Reconsidering Crime in Urban Working-Class Homes and Family Life, 1918-1979

This project provides the first history of 'everyday' minor illegal activities committed by women and children. Both the subject matter and its methodologies promotes a rethinking of how and why we address the history of family life and crime, both within academia and beyond. It aims to understand the nature and scale of home-based and family-orientated non-violent offences and explores whether they become increasingly designated as criminal through welfare reforms and policies of intervention, 1918-1979. In asking how far probation and social workers applied class-based models of domesticity through casework; by exploring the unforeseen consequences of state welfare; and analysing the varied application of new legalisation by the police and local and national government, the project asks who was criminalised, when and why. By uncovering the ways in which methods to alleviate poverty increased surveillance of family life after 1918, the project considers that interventions may have inadvertently criminalised vulnerable women and children. It aims to influence current welfare policies and improve charitable support for families in need by providing new historical knowledge around the entry point of women and children into the criminal justice system and identifying the influence of outdated legislation on current legal categories of welfare fraud. This focus is crucial amid current policies of welfare conditionality and concerns about the Covid-19 pandemic on child poverty.
As current government policies of 'levelling up' acknowledge, local disparities persisted throughout the twentieth century and justifies a regional historical analysis of homes and family life. This project undertakes a comparative assessment of the inner urban areas of Belfast, Liverpool, and Manchester, with Bolton, Birkenhead, Salford, and Sheffield as secondary locations, as sites associated with poverty, unemployment, and crime, 1918-1979. It examines: 1. The use of the home and engagement of children for the handling of stolen goods, gambling, benefit fraud and financial crimes; 2. The impact of welfare legislation and new jurisdiction on homes and family life, including on monetarising, regulating or criminalising provisions that had pre-existed within these communities, such as unofficial adoption, abortion, and the care of those with disabilities; and 3. how state intervention could be rebuffed or manipulated by families. This comprehensive approach explores the idea that the policies of housing and welfare and new jurisdiction may have created new categories of offending and had unanticipated consequences for the entry of women and children into the criminal justice system.
This bottom-up approach seeks to provide an alternative understanding of working-class lives that privileges the voices and experiences of those who remain unheard in existing histories of crime and urban life, such as older women and children, to challenge how we think about homes and offending. Alongside government reports and policies, the project offers the first assessment of post-1918 regional court archives, analysed as forms of personal testimony to explore how the home and domestic roles were used for minor, everyday offences and justified or presented as supporting familial domesticity. It embraces the contradictions and silences of memoirs and autobiographies to address the consequences of illegal behaviours, including on childhood, police scrutiny, community pressures, and risks of violence and retribution, but also questions the presumption that the presence of minor financial or property crimes was necessarily harmful to families. Shifting the analytical focus away from public spaces, the project centres working-class homes to craft a history of quotidian cultures of deviance that challenges received views of welfarism and working-class domesticity, placing contested concepts of family life at the heart of interactions between the state and its citizens.