Exploring Thatcher’s Children’s Experiences of Crime, Victimisation and Punitive Attitudes

• In Event: Crime, Politics and Insecurity

Abstract

In this paper we will outline the research design for a recently funded longitudinal project which seeks to explore the experiences of crime, victimisation and punitive attitudes of those born in 1970 and 1958. The project uses data from two longitudinal studies, the UK’s 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the 1970 British Birth Cohort Study (BCS70). These two longitudinal studies follow all live births born in one week in both 1958 and 1970, providing an ideal vehicle for studying the impact of the social and economic changes experienced by the UK in the 1980s, when the cohorts would have been respectively in their 20-30s and teenage years. The research will focus attention on the crucial questions relating to wider social and economic policies and the immediate and distal causes of crime and of both punitive attitudes and punitive policies.

Authors

• Stephen Farrall, University of Sheffield (UK)

• Emily Gray, Sheffield University