Victims of Circumstance

Description

Using records of the Scottish criminal justice system, Parliamentary Papers and newspaper articles, Alison Brown explores the lives of men and women who killed their children in nineteenth-century Scotland. This well researched account challenges the idea that parents who committed filicide were necessarily monstrous, and these moving stories demonstrate how social circumstances could lead to the death of a child. The book also sheds light on the workings of the Scottish criminal justice system and will be of interest to students of the history of crime and Scottish social history, as well as the interested general reader.