Introduction to Part Three

The contributions in this part of this collection illustrate how feminist thought has pushed at the boundaries of criminological work in such a way as to offer not only more nuanced approaches to thinking about crime and criminal victimisation but also to introduce differently problematic behaviour into the orbit of the discipline. As is now well-established whilst feminist thought is made up of a range of different strands a common meeting place for the work generated by feminism is the problematic behaviour of men. This problem is addressed in different ways by different writers but that key focus ensured criminology (and later victimology) took much more seriously the observations made some time ago by Baroness Wootton (1959) and others later that if men behaved more like women the courts would have no work to do and the prisons would be empty. In their chapter Stephen Tomsen and James Messerschmidt take men and the expression of masculinity as their key focus and explore the extent to which this enables criminology to make better sense of interpersonal violence.