As I show in this chapter, the broader developments in interpersonal and intersubjective relations that have taken place over the twentieth century have impacted on the way in which criminal responsibility organises relations of responsibility between individuals. I make two main arguments in this chapter. First, I argue that consorting laws fall into two generations. The first generation of laws, which appeared around the turn of the twentieth century, had a distinctive orientation, mode (which denotes the way in which criminal responsibility is expressed) and form. The second main argument made in this chapter is that these generations of consorting laws correspond to different relations of responsibility between individuals or ‘others’.

This chapter offers a rethinking of criminal responsibilty. What makes criminal responsibility significant, I argue, is that it organises key sets of relations as relations of responsibility. These sets of relations are those between self, others and the state. It is this hitherto overlooked aspect that demands a new account of its significance. This chapter has two main parts. In the first part, I assess existing criminal responsibility scholarship. In the second part of the chapter, I develop my new account of the role of criminal responsibility, focusing on each of the nodes of my tripartite schema of relations of responsibility. Each node of my schema is closely connected to the others, but, as I discuss below, at different points in this book, I foreground either self, others or the state in my analysis.

Through my analysis of women’s responsibility for crime, in this chapter, I engage with this unitary story of criminal responsibility from two perspectives and make two main arguments. First, I argue that, on the level of legal form, women’s responsibility for crime is marked by particularity and specificity, rather than generality and universalism, making women’s responsibility for crime distinctive. This particularity and specificity has been the product of two dynamics, relating to violence by women, and violence against women. In the first of the dynamics giving rise to the distinctiveness of women’s responsibility for crime, which was dominant up to the mid-century century, violence by women was pathologised and women’s responsibility for crime was constructed as diminished or circumscribed. In the second dynamic, which has been dominant since the last decades of the twentieth century, the rise to prominence of violence against women – in particular, domestic or family violence – has recast women’s violence as responsive – by which I mean comprehensible only by reference to what has already happened – and reconstructed women’s responsibility as an amalgam of agency and victimhood/survivorhood. Each of these dynamics has generated atypical responsibility forms which do not fit the unitary story of criminal responsibility.

This chapter provides the third and final investigation into relations of responsibility. As I show in this chapter, the position and function of the state in relations of responsibility is dynamic, reflecting changing social and political norms regarding the role of the state. I argue that there are four historic positions of the state in relations of responsibility, which are prominent at different points across the twentieth century and first years of the twenty-first century. In these relations of responsibility, the position of the state is less or more prominent, and its function is less or more elaborate – restricted to condemnation and prosecution, extending to prevention and deterrence, and to more elaborate functions concerning reconciliation with the past, preservation of the state and active strategies to avoid recurrence in the future. Each of these historic positions of the state posits a particular relation to individual responsibility for crime, revealing the ways in which criminal responsibility is distributed between individuals and the state and showing that such a division is dynamic.

This book has re-examined criminal responsibility. In the context of Australian criminal laws, it reassessed the general story told about the rise to prominence of criminal responsibility from around the turn of the twentieth century, paying close and careful attention to the intricacies of developments in criminal responsibility within this period. At the same time, the book reconsidered the role and, hence, significance of criminal responsibility in criminal law, arguing that criminal responsibility organises keys sets of relations – between self, others and the state – as relations of responsibility, and that this is what makes it significant. My analysis generated two main insights. First, it revealed the gradual and distinctive way in which Australian criminal laws came to be organised around criminal responsibility over the twentieth century, and what this makes possible and what it precludes. Second, it exposed the complexity and dynamism of the relations of responsibility that subtend criminal responsibility principles and practices – substituting the still-dominant account of criminal responsibility as singular, general and universal, for an account characterised by multiplicity, specificity and variation across the criminal law field.