Sex workers are at risk of state violence, surveillance, and becoming justice-involved. This risk is exacerbated by the criminalization of sex work and pro-criminalization efforts to rescue sex trafficking victims. Using the theoretical foundations of the carceral creep, the shadow state, and carceral protectionism/humanitarianism, interviews were conducted with 34 sex workers. Participants described impacts of carceral entanglements , which appeared in two distinct ways: 1. The over-reliance and failure of traditional legal avenues for addressing GBV and 2. The mimicking of carceral praxis within gender-based violence agencies.
Migrant women experiencing domestic and family violence (DFV) often struggle to access government funded supports. This article draws on in-depth interviews with migrant services workers in Australia to examine how this occurs, despite Australia’s policy framework adopting an intersectional approach. Participants described being unable to refer women to DFV services and delivering core DFV support. They felt their racialized and feminized labor was structurally ignored, limiting their capacity to support migrant women. Their insights reveal how the absence of structural reform that adequately funds migrant services has failed to materialize an intersectional response for migrant women in practice.
Research on gang-related social media has focused overwhelmingly on boys and men, leaving girls’ and women’s online engagement underdeveloped. To address this gap, we examine women’s engagement on a public Facebook page dedicated to Latina/o gangs in Chicago. Drawing on 2,309 comments and replies posted between 2015 and 2016, we combine descriptive frequency coding of comment-level practices with thematic analysis to develop a typology of four engagement themes: Observational, Confrontational, Regulatory, and Adaptive. Findings highlight women’s strategic participation in a hypermasculine digital environment and extend scholarship by specifying how gender shapes online identity, conflict, and regulation.
In this study, I examine the experiences of transgender women of color (TWOC) in New York City’s sex trade, using feminist pathways, queer pathways, and intersectional stigma frameworks. In interviews with 17 TWOC sex workers, I explore how systemic violence, criminalization, and marginalization shape their lives and limit access to safety, housing, and employment. I identified four themes: childhood trauma and familial rejection, criminal legal encounters, employment discrimination, and persistent fear and hypervigilance. Participants also offered policy recommendations, calling for trans-affirming services and community-led care. The study affirms TWOC sex workers as critical voices in reimagining justice beyond carceral systems.
This article examines the gendered dynamics of what is institutionally defined as women’s “radicalization” through a feminist criminological lens. Drawing on a qualitative study of 131 Muslim families and 30 prevention professionals in Quebec, Italy, and Tunisia, it analyzes narratives of women who were arrested or reported as “radicalized” by institutional actors. Moving beyond “brainwashing” tropes, the analysis shows how these trajectories reflect both constraint and agency—rooted in gendered precarity, familial expectations, and structural racism. Rather than treating radicalization as a fixed or objective condition, the article interrogates how a wide range of moral, religious, and social behaviours come to be interpreted and governed as security concerns. By re-centering women’s moral and political voices, and outlining five ideal-typical trajectories, the article reframes radicalization as a contested and gendered category, embedded within broader regimes of control and resistance.
Stalking has been widely criminalized globally since the 1990s, yet Russia still lacks a specific criminal offence of stalking and relies on general provisions that only partially cover persistent persecutory behavior. This study uses an experimental vignette-based survey of 292 Moscow university students to examine gaps between legal norms and social perceptions of stalking. Students evaluated scenarios varying perpetrator gender, relationship context, and behaviors. Stalking was most readily recognized when male perpetrators targeted female victims, while male respondents and those endorsing romantic ideals were less likely to recognize stalking behaviors as problematic.
This study examines how misogynistic attitudes and criminal thinking patterns jointly shape intimate partner violence (IPV), including emotional, psychological, threatening, and controlling behaviors. Using survey data from 503 heterosexual men and Generalized Linear Models, results show that misogyny is significantly associated with IPV in baseline models, but these effects weaken when criminal thinking is included. Power orientation and justification emerge as the strongest predictors of emotional abuse and controlling behaviors. Findings underscore the intersecting ideological and cognitive dimensions of IPV and highlight the need for culturally responsive, gender-informed interventions that address both belief systems and cognitive processes.
Criminologists have established a link between masculine ideologies and criminal behavior and have often discussed the influence that masculinity has on the gender differences in crime. However, little quantitative research has explored how attitudes towards patriarchal norms influence marijuana use, particularly among juveniles. This research begins to explore that gap in the literature and attempts to open further paths for examining how patriarchal norms influence gender differences in marijuana use. To do so, we examine high school seniors’ marijuana use across 40 years of data from Monitoring the Future ( N = 40,113). Our findings show that patriarchal norm acceptance increases the likelihood of smoking marijuana for both men and women, though significantly more so for men. Results from this research provide support for the role of patriarchal norms in young men’s and women’s involvement in illicit crime.
This paper engages abolition feminist storytelling as a methodology for feminist criminologists to identify, reflect on, grapple with, and ultimately confront carceral logics in the stories we (re)tell about violence and punishment. Drawing on over a decade's worth of research, advocacy, and community organizing, we identify three carceral tensions that emerged within our own storytelling: the victim-offender binary, researcher complicity, and a survivor standpoint. Building on prior black feminist scholarship, we then illustrate how an abolition feminist approach to storytelling allows us to confront these tensions through relationality, an ethic of love, accountability, vulnerability, and commitment to justice.
While community-engaged research would seem to have significant overlap with both implementation science and program and policy evaluation, these respective bodies of work have developed largely apart from one another. We argue that disregarding community-engaged epistemologies (or engaging only superficially) when studying how policy or programs "work" significantly increases the likelihood of producing invalid science. Accordingly, we present a case study of our work with a local community-based violence intervention operating in the Northeastern United States to demonstrate how principles of community-engaged research are essential to implementation and evaluation science work.
How do community-based responses to gender-based violence (GBV) imagine and implement perpetrator responsibility outside the criminal legal system? Drawing on participatory research with the transformative justice movement, I articulate a model of accountability called giving account, a narrative, qualitative approach that contrasts with the retributive, quantitative logics of taking account. I compare how these two models define harm, attribute responsibility, and proscribe desistance for GBV. Giving account repurposes a method often relegated to 'individual' desistance theory - narrative - as a vehicle for integrating individual agency and structural forces. Insodoing, it brings a feminist and anti-racist lens to narrative criminology.
Adopting a feminist narrative criminological approach this paper explores how the menopausal stories of women in prison are shaped by the context of imprisonment. Utilizing the Listening Guide method of analysis, this paper illustrates the multifaceted way in which women in prison draw on different menopause narratives at different moments of storytelling. Through adopting the theoretical framework of 'Slow Violence' and 'Slow Resistance', analysis also highlights the compounding impact of imprisonment and menopause whilst simultaneously illustrating women's agency in managing and taking control of their menopause experiences within the constraining environment of the prison.
Increasingly, research on legal system involvement has engaged in Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR). Drawing on reflections from our CBPR project focused on reentry from prison, we address three key questions: (1) Who is the "community" in CBPR? (2) What are the challenges in maintaining partnerships? And (3) How does CBPR exist in the framework of a larger neoliberal context? We highlight tensions around lived experiences, capacity, time, ethics, and constraints from the university and parole. We demonstrate that while CBPR is good in theory, practical and ethical considerations related to power and privilege cannot go unchecked.
Feminist scholar-activists in criminology occupy a paradoxical position where politically engaged research is rhetorically encouraged but structurally constrained. Most definitions assume combining scholarly and activist roles is simply additive. Drawing on institutional anomie theory (Messner & Rosenfeld, 2012), academia exemplifies institutional crisis by promoting expressive commitments like justice while privileging instrumental goals like prestige and productivity. A triadic framework reveals how scholar, activist, and scholar-activist roles are institutionally separated to preserve knowledge hierarchies. Feminist scholar-activists inhabit a liminal space between institutional legitimacy and justice-oriented knowledge practices. Rather than seeking assimilation into anomic structures, feminist scholar-activism constitutes a necessary, strategic transgression.
In recent years, there has been a disturbing rise in anti-transgender legislation and violence. Under the second Trump Administration, these threats have become even more aggressive, turning into direct attacks on transgender rights. For instance, in some states, like Texas, lawmakers have sought to criminalize transgender people's everyday lives. Now, more than ever, researching transgender people's safety is more than an academic pursuit-it is an act of resistance. Grounded in queer criminology and scholar-activist praxis, this article centers the experiences of transgender and gender non-conforming people in Southeastern Virginia, exploring how they navigate harm, assess threats, and rely on community when traditional systems fail them. Participant narratives reveal that these strategies are not merely survival mechanisms but forms of everyday resistance against a system that refuses to protect them. Reflexively, this article also argues that conducting this research as a queer, transgender, non-binary scholar navigating institutional erasure alongside participants is itself a praxis of resistance. From IRB protocols that reproduce cisnormative assumptions to federal funding restrictions that target gender-affirming scholarship, the conditions of this research mirror the conditions it documents. From a queer criminological perspective, researching transgender safety is not just about understanding risk; it is about actively challenging the systems that put transgender lives at risk in the first place. This article calls for a criminology that prioritizes lived experience, amplifies community knowledge, and refuses neutrality in the face of injustice.
This article examines the epistemic, political, and affective divides shaping femicide response in Mexico, highlighting the conflicting logics between formal institutional actors and grassroots feminist organizers. Drawing on 64 interviews and sustained community engagement across rural Michoac & aacute;n and Mexico City, it introduces three co-produced conceptual frameworks-the IPV Perception Gap, Localized Violence Realities (LVR), and the Cultural Conflict of IPV Perception (CCIP)-to analyze how violence is defined, prioritized, and addressed. The article demonstrates how contrasting epistemologies and legitimacy claims produce incompatible approaches to justice. It also reflects on the author's positionality as a survivor-researcher, arguing that scholar-activism is not a methodological stance, but an ethical imperative rooted in presence, accountability, and refusal of neutrality. By foregrounding lived experience and grassroots epistemologies, the study calls for a feminist criminology that is not only critical but also committed to those confronting violence on the ground.
Affective solidarity is a feminist theory in which solidarity is grounded in emotions, dissonance, and discomfort with injustice rather than a shared identity or a politics of empathy. This article first examines constraints within criminology and the neoliberal university, and then identifies challenges in moving beyond university and community binaries. Affective solidarity is proposed as an antidote to binaries and carceral logics in criminological scholar-activism. The authors offer examples of generative collaborations across university and prison walls, reflecting on the dynamics of collaborating with individuals who are directly impacted by the prison-industrial complex.
This paper uses autoethnographic analysis of my journey through higher education and a decade on the tenure track to examine the structural barriers that hinder the Scholarvist approach to criminology. Drawing on personal journals, email exchanges, and a longitudinal incident log, I identify recurring themes of fear of retaliation, denial of opportunity, personal and professional insult, and the devaluation of scholarvism, alongside moments of institutional support. Together, these experiences demonstrate how criminology’s entanglement with state power, grant funding, and rigid definitions of rigor has constrained the criminological imagination. Situating these patterns within broader disciplinary shifts from humanistic to positivist approaches, this paper illustrates how scholarvism is routinely dismissed as “just activism.” I conclude that scholarvism is necessary to restore humanity in our research, expand methodological legitimacy, and reengage with the criminological imagination.
This paper focuses on a multi-method project on the effects of policing on the well-being of the African American Community in a large, predominantly Black Midwestern city. Black-led community organizations and an independent police oversight board initiated the community-engaged research process. We analyze our collaboration against the backdrop of principles for anti-racist community-engaged research. We emphasize the importance of a diverse research team and share opportunities and challenges of design, recruitment, and deep community engagement for future qualitative research projects. We assert that intersectional, feminist, anti-racist criminological scholarship remains crucial, especially in turbulent political times.
