Criminological futures and gendered violence(s): Lessons from the global pandemic for criminology

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to foreground the gendered crime consequences of the global pandemic and to raise questions emanating from them for the future(s) of criminology. The paper reviews some of the criminological response to the pandemic offered during 2020. The global pandemic was constituted by some as providing the opportunity for a natural experiment in which criminological theories and concepts could be tested in real time and by others as an opportunity to further raise the profile of crimes more hidden from view, particularly domestic abuse. For the former, domestic abuse is constituted as an exception to what might be learned from this experimental moment. For the latter, gendered violence(s) are central to making sense of this moment as ongoing, mundane and ordinary features of (women’s) everyday lives. This paper makes the case that the evidence relating to the gendered consequences of Covid-19, renders it no longer possible for the discipline to regard feminist informed work (largely found within the latter view above) as the stranger, outside of, or an exception to, the discipline’s central concerns. It is suggested that the future(s) of criminology lie in rendering that stranger’s voice, focusing as it does on the continuities of men’s gendered violence(s) in all spheres of life, as the discipline’s central problematic.

Introduction

Downes (1988) defined criminology as a rendezvous subject (a meeting place in which those with different disciplinary orientations were brought together by the single problematic of crime), pointing to the potential for the discipline, insofar as ‘the most creative thinking occurs at the meeting places of disciplines….at the edges where the lines are blurred, it is easier to imagine that the world might be different’ (Bateson, 1989, p. 73). Indeed, this potential for creativity might be seen as a key characteristic of this area of investigation given that there is not just one criminology but, arguably, many criminologies. Yet despite the presence of these criminologies, one version dominates; positivist criminology (Young, 2011). At a moment of global challenge, such a meeting place of disciplines, like criminology, might be thought of as the place in which to look for different and imaginative responses to meet the challenges being faced. Indeed, criminologists have not been slow to offer comment on, and analyses of, the likely effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on crime and criminal behaviour.

From March 2020 onward a wide range of data and papers have been published (frequently open access) providing an evidence base for a considerable number of claims concerning the impact the pandemic was having, or might have, on crime of all kinds. For example, an early Policy Brief (published in March 2020 by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime) set the tone for some of the work that followed. This brief entitled, ‘Crime and Contagion: The Impact of a Pandemic on Organized Crime’ was far reaching in its focus commenting on the constraints and the opportunities for further exploitation of those already vulnerable to organised crime and the virus effects that might ensue in worsening those vulnerabilities. Cybercrime, trafficking of all kinds, the consequent effects of lockdowns, are all mentioned. This brief also spoke of the problematic consequences of possible social disorder and associated questions of legitimacy posed for criminal justice professionals because of pandemic-imposed restrictions on behaviour. In this work, seen through the concept of contagion, gender receives not one mention as a lens through which some of this crime related and virus generated contagion might be understood. Other work has followed in this vein desperately seeking data on which to make predictive claims for the virus effects on crime. In the rush for these claims to be heard, much of this work, when read closely, is necessarily replete with caveats since, at a minimum, predicting trends from time limited data is not to be recommended. Yet the temptation of prediction to inform criminal justice policy remains clear.

The purpose of this paper is to subject these criminologically informed interventions on the impact of the pandemic on crime to closer scrutiny with a particular emphasis on the different ways in which these interventions cast light on the gendered nature of crime, its violence(s), and the current state of criminology. To do so the paper falls into four parts. The first considers the impact of pandemic as a crime-consequent externality. The second considers the impact of the pandemic as a criminological-consequent internality. An analysis of these two responses through a gendered lens comprises part three of this paper. In conclusion, the paper draws out the implications of this analysis for criminology’s future(s) and its associated nomos (Morrison, 2015). It revisits the case made some time ago by Smart (1990) that criminology needs feminism more than feminism needs criminology.

The pandemic as an externality: Criminology as social experiment

On 17 December 2020, Nobel Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz gave the inaugural distinguished public lecture at the Centre of Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash University. In that lecture, he referred to the pandemic as an externality (in economic terms) which afforded the social sciences the opportunity of the kind of social experiment like those conducted in the natural science disciplines. The desire to emulate the natural sciences in terms of methodology and a search for knowledge tested along the same lines as that produced in the natural sciences, has always had a presence in criminology. Here the voice and influence of experimental criminology is undoubtedly influential. The Journal of Experimental Criminology (now in its 17th year) is dedicated to this genre of work. For some this work represents the epitome of an ideal science and is best equipped to inform policy.

Indeed, of relevance to the concerns of this paper is the Minneapolis Experiment conducted on the use of arrest for incidents of domestic abuse. This experiment was transformational in terms of policing policy in relation to domestic abuse in the United States and elsewhere (Goodmark, 2015). And as Koehler and Smith (2021, p. 210) state, ‘Within a few short years, Minneapolis had been refashioned into criminology’s bridgehead for an Experimenting Society’ despite the evidenced unintended consequences of this kind of work (see McCord, 2003 and in relation to domestic abuse see Goodmark, 2018; Walklate and Fitz-Gibbon, 2018). Yet the spirit of experimentation and its associated natural scientific aspirations in engaging with and informing policy remains. Indeed, the approach suggested by Stiglitz bears a striking similarity with the language deployed by several renowned criminologists in their early interventions on the crime implications of the global pandemic. Two of these interventions will be reviewed here: Miller and Blumstein (2020) and Stickle and Felson (2020).

Miller and Blumstein (2020) offer a national (U.S.) agenda for understanding how this ‘real world’ moment provides the opportunity to test criminological theories and concepts. For these authors, the key concepts to be tested are contagion and containment. They make the interesting, (and likely) provocative observation for some politicians and practitioners, that this moment affords the opportunity to release those serving life sentences for non-violent drug related offences (where containment and contagion are likely to be interlinked). This group, comprising mostly older (male) inmates, and consequently less of a risk in terms of crime to the wider public, might be part of an experimental policy response justifiable under the current circumstances. In other respects, they recommend a cautious exploration of the kinds of crime changes occurring during the pandemic given the well-known difficulties of claiming long-term trends from short-term data findings. For these authors the social conditions of the pandemic, as providing the opportunity to test theories in ‘experimental’ terms, are taken as given.

In the second paper, Stickle and Felson (2020) are more explicit on the opportunity for criminological experiment afforded by the pandemic. Indeed, in their opening sentence they state:

We believe the scope and nature of crime changes during the COVID-19 crisis will become a proving ground for the many theories that attempt to explain the etiology of criminal behavior. In the end, this naturally occurring experiment will advance our knowledge of crime and human behavior as no other event has ever done during the era in which criminological data were widely available. (Stickle and Felson, 2020, p. 528)

Citing the 2020 pandemic as the ‘largest criminological experiment in history’ (Stickle and Felson, 2020, p. 534), they make the case that this is the moment in which rational choice theory and routine activity theory will be established as the theoretical and conceptual frameworks standing the test of this time. They develop a criminological agenda extolling analyses which are data-driven, crime-specific, place-based and time contextualised. In so doing, they (rather like Miller and Blumstein, 2020) review a range of early studies on the impact that shelter-in-place/stay-at-home directives have had on crime (many of which, conducted in early 2020, offer different findings, see Walklate et al., 2020) and go on to say that:

The data and opportunities before every criminologist will provide near-endless research opportunities at levels never before possible, and every effort should be made to capture data and promote the study of crime. (Miller and Blumstein, 2020, p. 536)

Both papers reference the potential for rates of domestic abuse to be differently affected because of pandemic related public health policies. Seen as ‘exceptional’ by Miller and Blumstein, it is interesting to note that in their discussion of containment, the home as a place of containment is rendered invisible. Importantly, there is only one reference in either of these papers to gender as a feature of crime and criminal behaviour (made by Stickle and Felson). Yet some time ago, Braithwaite (1989, p. 44) stated the first fact any theory of crime needed to fit was that crime is committed disproportionately by males following on from the observation made somewhat earlier by Wootton (1959, p. 32) that, ‘if men behaved like women the courts would be idle and the prisons empty’. Despite the absence of this criminological truism, the search for making policy recommendations in the two papers discussed above remains.

Despite the gendered absences in this work, there has been no shortage of data-driven work endeavouring to establish the impact of various lockdown strategies on domestic abuse (widely accepted as a gendered crime) and the extent to which this might be documented in policing and criminal justice statistics. Much of this work has to date, as illustrated in the two comprehensive reviews offered by Peterman et al. (2020a, 2020b), reached different conclusions regarding the impact of lockdowns on rates of domestic abuse as evidenced by criminal justice statistics (see also inter alia Boxall et al., 2020; Humphreys et al., 2020). Given the caveats expressed earlier about evidencing longer-term trends from short-term data, and the well-documented feminist informed work concerning the limitations of such data sources in relation to this crime, inconclusive findings in relation to administrative data at this juncture are perhaps not surprising. Other data, however, clearly paints a different story particularly in relation to the consequences of lockdown documented by the service sector (see inter alia, Carrington et al., 2020; Pfitzner et al., 2020).

In sum, this work cited above and taken to stand for mainstream positivist criminology is arguably indicative of how far this version of the discipline has yet to travel in appreciating the gendered nature of crime, the conceptual testing opportunities afforded by this moment of social experiment notwithstanding. Recently, Wakeman (2019, pp. 199–200) has offered a somewhat different take on what might count as an experimental agenda for criminology. He suggests that for us, as criminologists, to make best sense of our “data,” we need to ask ourselves three questions: who am I; why do I react in the way that I do; and what don’t I want to tell people about my work? He goes on to suggest that:

….this [starting point] is useful for two main reasons: (1) it can reveal new and interesting things about the subjects we study; and (2), it can provide a medium by which we can start to reform our field and challenge criminology’s ‘dominant gaze’ of the emotionally-detached scientist. (Wakeman, 2019, p. 201)

The ‘dominant gaze’ of the emotionally detached scientist referred to above nicely captures the essence of viewing the pandemic moment as an opportunity for the ‘largest criminological social experiment in history’ (Stickle and Felson, 2020): a statement astonishingly reminiscent of Rafter’s (2008) analysis of early criminology’s Lombrosian infused ‘darkest hour’ in which experimentation also featured. Wakeman’s (2019) observations raise important questions about the way in which mainstream criminology and criminologists see themselves and their discipline. By implication, this view leads neatly into a consideration of the extent to which this pandemic moment engenders the potential for the discipline to ask questions about its capacity, as a rendezvous subject comprising diverse criminologies, to be creative (qua Bateson, 1989). In other words, the opportunity is clearly present to reflect on the crime related consequences of the global pandemic as an internal criminological dilemma. Asking this kind of question, whatever version of criminology is subscribed to, demands a deep embrace of the observations made by Wootton (1959) and Braithwaite (1989) referred to above.

The global pandemic as an internality: Experimenting with criminology

Reflecting on the questions raised by the crime related consequences of the global pandemic for criminology as an internality has several dimensions to it all of which are largely hidden by the nature of the dominant gaze of mainstream criminology. One place to start might be with the recent intervention of Wakeman (2019). He, along with others in the edited collection by Hviid-Jacobsen and Walklate (2019), raised the question of the discipline’s relationship with feelings. This is not the first collection to do this but revisiting how and under what condition feelings count, who do they count for, when and how reminds us that feelings matter. Compare and contrast the work of Katz (1988) with that of Felson (1994) in how they each address emotions as just one example of how they matter. Indeed, passion is clearly embedded in the papers reviewed above. Feelings are clearly differently centred in different criminological theories and draw our attention to different crimes and different victims and offenders in a variety of ways. Feelings also inform what we study and how we study it. Thus, the failure to recognise the ways in which the work we do is infused with emotion impacts upon that work in all kinds of ways. However, in putting feelings in the foreground, the discipline is very quickly sucked into a range of other tricky issues largely been taken for granted by the dominant gaze of criminological work. This dominant gaze, and its associated aspirations for experimentation resonant with the work of the natural sciences, has been labelled by Morrison (2015) as the nomos of criminology.

Morrison (2015) identifies four domain assumptions constituting this ‘nomos’. These are: liberalism; northern theorising; nature blindness and gender blindness. Elsewhere Young (2011, p. 80) has articulated in some detail the powerful influence of what he called the ‘bogus of positivism’ as a key feature of the dominant gaze of the discipline. Much of this work has emanated from the United States where, as Young (2011, p. 80) observes, the ‘most influential criminology is generated by the most atypical society’ and is currently meeting with resistance in the increasing presence of southern criminological voices (see inter alia Carrington et al., 2018). Morrison (2015) pushes this geographical contextual critique further by suggesting that the projection of US liberal values across the globe during the Cold War, particularly in relation to liberalism and its associated values, secured U.S. empire building, not by physical force and/or the presence of conventional weapons, but intellectually. This equates with the nomothetic impulse (Young’s, 2011); ways of doing criminology that became centrally valued within the discipline. Importantly, this intellectual empire building is saturated with northern theorising (Connell, 2007) characterised by Occidentalism (defined by Cain, 2000 as a presumption of cultural sameness), and epistemic and democratic thinking framing by this intellectual hegemony (De Sousa Santos, 2014).

The four domain assumptions depicted by Morrison (2015) are intrinsically interconnected through Cartesian thinking and assume a particular relationship between society and nature. So, for example, within this nomos Indigenous understandings of the human–environment nexus are denied and by implication the kind of sexual science (the 19th century ‘scientific’ construction of female inferiority) articulated some time ago by Eagle Russett (1989) is also deeply embedded. Escaping the powerful clutches of this nomos demands a different way of thinking and doing criminology. It also demands a serious commitment to reflexivity (qua Wakeman, 2019, among many others). Recently, some of the disciplinary work necessary to chart this dominant gaze has been put on the agenda by Carrington and Hogg (2017) and Carrington et al. (2018). In this work, they develop the case for Southern criminology as a metaphor through which to harness both the critique and the imagination offered by different ways of thinking and doing the discipline, the already existing different criminologies notwithstanding. Indeed, some of the work underpinning the development of this metaphor has been clearly influenced by a range of feminist and Indigenous informed ways of thinking and working. However, the questions posed for the discipline in rendering the gender-blindness of its nomos visible have had a longer presence than that found within this southern agenda, and have posed internal questions for the discipline for some time. It is to these internal disciplinary questions this paper now turns.

Criminology, gender and the global pandemic.

The focus on gender is key in binding different feminist perspectives on crime and criminal victimisation together (Dekeseredy, 2016). However, despite the significant presence and contribution of feminist informed work to criminology (and victimology) since the 1970s, both areas remain gender-blind (Belknap, 2015; Fitz-Gibbon and Walklate, 2018). This gender-blindness can be differently configured as female invisibility, privileging men, or a combination of these two. Nevertheless, the dominant gaze of the discipline, in particular, remains untouched by a feminist informed world view. As Morrison (2015) might say, the disciplinary nomos remain intact. The influence of this disciplinary blindness can be traced throughout the substantive concerns of the discipline and is present in different ways in the different criminologies that can be found there.

For example, Froestad et al. (2015), in offering an historical analysis of criminology’s relationship with security, suggested the discipline’s core concern was with ‘hitting and taking’ and this underpinned the discipline’s focus on ‘freedom from interpersonal harms’ (Froestad et al., 2015, p. 177). It is difficult to dispute such a Hobbesian framing especially in the context of the kind of work under the microscope here. As Walklate et al. (2019) argue, this articulation as to what might count as security has, within the discipline of criminology, proceeded as if public freedom from interpersonal harms (like, for example, terrorism) trumps private freedom from interpersonal harms (like, for example, domestic abuse). Following this line of argument, this focus has contributed to the disciplinary attention paid to terrorists, especially those of the ‘lone wolf’ variety, as if the evidenced interconnections between their recourse to violence in private as well as in public, were separate and separable (see also McCulloch et al., 2019; Smith, 2019). These separations, or silo thinkings, have important consequences for how the discipline defines the what, how and why of the issues studied. So much so Iratzoqui and McCutcheon (2018, p. 147) have suggested:

Within criminological research, domestic violence has been treated as a separate entity, because domestic violence is largely seen as a “uniquely female” phenomena, since females are overwhelmingly the victims of this form of violence, especially over time.

(See also Sechrist and Weil, 2017, on the interconnections between domestic abuse offenders and offending behaviour more generally.) At the same time, this silo thinking co-exists with a large body of work that not only demonstrates domestic abuse is gendered (for a review, see Fitz-Gibbon and Walklate, 2018, chapter 4), gendered violence(s) transgress and blur the boundaries of war-time, peace-time and post-conflict societies (Barberet, 2014), and those who commit violence(s) against each other are also those who commit violence(s) against their (female) partners. As Connell (2016, p. 15) has eloquently stated, patriarchal social relations remain a telling backcloth permeating;

Not just a power-oriented masculinity but also a cultivated callousness is involved in organizing abductions of girls, suicide bombings, beheadings, and mass addiction. It seems close to the callousness involved in drone strikes, mass sackings, structural adjustment programmes, nuclear armaments, and the relentless destruction of our common environment.

None of the above is intended to imply that researchers within the discipline have not concerned themselves with the gendered consequences of violence in all its forms. They clearly have.

An early intervention on violence(s) in relation to the pandemic was offered by Eisner and Nivette (2020). Their policy brief outlines the urgent questions for research in relation to violence and includes domestic abuse. This report offers some detail on the likely consequences of lockdowns and other policy responses to the pandemic noting the potential for increased pressures to ensue on family relationships because of financial strains, increased time together and so on. Interestingly, the term gender is absent in their overview of these consequences both in relation to family life and in their overview of the possibility of increased tensions between states. Yet at the same time this work clearly commits to violence as being a problem of signal importance. However, where is the work from Brownmiller (1975) to Wiener (2010), and many others in between and since, who have already and consistently told the story that this signal problem is a problem largely associated with the handiwork of men? This is more than a question of language and/or terminology. In essence, the issue is that if gender were centred in making sense of the range of violence(s)/hitting and taking which pre-occupy the discipline in all of its forms, it would start in a different conceptual and methodological place (see also Jamieson, 2014). Such ‘starting in a different place’ is evident in a wide range of feminist informed work addressing the gendered and violent consequences of the global pandemic. This work demonstrates that there is more at stake here than ‘simply’ the tensions between positivism and constructivism (Rocque and Posick, 2017).

Since the purpose of this paper is to consider what the discipline might learn from this pandemic moment, and in keeping with the practice so far of using particular work as illustrative of a wider approach, the work drawn on here is from a team of researchers emanating from the Center for Global Development. Working Paper 528 offered by Peterman et al. (2020b) provides some insight into what feminist-informed work in relation to the violent consequences of the global pandemic might look like and stands in contrast to the work discussed above.

Starting from a base of what is already known about the impact of epidemics and other disasters has on violence against women and children, this report charts nine pathways in which the contemporary global pandemic may further impact upon women and children. This starting point reveals several things. Women and children are foregrounded as the most likely victims and men as the most likely perpetrators. It forges links and interconnections with what is already known about the perpetration of such violence(s) in peace and in conflict situations. It is in essence inter-disciplinary cutting across boundaries and drawing on literature in health, psychology, sociology as well as criminology. It articulates a conceptual agenda emanating from feminist informed work (deploying for example, Stark’s (2007) concept of coercive control as one way to understand the impact of stay at home/quarantine). It recommends innovative methods for exploring the efficacy of policy responses recognising the limitations (both ethical and otherwise) of the random controlled experiment. In essence, this approach is not concerned to establish whether violence against women (and children) will be a problem. Existing work demonstrates that it is and will be. The task is to appreciate its extent and what it is that can be done about it (see also Wilson, 1983). Gender is referenced 67 times in this report. To summarise, Peterman et al. (2020b) take gender as a central concept, deploy gendered concepts to make sense of already existing data patterns, suggest innovative methods sensitive to gender, and provide a gender informed policy agenda in the light of this work. Some criminologies already do this kind of work (for a pandemic and violence related example, see Sanchez Parra, 2020). However, the dominant gaze that is ‘Criminology’ also might want to reflect on this kind of work.

Conclusion: Lessons for a post pandemic criminology?

To be explicit, all the work discussed above is concerned with influencing the public domain. In reflecting upon the current global moment, the question remains, however, what kind of criminological informed work might be best to assert such an influence. Miller (2021, p. 98), in writing on violence more generally, suggests

If we can find ways of persuading the public that expenditure on the overseas repressive state apparatus is wasteful, that academic knowledge can be valuable, that religion is obsessed with power and control, and that hegemonic masculinity has been bad for the vast majority of people, then violence can indeed be reduced. (Miller, 2021, p. 98)

This might be one place to start. For the dominant gaze of criminology, the concerns presented in this paper certainly demand some reflective thought on how the discipline does its work, and based on that, what kind of engagement it might reasonably expect with the wider public noting that neither of these issues will take the same shape or form everywhere. These kinds of observation inexorably lead to a consideration of what kind of criminology constitutes a public criminology.

Returning to the role of feelings with which some of this discussion has been concerned, the blurring of the boundaries between facts and values seen as separate and separable within much liberal (positivist) criminology, is one of the sticky issues facing the discipline (see also Turner, 2013). Blaustein (2017) has suggested one test that could be applied to criminological work emanating to meet its public role is a test of reasonableness. This would seek for such work to be held to account by ourselves and others on behalf of the beneficiaries of such work. The extent to which such a test might unsettle the embedded liberal project of the discipline is perhaps moot. However, Blaustein (2017) also suggests that criminologists ‘fly economy’. Elsewhere I have argued that, ‘This implies setting aside the discipline’s imperialist ambitions and the concepts and methods informing them. Setting aside implies creating space not abandonment’ (Walklate, 2018, p. 630). In a world in which concepts, policies and ideas travel the globe at speed, often out of context, and sometimes even without supporting evidence, it might we worth adding to this the recommendation that we ‘see the world glancingly, out of the corner of one’s eye, with an awareness that the most important action may take place out of frame and out of focus’ (Ferrell, 2014, p. 227). This view

 … also offers an exciting agenda for the future particularly if such ‘seeing’ encourages the discipline to loosen the shackles of positivism and its imperialist ambitions, characterised by the deep embrace of Northern theorising. Having once seen these issues … for me they cannot be unseen. (Walklate, 2018, p. 630)

It is a view which centres gender as a structuring dimension of crime, victimisation, punishment, policy, the criminological profession and so on. Of course, gender is not the only structuring variable. That all of these have ethnic, racial, class, cultural and indigenous dimensions is acknowledged. In a short paper of this kind, justice cannot be done to all of these variables. Here I have consciously and deliberately focused on gender since that variable (along with social class) has structured my own living and being as a criminologist.

The vision of a public criminology proposed here resonates with that of O’Neill and Seal (2012). Their vision has four nodes. These are: become familiar with the unfamiliar and be unfamiliar with the familiar; seek connections and cross disciplinary boundaries; think, listen, and see consciously implying the use of multi-sensory and innovative methods; keep the dialogue open to challenge stereotypes and create spaces for those who would otherwise be silenced (see also Ferrell, 2017). Walklate (2019) added two further nodes to these four; stay attuned to the role of the emotional whether working on policy, with marginal groups, and/or as an invited expert; and pay attention to time. The question of time is particularly pertinent to pandemic criminology.

The rush to make a case for the social experimental moment of the global pandemic and the assertions which have accompanied this work are product of their time. Rapid research produces rapid results and feeds into a rapidly changing policy framework. This is fast criminology. The dilemmas posed by a fast or slow criminology have been alluded to by Nancy Wonders (2016, p. 202). Here she states:

Neoliberal forms have transformed nation-states and legal orders in the West to facilitate the production of ‘just-in-time justice’ – the increasingly flexible and fluid character of law, order, and power.

Her concern is with the impact that the presumptions of neo-liberal fluidity has had on creating states of exception but arguably the same kind of ‘just-in-time’ justice/policy responses are to be found in the mundane and ordinary: policy response to gendered violence(s). For example, the speed with which something like the Minneapolis Experiment travelled the globe even in the 1980s (in the absence of any evidence as to its effectiveness in different parts of the world) has been telling in both its intended and unintended consequences. However, a slow criminology might not rush to engage in social experimentation but might take more time to reflect and see the value in transgressing disciplinary borders (qua Peterman et al., 2020b). Being a discipline borne at the crossroads and comprising different voices it is well equipped to do this.

The view implied here is that much mainstream (liberal positivist) criminological work erases the complexity of human life and relationships and it does so by erasing the emotional, spatial and time dynamics in which we all live. Now might be the apposite moment for the discipline to dig deep (to use Wakeman’s term) and grapple with the different ways in which the complexities of real life, permeated as they are by gender (and a range of other structural dynamics), can be better taken account of in doing criminology and the policy agendas that ensue. Of course, some of this kind of work is happening but it has yet to permeate the dominant gaze. To paraphrase Smart (1990), the pandemic may now be the time in which criminology needs (Southern) feminism more than feminism needs criminology, for feminism to be no longer regarded as the stranger within the discipline.