Introduction

This chapter explores the price paid by the theoretical omission and/or obfuscation of men in work on crime and particularly work on violence. We focus on violence because although men dominate in most categories of offending, it is violence where masculinity is so obviously implicated and yet masculinity per se remains elusive within the vast literature of criminological treatises on violence. We write this chapter at a crucial point in history for the discipline. Recorded crime rates indicate that crime, particularly in the UK, has decreased in recent years, despite the onset of the worst economic recession in decades. Some criminologists have busied themselves considering the reasons for the ‘crime drop’, often paying homage to the impact of administrative criminology and its success in designing out criminal opportunities. Yet, they seem to have completely missed, or perhaps disavowed (Hall, 2012a), the glaringly obvious: levels of harm across the globe remain high, even if they do not show up in the statistics. For instance, if crime-measuring instruments were able to record the various harmful behaviours and (mal)practices that plunged the global economic system into recession, perhaps the ‘crime drop’ may not have been so dramatic.

With this context in mind, we take a much broader approach to harmful violence, exploring the violences of both the powerful and the powerless and acknowledging that in both instances most actors are male. We cover a lot of ground in this chapter and recognise that our coverage of some of the issues we allude to is brief. But the purpose is to be suggestive of how a moral criminology with ‘values’ (Becker, 1967) might right the wrongs of decades spent ignoring or poorly theorising men's place in crime. In doing this, the chapter delineates men's place in violence globally, critically reviews feminist work on violence and evaluates the contribution made by some masculinities research in order to argue that men must become the focus for theoretical work in order to properly address the damages caused by their offending and to change the ongoing reproduction of gendered roles and identities that sustain those levels of harm. We finish the chapter by returning to the notions of ‘morality’ and ‘values’ introduced by Becker (1963, 1967) and their potential implications for the current context in which criminology operates.