11. Feminist Criminology
11.3 Issues that Brought Feminist Criminology to the Surface
Dr. Rochelle Stevenson; Dr. Jennifer Kusz; Dr. Tara Lyons; and Dr. Sheri Fabian
The key issues that brought feminist criminology to the surface involved domestic violence or violence against women (Dobash & Dobash, 1979; Johnson, 1996; Johnson & Dawson, 2011) and the differential and unequal treatment of women as offenders within the criminal justice system (Britton, 2000; Chesney-Lind & Pasko, 2004; Comack, 1996). We discuss the issue of women as offenders later in this chapter. We look now to how the contributions of feminist criminology have shaped our understandings of women’s victimisation.
Victimisation
“Feminist criminology has perhaps made its greatest impact on mainstream criminology in the area of women’s victimization” (Britton, 2000, p. 64).
Gender-based violence is disproportionately experienced by women in Canada (Cotter & Savage, 2019, p. 3) and around the world (World Health Organization, 2021). As Bruckert and Law (2018) note, violence against women stems from a broad range of systemic issues, including those rooted in patriarchal beliefs, such as colonialism, neoliberalism and capitalism (p. 9). Such social structures intersect with aspects of identity (such as sexual orientation, gender expression, age, ability, ethnicity) which can increase risk of victimisation.
Female victims account for two-thirds of police-reported family violence in Canada (Conroy, 2021). Women are much more likely to be murdered by their male intimate partners than male partners are to be murdered by their female partners; in fact, women make up approximately 80% of all victims of intimate partner homicide (Conroy, 2021).
The trend of the disproportionate victimisation of women grows larger when looking at the victimization of women along intersectional social positions and identities:
While anyone in Canada can experience violence, women, girls and young women, Indigenous women and girls, lesbian, gay and bisexual people, women living with a disability and women living in rural and remote regions, are at greater risk of violence. (Government of Canada)
Specifically, women with disabilities experience double the rate of violent crime compared to women without disabilities (Cotter, 2018). With regards to lesbian, bisexual, transgender and non-binary people’s experiences of violence, there is a lack of comprehensive statistics, but the available evidence indicates that bisexual women and transgender individuals face very high levels of violence compared to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts (Jaffray, 2020; Langenderfer-Magruder et al., 2016). In particular, bisexual women in Canada have the highest rates of violent victimisation and physical assault, and transgender people are more likely to experience violence compared to cisgender people in Canada (Jaffray, 2020). When considering intersections of transphobia and racism, experiences of violence are higher amo