"A different objection to conceding a right to privacy is that privacy is open to abuse, and has in fact been repeatedly abused in the past. Its chequered record has given the right to privacy a bad reputation in some circles. For, it is charged, does privacy not provide a cloak for tyranny and a licence to victimise the vulnerable and defenceless? Is the right to privacy not the reflex defence of choice for sweat-shop factor owners, men who beat their wives and girlfriends, and parents who abuse their children? The work done in recent decades by feminist criminologists and others in beginning to expose the almost unimaginable nature and extent of (mostly) men's violence against women and children in the home gives these questions itresistable force and urgency. Furthermore – as if that were not enough – in these times of “flexibilisation”, de-regulation, privatisation and increasing casualisation of the workforce, we are again confronting questions about working conditions and labour exploitation that by now ought to have been consigned to histories of the rabid first phase of nineteenth century capitalism. The feminist-leftist critique of the public-private divide has become (though radicals bristle at the thought of contributing t a new orthodoxy) a received part of the philosophical canon."