Preliminary Programme

Recent years have seen an unprecedented level of historic rape and child abuse cases coming to public, press and political notice in the United Kingdom, implicating senior members of Parliament, as well as previously popular family entertainment figures. Cases where the perpetrators do not have a public profile only tend to come to attention when the details are particularly extreme, such as in Rochdale in 2012 where nine men were convicted of rape, trafficking and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child. The victims were as young as twelve or thirteen. Nonetheless, such crimes are clearly more widespread. In Scotland, for example, there are over 200 children on the child protection register today as a result of sexual abuse. These are only those documented cases which have come to the attention of the authorities; and for valid reasons of privacy and child protection, gain no press coverage.

This paper will argue that, while the current media coverage of high-profile child sex abuse is unprecedented, the sexual abuse and exploitation of children, unfortunately, has a much longer history and was often overlooked. Focusing on cases within Scotland, drawn from turn of the 20th century High Court records in Edinburgh, and parish records from Glasgow, we will show that child sexual abuse tended to fall into three main categories: rape outside the household, familial rape (incest) and child sexual exploitation. We will argue that the language used to describe both the victims and the crime itself, in the context of accepted gender and family power relationships, often led to exoneration of the perpetrator(s) or a minimisation of the crime, and therefore the sentence. Additionally, we suggest that the age, sex and conduct of the victim also shaped responses to these crimes, both in light of later 19th century changes to the age of consent, and as a result of ideas about female culpability which blurred the lines between choice and abuse. Unpicking legal and social discourses around child sex abuse in the past help with understanding the long, and often still on-going, silences around these crimes. (Show less)

This paper interrogates the relationship between burglary and the design and symbolism of the domestic interior, its contents, and furnishings. It discusses the tension between threatening accounts of burglars’ intrusion into the home and sexualised portrayals of ‘attractive’ burglars’ presence in women’s bedrooms. I argue that this latter connotation was emphasised by the heightened publicity accorded burglaries of women’s jewellery, possessions which held their own emotional significance as tokens of love and familial bonds. The paper uses the trade manuals of lock and safe companies such as Chubb’s and John Tanner’s to show how their products sought to balance a need for burglar-proof security technologies with consumer demand for decorative interior design. Scholarship on the history of domestic space has thus far treated the domains of decoration and security separately, highlighting the architectural boundaries created by locks and bolts but disregarding their effect on the visual appearance of homes — and thereby ignoring the full breadth of commercial imperatives at work in the design of security technologies (Cohen, 2006; Vickery, 2009; Hamlett, 2010). This paper therefore addresses how safety united with the ideal of artistic domesticity, fashioning an interplay between boundaries and furnishings that maintained the facade of carefree residential harmony. The second section moves to analyse the integration of burglar alarms into the home, and the way in which the manufacturers of these devices sought to use light and sound to collapse the spatial and temporal distance between citizen and police in the event of a burglary; fundamentally altering the way London was policed to recondition crime prevention as depending on another commercial transaction. (Show less)

This paper uses case files for murder trials at the Old Bailey in the 1950s and 60s to examine the ways in which police, judicial system, and press ‘read’ and represented home spaces that were also scenes of crime. I argue that contemporary imaginings of the ‘ideal home’ influenced recording and interpretation of homes in this period as never before, frequently creating bias against victims and defendants alike who failed to meet or maintain a domestic ideal that was framed as British, private, and increasingly family-centred.

Though the science of the crime scene, of forensics and ‘trace’ analysis were developing apace in this period, pushing investigations into the laboratory, these techniques were slow to overtake more established readings of home spaces in cases of domestic murder. Rather I argue that the ways that people lived in their homes and organised them remained key to police in determining a narrative that explained who killed, why, and how criminal or culpable they were. I explore the ways in which police, court and press interpreted and explained the scenes of domestic murders, highlighting evidence of strategies for negotiating comfort, privacy, security and safety, in places inhabited by people for whom the ‘ideal’ of the suburban semi was less accessible. (Show less)

During the early twentieth century, women convicted of prostitution offences in Scotland were increasingly placed on probation rather than given fines and short prison sentences. This meant that they were placed under the supervision of a probation officer for a maximum of three years and were required to reside either in their own home or in a reform home run by a voluntary organisation. This paper will examine the ways in the police, magistrates, probation officers and voluntary organisations in Scotland worked together to reform women in the domestic sphere and in accordance with middle class domestic sphere ideologies. Whilst there have been studies on use of voluntary organisations to reform ‘fallen women’ in the domestic sphere during the nineteenth century (Mahood, 1990; Bartley, 2000) there has been little research on how this approach was incorporated into the Scottish probation service during the twentieth century.
Using probation reports and the records of voluntary organisations that ran the reform homes, the paper will examine the various ways in which this penal-welfare approach influenced the experiences of women involved in prostitution. What impact did probation have on their lives and how successful was this domestic approach in stopping women returning to prostitution? On the one hand probation meant that some women were spared a prison sentence and gained useful domestic skills to enable them to find ‘respectable’ domestic employment. Some were even helped to emigrate and start new lives overseas. On the other hand, these women had their freedom restricted in different ways, and for periods that were potentially far longer than was allowed under legislation relating to prostitution offences. Moreover, whilst the police and probation officers had considerable powers to restrict and regulate probationers’ activities, many women found ways to evade these methods of surveillance and control. The paper will therefore explore these often contradictory outcomes of probation and consider the long-term implications this domestic approach had on the policing of prostitution and on women’s experiences of the criminal justice system. (Show less)

This paper examines uses of domestic space for criminal activities by women and its influence on family life, c.1920 to 1950. Focussing on the use of the home for illegal activities such as the handling of stolen goods and for illegal gambling in urban communities in Liverpool, Manchester and London, the paper draws on press reports and contemporary social surveys and crime reports to show that women exploited the relative privacy of the home and the ideology around the maternal role to commit crimes and, in doing so, ensured children were instructed or trained in strategies or tactics for criminal activities. Building on scholarship by Barry Godfrey, David Cox, and Steven Farrall on criminal family networks, Heather Shore on criminal communities, and on class and poverty in twentieth-century Britain by Selina Todd, the paper draws attention to the importance of domestic space as a site of female crime and, at the same time, argues the home was crucial in allowing mothers and other female relatives to teach children how to commit crimes, which might be crucial strategies of survival in times of poverty and hardship. It argues that, when caught, these women, seen as corruptors of children and for manipulating their maternal responsibilities and influences, received harsher treatment by magistrates. By implication, this paper highlights the importance of women as mothers, in particular, not just as agents of crime, but in shaping patterns and strategies of offending within criminal communities more generally, suggests that participating in criminal activities might act as a bonding experience between mother and child, and challenges the idealisation of the home as a refuge or haven from criminality. (Show less)