Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds explores the small-scale communities of late antiquity – households, monasteries, and schools – where power was a question of personal relationships. When fathers, husbands, teachers, abbots, and slave-owners asserted their own will, they saw themselves as maintaining the social order, and expected law and government to reinforce their rule. Naturally, the members of these communities had their own ideas, and teaching them to 'obey their betters' was not always a straightforward business. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from across the late Roman Mediterranean, from law codes and inscriptions to monastic rules and hagiography, the book considers the sometimes conflicting identities of women, slaves, and children, and documents how they found opportunities for agency and recognition within a system built on the unremitting assertion of the rights of the powerful.

With recent "tough on crime" policies of the 1990s, the negative impact on women and children reverberates with social unawareness. Using a feminist perspective, Crime Control and Women explores the adverse effects of the U.S. crackdown on crime. Edited by Susan L. Miller, this book exposes the unintended consequences of today crime control policies: how cuts from social services to pay for crime control can disproportionately affect women; how women incur increased responsibility for family while men serve longer sentences; and how government often victimizes women as third parties when women are associated with criminals. Using policy-oriented contributions, the book discusses empirically driven and theoretically driven implications of today crime control policies. Miller provides a substantive introductory overview and a concluding summary, creating a cohesive text that emphasizes a reduction in crime through commitments to prevention, education, and treatment. A timely book, Crime Control and Women is vital for criminal justice academics and practitioners, mental health professionals, and policy makers. It future implications also make it an essential component for courses related to criminology, criminal justice, gender studies, sociology, public policy, and social work.

This book addresses the issue of domestic violence against women, drawing on research findings, policy developments and current debates to contextualise its alarming prevalence and to propose informed ways of addressing, through training and practice, the needs of both victims and perpetrators in current social and related care provision.

Annotation Draws on data from a study of police behaviour in the field, interviews with criminal justice professionals and social service providers, and participant observations of female offender programs. Offering critical analysis of the theoretical assumptions, this book unveils a reality that looks different from what statistics on domestic violence imply.

Drawing on cases, Stark identifies the problems with our current approach to domestic violence, outlines the components of coercive control, and then uses this alternate framework to analyse the cases of battered women charged with criminal offenses directed at their abusers.