David Gadd

Criminal Careers, Desistance and Subjectivity Interpreting Men’s Narratives of Change

This article analyses the life-stories told by two men who appeared to be desisting from crime. At the time of their respective interviews, both men had reduced the frequency and intensity of their offending behaviours, although neither man had completely stopped offending. Using these men’s life-stories, the authors endorse Shadd Maruna’s argument that the study of criminal careers and desistance needs to embrace a more adequately psychosocial conception of subjectivity. However, in contrast to the cognitive approach preferred by Maruna, the authors seek to demonstrate that an interpretive approach to narrative material, sensitive to the possibility of unconscious motivations, better explains some of the contradictions evident in desisters’ life-stories, especially in relation to the heavily gendered issue of family formation. The authors draw particularly on the psychoanalytic work of Tony Jefferson to make their argument.

The role of recognition in the desistance process: A case analysis of a former far-right activist

This article explores the intersubjective dynamics that foster desistance from crime. It explains that the concepts of ‘identification’ and ‘recognition’—as defined by Jessica Benjamin—illuminate how psychic change can come about despite social continuity within offenders’ lives. The value of Benjamin’s approach is illustrated through the analysis of the case of a former far-right activist. The article shows that in order to desist from crimes that involve a symbolic ‘othering’ (e.g. hate crimes) offenders have to reclaim the psychic parts of themselves that are projected onto victims. The article concludes that when those deemed ‘other’ are able to withstand and survive hostile projections the possibilities for psychic change among desisting offenders are enhanced.

The SAGE Handbook of Criminological Research Methods

Editorial Introduction - David Gadd, Susanne Karstedt, Steven F. Messner PART ONE: CRIME AND CRIMINALS Life Histories and Autobiographies as Ethnographic Data - Neal Shover Self-Report Surveys within Longitudinal Panel Designs - Marvin D Krohn, Terence P Thornberry, Kristin A Bell, Alan J Lizotte, Matthew D Phillips In-depth Interviewing and Psychosocial Case Study Analysis - David Gadd Grounding the Analysis of Gender and Crime: Accomplishing and Interpreting Qualitative Interview Research - Jody Miller Neurocriminological Approaches - Yu Gao, Andrea L Glenn, Melissa Peskin, Anna Rudo-Hutt, Robert A Schug, Yaling Yang, Adrian Raine Gun Prevalence, Homicide Rates and Causality: A GMM Approach to Endogeneity Bias - Tomislav Kovandzic, Mark E Schaffer, Gary Kleck PART TWO: CONTEXTUALIZING CRIME IN SPACE AND TIME: NETWORKS, COMMUNITIES AND CULTURE Multi-level Modeling and Criminological Inquiry - Eric P Baumer amd Ashley N Arnio Examining the Role of the Environment in Crime Causation: Small Area Community Surveys and Space-Time Budgets - Per-Olof H Wikstroem, Kyle Treiber, Beth Hardie Social Networks and the Ecology of Crime: Using Social Network Data to Understand the Spatial Distribution of Crime - George E Tita and Adam Michael Boessen Using Census Data and Surveys to Study Labor Markets and Crime - Robert D Crutchfield and Suzanna R Ramirez Historical and Archival Research Methods - Barry Godfrey PART THREE: PERCEPTUAL DIMENSIONS OF CRIME Ethnographic Photography in Criminological Research - Cecile Van de Voorde Autoethnography - Jeff Ferrell Interviewing Victims of State Violence - Elizabeth Stanley Questioning Homicide and the Media: Analysis of Content or Content Analysis? - Moira Peelo and Keith Soothill Assessing Crime through International Victimization Surveys - Pat Mayhew and Jan Van Dijk In Search of the Fear of Crime: Using Interdisciplinary Insights to Improve the Conceptualisation and Measurement of Everyday Insecurities - Emily Gray, Jonathan Jackson and Stephen Farrall Measuring Public Attitudes to Criminal Justice - Julian Roberts, Matrina Feilzer, Mike Hough PART FOUR: CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEMS: ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS Researching Police Culture: A Longitudinal Mixed Method Approach - Janet Chan Quasi-experimental Research on Community Policing - Wesley G Skogan Order in the Court: Using Ethnomethodology to Explore Juvenile Justice Settings - Aaron Kupchik, Joseph De Angelis and Nicole L Bracy Evaluation Research and Probation: How to Distinguish High Performance from Low Performance Programmes - Karin Tusinski Miofsky and James M Byrne Conceptualising and Measuring the Quality of Prison Life - Alison Liebling, Susie Hulley and Ben Crewe Comparing Justice and Crime across Cultures - Susanne Karstedt PART FIVE: PREVENTING CRIME AND IMPROVING JUSTICE Experimental Criminology and Restorative Justice: Principles of Developing and Testing Innovations in Crime Policy - Heather Strang and Lawrence W Sherman Large-Scale Criminological Field Experiments - Manuel Eisner, Tina Malti, Denis Ribeaud Meta-Analysis as a Method of Systematic Reviews - Martin Schmucker and Friedrich Loesel Crime Concentration and Police Work - Ken Pease Assessing the costs of Fraud - Michael Levi The Other Cultural Criminology: The Role of Action Research in Justice Work and Development - Cyndi Banks Feminist Approaches to Criminological Research - Gail Mason and Julie Stubbs Research Ethics in Criminology - Mark Israel and Iain Hay

Getting the message? ‘New’ Labour and the criminalization of ‘hate’

Hate crimes, it has been said, are ‘message’ crimes to which society needs to respond using the most powerful and unambiguous means of communication at its disposal, the criminal law. Using empirical data collected in the course of research conducted by the authors on racially motivated violence and harassment in North Staffordshire, this article sets out to interpret the messages about hate crime sent to perpetrators, and people from their local communities, by the creation, in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, of a new category of racially aggravated offences. To this end two possible anti-hate crime messages and three potential audiences are identified and evaluated in the light of data generated from biographical interviews with perpetrators and focus group discussions with other local people in and around the city of Stokeon-Trent. Our conclusion is that the supposedly clear deterrent and denunciatory or declaratory messages contained in the 1998 Act are either drowned out or distorted by other signals coming from successive ‘New’ Labour governments about crime, immigration, nationality and ‘community cohesion’, and by the highly idiosyncratic and unpredictable ways in which they are mediated and interpreted by their intended recipients.

Making sense of interviewee–interviewer dynamics in narratives about violence in intimate relationships

This article examines the dynamics between the author and an interviewee called ‘Brian’. The article explores how the authors pursuit of a coherent account in a narrative interview reduced Brians willingness to ‘open up’. Brians case is used to explore the impact of the author/researchers defensiveness on the interview and the process of analysis. The article demonstrates the importance of theorizing the intersubjective dynamics that enable respondents to tell coherent stories, and, in so doing, draws especially on Hollway and Jeffersons concept of the ‘defended subject’. The article concludes by arguing that reflexivity is best achieved when researchers return to their data having relinquished some of their investment in their research projects as they were originally conceived.

Evaluating crime fears : a research note on a pilot study to improve the measurement of the ‘fear of crime’ as a performance indicator

Numerous projects aim to reduce not only crime but also the fear of crime. Reviews of the survey tools used to measure the fear of crime suggest that these tools may suffer from poor design. It is contended here that as well as suffering from poor design, these tools fail to address a number of important issues which evaluators and policy makers will be interested in: namely the prevalence, frequency and severity of fearful episodes. An alternative question structure that measures prevalence, frequency and severity of fearful episodes, and addresses design faults is discussed herein.

Young teenagers' experiences of domestic abuse

This article reports on the first findings from the Boys to Men Research Project. In total, 1143 pupils aged 13–14 years completed a questionnaire to assess their experiences of domestic abuse as victims, witnesses and perpetrators. Overall, 45% of pupils who had been in a dating relationship reported having been victimised, 25% having perpetrated it, with the only difference in rates of victimisation and perpetration between boys and girls being in relation to sexual victimisation. Of the whole sample, 34% reported having witnessed it in their own family. There was a relationship between victimisation and perpetration with the vast majority of perpetrators (92%) also reporting experiencing abuse from a boyfriend/girlfriend. There was also a relationship between experiencing abuse and help seeking from adults, with those who have been victimised less likely to say they would seek help if they were hit by a partner than those who had yet to experience any abuse. The relationship between help seeking and experiences of abuse is further complicated by gender, with girls twice as likely to seek help than boys, but with girls who have previously hit a partner among the most reticent group. The paper concludes with highlighting the implications of these findings for those undertaking preventative work in schools.

Domestic Abuse Prevention Education: Listening to the Views of Young People.

This paper reports on findings derived as part of a two-year project funded by the European Unions Daphne III scheme, involving collaboration between seven partner organisations across six European countries. The project involved an evaluation, using questionnaires and focus groups, of domestic abuse prevention education programmes delivered in schools in the UK, France and Spain. This paper presents the findings from the UK focus group discussions, conducted with young people aged 10–11 years, and 13–14 years to explore their opinions about the intervention delivered in their school. The focus groups revealed the following challenges for service providers in this area: young people can misunderstand issues related to domestic abuse, especially the role of power and control within relationships; there is a tension between educators giving young people free expression to share their opinions and challenging sexism and other prejudices; and boys can become disengaged with gender-based interventions. These issues point towards three key considerations when implementing a domestic abuse prevention education intervention: programme content (the what); the teaching methods used (the how); and whether teachers or external organisations should deliver the programme (the who).

Equal Victims or the Usual Suspects? Making Sense of Domestic Abuse Against Men

This article reports on research commissioned to address the topic of domestic abuse against men in Scotland. The research addressed three key questions: (1) Why do male victims appear much more frequently in crime survey data than in recorded crime statistics? (2) Are there significant differences in the nature and frequency of domestic abuse experienced by men and women? (3) In what kinds of relationships does domestic abuse against men occur? The article explains that the relative absence of male victims in the domestic abuse statistics gathered by the Scottish police can be accounted for in terms of gender differences in experiences of victimisation and reporting patterns. Drawing upon in-depth interview material elicited from a sample of men originally counted as ‘male victims’ in the Scottish Crime Survey, the article also argues that statistics collated on the basis of crime survey data overstate mens experiences of domestic abuse. The article concludes with a discussion of the methodological and policy implications that should be drawn from this finding.

Preliminary steps towards a more preventative approach to eliminating violence against women in Europe

This article discusses findings from a project funded by the European Commission’s DAPHNE III programme that sought to enhance the provision of relationship education and domestic abuse prevention in European schools and other educational facilities: the REaDAPt (Relationship Education and Domestic Abuse Prevention tuition) project. It summarizes what is known about effective prevention from the research literature before explaining what the REaDAPt project revealed about changing attitudes, about implementing and evaluating domestic abuse prevention programmes in educational settings, and about being responsive to young people’s perspectives in the delivery of interventions. The article concludes by highlighting the iterative nature of the research needed to help develop relationship education and domestic abuse prevention tuition on a Europe-wide scale.