Violence of Austerity
Austerity, a response to the aftermath of the financial crisis, continues to devastate contemporary Britain.
In The Violence of Austerity, Vickie Cooper and David Whyte bring together the voices of campaigners and academics including Danny Dorling, Mary O'Hara and Rizwaan Sabir to show that rather than stimulating economic growth, austerity policies have led to a dismantling of the social systems that operated as a buffer against economic hardship, exposing austerity to be a form of systematic violence.
Covering a range of famous cases of institutional violence in Britain, the book argues that police attacks on the homeless, violent evictions in the rented sector, the risks faced by people on workfare schemes, community violence in Northern Ireland and cuts to the regulation of social protection, are all being driven by reductions in public sector funding. The result is a shocking expose of the myriad ways in which austerity policies harm people in Britain.
Vickie Cooper is a Lecturer in Criminology at the Open University where she is Co-Director of HERC (Harm and Evidence Research Collaborative) and researches issues related to homelessness, criminal justice system, housing and eviction. She is the co-editor of The Violence of Austerity (Pluto, 2017).
David Whyte is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Liverpool where he researches issues related to corporate violence and corporate corruption. He is the co-editor of How Corrupt is Britain? (Pluto, 2015) and The Violence of Austerity (Pluto, 2017).