This theory explains the homicidal behavior of women in a variety of settings. Structural, social, and cultural conditions of modern societies generate strain for all women, which produces negative affect. Women tend to internalize negative affect as guilt and hurt rather than externalize it as anger directed at a target. This results in a situation analogous to overcontrolled personality, and results in low overall rates of deviance punctuated by occasional instances of extreme violence. The conditions found in long‐term abusive relationships and pre‐ or post‐partum environments are more likely to produce this result, but the theory is not limited to explaining female homicide in these settings.

Criminology has largely ignored the study of crimes against humanity even though the acts involved-genocide, murder, rape, torture, the appropriation or destruction of property and the displacement and enslavement of populations-are criminal under national and international law and more serious than most crimes commonly studied by criminologists. We examine why criminology has neglected these crimes, argue that criminological theorizing will benefit by attending to this substantive area and put forward a theory of crimes against humanity derived from and expanding on existing criminological theory both to offer a basis for new theoretical and empirical work and to illustrate how criminological theories might be modified to provide more powerful accounts of crime. The article draws on a case example of genocidal massmurder: Jedwabne, Poland, July 1941.The literature in criminology has largely ignored war crimes and crimes against humanity. Hagan and Greer (2002) provide an interesting historical note about early work by Sheldon Glueck and Austin Turk. More recently Hagan et al. (2005) and Hagan and Rymond-Richmond (2008, 2009) have demonstrated the power of criminological research to describe and characterize acts of genocide. In addition, scholarship addressing white collar crime and organizational Theoretical Criminology Downloaded from deviance has sometimes directed attention to the criminality of governments including accounts of torture and massacres (Ermann and Lundman, 2002). Critical criminology and conflict theorists, as well as proponents of interdisciplinary research (Alvarez, 2001;Woolford, 2006), have directed attention to state crime over the past 20 years, and more recently to the criminological relevance of the new International Criminal Court (Mullins et al., 2004;Mullins and Rothe, 2007;Rothe and Mullins, 2007) but overall there is very little empirical work and even less theory

In the last decade, there have been many allegations about the prevalence of occult or "Satanic" criminality, which is believed to be involved in many offenses ranging from vandalism to child abuse and serial murder. Some have advocated the creation of specialized police units to combat the supposed threat. On the other hand, most of the alleged evils are very poorly substantiated, and highly questionable statements have been widely circulated. In fact, the current concern about the occult appears to have all the hallmarks of a classic moral panic, where a peripheral issue is suddenly perceived as a major social menace. This paper discusses the limited foundation of truth underlying the present "crime-wave"; and suggests that the panic reflects the moral and political agenda of extremists from the fundamentalist religious Right.

Sometimes I ain't sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he ain't. Sometimes I think it ain't none of us pure crazy and ain't none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it ain't so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it…That's how I reckon a man is crazy…And I reckon they ain't nothing else to do with him but what the most folks says is right.- William Faulkner, As I Lay DyingABSTRAcT Anders Breivik is the right wing terrorist who planted bombs in central Oslo then traveled twenty-five miles to Utoya Island, where he murdered, maimed, and wounded more than 100 people-the children of left-leaning politicians and public officials-at a summer camp associated with the ruling Labor Party. Breivik maintained that the killings were an act of asymmetrical warfare aimed at alerting fellow citizens to the impending Islamization of Norway and beginning a revolution against the "traitorous" liberals who were permitting or encouraging immigration from Muslim countries. Breivik surrendered to authorities at the site of the mass murder, and whether he committed the shooting, killing, and bombing was never in controversy; the only issue at trial was Breivik's sanity. Psychiatric experts disagreed, leaving the District Court in Oslo with the challenge of determining whether acts rationally related to extreme rightwing political values and beliefs, in a culture with longstanding and deeply rooted right-wing traditions, satisfy the legal understanding of what it means to be deemed not guilty by virtue of insanity.

In the past few years postpartum phychosis has been offered as a legal defense in a small number of deeply disturbing infanticide cases in several American jurisdictions. These cases have attracted a great deal of media attention, and fueled public discussion about the mental health of mothers who kill their own babies. From the perspective of the criminologist these cases present an extraordinary pattern of criminal behavior. Not merely a few isolated incidents, but a recurring pattern of the destruction of planned-for, wanted children by their own mothers with no apparent motive and under circumstances that suggest transitory postpartum phychoses. This article presents a detailed examination of specific cases aimed at exploration of the following issues: Are these women insane at the time of the act? Is their behavior the product of a diseased state of mind, or is it premeditated and willful? These issues lie at the core of the concept of criminal responsibility.