This paper examines the variety of ways in which African women in the criminal justice system are treated as offenders when they are clearly innocent. Their treatment is compared with that of African men and white women and is situated in the history of slavery and colonialism. It is proposed that African women are relatively vulnerable to `victimisationas-mere-punishment' because they are marginalised in the articulation, re-articulation and disarticulation of race-gender-class relations. In the paper, all people of African descent would be simply referred to as Africans.
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