Looking to Critical Criminology to Centre Gender and Violence Against Women in State Crime Studies

Abstract

The state is over-represented as a perpetrator of violence against women, yet it receives little attention in the state crime/crimes of the powerful literature. In line with the goal of this special issue, the focus here will be to introduce state-perpetrated gender-based violence and demonstrate the utility of including gender as an analytic concept for understanding the pervasive and prolonged harms perpetrated by states that disproportionately harm women and girls. Furthermore, I argue for a more integrative approach to the study of state crime/crimes of the powerful, to better include other innovative critical criminological approaches such as queer perspectives, rural criminology, and more in-depth race analysis to mention but a few.