Chapter Four focuses on how the colonial judiciary and the local government wielded the discretion available in the IPC to manage the punishment of capital crimes. The chapter begins by studying the implications of the new High Courts Act of 1861. I then explore sentencing practices for the crimes of domestic murder and infanticide to consider when and why decision-makers passed more or less severe punishments. I argue that the decision to save some subjects from the gallows helped the law build vital but ultimately fragile alliances between local elites as colonial authorities sought access to the most intimate and politicized areas of Indian life. This process also sharpened colonial terror by regulating the decision to send certain subjects to their death.

The death of a patient by suicide (or homicide) can have a considerable, and lasting, emotional impact on mental health professionals, most commonly manifested as guilt, blame, shock, anger, sadness, anxiety and grief. There are often notable impacts on professional practice, including self-doubt and being more cautious and defensive in the management of risk. This chapter explores suicide and unlawful killing in the context of inquests.

The final chapter considers tensions between beliefs in the “healthy,” salvific character of crusading and anxieties about the morality of violence. It argues that, finding their origins in events that took place during the First Crusade, these tensions became especially acute in late medieval crusade culture, crystallizing in works by John Gower, John Wyclif, and Michel Pintoin, among others, and complexly articulated in The Siege of Jerusalem and Richard Coeur de Lion. The chapter reads these romances alongside literary and historical responses to the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, pogroms against Europe’s Jewish communities, and acts of cannibalism perpetrated by crusaders at the siege of Ma‘arra in 1098. The Siege of Jerusalem, Richard Coeur de Lion, and authors who wrote about these events deployed similar representational strategies to raise questions about the corruptive potential and human costs of holy war.

The chapter explores the workings of gender in genocidal processes. It frames the subject inclusively, to address women and men; masculinities and femininities; the specific vulnerabilities of LGBT people; survivor, victim and perpetrator experiences; and structural and institutional forms of sexualized violence alongside event-specific ones. The chapter encourages readers to rethink major categories of analysis and themes in genocide studies as gendered phenomena.

Although pervasive, gender is often overlooked for its role in how genocide is conceived, performed, and experienced. The chapter traces its influence in connection to other explanatory narratives and theories such as the roles of the state, militarism, war, imperialism, racism, and sexism. Was gender one of many facets or a primary force in escalating or de-escalating the violence over time and space? Variables of race and ethnicity, themselves typically intersecting with social class, crucially shape how gender identities are imposed, interpreted, and experienced. The interaction of gender with an age variable is also noted. The coverage spans case studies of genocide in Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa in order to illuminate the universal and particular. The authors also present on the role of courts in prosecuting mass rape and sexual violence as acts of genocide. The conclusion points out key intellectual, ethical and policy challenges ahead.

This chapter demonstrates the interplay between domestic and international ideas about birth control and abortion in Republican China (1912–1949). Eugenic discourses linking individual health to national strength and modernity gained currency in the early 1920s. Margaret Sanger’s visit to China in 1922 further fueled elite preoccupation with using contraception to improve the “quality” of the population, while reformers called for an end to social ills, such as abortion, child abandonment, and infanticide. Mirroring the blending of Chinese and foreign eugenic thought, the medical language used to describe birth control merged a primarily traditional Chinese medical discourse with Western and Japanese scientific terminology. Despite their prominence in intellectual circles, many of the high-level arguments for and against birth control had little direct impact on everyday reproductive practices.

Chapter 2 focuses on the praxis of birth control and abortion during the Republican era. Although sterilization and abortion were criminalized, contraception was neither explicitly endorsed nor banned. Yet, at times, local police cracked down on those who sold or consumed these products. In spite of the law, a wide range of contraceptive and abortive techniques were available to women in urban China. Grounded in folk practices, traditional Chinese healing, and Western medicine, abortion was the most prevalent form of fertility regulation that appeared in the historical record. Tiaojingyao – patent drugs and homemade herbal decoctions that blurred the line between abortifacients and emmenagogues designed to induce regular menses – were also particularly common, and by their nature, difficult to police.

In Western culture, both the lay public and mental health professionals tend to believe that mothers evolved to love all of their children instinctually and unconditionally. In contrast, any mother who feels ambivalence or hostility towards her child is typically seen as unnatural, and a mother who maltreats her child is seen as behaving pathologically. This chapter draws on evolutionary research to challenge this widespread view of motherhood. In particular, it describes how raising children has required mothers to negotiate a series of complex, precarious and layered trade-offs, and it argues that maternal negativity and child maltreatment can arise from this. The goal of this chapter is to foster a more evolutionarily valid, nuanced and compassionate understanding of motherhood. Such an understanding has the potential to contribute to clinical work with faltering mothers as well as to programmes focused on preventing maternal maltreatment of children.

Male medical experts faced challenges and uncertainty in examining presumably pregnant or postpartum women, particularly condemned women facing execution who declared pregnancy, as well as women accused of infanticide. Forensic doctors’ efforts and methods to establish the facts of infanticide cases commonly elicited criticism from other medical men or judicial authorities, and their conclusions were frequently at odds with the accused’s version of events. In many cases, forensic reports and testimony appeared to be the most decisive factor in shaping jury verdicts. However, all-male juries often weighed forensic evidence against evaluations of the character and life circumstances of the accused, and the sympathies of jurors shaped the interpretation of forensic evidence as well as judicial verdicts. Medical men’s role in the search for material proof of the crime was often both crucial and problematic, and changing, ambivalent social attitudes towards infanticide shaped the interpretations and consideration of forensic evidence.

This chapter provides a theoretical and empirical framework for understanding the relation between life history strategy and mating strategies. The current scientific debate regarding the structure of life history and its connection to mating behaviors inspired the authors of this chapter to conduct several theoretical and empirical examinations of this subject. For example, phylogenetic confirmatory factor analysis across a sample of 503 eutherian mammals supports the presence of a higher-order life history factor comprised of lower-order factors that have been labeled fast–slow and neoteny, respectively. Consistent with past publications, the present chapter also found evidence supporting the predicted relation between life history indicators with mating strategies. Also consistent with previously published findings, one set of phylogenetic generalized linear models identified that polygynandrous mating systems in nonhuman primates, along with the [lactation/(lactation + gestation)] ratio, positively predicted infanticide by males. These constructive replications, however, also revealed the novel finding that the higher-order life history factor did not predict these infanticides when statistically controlled for the effects of the lower-order indicators. Hence, the specific variance associated with the lower-order indicators eliminates any significant residual contribution made by the higher-order life history factor. These results are not unexpected given the principle of Brunswik symmetry, wherein to attain optimal predictive power the predictor and criterion variable must be measured at the same level of data aggregation. These findings led us to conduct a theoretical examination of the psychometrically expected relations between higher-order factors, such as life history strategy, and lower-order factors, such as mating strategies, in general. We therefore explore the characteristics of the latent hierarchical structure of life history strategy that has been found in numerous empirical studies for the purpose of deriving more specific predictions regarding the effects of general life history strategy on specific mating strategies. We afterwards test the principle of Brunswik symmetry by reporting additional analyses of the expected moderating effect of slow life history strategy on the relation between short-term and long-term mating orientations, r(STM,LTM), in humans. A sequential canonical analysis revealed that the positive effect of slow life history strategy on r(STM,LTM) was fully mediated by a general strategic differentiation-integration factor (SD-IE) on life history traits. Individuals with slower life history strategies exhibited greater integration between short-term and long-term mating strategies. Consequently, this analysis counters a long-held position regarding any fixed association between slow life history strategy and the relationship between short-term and long-term mating orientations.

The neotropical capuchin monkeys (genera Cebus and Sapajus) have converged with hominins and Pan in several respects, including brain expansion and slow life histories, and they thereby provide an important data point for comparative analyses. Capuchins live in stable, female-philopatric social groups in which alpha males, as preferred mates, sire a disproportionately large share of offspring. Periods of violent upheaval within groups alternate with long periods of social peace and stability, during which an alpha male retains his position with (in Cebus) coalitional support from subordinates against potential usurpers from outside the troop. Males’ “career trajectories” are products of a set of incompletely understood constraints, decisions, and random events. New alpha males often kill the nursing offspring sired by their predecessors, and females respond to this threat by supporting reigning alpha males against rivals from within and outside the group. Long alpha male tenures result in co-residence between alpha males and their adult daughters. Father–daughter inbreeding is almost entirely avoided via selective, cue-based sexual aversion. Sapajus employs an elaborate repertoire of courtship signals.Same-sex sexual interactions are fairly common and may function to negotiate social relationships.

In the 1870s and 1880s, some of Japan’s leading intellectuals and modernizers discussed human rights, reintroduced the binary difference between male and female, and declared motherhood the core principle of women’s nature. As gender displaced status as the primary system of social and legal classification, women began adopting the language of rights and representing themselves in public. By the beginning of the twentieth century, women forcefully entered and shaped a range of debates. Chapter 2, “Controlling Reproduction and Motherhood,” discusses women’s struggle to both define motherhood for themselves and take control of reproduction – the debate about motherhood being closely tied to the quest for legalizing abortions. Notably, this demand was increasingly at odds with the country’s advancing imperialism, which relied on rapid population growth. The end of the Japanese empire constituted a major rupture within the question of reproductive control, ultimately leading to today’s effects of rapid population decline and the lack of will among the young generation to have babies.

Colobines display an array of different types of social organization. In some Asian colobines (most prominently the snub-nosed monkeys, Rhinopithecus spp.) and one subspecies of African colobine, social organization is multilevel, i.e. social units are characterized by a complete absence of exclusive territories, occupy wholly shared ranges and are nested within a larger, bounded social matrix. This chapter reviews and discusses the composition and social dynamics of colobine multilevel societies as well as the causes and consequences of living in such a complex social setting.

For folivores, socio-ecological models predict scramble competition and egalitarian dominance relationships with female dispersal, but female Asian colobines do not all nicely fit these predictions. Alternative explanations concern an absence of competition, and the Folivore Paradox, where group size is limited by social factors such as infanticide. Relevant data are scarce, but our review shows that colobine foraging costs increase with group size, yet female fitness may increase or decrease. Dominance relationships vary from despotic to egalitarian, and are individualistic. The lack of female nepotism in despotic species (or populations) still requires explanation. Female dispersal is found in egalitarian and some despotic species, yet costs may be low if females migrate into a group with familiar females. Asian colobine social organization seems to follow one of two patterns. First, in seasonal species, food limits group size, while infanticide does not; these groups may experience contest competition. Second, in a-seasonal species groups are uni-male, the infanticide risk is high and infanticide, not food, may limit group size. This proposal requires further testing and may also apply to uni-male frugivores. This overview of the socio-ecological patterns in Asian colobines highlights that ecological and social selection pressures in interaction determine primate social organization.

The notion that a child has rights is longstanding: the 1924 Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted by the League of Nations, was the first international instrument explicitly acknowledging the existence of children’s rights. The formulation of the right to life under the Convention on the Rights of the Child—the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history – is distinct, referring to the duty to ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child. Accordingly, the chapter considers infanticide and violence against children, including in domestic settings as well as against children in the streets. Also addressed are infant mortality, disease, illness, and substance abuse, and recruitment into armed forces, armed groups, and gangs.

This chapter describes how the duty on States to respect and protect the right to life applies to terminations of pregnancy. Worldwide, tens of millions of abortions are said to take place each year. There is no general right of a pregnant woman to an abortion under customary international law, even within a minimal number of weeks. Nor, however, is there any rule generally prohibiting abortion.