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Female aggression in night-time economies (NTE) is a relatively under-researched area of criminological inquiry. This article focuses on a group of White, working-class local women (Locals) drawing on a mixed-method qualitative study of 78 women (18–58 years) who participated in the NTE of a Welsh city centre. This article explores the women's accounts and understandings of engaging in aggressive behaviours in this particular situational context. Foregrounding their voices, the research found that stereotypical assumptions surrounding the women's reputation for unprovoked aggression is not supported. Rather, the women themselves understand their aggression as justifiable responses to breaches of shared group norms and values in relation to both reputation and manners. This group of women's aggressive behaviour often was oriented towards maintaining their relationships and loyalty to each other and their group. This further challenges research in which women's violence is framed as a response to or modelled on the behaviour of men. This article reports on a subgroup ('Locals') of a larger study that included two additional female groups, Professionals and Students, the perspectives of which are occasionally included to draw out distinctions with the working-class women focused on here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers recent policing and regulatory responses to the night-time economy in England and Wales. Drawing upon the findings of a broader two-year qualitative investigation of local and national developments in alcohol policy, it identifies a dramatic acceleration of statutory activity, with 12 new or revised powers, and several more in prospect, introduced by the Labour Government within its first decade in office. Interview data and documentary sources are used to explore the degree to which the introduction of such powers, often accompanied by forceful rhetoric and high profile police action, has translated into a sustained expansion of control. Many of the new powers are spatially directed, as well as being focused upon the actions of distinct individuals or businesses, yet the willingness and capacity to apply powers to offending individuals in comparison to businesses is often variable and asymmetrical. The practice of negotiating order in the night-time economy is riddled with tensions and ambiguities that reflect the ad hoc nature and rapid escalation of the regulatory architecture. Night-time urban security governance is understood as the outcome of subtle organizational and interpersonal power-plays. Social orders, normative schemas and apportionments of blame thus arise as a byproduct of patterned (structural) relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary city is a contested space and its governance is the subject of complex global economic forces, local interests and political struggles as well as a response to the changing face of governing alliances in residential and commercial areas, forms of consumption, commercially-generated crime and disorder and cultural expressions of leisure. This article seeks to provide a thematic introduction to the manner in which the regulation of contemporary British cities has been influenced by concerns with tackling anti-social behaviour and promoting civility. It argues that in governing urban safety, the normative governmental agendas that seek to remoralize and cleanse city spaces and promote certain values of appropriate consumer-citizen, often clash with commercially-driven imperatives to (excessive) consumption and the allure of cities, for some, as places of difference that exhibit relaxed normative constraints; most notably in the night-time economy. It argues that the manner in which these forces are played out is conditioned by the interplay between different actors and organizations, as both regulators and regulated, some of whom have assumed new responsibilities in the governance of urban safety. The resultant pressures have produced mixed experiences of the city as a meeting place for loosely connected strangers, as a place of indulgence and as a place of cultural expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]