Motherhood Respectability And Baby Farming In Victorian And Edwardian London

Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London explores a largely obscured marketplace of motherhood that provided ways for women to manage the stigma of illegitimacy and their respectable identities within Victorian and Edwardian society. It focuses on the extent of women’s ‘dirty work’, when maternal problem management was fundamental to the general maintenance of respectability and, by extension, to Empire and Civilisation. Despite its intrigue, history has struggled to understand and represent an uncomfortable but significant artefact of Western modernising society: ‘baby-farming’. During a period when ideologies of respectability and civilisation arguably mattered most, the ‘right’ kind of parenthood – especially motherhood – became paramount. As the ‘wrong’ offspring could jeopardise a woman’s chances of being respectable, a wholesale, informal, and somewhat clandestine marketplace emerged that catered to various maternal difficulties. Within this marketplace, a pregnancy or newborn child who may have compromised a woman’s respectability could be ‘disposed’ of through different means, for a fee. From the Victorian period to the present, the commercialised maternal practices associated with baby-farming have become firmly established within collective consciousness as being synonymous with child murder, female pathology, and ‘infanticide for hire’. This book provides a revised, far more complex, and nuanced narrative history which reveals all that was associated with baby-farming – including all possible outcomes – to be entirely natural, rational, and even necessary products of their time; an understandable outcome of the period’s ‘civilising offensive’. Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, history, and gender studies.

"Motherhood, Respectability & Baby-Farming in Victorian & Edwardian London explores the largely obscured marketplace of motherhood that provided ways for women to manage the stigma of illegitimacy and their respectable identities within Victorian and Edwardian society. It focuses on the extent of women's 'dirty work', when maternal problem management was fundamental to the general maintenance of respectability and, by extension, to Empire and Civilisation. Despite its intrigue, history has struggled to understand and represent an uncomfortable but significant artifact of Western modernising society: 'baby-farming'. During a period when ideologies of respectability and civilisation arguably mattered most, the 'right' kind of parenthood - especially motherhood - became paramount. As the 'wrong' offspring could jeopardise a woman's chances of being respectable, a wholesale, informal, and somewhat clandestine marketplace emerged that catered to various maternal difficulties. Within this marketplace, a pregnancy or new-born child who may have compromised a woman's respectability could be 'disposed' of through different means, for a fee. From the Victorian period to the present, the commercialised maternal practices associated with baby-farming have become firmly established within collective consciousness as being synonymous with child murder, female pathology, and 'infanticide for hire'. This book provides a revised, far more complex, and nuanced narrative history which reveals all that was associated with baby-farming - including all possible outcomes - to be entirely natural, rational, and even necessary products of their time; an understandable outcome of the period's 'civilising offensive'. Motherhood, Respectability & Baby-Farming in Victorian & Edwardian London will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, history, and gender studies"--

The name Mrs Beeton has endured for well over a century, synonymous with all things reassuringly culinary, while her contemporary Agnes Bertha Marshall remains somewhat of an enigma. Both Isabella Beeton and Agnes Bertha Marshall lived within a short distance of each other in Pinner, worked in London, wrote about, and shared a passion for food, all just a couple of decades apart. While Isabella Beeton compiled one successful book of collected recipes, Agnes built a cookery empire, including a training school, the development of innovative kitchen equipment, a range of cooking ingredients, an employment agency and a successful weekly journal, as well as writing three incredibly popular recipe books. Mrs Beeton and Mrs Marshall: A Tale Of Two Victorian Cooks intrudes on the private lives of both these women, whose careers eclipsed two very different halves of the Victorian era. While there are similarities between the two, their narratives explore class and background, highlight the social and economic contrasts of the nineteenth century, the ascension of the cookery industry in general and the burgeoning power of suffragism.

Who are the perpetrators of modern slavery? Why do they exploit others? What might be done to stop exploitation recurring? These are the questions answered in this book. Reporting on the first primary study of modern slavery offenders, the book depicts the findings of in-depth interviews with people accused of, and convicted for, committing modern slavery offences. The different forms that modern slavery takes are explained chapter by chapter: organized crime, people smuggling, labour exploitation, domestic servitude, sham marriage, the trafficking of adults for sexual exploitation and child sex trafficking. Using case studies to illuminate the perspectives of those deemed perpetrators, we show that few modern slavery offenders conform to stereotypes of people traffickers. Through an interpretive analysis of offenders’ life stories, we reveal the points in the past and present where interventions could have prevented victims from becoming trapped in exploitation. We show that while national governments and international bodies often appear resolute in their efforts to tackle modern slavery and people trafficking, they have also obscured their own roles in compounding the plights of those at the sharp ends of globalization. In racializing the actions of sex traffickers, grooming gangs, and organized criminals, the modern slavery agenda has mystified the roles market dynamics, the absence of workers’ rights, and immigration controls play in generating vulnerabilities to exploitation. This book will be of interest to a wide range of students, policymakers and practitioners concerned with modern slavery, human trafficking, border control and immigration, globalization and inequality, as well as the more disciplinefocused criminological audiences concerned with why people commit crimes, what should be done about them and the, often paradoxical, consequences of social control across borders. Given the book’s strong focus on narrative, psychosocial and social network methodologies, it will also appeal to audiences across the social sciences concerned with applying these novel approaches to difficult to reach populations.

This book considers how the concept of violence has been interpreted, used, defined, and explored by social researchers and thinkers. It does not provide a final answer to the question of what violence is or how it should be explained (or prevented), and instead offers a variety of useful ways of thinking about and theorising the phenomenon, mainly from a sociological standpoint. It outlines four ways of understanding violence: • Violence as situation: the tension that exists between category-driven and situational explanations. • Violence as speciality: the study of particularly violent actors, and how they may be understood by reference to childhood histories, technologies, institutions, culture, class, and gender. • Violence as politics: political violence and violent politics. • Violence as storytelling: representations of violence from a narrative perspective. Concluding with reflections on possible convergences between the four approaches and new directions for research, this book offers a unique and experimental approach to discussing and reconstructing the concept of violence. It is essential reading for criminologists, sociologists, and philosophers alike.

Crime, Criminal Justice and Religion: A Critical Appraisal seeks to bridge a gap in the examination of crime and criminal justice by taking both a historical and a contemporary lens to explore the influence of religion. Offering unique perspectives that consider the impact on modern-day policy and practice, the book scrutinises a range of issues such as abortion, hate crime and desistance as well as reflecting upon the influence religion can have on criminal justice professions. The book acts to renew the importance of, and recognise, the influence and impact religion has in terms of how we view and ultimately address crime and deliver criminal justice. One of the first books to cover the area of crime, criminal justice and religion, the book is split into three parts, with part 1 - 'Contextualising Crime, Criminal Justice and Religion' - providing an introduction to crime, criminal justice and religion, and reflections on the role religion has had, and continues to have, in how crime is understood and how we respond to it. Part 2 - 'Appraisal of Institutions and Professional Practice' - considers the issue of religion through institutions and professions of criminal justice, such as the police and legal profession, while part 3 - 'Appraisal of Contemporary Issues' - explores a range of crime and criminal justice issues in on which religion has had an impact, such as the death penalty and terrorism. Crime, Criminal Justice and Religion will be of primary interest to academics, researchers and students in criminology, law, sociology, psychology, social policy and related Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences disciplines. It will also be of interest to theologians, both as scholars and practitioners. The book is a body of work that will appeal at an international level and will also be a key resource for a range of practitioners across the globe working on issues concerning crime and criminal justice.

The historical context of colonisation situates the analysis in Children, Care and Crime of the involvement of children with care experience in the criminal justice system in an Australian jurisdiction (New South Wales), focusing on residential care, policing, the provision of legal services and interactions in the Children’s Court. While the majority of children in care do not have contact with the criminal justice system, this book explores why those with care experience, and Indigenous children, are over-represented in this system. Drawing on findings from an innovative, mixed-method study – court observations, file reviews and qualitative interviews – the book investigates historical and contemporary processes of colonisation and criminalisation. The book outlines the impact of trauma and responses to trauma, including inter-generational trauma caused by policies of colonisation and criminalisation. It then follows a child’s journey through the continuum of care to the criminal justice system, examining data at each stage including the residential care environment, interactions with police, the provision of legal services and experiences at the Children’s Court. Drawing together an analysis of the gendered and racialised treatment of women and girls with care experience in the criminal justice system, the book particularly focuses on legacies of forced removal and apprenticeship which targeted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls. Through analysing what practices from England and Wales might offer the NSW context, our findings are enriched by further reflection on how decriminalisation pathways might be imagined. While there have been many policy initiatives developed to address criminalisation, in all parts of the study little evidence was found of implementation and impact. To conclude, the book examines the way that ‘hope tropes’ are regularly deployed in child protection and criminal justice to dangle the prospect of reform, and even to produce pockets of success, only to be whittled away by well-worn pathways to routine criminalisation. The conclusion also considers what a transformative agenda would look like and how monitoring and accountability mechanisms are key to new ways of operating. Finally, the book explores strengths-based approaches and how they might take shape in the child protection and criminal justice systems. Children, Care and Crime is aimed at researchers, lawyers and criminal justice practitioners, police, Judges and Magistrates, policy-makers and those working in child protection, the criminal justice system or delivering services to children or adults with care experience. The research is multidisciplinary and therefore will be of broad appeal to the criminology, law, psychology, sociology and social work disciplines. The book is most suitable for undergraduate courses focusing on youth justice and policing, and postgraduates researching in this field.

Often examined separately, this timely volume provides a detailed exploration of the nexus between family violence and sexual offending. Recognising family and sexual violence as highly interrelated issues, it uncovers the challenges and paradoxes of addressing them as separate versus coinciding problems. What is lost and gained when we treat family violence and sexual offending according to the same framework? Light is shed on the nature and dynamics of offending; various terminology (e.g., domestic abuse, intimate partner violence, grooming, coercive control); political and policy contexts; myths and misconceptions; policing and investigative responses; children as overlooked victim-survivors; and the punishment and treatment of offenders. Drawing on international literature, case studies, and stakeholder interviews, the book encourages critical consideration to inform future policy, practise, and research, ultimately prompting stronger approaches to reflect victim-survivors’ realities and needs. The book is relevant to the work of professionals in the social service and criminal justice sectors (e.g., police, policymakers, social workers, advocates, and counsellors), and will be of key interest to researchers and students in diverse academic fields such as criminology, forensic psychology, social work, and socio-legal studies.