This article explores the gender dynamics of ‘causing or allowing a child to die’, contrary to the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004, section 5. This offence was intended to allow for prosecution where a child had been killed and it was uncertain who had killed him/her, but also to allow for prosecution of non-violent defendants who failed to protect him/her. More women than men have been charged and convicted of this offence signifying a reversal of usual patterns of prosecution and conviction. This analysis interrogates how section 5 criminalises women who have experienced domestic abuse. Drawing on a case observation, reported cases and media reports of cases, I suggest this offence derives from and perpetuates patriarchal constructs of motherhood. Grounded in a feminist approach building on women’s concrete experiences of law, I conclude that section 5 should be amended so that it is only used where it cannot be ascertained which defendant actively harmed a child.

Singh, SFCriminalising vulnerability: Protecting 'vulnerable' children and punishing 'wicked' mothers http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/6298/ Article LJMU has developed LJMU Research Online for users to access the research output of the University more effectively. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LJMU Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain.The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of the record. Please see the repository URL above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. AbstractThis article aims to uncover how, in attempting to ameliorate the vulnerability of children, the offence of 'causing or allowing the death of the child' criminalises abused mothers. It explores how, in the courtroom, tropes of female criminality and constructs of the 'bad' mother are mobilised in ways that are both gendered and 'classed'. The effect is to silence female defendants, deprive their actions of context, and deny them agency. This argument has implications for assessing the moral and legal culpability of abused women who fail to protect their children, because it shifts the focus onto how the abuser has exploited and exacerbated the vulnerability of both mother and child. This approach also challenges law's preoccupation with scrutinising (and punishing) women who do not adhere to a glorified, middle class ideal of motherhood. More broadly, by focusing on the context of a woman's alleged 'failure', there opens a space within legal discourse to refute the characterisation of female criminality as being either 'mad' or 'bad', and of women who engage in criminal behaviour as being either 'virgins' or 'whores'. Finally, in focusing on vulnerability as a universal and unavoidable part of the human experience, gendered assumptions of autonomy and the self/other dichotomy are challenged. Keywords'causing or allowing the death of a child', 'failure to protect', mothers, domestic abuse, vulnerability, agency

about 20 minutes to fill out and produced a 'class classification'). As a social scientist, I was struck by the ways the authors painstakingly take the survey apart and provide the epistemological and ontological thinking behind its clever and simple design. I cannot recall a similar sociological study that has grown from an internationally publicized survey-the largest survey of social class ever conducted in the United Kingdom. Readers will be fascinated by the attention to detail given in the take-up of the survey and the distribution and disparities found at the local levels. In and of itself, the take-up of the survey reflected the marked geographical divisions in why some people are interested in class and others are not. As Savage notes, 'it is the more affluent who seem to be more interested in the topic of class, even though they might also be sceptical of the survey results' (p. 11). And on the same page '. .. Of the 161,000 respondents, not a single cleaner or worker in elementary (basic) services or plastics processing answered'. The book offers a superb methodology and analysis of how the GCBS questions were calibrated. For students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, the book will provide a rich and relevant insight into how to produce rigorous data from survey research and how to marry together online digital engagement with more conventional modes of data collection. I refer here to the inclusion into the study of one of the UK's leading researchers of the precariat, Lisa McKenzie, who lent her ethnographic skills to interrogate why the precariat had not engaged with the survey. The methodological richness of this book is certainly a key strength. The first key finding is that in the United Kingdom today there is a clearly defined wealth elite at the top and the precariat at the bottom, alongside huge numbers of people located in five middle-class structures that are fluid and mobile in their orientation. The second, perhaps more significant, finding is that Britain is facing new mountains of inequality fuelled by a 'housing aristocracy', regional, national and intra-city divides and the elite educational and professional institutions that are affiliated to political parties (and no longer to occupational classes). The 'cultural class analysis' fundamental to the framing of these findings reveals extremely interesting things about how classifying processes themselves are necessarily morally loaded and inherently hierarchical and proliferate a politics of stigmatization. This is somewhat ironic, given the GBCS is itself a survey that seeks to classify! But this misses the point of this book, which is to place under a political microscope the ways in which we discourse on class and how we positon 'our own class'. Sadly, it is this politics of classification that has led to the precariat becoming invisible in modern Britain today.

Feminist legal scholars have recognized for quite some time that women who kill provide an important space for the deconstruction of representations of gender. Moreover, the ensuing socio-legal response often provides valuable insight into wider social and cultural tensions. Both Lizzie Seal and Emma Cunliffe contribute significantly to the existing literature in this area, providing valuable insight as to the hegemonic power of law in perpetuating and maintaining representations of gender.Lizzie Seal's Women, Murder and Femininity: Gender Representation of Women Who Kill deconstructs typologies that are commonly found in discourse surrounding women who kill. Seal focuses on women who have committed 'unusual' murders, murders that occur outside of the context of heterosexual relationships or motherhood, as she suggests that these are both more disruptive and unsympathetic, and therefore wanting in feminist engagement. Following a very comprehensive overview of the literature surrounding women who kill, this concise text is then divided into two parts. Throughout Part I five typologies are developed, namely: the masculine woman; the damaged personality; the respectable woman; the witch; and the muse or mastermind dichotomy. Firmly grounded in sociology, Seal appears mindful to not only discuss each typology in terms of its implication for the construction of appropriate femininity, but also considers the impact of heterosexual norms, familial ideology, socioeconomic status and age. Furthermore these tropes are not left as abstract theories but are fully developed and illustrated by applying them to high-profile cases from England and other jurisdictions. It is suggested that transgressive women such as Myra Hindley and Rose West pose a 434Social & Legal Studies 21 (3)