support, with mothers more often being the target recipients. Asking women about their perceptions of an initiative for fathers then offers original insights from women who are positioned as ‘related outsiders’, in that they were ‘outside’ the project but ‘inside’ the family and community. Findings suggest that women are able to see the positive impact of such a project, identifying that it offers a shared space for men and children, time for mothers without their children and can help with shifting roles and attitudes around childcare and emotional labour in the home. The initiative was also seen by the women as offering men more healthy means of coping, including men moving away from traditional hegemonic practices, which in turn shifted some women’s long held gendered beliefs about men as fathers. This research then offers a relational gendered backstory to a father’s initiative, demonstrating how such initiatives can potentially ‘undo’ gender and the positive implications this could have for families.     

The Intergenerational Transmission of Violent Offending

The current study examines the intergenerational transmission and concentration of violent offending using conviction data of 3,440 persons from three consecutive generations from the Dutch Transfive study. Violent offending is more concentrated within nuclear families than non-violent offending, and the intergenerational transmission of violent offending is stronger than the intergenerational transmission of non-violent offending. Due to the low prevalence of violent offending by women, only transmission from father to son is studied. Paternal violent offending before the birth of the son does not increase the son’s risk to become violent, while paternal violent offending during the son’s childhood and adolescence does. These results suggest that exposure to paternal violence plays an important role in the intergenerational transmission of violent offending.