Christina Pantazis

• Professor (Full) at University of Bristol

We are delighted with the addition of Against Youth Violence to the Studies in Social Harm series. Billingham and Irwin-Rogers provide a piercing social harm analysis that offers fresh insights into a pressing and much debated issue. In doing so, the authors successfully: dissect the true scale and nature of youth violence in the UK, revealing its...

This chapter makes the case for reasserting the importance of gender to poverty and social exclusion.We argue that gender matters to understanding poverty, given the continued relevance of gender to involvement in paid and unpaid work, and caring responsibilities, across the lifecourse. However, academics and policy makers need to reconfigure gende...

Introduction In this chapter we make the case for reasserting the importance of gender to poverty and social exclusion. Within mainstream policy and political debates in the UK today, gendered poverty is barely on the agenda. In the face of ongoing concerns about how to reduce childhood poverty, a focus on the role of employment, and measures based...

Introduction In recent years interest has grown in the concept of social harm as a form of social enquiry that can provide accurate and systematic analyses of injury in late capitalist societies (see Hillyard et al, 2004; Pemberton, 2015). A key concern of this approach has been to contextualise harm and to consider the forms of injury that have th...

The largest UK research study on poverty and social exclusion ever conducted reveals startling levels of deprivation. 18m people are unable to afford adequate housing; 14m can’t afford essential household goods; and nearly half the population have some form of financial insecurity. Defining poverty as those whose lack of resources forces them to li...

This article introduces this themed issue which challenges government policies and discourses using evidence from the UK 2012 Poverty and Social Exclusion Study. Policies and discourses prioritising the role of individual deficiencies and highlighting the structural problems of the welfare state in poverty causation are nothing new. However, they r...

There is increasing concern that poverty has reached an unacceptable level in Hong Kong. This article presents findings from the most current and comprehensive study of poverty and social exclusion. It reveals that the Hong Kong public accepts that a minimum standard of living should incorporate not only basic needs but also opportunities for parti...

There is increasing concern that poverty has reached an unacceptable level in Hong Kong. This article presents findings from the most current and comprehensive study of poverty and social exclusion. It reveals that the Hong Kong public accepts that a minimum standard of living should incorporate not only basic needs but also opportunities for parti...

Drawing on nationally representative surveys, this paper describes the contemporary relationship between gender and poverty in Britain and changes between 1999 and 2012. Poverty rates between men and women have converged: women today are only marginally poorer than men. Our analysis reveals that female lone parents' poverty rates remain exceptional...

There has been growing research interest into poverty and social exclusion in Hong Kong over the past 30 years. However, the development of surveys in this field continues to be primarily ‘top-down’ or ‘expert-led’. ‘Bottom-up’ or ‘lay’ perspectives, utilising the views of ordinary members of the public, are rarely incorporated. This article discus...

Poverty and inequality appear to be intractable features of rich industrialised nations. It is a great paradox that despite rising prosperity in most advanced industrialised countries over the last two or three decades, poverty and inequality have remained stubbornly high and have even increased in the majority of rich countries (OECD, 2008, 2011)....

From the turn of the new century, the UK witnessed an unprecedented advancement in the state's security apparatus. These developments and their human rights implications have been extensively documented by the socio-legal and wider academic community. However, less well-understood has been the forms of resistance which have placed fetters on the op...

Establishing what constitutes 'need' has been a long-standing tradition in empirical investigations of poverty. In their pioneering Poor Britain study, Joanna Mack and Stewart Lansley (1985) developed the 'consensual' or 'socially perceived deprivation' approach. This sought the views of ordinary people (as opposed to academics or professional expe...

In 2009, in an article for this journal, we argued that UK legal and political developments, following the events of September 2001, had designated Muslims as the ‘enemy within’ and served to construct Muslims as the principal suspect community (Pantazis and Pemberton 2009). This work sought to utilize and extend Hillyard's original (1993) thesis,...

The debate about the relationship between security and liberty has intensified in liberal democracies since September 2001. In this article, we argue that corrosive legislative developments in UK counter-terrorism have been made possible by the emergence of a centre-right political consensus that discursively 'trades' the freedoms of the 'minority'...

The ‘war on terror’ has emerged as the principal conflict of our time, where ‘Islamic fanaticism’ is identified as the greatest threat to Western liberal democracies. Within the United Kingdom, and beyond, this political discourse has designated Muslims as the new ‘enemy within’—justifying the introduction of counter-terrorist legislation and facil...

Utilising a political economy perspective in examining the UK's counter-terrorist strategy since September 2001, we argue that there are observable economic and political interests influencing the development and implementation of policy. Specifically, there are significant electoral gains to be made and also lucrative contracts to be won in the ne...

This is not an argument about whether we respect civil liberties or not; but whose take priority. It is not about choosing hard line policies over an individual's human rights. It's about which human rights prevail. In making that decision, there is a balance to be struck. I am saying it is time to rebalance the decision in favour of the decent, la...

The authors explain how the international framework of human rights can be better used to help reduce child poverty and improve child survival rates.

Over the last 30 or so years the problem of violence against women and how states should respond to it, in its myriad of forms, has become increasingly prevalent in academic and policy debates at both the national and international level. An active international women's movement, spanning Europe, the United States and many parts of the Southern hem...

Social scientists discuss the theory and practice used in the 1999 Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey, and interpret its findings. Among their topics are the concept and measurement of poverty and social exclusion, debt and financial exclusion, mental health, children, gender, and pensioners.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and address important gaps in criminology regarding the extent and nature of female criminality. A neglected area of academic interest is investigated, namely, offences relating to television licence evasion. The focus is on the growth, over the 1980s and 1990s, in the disproportionate number of women enteri...

This article considers the ways in which social housing has in recent years become inextricably linked with the process of crime control. Drawing on case study research into the rehousing of sex offenders, the authors provide evidence illustrating why and how social housing management has become increasingly drawn into the fold of crime control. Th...

This article is based on a study which employs the notion of vulnerability to explore perceptions of safety among people living in poverty. It is suggested that 'fear of crime' among poor people should not be seen in isolation from other insecurities which they may experience as a result of local, national, and international processes. Analysis bas...

This article is based on a study which employs the notion of vulnerability to explore perceptions of safety among people living in poverty. It is suggested that'fear of crime' among poor people should not be seen in isolation from other insecurities which they may experience as a result of local, national, and international processes.1 Analysis bas...

While there is a longitudinal literature that considers the impact of poor socio-economic circumstances upon health, the more specific impact of poor housing upon health is much less frequently studied longitudinally. This paper draws on the National Child Development Study to examine the impact upon health of poor housing through the life course....

This chapter discusses New Labour's policies on crime, in particular the New Deal for Communities, its initiative to reduce crime and disorder on Britain's most deprived estates. It offers an alternative approach to the government's proposals by suggesting that inequalities in crime and fear of crime should be seen in the context of other inequalit...

This report presents the initial findings from the most comprehensive survey of poverty and social exclusion ever undertaken in Britain. The study was undertaken by researchers at four universities and the fieldwork was conducted during 1999 by the Office for National Statistics. The main part of the fieldwork, conducted during September/October 19...

It is commonly suggested that social housing is allocated on the basis of ‘need’. The authors, however, suggest that the concept of risk provides a much better explanation of the complex interplay of interests involved in the allocation process. In particular, risk explains developing allocation methods in low-demand areas. The thesis is exemplifie...

Breadline Britain in the 1990s included a chapter which focused specifically on the relationship between gender and poverty and explored the extent to which the data collected had helped to measure the different experience of poverty and deprivation for men and women (Payne and Pantazis, 1997). We were able to look at current and life- long experie...

As well as seeking to measure the extent and nature of poverty, the 1990 Breadline Britain survey attempted to establish the extent to which the damage to the lives of people living in poverty is compounded by social problems such as crime and fear of crime (Pantazis and Gordon, 1997). The view held by Mack and Lansley (1985) is that poor people su...