This book is concerned with critically analysing the importance of the status of knowledge in establishing truth about female defendants convicted of murder during the 20th Century. While the abolition of the death penalty in the UK has insured that the impact of this knowledge is no longer one of life and death, modern cases such as that of Sally Clark, whose guilty verdict was eventually overturned, nevertheless demonstrate the devastating impact that those with the power to define the 'truth' still have on the lives of individuals who are unable to construct a dominant truth of their own...

Since the 1960s, the field of victimology has developed into a variegated discipline with its own theoretical and methodological traditions. In the early 1990s two texts were published--Towards a Critical Victimology (Fattah, 1992) and Critical Victimology (Mawby and Walklate, 1994)--that concretized critical victimology as a paradigm within victimology. Since then, the field has remained conceptually stale and with few a few exceptions there has not been a considerable lacuna of works from a critical perspective. Reconceptualizing Critical Victimology: Interventions and Possibilities...