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Behaving Badly: Social Panic and Moral Outrage-Victorian and Modern Parallels, edited by Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson; pp. xxii + 247. AJdershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2003, £47.50, $94.95.
The fourteen chapters of this book address a range of issues of concern to the Victorians and still, or again, causes of concern today. These involve "the essentially fluid boundary between the criminal and the anti-social" (1). This volume foregrounds the complex interactions between popular and media understandings of the point at which offensive behaviour becomes (or ought to be designated) crime, and the official response through legislation or policing practice. The approach is strongly interdisciplinary: contributors include academics from a range of areas, and several are also lawyers or solicitors, or have been involved in other aspects of law and policing.
Initial chapters look at general issues of legal systems, perceptions of the law, and the role of policing. David Bentley, a former Queen's Counsel, judge, and legal historian, contrasts Victorian and modern trial systems. He argues that in spite of the lack of representation for poor prisoners, and of an effective appeal structure, confidence in the Victorian legal system was high, with a tacit assumption that there were never miscarriages of justice. Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson's chapter on "Media and Legal Representations of Bad Behaviour" argues that Victorian media fostered trust in their political and legal institutions, whereas in the present day the media uses "personal 'exposures'... to undermine the individual professional" (33). They also find, however, significant similarities in "attention-grabbing sensationalism" and the media's ability to "make choate the incoherent fears existing more widely in society" (41 ). Kiron Reid, a lecturer in law, examines the enormous recent increase of criminal legislation and state intervention in the UK, independent of changes in the ruling party. The Victorians passed relatively few acts relating to criminal justice, but, he argues, this was less about liberalism than the presence of extensive powers enabling the police to...