The gendering of violent crime: towards a human rights approach

This article reveals the diverse threats violent masculinities pose to human rights, especially females, in view of the idea that 'all things are equal now' between the genders. In the UK the Human Rights Act (1998) has sustained existing safeguards for the mainly male perpetrators of violence, but the needs of some female victims of domestic violence remain unmet. Contemporaneously, mainly female crime victims are vulnerable to violations of their basic human rights. The analysis in this paper identifies and interrogates the negative consequences of the principles of modernisation and six drivers of crime control underpinning government approaches since the late 1990s to dealing with violence against women in the context of general approaches to victimisation. Alongside issues relating to the receding influence of the state our argument is that a human rightsinformed approach reveals not only the deficiencies and contradictions of government policy affecting change, but provides a vehicle for embedding a more comprehensive way of safeguarding human rights in practice.