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

该项目首次提供了妇女和儿童“日常”轻微非法活动的历史。这本书的主题和方法论都促使我们在学术界内外重新思考如何以及为什么要研究家庭生活和犯罪的历史。它旨在了解以家庭为基础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，通过福利改革和干预政策，这些非暴力犯罪是否越来越多地被定为犯罪。在询问缓刑和社会工作者在多大程度上通过个案工作应用基于阶级的家庭生活模式；通过探索国家福利带来的不可预见的后果；该项目分析了警察、地方和国家政府对新合法化的不同应用，询问了哪些人、何时以及为什么被定为犯罪。通过揭示1918年以后减轻贫困的方法增加了对家庭生活的监视，该项目认为干预措施可能无意中将弱势妇女和儿童定为犯罪。它的目的是通过提供关于妇女和儿童进入刑事司法系统的切入点的新的历史知识，并确定过时的立法对当前福利欺诈法律类别的影响，影响当前的福利政策，改善对有需要的家庭的慈善支持。在当前的福利条件政策和对Covid-19大流行对儿童贫困的担忧中，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，地方差异贯穿了整个20世纪，这证明了对房屋和家庭生活进行区域性历史分析是合理的。该项目对贝尔法斯特、利物浦和曼彻斯特的内城区域进行了比较评估，博尔顿、伯肯黑德、索尔福德和谢菲尔德作为次要地点，作为1918-1979年与贫困、失业和犯罪相关的地点。它检查：1；利用儿童的住所和受雇处理赃物、赌博、诈骗利益和金融罪行；2. 福利立法和新的管辖权对家庭和家庭生活的影响，包括对这些社区中先前存在的规定货币化、管制或定罪的影响，例如非正式收养、堕胎和照顾残疾人；和3。国家干预是如何被家庭拒绝或操纵的。这种全面的方法探讨了住房和福利政策以及新的司法管辖权可能创造了新的犯罪类别，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对工人阶级生活的另一种理解，赋予那些在现有的犯罪和城市生活历史中未被听到的人（如老年妇女和儿童）的声音和经历以特权，以挑战我们对家庭和犯罪的看法。除了政府报告和政策，该项目还提供了1918年后地区法院档案的首次评估，作为个人证词的形式进行分析，以探索家庭和家庭角色如何用于轻微的日常犯罪，并证明或呈现为支持家庭生活。它接受回忆录和自传的矛盾和沉默，以解决非法行为的后果，包括童年，警察审查，社区压力，暴力和报复的风险，但也质疑轻微的经济或财产犯罪的存在必然对家庭有害的假设。该项目将分析的焦点从公共空间转移，以工人阶级家庭为中心，创造了一种日常文化的越轨历史，挑战了人们对福利主义和工人阶级家庭生活的看法，将有争议的家庭生活概念置于国家与公民之间互动的核心。

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around the entry point of women and children into the criminal justice system and identifying the influence of outdated legislation on current legal categories of welfare fraud.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.