Introduction

Our interest in women and anti-social behaviour stems from a long-standing research partnership. As sociolegal scholars, we have sought to combine our focus on legal instruments and on the processes of governance. Towards the end of the 1990s we published a report detailing social landlords’ responses to the growing problem of anti-social behaviour (ASB) (Hunter et al, 1999). As part of this study we analysed data from a sample of 67 nuisance case files drawn from 10 case study landlords, which we subsequently combined with scrutiny of reported Court of Appeal ASB cases. The findings provided a stark indication of the way in which ASB was emerging as a gendered issue; over half the sample of landlord cases involved women heads of households, the majority of whom were single parents; the Court of Appeal cases showed a similar bias. Critically, in both sets of data, in two out of three cases, the complaints focused not on the woman's behaviour but rather on her inability to control the behaviour of teenage (mostly male) children and/or the violent and disruptive behaviour of male partners (Hunter and Nixon, 2001). Since this work was published, the issue of ASB has continued to attract widespread media and political interest, but there has been a marked silence on the disproportionate use of technologies to control behaviour of women-headed households. It is our intention in this chapter to focus attention once again on the compelling evidence that suggests that ASB is indeed a gendered issue.

Policy discourses on ASB reflect notions of self-regulation, active citizenship and communitarian-informed rights and responsibilities. It is also apparent that within such discourses – as exemplified by the government's Respect campaign – the family is located as an important site of control, with a focus on individual deficiencies associated with dysfunctional families and bad parenting (see for example Youth Taskforce, 2008, ch 3). While gender plays a pivotal role and is implicit in such discourses, scant attention has been paid by either policy makers or academic commentators to the impact of disciplining interventions on women. In trying to make visible the hidden within these ASB discourses, we draw on two key sources of data collected by us over the period 2004–07.