The Emerald Handbook of Feminism, Criminology and Social Change

Sandra Walklate, Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Jude McCulloch, JaneMaree Maher, Sandra Walklate, Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Jude McCulloch, JaneMaree Maher, Sandra Walklate, Kate Fitz-Gibbon, JaneMaree Maher, Jude McCulloch

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781787699564
• eBook ISBN: 9781787699571
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Emerald Handbook of Criminology, Feminism and Social Change combines a wide range of international contributors to chart the uneasy relationship between feminism, criminology and victimology. It explores historical and contemporary questions posed for criminology and victimology by feminist work. 

The book is split into four sections which introduce the origins of feminist criminology; explore research beyond the northern hemisphere; extend the criminological agenda; and look to the future relationship between feminism and criminology. 

Comprehensive and current, this handbook provides fresh insight and commentary on the capacity of criminology to listen to feminist voices and is essential reading for anyone interested in feminism, criminology and social change.

Part One

The Origins of Feminist Criminology

Introduction to Part One

In proposing a handbook on The Emerald Handbook of Feminism, Criminology and Social Change, our objective was to capture and collate the substantive contributions of feminist criminology, but also to recognise and record the transformative interventions of feminist scholarship in criminology more broadly. Each of the chapters in this opening section of the volume chart specific and detailed feminist contributions to areas of criminology such as victimology, research practice and methodologies and understandings of crime, but they simultaneously point to the alterations these interventions have generated in criminology. The chronologies of change that they offer in these different areas of criminology are both concrete and conceptual and they are always connected to and driven by social debate and contestation. As Gelsthorpe reflects in this volume, ‘the methodological and epistemological is political’.

In this opening chapter, the editors review the nature of different feminist perspectives and the impact that they have had on criminology and victimology. They pay particular attention to the challenges of inter-disciplinarity as central to feminist projects and reflect upon the influence of diverse feminist voices in both past and present. This chapter will lay the foundation for the contributions which follow and will make the case for the importance of appreciating these contributions within their global context and chronological position.

In her chapter on feminist work, Loraine Gelsthorpe revisits the early history of feminist interventions in criminology in the UK and other Western countries. She illuminates the on-going epistemological challenges inherent in bringing feminist perspectives to bear on a generally ‘androcentric’ criminological enterprise. Offering a valuable chronology that spans the second half of the twentieth century, the chapter is centrally concerned with the different ways in which feminist scholars in criminology grappled with the question of how to produce good quality knowledge that locates gender, and its consequent inequalities, at the heart of criminology. The positioning of ‘woman’ as a conceptual term which transformed the criminological framework in Carol Smart’s (1976) pioneering work Women, Crime and Criminology began a series of gendered interventions grounded in critical feminist perspectives. Gelsthorpe also documents the evolution of feminist work itself: while early approaches tended to concentrate on the inadequacies and omissions of criminology, on ‘adding’ women’s experiences and outcomes to existing knowledges, subsequent work goes further and challenges the framework of mainstream criminology. Interventions into central practices and conventions of criminological research, such as Sylvia Walby et al.’s (2015) critique of conventional counting of violent incidents address fundamental knowledge production practices and argue for the need to embed gender to achieve veracity, accuracy and social change. Gelsthorpe’s final reflection, following Heidensohn, that criminology definitely needed feminism, and continues to need it, is pertinent to the remaining chapters in the section and in this volume. The processes by which feminist criminology has created change have been gradual, complex and not always uni-directional, as other contributors highlight.

If gender is understood as central to the commission, patterns and prevalence of crime itself, the impact of gender on patterns of victimisation is immediately highlighted. In their chapter on ‘Feminist Approaches to Victimology’, Jody Clay-Warner and Timothy G. Edgemon document how feminist scholarship has changed victimology, in terms of domain knowledge, in terms of our understanding and in terms of understanding of the term victim, and centrally in how we consider the experiences of, and outcomes for, victims of crime. Clay-Warner and Edgemon highlight key themes in victimology informed by feminist knowledges: (1) the gendered nature of criminal victimisation, (2) victimisation of women (and threat of victimisation) as a means of informal social control, (3) examination of ways in which legal structures limit women’s ability to report victimisation and to prosecute offenders and (4) the relationship between women’s victimisation and offending. They highlight the gendered biases and inequalities built into early victimology where the study of victims centred on their role in ‘triggering’ the violence(s) that were perpetrated against them and the destructive ways in which this approach impacted women in particular. Their excavation of underlying assumptions about causes of victimisation and offending reveal both the persistence and protection of the gendered social order and the challenges already mounted by, and still required, from feminist-informed victimology.

Challenging the gendered social order is also a central theme of the chapter by Joanne Belknap and Deanne Grant. In ‘Feminist Activism and Scholarship in Resisting and Responding to Gender-based Abuse’, they review the contribution of feminist criminologists and activists to moving violence against women (VAW) from an area of concern for women and feminists to a global focus. They chart the influence of feminist concerns and activism in driving and embedding recognition that the prevalence and ramifications of VAW are critical well beyond the experiences of individual women. Belknap and Grant examine a range of gender-based abuses, such as honour killings, fistula, forced marriage, sexual harassment and stalking, but their central focus is on intimate partner abuse and rape. In taking this approach, they point to one of the key contributions of feminist criminology, which is the challenge to distinctions of public and private violence and the implications for what we consequently understand as criminal. The complex pathway towards recognising rape in marriage is emblematic of such shifts, and the barriers that have existed and continue to exist in securing the everyday safety of survivors of gendered violence, holding abusers accountable and working towards safer communities. As Clay-Warner and Edgemon comment elsewhere in this volume,

the irony, of course, is that avoiding going out alone at night, riding public transportation, etc. is directed as preventing violent crimes by strangers, while women face the greatest risk from men they know.

This gendered assessment of risk, and recognition of its implications, has been central to the work of feminist criminology and its programme of social change.

The link between scholarship and activism highlighted by Belknap and Grant also speaks to one of the central insights of this volume. While it is not possible to fully capture the historical and contemporary efforts of activists to respond to and prevent VAW across the world, they point to intertwined epistemological and activist efforts to identify VAW as a serious social problem, to scope the various and often overlapping types of VAW and to implement a range of responses that change women’s experiences. As Ann Oakley (2000) has persuasively argued, we cannot distinguish ways of knowing from the gendered social relations that produced them. Challenges to these gendered social relations will necessarily be both conceptual and social: and as this chapter shows, innovative and effective change often emerges at this intersection.

This intersection of activism and scholarship underpins the chapter contributed by Annie Cossins, ‘Feminist Criminology in a Time of ‘Digital Feminism’: Can the #MeToo Movement Create Fundamental Cultural Change?’ Cossins begins with an examination of the ways in which the #MeToo movement can be situated within a long history of feminist criminology’s recognition of the cultural significance of the concepts of sex and gender, bodies and social practices in how we understand and respond to crimes. This focus on sex, gender and bodies has been a key aspect of the transformation proposed by feminist criminological scholarship. As Cossins observes here,

[t]he sex of the body matters within each different cultural/racial milieu so that women and girls quickly learn from their own men about the specific cultural values associated with their bodies.

Cossins explores the social significance of the body and, in particular, how sex intersects with race, ethnicity and class to document feminist criminology’s role in order to understand different women’s experiences of men’s sexual violence.

Yet, the focus of this chapter, the final in this section, on the #MeToo movement highlights some dispiriting realities. As Cossins shows, the outcomes of the #MeToo movement have revealed the extent of sexual assault and harassment in workplaces, the extent of male privilege and entitlement, across lines of diversity and power and the systemic failure of systems designed to protect women and girls. When we chart the origins and trajectory of feminist criminology, we see the impact of radical, activist and transformative scholarship but we also face the magnitude of the work still to be done. It is to this work that the following sections in the volume turn.

References

Oakley. A. 2000. Experiments on Knowing: Gender and Method in the Social Sciences, Cambridge, Polity Press.

Smart, C. 2013 (1977). Women, Crime and Criminology (Routledge Revivals): A Feminist Critique. London, Routledge.

Walby, S., Towers, J. and Francis, B. 2015. Is violent crime increasing or decreasing? A new methodology to measure repeat attacks making visible the significance of gender and domestic relations, British Journal of Criminology, 56(6), 1203–1234.

The Emerald Handbook of Feminism, Criminology and Social Change, 3–6
Copyright © 2020 by Sandra Walklate, Kate Fitz-Gibbon, JaneMaree Maher and Jude McCulloch
Published under exclusive licence
doi:10.1108/978-1-78769-955-720201002

Chapter 1

Evolving Feminist Perspectives in Criminology and Victimology and Their Influence on Understandings of, and Responses to, Intimate Partner Violence

Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Sandra Walklate, Jude McCulloch and JaneMaree Maher

Abstract

In this opening chapter, the editors review the nature of different feminist perspectives and the impact that they have had on criminology and victimology. They will pay particular attention to the influence of diverse feminist voices in both past and present and the ongoing challenges posed by the emergence of southern criminology and the recourse to law as an avenue to securing change for women living with violence.

Keywords: Criminology; victimology; feminisms; gender; violence(s) against women; masculinities

Introduction

This chapter examines feminist responses to criminology and victimology over time, acknowledging that the work of feminisms as it intersects with these two domains has evolved and has met different challenges. In the first part of this chapter, we offer an examination of the emergence of criminology and victimology and the different forms of feminism including the work of liberal, radical, postmodern and third/forth wave feminism that have made their presence felt in each of these areas of investigation. Here we are deliberate in our use of the term ‘feminisms’ as we acknowledge that over time and at any one given time there is no single feminist voice or view (this follows on from terminology set up in Fitz-Gibbon and Walklate, 2018, see also Daly and Chesney-Lind, 1988: 501). In the second part of this chapter, we move...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part One. The Origins of Feminist Criminology
• Part Two. Research Beyond the Global North
• Part Three. Extending the Criminological Agenda
• Part Four. Looking to the Future
• Index