Gender, Power and Criminalisation

Abstract

In his seminal text Power, Crime and Mystification (Box 1983), Steven Box engages in a detailed examination of women’s experiences of crime and harm, both as victims of interpersonal violence and of economic, political, and social marginalisation. In tying the latter to explanations of women’s criminality, Box examines the applicability of a range of theoretical assumptions to ‘female crime’. A particular feature of his work that we value, and seek to replicate in our own, is the detailed consideration of a wide range of empirical sources. Drawing on our own approach to analysis and empirical evidence on two projects involving narrative work with criminalised women (Clarke et al. 2017; Clarke and Chadwick 2020; Clarke and Leah, 2023), framed clearly by the lens of the process of criminalisation, we reflect on Box’s contribution, particularly around revealing harms of the powerful, alongside our own attempts to examine issues of power. We consider how rather than viewing powerlessness as a causal feature of criminality, it is the unequal power to criminalise some girls and women that offers the most value for contemporary critical and interventionist social research that seeks to make sense of gender, power, and criminalisation.