Reconsidering Crime in Urban Working-Class Homes and Family Life, 1918-1979

该项目提供了妇女和儿童进行的“日常”轻微非法活动的第一个历史。这一主题及其方法都促使我们重新思考我们如何以及为什么要在学术界和学术界以外的地方处理家庭生活和犯罪的历史。它旨在了解基于家庭和以家庭为导向的非暴力犯罪的性质和规模，并探讨1918-1979年期间通过福利改革和干预政策是否越来越多地将它们定为犯罪行为。在询问缓刑和社会工作者通过个案工作在多大程度上应用了基于阶级的家庭生活模式；通过探索国家福利的不可预见的后果；以及分析警察以及地方和国家政府对新合法化的各种应用时，该项目询问了谁被定为刑事犯罪，何时以及为什么。通过揭示1918年后减轻贫困的方法如何加强对家庭生活的监控，该项目认为，干预措施可能无意中将脆弱的妇女和儿童定为犯罪。它旨在通过提供有关妇女和儿童进入刑事司法系统的切入点的新的历史知识，并确定过时立法对现行福利欺诈法律类别的影响，来影响当前的福利政策，并改善对有需要的家庭的慈善支持。在当前的福利附加条件政策以及对新冠肺炎大流行病对儿童贫困的担忧之际，这一重点至关重要。正如当前政府的“升级”政策所承认的那样，地方差距在整个20世纪持续存在，这证明了对住房和家庭生活的地区历史分析是合理的。该项目对贝尔法斯特、利物浦和曼彻斯特的市中心进行了比较评估，将博尔顿、比肯黑德、索尔福德和谢菲尔德作为次要地点，作为1918-1979年与贫困、失业和犯罪有关的地点。它审查了：1.利用家庭和儿童参与处理赃物、赌博、福利欺诈和金融犯罪；2.福利立法和新司法对家庭和家庭生活的影响，包括对这些社区中先前存在的条款的货币化、监管或刑事化，如非官方收养、堕胎和照顾残疾人；以及3.国家干预如何被家庭拒绝或操纵。这一综合办法探讨了这样一种观点，即住房和福利政策以及新的司法管辖权可能造成了新的犯罪类别，并对妇女和儿童进入刑事司法系统产生了意想不到的后果。这种自下而上的方法试图提供一种对工人阶级生活的另类理解，赋予那些在现有犯罪和城市生活历史中仍然默默无闻的人的声音和经历，比如老年妇女和儿童，挑战我们对家庭和犯罪的看法。除政府报告和政策外，该项目还对1918年以后的地区法院档案进行了首次评估，这些档案作为个人证词的形式进行了分析，以探讨家庭和家庭角色如何被用于轻微的日常犯罪，以及作为支持家庭家庭生活的正当理由或提供支持。它包含了回忆录和自传的矛盾和沉默，以解决非法行为的后果，包括关于童年、警察审查、社区压力以及暴力和报复的风险，但也质疑存在轻微金融或财产犯罪必然对家庭有害的推定。该项目将分析的重点从公共空间转移到工人阶级住宅，以打造一部平凡的越轨文化的历史，挑战人们对福利主义和工人阶级家庭生活的普遍看法，将有争议的家庭生活概念置于国家与公民互动的核心。

This project provides the first history of 'everyday' minor illegal activities committed by women and children. Both the subject matter and its methodologies promotes a rethinking of how and why we address the history of family life and crime, both within academia and beyond. It aims to understand the nature and scale of home-based and family-orientated non-violent offences and explores whether they become increasingly designated as criminal through welfare reforms and policies of intervention, 1918-1979. In asking how far probation and social workers applied class-based models of domesticity through casework; by exploring the unforeseen consequences of state welfare; and analysing the varied application of new legalisation by the police and local and national government, the project asks who was criminalised, when and why. By uncovering the ways in which methods to alleviate poverty increased surveillance of family life after 1918, the project considers that interventions may have inadvertently criminalised vulnerable women and children. It aims to influence current welfare policies and improve charitable support for families in need by providing new historical knowledge around the entry point of women and children into the criminal justice system and identifying the influence of outdated legislation on current legal categories of welfare fraud. This focus is crucial amid current policies of welfare conditionality and concerns about the Covid-19 pandemic on child poverty. As current government policies of 'levelling up' acknowledge, local disparities persisted throughout the twentieth century and justifies a regional historical analysis of homes and family life. This project undertakes a comparative assessment of the inner urban areas of Belfast, Liverpool, and Manchester, with Bolton, Birkenhead, Salford, and Sheffield as secondary locations, as sites associated with poverty, unemployment, and crime, 1918-1979. It examines: 1. The use of the home and engagement of children for the handling of stolen goods, gambling, benefit fraud and financial crimes; 2. The impact of welfare legislation and new jurisdiction on homes and family life, including on monetarising, regulating or criminalising provisions that had pre-existed within these communities, such as unofficial adoption, abortion, and the care of those with disabilities; and 3. how state intervention could be rebuffed or manipulated by families. This comprehensive approach explores the idea that the policies of housing and welfare and new jurisdiction may have created new categories of offending and had unanticipated consequences for the entry of women and children into the criminal justice system. This bottom-up approach seeks to provide an alternative understanding of working-class lives that privileges the voices and experiences of those who remain unheard in existing histories of crime and urban life, such as older women and children, to challenge how we think about homes and offending. Alongside government reports and policies, the project offers the first assessment of post-1918 regional court archives, analysed as forms of personal testimony to explore how the home and domestic roles were used for minor, everyday offences and justified or presented as supporting familial domesticity. It embraces the contradictions and silences of memoirs and autobiographies to address the consequences of illegal behaviours, including on childhood, police scrutiny, community pressures, and risks of violence and retribution, but also questions the presumption that the presence of minor financial or property crimes was necessarily harmful to families. Shifting the analytical focus away from public spaces, the project centres working-class homes to craft a history of quotidian cultures of deviance that challenges received views of welfarism and working-class domesticity, placing contested concepts of family life at the heart of interactions between the state and its citizens.