Carol Smart

Women, crime and criminology : a feminist critique

Introduction 1. The nature of female criminality 2. Classical studies of female criminality 3. Contemporary studies of female criminality 4. Prostitution, rape and sexual politics 5. The treatment of female offenders 6. Women, crime and mental illness 7. Redressing the balance: Women and criminology Appendix I Appendix II Notes Bibliography Index

A History of Ambivalence and Conflict in the Discursive Construction of the ‘Child Victim’ of Sexual Abuse

This article was presented as one of the plenary addresses at the Keele Conference on Gender, Sexuality and Law in June 1998. Speakers were asked to focus on how their own work had developed and changed over time. In my address and in this article these issues are essentially absent because I cannot avoid the conclusion that, in my case at least, the substance of my research is of more interest than reflections upon my intellectual biography. However, this article is, I think, a good example of what I regard as an important strand of my work as a feminist socio-legal theorist and researcher. My work over the last 20 years has moved back and forth between the theoretical (viz. Feminism and the Power of Law [1989]), the empirical (Family Fragments? [1999]) and the historical (Regulating Womanhood [1992]). Sometimes it has even managed to combine all three elements (The Ties That Bind [1982]). There have been moments when I felt that theoretical work was the most important, because of the limits of contemporary analysis or because I felt that my historical or empirical work had given rise to ways of thinking which called for expression in a transferable medium - and theory is always more widely read than empirical or historical work. But at other times I have found the focus on theory to be rather sterile and unrewarding and at such times I have found that empirical work poses new challenges and forces me to think in new ways. My current work on contemporary changes to childhood, for example, is certainly making me reconsider how we should theorise gender in family relationships. Empirical work, in my experience, always changes how one understands the social world. At other times, particularly when the rigours of fieldwork are too demanding, I return to the library and the archives. While fieldwork is exciting and challenging, I find that I am most intellectually contented when I am among original documents. This article emerges from such a period. Historical work challenges our modern complacencies and arrogance, and brings us back in touch with the prolonged difficulties of bringing about social and legal change. It also locates us, as researchers and as sometime agents of change, in an important tradition of endeavour and struggle. The issue of how law deals with sexuality, and indeed the extent to which it is part of the historical and cultural construction of sexual behaviour, has been of interest and concern to me throughout my academic career. I remain convinced that law, understood in its widest meaning, is still one of the most important sites of engagement and counter-discourse.

Equal shares: Rights for fathers or recognition for children?

The fathers’ rights movement in England has recently been given a huge boost by the involvement of Bob Geldof who has become their influential mouthpiece in the media and elsewhere. The movement has also diversified and adopted more high profile tactics more akin to those used in Australia and New Zealand. These tactics have challenged family law to adopt a principle of pure equality between mothers and fathers and demands that, on divorce or separation, children should be shared equally. In this paper it is argued that this demand ignores entirely the experiences of children who have lived an ‘equal shares’ arrangement for many years and that it reduces children to passive objects who can have no voice in a system designed only to create equality between adults. It is argued that rather than pushing the principles of family law back towards simplistic notions of equality, what is needed is a policy based on recognition rather than rights.

Wishful Thinking and Harmful Tinkering? Sociological Reflections on Family Policy

In popular and political debate there is currently a theme which dominates discussion about the family and this is the theme of decline and destabilisation caused by the rise of individualism and lack of moral fibre. There is a wishful thinking intrinsic to these debates in which it is hoped that the family can be returned to an idealised state, unaffected by other social changes. Recent sociological work on the family interprets changes to family life rather differently and therefore offers an important counter-discourse. Although there are certain limitations to the new theoretical work on the family provided by Giddens and Beck, it is argued here that their work provides a broad understanding of change which is not reducible to individual motivations and moral decline. These perspectives are particularly important at a time when family law is engineering policies to change the very nature of post-divorce family life. Because these changes are based on a narrow understanding of change, it is suggested that they amount to harmful tinkerings which misconstrue the wider context within which families are being transformed.

Families, Secrets and Memories

In this article I argue that the telling of family secrets is tied into the workings of family memories and that the stories that people tell cannot be regarded as simple factual accounts. Rather they are amongst the kinds of stories that are part of the constitution of ‘the family’. Secrets, it might be assumed, are buried and forgotten but it is equally likely in families that secrets can be kept alive by innuendo, palpable silences, and rumour. I argue that it is important to understand the sociological significance of family secrets, not because they reveal a simple ‘truth’ about family life, but because these secrets are a route into understanding the complex relationship between power, the personal, the cultural and the social. This entanglement of secrets, memories and family practices is explored through written accounts of family secrets found in the Mass Observation Project. The study of family secrets throws additional light on the everyday workings of families and the ways in which family stories are managed.

'It's Made a Huge Difference': Recognition, Rights and the Personal Significance of Civil Partnership

In this paper we map briefly some of the arguments around the meaning and significance of the introduction of Civil Partnership in England and Wales, and in this way show how contested these meanings are with some groups profoundly against this legal reform and others supporting it, but for a mixture of reasons. We then turn to our empirical data based on interviews with same-sex couples to explore the extent to which these arguments and issues are part of the everyday decision making processes of same sex couples who have decided to register their partnerships or to undergo a commitment ceremony of some kind. In doing this, we were interested in how people make their own meanings (if they do) and whether they actually frame important decisions in their lives around the ideas that are part of the current political debates. We are interested in whether the public debates (such as legal equality) are featured in the accounts of our interviewees but we are also concerned to reveal whether other issues are important to same sex couples when they decide to have their relationship publicly recognised in some way. We found for example that while equality and legal rights were important, love, commitment and respect from wider family featured just as strongly in peoples accounts.

The Legal and Moral Ordering of Child Custody

theoretical perspective and to clarify certain concepts which have come into use in the field of feminist philosophy but which may be less familar elsewhere. My interest in law is in terms of law as a discourse which brings into practice or operation the feminine legal subject. The specific feminine legal subject I am concerned with here is the mother who, in legal texts, takes shape in various

Relative Strangers: Family life, genes and donor conception

Introduction 1. Proper Families? Cultural Expectations and Donor Conception 2. Uncharted Territories: Donor Conception in Personal Life 3. Ripples Through the Family 4. Keeping it Close: Sensitivities and Secrecy 5. Opening Up: Negotiating Disclosure 6. Donors: Strangers, Boundaries and Tantalising Knowledge 7. (Not) One of Us: Genes and Belonging in Family Life 8. Relative Strangers and the Paradoxes of Genetic Kinship

Shifting horizons Reflections on qualitative methods

This article addresses the challenges of developing methodologies which build on the insights of early feminist research and methods, but which also incorporate some of the new innovations in sociological, qualitative research. Feminist research has emphasized the need to capture the everyday lives of women (and others) but this is not so easy once it is realized how ‘messy’ everyday life may be and that we may also not have tools adequate to the art of listening and the task of ‘story telling’. In particular there is a need to incorporate a wide range of sensibilities into the creation of feminist/sociological accounts of everyday lives. These include accounting for emotions, memories, intersubjective meanings, and other intangibles. Finally, the article argues that debates over methodologies should not stop with questions of collecting and analysing data, but must also address the problems of how to write the lives of people differently.

Difficult friendships and ontological insecurity

In this paper we explore some of the negative aspects of friendship. In so doing we do not seek to join the debate about whether or not friendships are more or less important than other relationships but rather to explore precisely how significant friendships can be. Based on written accounts submitted to the British Mass Observation Project, we analyse how friendship, when it goes wrong, can challenge ones sense of self and even produce ontological insecurity. Friendship, it is argued, is tied into the process of self-identification and so staying true to friends, even when the relationships becomes uneven or tiresome, can be a sign of ethical standing. Meeting ‘old’ friends can also become very challenging, especially if one does not wish to be reminded of the self one once was. The paper contributes to the growing interest in relationships beyond kin.