The Murder in Britain Study was designed to examine in detail different types of murder. Using a subset of case files from this study, men who murder other men (MM;n = 424) are compared with men who murder an intimate partner (IP;n = 106) to reflect on the relative conventionality of each group. In terms of many of the characteristics of childhood and adulthood, the IP murder group differs from theMMgroup and appears to be more “ordinary” or “conventional.” However, the IP group is less conventional in that they are more likely to have intimate relationships that had broken down, to have used violence against a previous woman partner as well as against the victim they killed, and to “ specialize” in violence against women.

Changing Violent Men is based on the evaluation of British criminal justice responses and treatment programs for men who use violence against a woman partner

The gendered nature of safety has been explored empirically and theoretically as awareness has grown of the pervasive challenges to women's safety. Notions of ‘safe space’ are frequently invoked in wider feminist environments (particularly, recently, in relation to debates about trans people's access to women's spaces), but are relatively neglected in academia. Indeed, despite a body of scholarship which looks at questions of gender, safety and space, relatively little attention has been paid to exploring the meaning of ‘safety’ for women and, particularly, the meaning and experience of spaces they consider to be ‘safe.’ Drawing on focus group data with 30 women who attended a two-day, women-only feminist gathering in the UK, this paper analyses experiences of what they describe as ‘safe space’ to explore the significance and meaning of ‘safety’ in their lives. Using their accounts, we distinguish between safe from and safe to, demonstrating that once women are safe from harassment, abuse and misogyny, they feel safe to be cognitively, intellectually and emotionally expressive. We argue that this sense of being ‘safe to’ denotes fundamental aspects of civic engagement, personhood and freedom.

Abuse directed at visible and audible women demonstrates that cyberspace, once heralded as a new, democratic, public sphere, suffers similar gender inequalities as the offline world. This paper reports findings from a national UK study about experiences of online abuse among women who debate feminist politics. It argues that online abuse is most usefully conceived as a form of abuse or violence against women and girls, rather than as a form of communication. It examines the experiences of those receiving online abuse, thereby making a valuable contribution to existing research which tends to focus on analysis of the communications themselves.

Based on interviews with 122 men who had used violence against their partner, and employing Goffman's (1971) concept of `remedial work', this paper interrogates violent men's perceptions, constructions and understandings of domestic violence and their responses to its use. Accounts of women partners are also examined. `Remedial work' involves the perpetrator of an act of untoward behaviour in various forms of `damage limitation' intended to change the meaning of the offensive act into one that is deemed acceptable. Goffman's three related devices of remedial work - `accounts, apologies, and requests' - are used to explore men's narratives of violent events, their definitions of the event, rationales and perceptions of consequences. Revealed are the exculpatory and expiatory discourses which dominate men's narratives and which expose the purposeful yet paradoxical nature of their responses to violence, directed at mitigating and obfuscating culpability while at the same time seeking forgiveness and absolution. We suggest that through these devices men seek to impose their own definitions upon their woman partner and thereby neutralise or eradicate her experience of abuse and control the ways in which she interprets and responds to it. These findings strongly support Goffman's theoretical conception. In addition, they highlight the need for further investigation of how men's and women's accounts, definitions and responses to violence are interactionally connected through men's attempts to define the violence in exculpatory and expiatory terms and in women's resistance to such definitions and their implications.

In the last two decades there have been a number of social, medical and legal initiatives in the UK and elsewhere to provide assistance to women who suffer violence from their partner. The most recent innovations focus on responding to the men who perpetrate this violence. In this article we present the initial results of the first British study of programmes for violent men. The three-year study used a longitudinal method to compare the effects of two court mandated programmes with other, more orthodox, forms of criminal justice intervention (fines, admonishment, traditional probation, prison). Here we describe the men's programmes, locate the current study in the context of existing evaluations of similar programmes operating in North America, outline the methods employed, present the results of the post-hoc matching used to assess the probable effects of selection bias and using subsequent prosecutions and the accounts of women, compare the impact of different criminal justice interventions. The results indicate that twelve months after the criminal justice intervention a significant proportion of the Programme men had not subsequently been violent to their partner. This was in contrast to men sanctioned in other ways (the Other CJ group) who were much less likely to have changed their violent behaviour.