The legal regulation of male violence in Scotland, 1850-1914

Abstract

This thesis explores the legal regulation and social responses to a spectrum of male violent offending in Scotland between 1850 and 1914. This research uses hitherto underutilised archival legal sources from a range of courts in Scotland, exploring the varying ways in which non-domestic, domestic and sexual violence was regulated before the law. The operation of the law is supplemented with a sustained examination of how criminal law was theorised in legal treatises from the late eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries, thereby revealing the ways in which the law differed in practice from its theoretical foundations. The extensive use of press reports provides evidence of varying and sometimes contradictory attitudes towards male violence in this period. This study provides three overarching contentions; that gendered power relations and constructions of gender roles affected the judicial and cultural reactions to male violence, that there were distinct differences between the law in theory and its implementation in practice, and that contrasts existed between judicial attitudes and public responses to male violence in this period. This research focuses on Scotland, yet possesses broader appeal, contributing a new perspective to debates about gender and violence and about changes in attitudes and responses to violence in Britain in the late nineteenth-century. By adopting a novel and broad-ranging methodological approach that roots an examination of responses to male violence within a sustained examination of the operation of Scots Law in practice, this thesis makes an original and significant contribution to existing studies of gender, violence, class and crime