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Feminist Approaches to Criminological Research

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 Sydney Law School

Legal Studies Research Paper

No. 10/36

April 2010

Feminist Approaches to Criminological

Research
Gail Mason & Julie Stubbs

This paper can be downloaded without charge from the

Social Science Research Network Electronic Library
at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1597469.

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1597469

 Feminist Approaches to Criminological Research
Gail Mason and Julie Stubbs
Forthcoming in Gadd, D., Karstedt, S., and Messner, S. (eds) Criminological Research Methods, Sage
UK.

Abstract

In this chapter we argue that there is no orthodox methodology in feminist criminology. Rather,
there are a series of methodological preferences that feminists adopt as a means of pursuing
research questions inspired by: the insights of gender theory; the need for social change; the
advances made by post-positivist epistemologies; the importance of experience in understanding
crime and justice and; a commitment to breaking down the power relations inherent in research
through processes of reflexivity. We provide an overview of approaches to research favoured by
feminist criminologists. In order to highlight on-going debates and emerging themes in feminist
methodology we focus on research that investigates violence against women. Four themes are
featured: intersectionality; the victim/agent dichotomy; integrity and analysis and; the ‘textual turn’
in research. We flesh out these themes through two cases studies based on our own research on
violence against Filipino women and homophobic violence against women.

Key words: feminist criminology; feminist methodology; feminist research in crime; qualitative
research; feminist epistemology; violence; victims; intersectionality; post-positivism

INTRODUCTION
There is no orthodoxy to feminist research methods in criminology. Rather than adherence
to particular methods, feminist research is better characterised as arising from
methodological and ethical concerns related to theory, ontology (beliefs about the nature of
the world) and epistemology (theories of knowledge), and to political engagement.
Feminist work from the outset has been deeply concerned with methodological issues. It
has been open to innovative approaches to research and to deploying established methods
in new ways. Feminist criminological approaches commonly have a concern with the
production and authorising of knowledge, and with questions such as: who can know, what
counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts? While some of these concerns may be
shared by other critical approaches to criminology, feminist research is typically marked by a
concern with social relations as organized by reference to sex/gender. These issues have
implications for the choice of methods but there is no necessary link between a feminist
approach and a particular method.

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1597469

Theoretical developments in feminist criminology have begun to permeate mainstream
criminology (the concept of intersectionality is a good example), and the benefits of
research methodologies favoured by feminist criminologists are gradually being recognized
by other streams of criminology; for instance, feminist approaches have re-shaped
developments in victimology (Walklate, 2007). Carol Smart (2009) argues with respect to
sociology, that feminist methodologies have come to provide a foundation for innovative
research and for highlighting the importance of theoretically informed research. However,
feminist research continues to be given scant attention in many methodological texts within
criminology. Feminist criminology is committed to an interdisciplinary approach that
employs blended research methods. Like all feminist research, feminist criminology is ‘in a
state of constant challenge and continual reformulation’ that makes it ‘its own most
trenchant critic’ (Smart 2009: 296).

We begin with an overview of feminist criminology, identifying selected methodological

features that are characteristic of a feminist approach to research. We flag key debates and
emerging themes related to feminist research on violent victimization. We have selected
four themes for more detailed examination: the challenge of intersectional work; moving
beyond the victim/agent dichotomy; the integrity of the research process in the
interpretation and analysis of research data; and, the implications of the so called ‘textual
turn’. We demonstrate the challenges of engaging with these issues through case studies
based on our own research.

OVERVIEW
Mainstream criminology has focused on producing an etiological, explanatory approach to
crime, charting the patterns of crime and monitoring the practices of police, courts and
corrections towards improving the efficiency and effectiveness of criminal justice
(Gelsthorpe, 2002). Criminology has largely sought to do this through empirical inquiry and
the development of theoretical frameworks grounded in this inquiry. Feminist criminology
of the 1970s and 1980s sought to address two main problems with this criminological
enterprise: neglect of women in the study of crime; and distorted, stereotyped and one-
dimensional accounts of women’s offending and consequent problems in the management

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1597469

of female crime within the criminal justice system (Gelsthorpe, 2002; Morris, 1987; Smart,
1976; Heidensohn, 1985).

Under-representation of women and girls in official crime statistics made it easy to exclude
them from mainstream criminological theories, grounded in empirical research largely
conducted on male subjects and crime patterns. As Daly (forthcoming) notes, feminist
criminology identified a ‘generalizability problem’: so called general explanations of crime
were in fact theories about male offenders that were inappropriate and inadequate for
explaining criminal behaviour (or its absence) amongst women and girls. Distorted accounts
of women’s experiences of crime were the product of stereotypes about female psychology
and behaviour, and traditional gender-role expectations that led to assumptions about
‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ behaviour for women (Gelsthorpe, 2002). Early feminist criminology
worked to expose the influence of these stereotypes on criminal justice policy and practice,
and within attempts to explain crime committed by, and towards women. It has also been
associated with calls to work beyond the limitations of criminology (Cain, 1990).

Building on this critique, feminist criminology began to investigate the absence of gender
theory in the study of crime as a whole. Male offending was too often analysed without an
adequate investigation of the relationship between crime and masculinity. This evolved into
a focus on crime as a way of ‘doing masculinity’ (Messerschmidt, 1993). As critiques
emerged (Collier, 1998), ‘doing gender’ developed into more nuanced accounts of
‘situated/structured action’ (Miller, 2002) and the idea of ‘gendered lives’ shaping offending
and non-offending behaviour (see Daly, forthcoming).

From the 1980s, more analyses emerged of the differences not just between women and
men but also between women of different circumstances and cultures. Daly (forthcoming)
observes that an appreciation, led by Black feminist thought, of the intersectionality of
gender, class and race allowed for more varied and divergent understandings of female
experiences of crime, as victims and offenders. In the 1990s, some feminist criminologists
started to draw upon the postmodern trend in wider feminist theory of ‘deconstructing’ the
traditional sex/gender distinction with a view to highlighting the discursively constructed
and performative nature of gender identity (Daly, forthcoming). Together with a

3
postmodern scepticism about ‘grand theories’ and definitive, linear and causal explanations
for human behaviour, with crime no exception, this led some feminist theorists to suggest
that the notion of a single feminist criminology is neither theoretically possible nor
politically desirable.

In summary, feminist criminological approaches have sought to: bring the specific
experiences and representations of women into focus as victims, offenders and agents in
the criminal justice system, whilst remaining attuned to multiple and sometimes
contradictory ways in which gender interacts with other aspects of identity; critique and
reform the processing of women within the criminal justice system; draw upon the insights
of gender theory to challenge and reconstruct theories of crime and the model of social
science through which criminological knowledge is produced.

This scholarship would not have been possible without the leadership of early feminists who
challenged both dominant and emerging radical criminological perspectives for failing to
attend to gender, and participated in debates that contributed to feminist developments in
criminology and beyond (Carlen 1983; Chesney-Lind 1986; Heidensohn 1985; Klein, 1973;
Smart 1976;). Nor would it have been possible if some criminologists had not taken up the
feminist challenge to develop new research methodologies. The theories used, the
questions asked, the subjects studied and the data gathered required feminist criminologists
to look beyond the disciplinary boundaries of criminology for inspiration and practical
advice. Initially, they found guidance in the burgeoning field of feminist methodology and
epistemology that was influencing many disciplines across the sciences and humanities
(Harding, 1987; Stanley and Wise, 1983). As fracture lines started to appear in
methodological praxis, feminist criminologists began to draw from a larger pool of
methodological resources, including reinventing approaches favoured by various forms of
traditional criminology such as ethnography, qualitative interviews or crime victimization
surveys and using quantitative methods in a more considered way (Kelly, 1990; Gelsthorpe
1990).

Given the dynamic and multi-faceted nature of feminism, it should come as no surprise that
there is little agreement on epistemological questions of how, and what kind of, feminist

4
knowledge should be produced. Over the last forty years, debates about ways of creating
knowledge and doing research have produced multiple methodological loyalties and
options. With an eye to these methodological issues, Sandra Harding (1987) grouped
feminist thinking in the social sciences according to three broad epistemological
orientations: feminist empiricism, standpoint feminism and postmodern feminism.

Within criminology, feminist empiricism describes research that focuses on the production
of data about women in order to analyse women’s victimization, criminality and
engagement with the criminal justice system. The assumption is that such knowledge will
bring greater objectivity to criminological theory and research that prioritises men.
Empirical research of this nature attempts to improve criminology as a science by adding
women but without questioning the underlying assumptions of positivism and the
hypothetico-deductive model of science which it favours (Naffine, 1997). Such empirical
research continues to make an important contribution to knowledge within feminist
criminology and recent work has often been responsive to criticisms of earlier empiricism.

One of the most significant challenges to this understanding of knowledge has been the
development of feminist standpoint epistemology (Harding, 1987). Borrowing from Marx
and Hegel, this approach prioritises women’s views of the world and was quickly expanded
to the idea of a woman’s standpoint (Harding, 1987) or a Black feminist standpoint (Collins,
1990). Standpoint epistemology treats women’s experiences as the foundation for feminist
knowledge. In some versions of standpoint epistemology, research that commences from
this marginalized social position is ‘scientifically preferable’ because it originates in, and is
tested against, a ‘more complete and less distorting kind of social experience’ (Harding
1987: 184). Critics argue that this epistemological position reduces women’s experience to a
universal and essential benchmark that is incapable of deconstructing the power relations
embedded in criminology’s truth claims, or, of adequately accounting for differences of
race, ethnicity, sexuality and the like (Cain, 1990; Naffine, 1987).

Feminist postmodernism is a broad term that includes feminist approaches that are
influenced by postmodern or poststructural theory (such as by Derrida or Foucault). It

5
rejects the positivist claim that research can produce a universal, objective and certain
account of the social world and the standpoint assertion that experience is a preferred
origin for the production of knowledge. Instead, it argues that ‘reality’, subjectivity and
‘truth’ are constructed and produced through discourse, power and knowledge (such as
legal, criminological, scientific or artistic discourses). This sometimes focuses on
deconstructing the binary oppositions that profoundly shape human knowledge
(mind/body, male/female, masculinity/femininity, black/white, heterosexual/homosexual,
agent/victim etc). An influential body of feminist thinkers have applied this strong version of
constructionism to reinvent the sex/gender distinction as a matter of corporeality and
performativity (Butler, 1990). This has been picked up by a number of feminist researchers
on crime (Howe, 1994; Mason, 2002; Naffine, 1997; Young, 1996). For example, Carol Smart
proposed the idea of the ‘woman of legal discourse’, arguing that ‘*w+oman is a gendered
subject position which legal discourse brings into being’ (1992: 34).

It is helpful to identify the differences between these epistemological positions but we

should not see them as either chronological stages or as mutually exclusive. Feminist
criminological research has become so diverse and flexible - with individual researchers
often employing a combination of different methodological approaches within and between
studies – that it is difficult for such classifications to do justice to the richness of this
scholarship. It is more helpful to think of feminist research in criminology as involving a
series of key methodological preferences, or imperatives, that shape how we design,
implement and analyse research. Feminist research has few essential ingredients but,
rather, engages with the epistemological issues discussed above while not being determined
by them. These preferences, in turn, influence how we anticipate the results of our research
could, or should, be applied in practice. While some of these preferences are unique to
feminist research (such as the commitment to a gendered analysis), others are shared by
related criminological approaches (such as critical criminology) or adapted from fields
outside criminology. Feminist research is thus a question of process rather than simply one
of definition: it is not just what we do but how we do it that makes a project feminist. Below
we describe and explain these preferences.

6
Feminist/Gender Theory
One defining characteristic of feminist criminological research is an engagement with
feminist theory. Although there is no single approach to feminist theorising, and studies
vary in how much emphasis they give to feminist theory, it is difficult to see how research
can be feminist without some commitment to feminist thinking. However, the fact that a
project has an analysis of sex/gender differences is not sufficient to make it feminist. The
subject matter and research questions of a feminist approach are informed by, and
sympathetic to, feminist theory as an account of sex/gender as an organising principle and
power relation in social life (Daly, forthcoming; Gelsthorpe, 2002: 135). This doesn’t mean
that feminist research only uses feminist theory; it brings a feminist sensibility to bear upon
a variety of theories from within and outside criminology. Developments in feminist
theorising have had important implications for research methodology, and research findings
and political activism have also shaped feminist theorising.

Over time feminist theory has developed a deeper and more complex engagement with
gender relations, moving from a focus on patriarchy to a more differentiated understanding
of power and beyond a dichotomous conception of gender, and also undertaking a critical
examination of masculinity (Daly, forthcoming; Gelsthorpe, 2002). Contemporary feminist
projects commonly analyse and interpret sex/gender as a relation of power that operates
across multiple levels and sites including individual, structural and discursive levels, and
intersects with other axes of power (see Intersectionality below). Kathy Daly makes the
point that ‘*f+ew feminist scholars are interested to devise a grand theory of crime’
(forthcoming: 232) because they recognize that offending behaviour is a social construct
that is shaped by multiple, shifting and context-dependent variables.

More complex conceptions of sex/gender have offered challenges for researchers, and
perhaps more so for researchers who rely exclusively on quantitative methods; sex/gender
cannot be adequately captured as a trait, or variable, and researchers need to engage with
the meanings of social processes and interactions (Daly, forthcoming). Mixed method
approaches, drawing from both qualitative and quantitative methods, may address these
concerns although care must be taken in attempting to integrate approaches that have
inconsistent epistemological foundations (Tashakkori and Tedlie, 2008).

7
Experience
For theoretical, epistemological and political reasons, feminist research has emphasized
women’s experiences as a subject of research, and a source of knowledge. It typically links
individual or micro level experience with gendered power relations at the macro level.
Giving voice to women has been associated with democratising research, validating women
and acknowledging women’s agency, redressing their absence from criminology and
criminological analysis, recognizing the private sphere, challenging universal criminological
accounts and offering a more complete account of social relations. Experience is given
greatest emphasis within standpoint feminism which usually privileges qualitative methods.
Attention to women’s experience does not preclude an examination of men or masculinity,
nor does it preclude men conducting research within a feminist framework (Collier, 1998).

In the 1970s and 1980s documenting women’s experiences of offences like domestic
violence and sexual assault was a focus of feminist research, commonly using methods such
as interviews based on convenience or purposive samples, and localised victimization
surveys. Much of this research and associated political activism emphasized the common
experiences of women. Critical reflection on the inadequacies of conventional research
methodologies and methods for such purposes shaped future developments in feminist
research and in criminology more generally such as the refinement of crime victimization
surveys (Walklate, 2007), approaches to evaluation (Griffiths and Hanmer, 2005), and
arguably the move towards mixed methods. Such research also opened up new areas of
enquiry and had a profound influence on criminal justice policy.

However, the role of experience, and especially the valorization of subjectivity became a
vexed issue for feminist researchers and has been debated from several perspectives.
Strong versions of standpoint feminism attracted criticism for seeming to endorse a singular
standpoint, imposing a false unity and failing to attend to differences between women
including but not limited to those of race, class and sexuality; for some the category
‘Woman’ became untenable. For instance, research about the experiences of lesbian (and
gay male) victims of intimate partner violence (Renzetti and Miles, 1996) challenged simple
dichotomous conceptions of sex/gender, and research concerning Black women’s

8
experiences exposed constructs such as Battered Women Syndrome as largely based on
white, middle class experience (Allard, 1991). From a different perspective Joan Scott has
critically examined the claim that experience might provide an ‘unassailable’ basis for
knowledge. In a more complex argument than can be summarised here, she observes that
when ‘meaning is taken as transparent’, experience ‘reproduces rather than contests given
ideological systems’ (1991: 778). For Scott ‘*i+t is not individuals who have experience, but
subjects who are constituted through experience’ (1991: 779); ‘*w+hat counts as experience
is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, and always therefore
political’ and thus ‘the discursive nature of experience’ needs critical analysis (1991: 797).

Such criticisms have encouraged ongoing reflection on how experience is used and
represented. Feminist research has responded by seeking to give richer accounts of
women’s experiences and differences, for instance, by using ethnographies (Maher, 1997),
life histories (Richie, 1996) and feminist pathways analysis (Daly, 1994), attending to the
gendered, situational contexts of violence (Miller, 2008), deploying constructs such as
intersectionality (Maher, 1997), and by analyzing how discourses constitute women (Young,
1996). We return to these issues below. Documenting women’s and girls’ experiences of
violence continues to be a significant concern, especially to highlight issues specific to
particular groups and to demonstrate failures in laws, policies and practices.

Social Change
A defining feature of feminism is a commitment to social change in the interests of women
(Gelsthorpe, 2002). Thus, feminist research is commonly seen as having political utility,
informing social change and social justice. However, together the focus on women’s
experiences and a preference for political engagement offers a profound challenge to
conventional ideas about value neutral research and objectivity (Harding, 1987). These
characteristics are consistent with aspects of other post-positivist research traditions
(Tashakkori and Tedlie, 2008; Mertens, 2008) and critical criminological approaches. A
feminist preference for consciously partial and purposive research projects does not signal a
departure from rigorous and sound methodology but may be entirely consistent with
effectively integrating theoretical, ethical, epistemological and methodological concerns.

9
This commitment to change tends to encourage certain research questions and topics: the
application of feminist theory to feminism’s preferred subject matter, women’s and girl’s
experiences, produces research questions that characterize feminist methodology. Asking
questions about women’s experiences of violence has been one of feminism’s major
contributions to criminal justice reform. A commitment to social change may also be
associated with allowing the perspectives of women, children or other marginalized groups
to be heard through research, and through linking research with practice and practitioners.
The feminist commitment to social change is sometimes incorporated directly into the
project in an ‘action research’ design. Haviland, Frye and Rajah ‘s study (2008) on the effects
of mandatory arrest was specifically designed to advocate change and affect policy on
domestic violence. The advocacy-researcher partnership technique they adopted sought to
move away from dispassionate observational methods typical in this area. Their project
approaches the task of data collection and research as an aspect of social action rather than
social study.

Post-Positivism
Scepticism amongst feminists about the capacity of criminology to deliver neutral or
universal accounts of crime has prompted a disavowal of positivist epistemology which
includes: a belief in the existence of a single reality; a conviction that value-free and
independent research is possible; a search for cause-and-effect relationships; and a belief in
the ability of research to generalize to the wider population (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). Like
other post-positivists, feminists acknowledge that research is influenced by the values of the
researcher and the theory that he/she uses and can ever only hope to represent a
constructed version of reality (Tashakkori and Teddlie, 2008). This has methodological
implications for research practice. Instead of undertaking quantitative analysis on large
datasets in order to test hypotheses derived from grand theories of crime, feminists have
favoured small-scale, qualitative studies and inductive modes of analysis. This preference is
apparent from an examination of the pages of the journal Feminist Criminology. The
majority of articles published since its inception employ comparable designs of qualitative
research including: i) a selection of samples drawn from volunteers; ii) use of semi-
structured interviews; and iii) coding of themes in interview transcripts by hand or by using
qualitative software.

10
In seeking to capture the dynamic, contradictory nature of experience, feminist
criminologists have also borrowed a range of qualitative methods from other disciplines
(such as oral history and ethnography) and engaged with objects of analysis (fiction, media
or photographic images) and/or modes of analysis (literary analysis or psychoanalysis) that
provide alternate cultural or experiential views of crime (Hollway and Jefferson, 2001;
Young, 1996). For example, adopting a psychoanalytic orientation, Robinson (2007) uses a
single-subject clinical case study to explore the subjective experiences of a ‘delinquent’
adolescent mother within a theoretical model that sees gender, race, trauma and power as
fluid and interwoven constructs. Treatment (including the exchange of emotion between
client and therapist) and treatment outcomes of this single case study are given policy
implications through extrapolation to ‘a larger population exhibiting similar constellations
of thoughts, feelings and behaviors’ (32).

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that feminist criminology is wedded to

qualitative research alone. Admittedly, in the beginning, the need to build a firm
epistemological foundation for feminist inquiry meant that quantitative research was often
viewed with suspicion or accompanied by an apology. Yet, the problem has never been with
quantitative research itself but rather with ‘insensitive quantification’ (Gelsthorpe, 1990:
91). While qualitative data gathering still dominates feminist criminology, increasingly we
see the use of innovative and careful statistical analysis to answer feminist-inspired
questions about crime (Griffiths and Hanmer, 2005). Recent examples include research on
attrition rates in sexual assault cases (Kelly, Lovett and Regan, 2005) and measuring the
costs of domestic violence (Stanko, 2001).

Reflexivity and Power

Feminism’s sensitivity to questions of power and experience extends beyond the research
subject to the researcher herself. One hallmark of feminist methodology is a commitment to
acknowledging and breaking down the power relations that operate between the
researcher and her participants. Reflexivity describes research that attempts to: i) de-
objectify research participants by enabling them to have greater input into a research

11
project; and ii) consciously insert the researcher into the research process with the view to
producing a more honest, ethical and balanced form of knowledge. Reflexivity is one of the
means used by feminist criminologists to avoid the myth of objective and value-free
research. Although there are limits on the extent to which the power imbalance between
researcher and research participant can be neutralised, particular methods (usually
qualitative) are thought to be better at moderating and minimising this imbalance. For
example, the social change objectives of action research mean that it is geared towards
involving research subjects in project design and implementation (Gelsthorpe, 1990).
Something as simple as describing one’s research project in the first person can also remind
the writer and the reader that the research results are shaped by subjective decisions made
by the researcher at every step of the way (eg: ‘I chose to ask my research participants
questions about their perceptions of domestic violence education programs because I had
good reason to believe …’).

One of the complexities of breaking down the power relations in research has been the
question of ‘who speaks for whom?’ raised particularly by women of colour: for instance,
how can a privileged white, middle-class feminist academic hope to speak on behalf of a
disenfranchised, working-class, indigenous woman whose life has been deeply affected by
criminalization and/or victimization? Whilst distinctions between speaking ‘for’, speaking
‘about’ and speaking ‘with’ have consumed considerable feminist attention, the issue is
more helpfully approached, as noted by postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak (1988), as less
about who does the speaking and more about what we say, how we say it and who listens.

In summary, it is the preferences described above that make a project distinctly feminist or
give it a feminist ‘edge’. Criminological research that takes feminism seriously will most
likely address, or adopt, one or more of these features. We have chosen Lisa Maher’s study
(1997) of women’s lives in a Brooklyn drug market, below, as an exemplar of feminist
criminological research.

12
Sexed Work: Gender, Race and Resistance in a Brooklyn Drug Market by Lisa Maher
This study draws on criminology, anthropology and other disciplines. Maher locates the
women’s offending, and victimization, within the context of their lives and work in the
informal and formal economies, in sex work and drug markets. She pays careful attention to
women’s agency, while acknowledging the significant constraints on that agency. This is a
theoretically sophisticated study, using an intersectional approach that engages race,
gender and class, and works across levels connecting individual experience, with the
situational context and structural conditions. Maher demonstrates how structural
conditions and cultural narratives shape identities and reproduce inequalities. She uses
triangulated methods, giving a rich ethnographic account based on detailed observations,
interviews with a wide sample, and repeated interviews with a deep sample. She is
respectful of the research subjects and deeply reflexive, recognising the limits on claims of
allowing women to tell their stories since she is the author of the text.

EMERGENT THEMES & ON-GOING DEBATES: VIOLENCE AND VICTIMIZATION

In this section we draw out some themes that reflect recent trends, on-going debates or
conundrums for criminologists engaged in feminist research, with reference to feminist
research on violence. In the 1970s, the violent victimization of women became a focal point
of feminist politics, spawning a massive movement seeking to expose, challenge and
prevent men’s violence towards women and children, particularly domestic violence, rape
and child sexual assault. Much of this work was conducted at the ‘coal face’ of service
provision to women survivors of violence (eg: women’s refuges and rape crisis centres) but
quickly developed close and enduring ties with feminists in academia and government
agencies. The policy reforms and shifts in social attitudes that were sought called for new
theoretical and empirical knowledge on women and girl’s experiences of violence. Although
this concern was at odds with the ‘new criminology’ that was developing amongst left-
leaning critical criminologists (Carrington, 2008), feminist criminologists were insistent on
the need to develop a comprehensive and critical body of scholarship in this area of
victimology. This research has been highly influential in bringing visibility, and giving voice,
to women’s and girl’s experiences as the victims of violence, their treatment in the criminal

13
justice system and our understanding of these processes. It has changed the face of
criminology and the practices of the criminal justice system. Feminist scholarship on the
violent victimization of women and girls has also been at the forefront of methodological
innovation. On-going debates about how best to research and represent women as the
victims of violence have tapped into deeper theoretical and epistemological questions. The
following selected themes give some sense of the complexity of issues that are currently
leading methodological discussion in this area.

Intersectionality
Useful reviews of the call for an intersectional approach within criminology are provided by
Burgess-Proctor (2006) and Sokoloff and Dupont (2005) who apply intersectionality to
domestic violence. Intersectionality is a shorthand term that reflects the complexity of
experience and relations of power, especially but not limited to the intersection of gender,
race (and or ethnicity) and class. It recognizes that these relations are ‘dynamic, historically
grounded, socially constructed power relationships that simultaneously operate at both
micro-structural and macro-structural levels’ (Burgess-Proctor, 2006: 37), although
‘particular social identities may be more salient in one context than another’ (Daly,
forthcoming: 237). In part it has grown out of recognition of the limitations of a unitary
account of women’s experiences, that the category ‘Woman/en’ is essentialist, and in
response to criticisms especially from women from minorities. Feminist legal scholar
Kimberle Crenshaw (1991) has been very influential; she examined violence against women
of colour with reference to intersecting social categories at structural, political and
representational levels. However, intersectionality has been used in various ways and has
no singular meaning.

In examining the methodological implications of intersectionality, Burgess-Proctor (2006)

sees qualitative approaches as offering the capacity to examine experience, and mixed
methods approaches as having the potential to engage both macro and micro levels as
commonly required from an intersectional frame. Some feminist criminological studies of
victimization (directly or indirectly) have used an intersectional approach, in conjunction
with methods such as the integration of interview data and a post-structural analysis
(Mason, 2002), ethnography (Maher, 1997) and case studies (Cunneen and Stubbs, 1997;

14
Stubbs and Tolmie 1995). However, as Daly suggests, few researchers are actually doing
intersectional analyses of crime and giving effect to intersectionality remains complex, and
subject to debate (forthcoming; 1994). For instance, which differences count, and for
whom, and what are the limits, if any, of taking intersecting social identities into account?
Does intersectionality imply the use of a highly specific account of individual experience? As
Snyder notes the latter can be a useful means of ‘unsettling essentialist narratives about
dominant men and passive women’ (2008: 185), but does not resolve the challenges of
moving beyond narrative to analysis and interpretation. Sokoloff and Dupont’s (2005)
concern that recognizing differences among women who experience violence should not
obscure the need to examine structural oppression captures one part of the debate, but
ways of thinking about intersectionality are not limited to those that emphasize either
structure or the multiplicity of factors that shape identity.

Victim/Agent
How to research women’s experiences of victimization without erasing their agency or
casting women as inevitable victims is an ongoing challenge. Feminist political campaigns
concerning the victimization of women have been very important, but may have had
unintended consequences such as reinforcing an association of the category ‘victim’ with
that of ‘women’, and underplaying the agency of victims. Recent research and advocacy has
sought to redress this concern, for instance, by challenging the victim/agent dichotomy,
recognising the blurred boundaries between victim and offender and re-examining the
category of victim (and offender), how it is deployed and with what political and other
effects (Walklate, 2007). The term survivor is often used to signal that victimization does not
define the individual and to respect their agency and subjectivity.

Popular discourses and criminal justice practices often assume an idealized victim, and in
consequence some victims of crime are constructed as deserving of concern and support
and others as undeserving and complicit in their own victimization. Critical engagement with
these issues is well developed in research on sexual violence (Estrich, 1987)and has been
undertaken with respect to the responsibilization of victims within crime prevention
literature (Stanko, 1997). Jan Jordan’s (2008) study of women’s narratives of surviving
attacks by a serial rapist, demonstrates flaws in conventional understandings of active

15
resistance versus passive victims. The women used psychological and other strategies to
resist the rapist’s dominance and control; they were ‘victims in survivor mode’ (Jordan,
2008: 28).

The blurred boundary between victimization and offending is commonly recognized with
respect to incarcerated women (Richie, 1996) and in research concerning battered women
who offend against abusers (Ferraro, 2006; Stubbs and Tolmie, 1995). This recognition has
also helped disrupt essentialist depictions of women as victims and men as offenders
(Carrington, 2008: 87). However, this approach carries the risk of too neatly accounting for
women’s offending by reference to their victimization (Daly, 1994) which may erase their
agency. Lisa Maher recognized that women were ‘*constrained by+ sexism, racism and
poverty’ but also the ‘active, creative and often contradictory choices, adaptations and
resistances that constitute these women’s criminal agencies’ (1997: 201). A ‘gendered lives
approach’ that starts with women’s lives, rather than with their offending or victimization,
may offer one way beyond the methodological limitations of victim/agent and
victim/offender dichotomies.

Integrity and Analysis

Early leaders in feminist methodology, Liz Stanley and Sue Wise, described the relationship
between researcher and research subject as ‘obscene’ and ‘morally unjustifiable’, aligning it
with sexual objectification (Stanley and Wise, 1983: 170). Although few feminists would
describe the dilemma in the same terms today, that is partly because there are now well
established techniques for minimizing the hierarchical relationship between researcher and
research participant. These include: allowing participant input into various stages of the
research process; sharing one’s own experience with participants; reproducing unabridged
participant narratives; minimizing the application of analytical categories upon participant
experiences; and, maintaining an open and honest reflexivity over the research process by
describing the assumptions, hiccups and mistakes we make.

It is not easy putting these strategies into practice. Analysis is a case in point. Analysis is the
process by which experiential knowledge is transformed into scholarship: the application of
a conceptual framework to personal narratives of violence renders them meaningful within

16
wider social and legal paradigms. Feminist research on violence treads a fine line here
because it is often working with ‘data’ on deeply personal and traumatic experiences of
violation. Ethically, the researcher is bound to maintain the ‘voice’ of these experiences by
avoiding a ‘slice and dice’ analysis that transforms them into easily digestible categories. It is
the responsibility of the feminist scholar – a politics which may not be shared by her
research participants – to reveal how these experiences function with other experiences,
discourses, structures and power relations even if this does require their dissection and
classification. In other words, feminist researchers must do more than let these experiences
speak for themselves. A good example of how to balance these competing interests is the
recent work by Segrave, Milivojevic and Pickering (2009) on sex trafficking which
successfully brings together the voices of women who have been trafficked with trafficking
‘experts’ and policy-makers across three continents to unearth the way in which discourses
of race, gender and criminal justice frame international trafficking policies and practices.

As feminist theory becomes more comfortable with multivocality (Snyder, 2008), feminist
research methods become more adept at drawing out the multiple readings that can be
made of the experience of victimization. For example, in her analysis of semi-structured
interviews on mother-daughter sexual abuse, Peter (2006) encouraged her research
participants to revisit, reconsider and rationalise their attitudes towards their abusive
mothers, thereby developing more nuanced positions. Whilst this reflexivity offers a
genuine opportunity for participants to contribute to analysis and to receive something in
return for their efforts, it raises the question of where to draw the line between research
and therapy. Feminist criminology aims to minimize the power discrepancies between
researcher and research participant but, ultimately, the final analytical responsibility rests
with the researcher. While researchers often seek to convey the multiple, contradictory and
‘messy’ nature of everyday life, is no longer de rigueur to under-analyse data on the
grounds that it diminishes the integrity of participants’ experiences.

The Textual Turn

Daly and Maher (1998) have identified a tension in feminist criminology between the
‘woman of discourse’ and the ‘real’ woman. Picking up on Smart’s articulation of gender
identity as a product of discourse – an idea born of feminism’s engagement with

17
poststructural theory – the former focuses on the construction of women/femininity and
men/masculinity (gender) through legal, economic and social discourses (Smart, 1992). It
prioritises texts (such as film, fiction, media, legal documents) and deconstructive
approaches to discourse analysis (Howe, 1994; Naffine, 1997; Young, 1996). The latter
emphasizes experiential accounts of women’s lives, victimization and criminalization, using
methods such as surveys, interviews and ethnographies to understand these lives (Dobash
and Dobash, 1998; Stanko, 1990). In the field of gendered violence, it is the latter approach,
particularly from a standpoint perspective, that has had the most influence, promoting
qualitative, reflexive methods that take women’s experiences of victimization as the starting
point for understanding violence.

In the context of gendered violence, two issues lie at the heart of this tension between
‘women of discourse’ and ‘real’ women: power and experience. Faced with the realities of
men’s violence against women, many researchers working directly with experiential
accounts of violence have been comfortable analysing violence as a tool of oppression
within a structural model of gendered power relations (albeit an increasingly intersectional
model). Liz Kelly’s (1988) work on the continuum of sexual assault is an excellent example of
insightful and influential research in this style. Drawing upon alternative articulations of
power - such as Foucault’s model of disciplinary power as a shifting force that creates
subjectivities – other feminist researchers have been increasingly interested in the way in
which representations of violence feed into the maintenance of fixed and essential
gendered identities. Sharon Marcus’ (1992) work on the ‘rape script’ is a good example of
scholarship in this vein from outside criminology. In terms of experience, feminist
criminologists drawn to postmodern theory tend to be wary about privileging personal
narrative as evidence of the material ‘facts’ of violence, much less a superior form of
evidence. As noted above, this concern has much to do with the belief that individuals do
not simply have experience but, rather, are constructed through experience (Scott, 1991),
and thus, experience cannot provide a self-evident beginning for knowledge because it is
itself a cultural construct that demands explanation. Some feminist criminologists have
rejected research methods that use empirical accounts of experience as a foundation for
understanding violence, focusing instead on textual representations of such violence. A
small number of projects have sought to integrate empirical research on women’s

18
experiences of violence with a theoretical framework attuned to post-structural thinking
about experience and power (Bell, 1993: Mason, 2002).

CASE STUDIES
In the following case studies from our own research we seek to illustrate the above
methodological themes. We consider some of the difficulties of feminist methodological
praxis in researching different types of violence against women and how we sought to deal
with some of the issues faced.

Violence Against Filipino Women in Australia (Chris Cunneen and Julie Stubbs)
When Chris Cunneen and I began to examine the high number of homicides of Filipino
women in Australia, it was clear that most women were killed by a partner or former
partner (Cunneen and Stubbs 1997; 2004). Using a national homicide database, and
epidemiological advice, we established that Filipino women were almost six times over-
represented as victims of homicide compared with other women in Australia. Unlike other
immigrant groups, Filipino women had a higher homicide rate than Filipino men. Most
offenders were not Filipino; this, too was distinctive as homicide tends to be intra-racial. The
well developed literature on intimate partner homicide was helpful but insufficient as a
framework for understanding these deaths. Neither did mainstream criminological theory
seem to be adequate; for instance, theories such as those related to culture conflict offered
few insights into the complex factors that shaped the women’s immigration to Australia,
and rendered them vulnerable once there.

An intersectional approach offered a framework that explicitly recognized that gender,

race/ethnicity and class were key factors related to how these women were situated. Class
related to both the women’s economic circumstances, and to international political
economy which underlies migration patterns. Unlike other immigrant communities, the
Filipino community in Australia is predominantly female. In the Philippines emigration is
common, but many Filipino women can only qualify to migrate to Australia as spouses or
fiancées of Australian men. In part this highly gendered and racialised pattern of migration

19
reflects immigration policy which has devalued occupational skills categories common to
women, and does not provide visas for domestic labour. Decisions to immigrate are not just
individual or family decisions; immigration is supported by the Filipino government and, at
the time of our research, the remittances sent to the Philippines by overseas nationals
constituted the country’s largest foreign exchange earner.

Our research was instigated by women from the Filipino community who lobbied the
Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission for the study; the commission sought
submissions related to this issue, which together with some case files and media accounts
collated by the community provided resources for our work. We undertook further research
of media sources and transcripts of cases where prosecutions had occurred; using a case
study approach, we examined 27 homicides. We also undertook internet based research of
sites promoting international marriages with Filipino or other Asian women after this
emerged as a concern from the submissions. Later in the project we travelled to the
Philippines for consultations with government and non-government agencies, and visited a
community that was the source of many immigrants to Australia.

Intersectionality offered a way to frame our research, but did not determine how best to
analyse and interpret the case studies. We benefited from community activists who helped
us reflect on our analysis and the emerging themes.

Absent voices

A key concern in studies of homicide is that it is typically the defendant, other legal
actors and the media whose accounts construct what we know about victims; it is
rare to have access to any account by the victim. In this study we were also aware
that discourses concerning ‘mail order brides’ were widely circulating and typically
demeaning of the women, often stripping them of agency by characterizing them as
‘naturally submissive’ or else over-endowing them with agency by representing them
as calculating and manipulative of their sponsors. We were conscious, too, that we
risked being seen to problematize intimate partnerships across race or ethnicity,
when that was not our intention. However, as new immigrants, the women were
dependant in many ways on their sponsoring partners, who were established
residents in the country, and they were legally dependant since their immigration

20
 status rested on their relationship. We examined how the women were constructed
discursively through media accounts, internet sources, and legal texts and
juxtaposed this with the material reality of the women’s lives. In some cases this
revealed conflicting accounts, for instance, demonstrating previous attempts by the
woman to seek protection from domestic violence when the defendant denied prior
violence. One case involved a young woman who married the offender in the
Philippines at age 15 and was only 17 when he killed her. The judge apparently
accepted the evidence of a psychiatric expert that the young woman was demanding
and uncompromising; this account was based on the expert’s interview with the
offender. Evidence of the escalating violence that had been used against the young
woman, available in police reports and from her friends, was muted in the
sentencing decision.

Economic disadvantage and lack of technological access limited the capacity of Filipino
women to contest how they are represented in international marriage marketing through
internet sites. These sites commonly deployed essentialised images of Filipino women, or
other Asian women, as passive, exotic, and highly desirable for ‘western’ men, and thus also
incorporated a particular understanding of masculine desire. Some sites also promoted sex
tourism. Myths about naturally submissive, sexually accommodating Filipino women can
function to authorize male power and control, although we recognized, that culturally
dominant discourses are not necessarily determinative of gendered behaviour and
practices. However, our analysis suggested that in at least some of the cases, men used
violence against their (ex) partners to impose conceptions of sex/gender consistent with
such discursive constructions. Like intimate partner homicides generally, these cases
commonly occurred in the context of previous domestic violence, at separation, or when
the victim tried to end the relationship. This was consistent with Polk’s ‘masculine scenario
of violence’ (1994), or the use of violence as a form of ‘doing gender’ (Messerschmidt 1993),
but more was happening here. The meaning of the violence could not be grasped by
reference to masculinity alone; violence both reflected and sought to reimpose a racialized
order that authorised the entitlement of ‘first world’ men to ‘third world’ women
discursively constructed as available to meet their desires. That media reports, and court

21
decisions often deployed similar gendered and racialized stereotypes suggests that such
discourses are deeply embedded across a range of institutional settings.

Researching Homophobic Violence against Women (Gail Mason)

Feminist research in criminology is often conducted at a crossroads between different
theories, bodies of literature, epistemological orientations and methodological preferences.
Some years ago, I conducted an in-depth study of women’s experiences of homophobic
hostility and violence using individual and group interviews as well as focus groups (Mason,
2002). My research participants were all women who identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual.
Although most were Anglo-Celtic, others came from diverse cultural and linguistic
backgrounds including Chinese-Australian, Indian, Greek-Australian and Jewish. My aim was
to understand both the contexts for and the implications of homophobic violence against
women (and to extrapolate to gay men as far as possible). At the time, the literature was
largely divided into two distinct fields which barely acknowledged the other: research on
homophobic violence grounded in gay men’s experiences; and research on violence against
women grounded in the experiences of heterosexual women. The normative effect was that
violence towards lesbians tended to be reduced to a problem of either gendered violence or
homophobic violence. I hoped to move between these polarities by capturing the
interaction between embodied subjectivities of sexuality and gender and by layering this
with questions of ethnic and racial difference. It is challenging to put this kind of multi-
faceted conceptual framework into practice. I learnt that it was impossible to always do
justice to a sexuality-gender-race configuration at every stage of the research (not to
mention other cultural formations such as class).

I found the ‘solution’ - for my project at least - in the process of reflexivity. My approach to
interviewing was not just to gather experiences of violence but also to actively garner
participants’ interpretations of their own experiences. Some participants remarked that
although their everyday lives were shaped by the interaction of sexual, gendered and racial
hierarchies of difference, particular constructions of difference dominated at certain times
and places. For example, an act of violence may be primarily motivated by racist sentiment
even though the way that racism is acted out is refracted through the gender relations

22
between perpetrator and victim: a white male perpetrator may be ‘differently racist’
towards a male Asian victim than towards a female Asian victim.

Reflexive Voices

One of the women I interviewed, So Fong, emigrated from Hong Kong as a child and had

lived in Australia for approximately 20 years. In talking of the privileges attached to being

white, she suggested that race can interact with gender to produce a specific and more

acute experience:

‘If I were a white woman, if I were you, I’d still have to be worried about all the violence

that is handed out to women. But I wouldn’t also have to worry that every time I step off

my own bit of turf I might be entering racist territory, or that men might be more sexist

to me because they’re also racists. The difference of race is as simple as that.’ (Mason
Although the victim’s experience of such hostility is lived through specificities of gender and
2002: 71)
sexuality, it may well be their racial identity that feels primarily under attack. In practice, it
was appropriate and necessary to prioritise particular formations of power/difference over
others at given points (whether through the kinds of questions I asked or the analysis).
Ultimately, it was my responsibility to decide how I incorporated this experiential insight
into my analysis but I would not have arrived at it so readily without the analytical input of
my participants.

Violence is very real for those who are on the receiving end. Feminist methodology provides
us with the tools for making this reality visible so as to better understand and respond to it.
However, in this I was also drawn to a post-structural and Foucauldian framework that
suggests that we cannot treat the ‘realities’ of violence that women recount during research
as either objective facts in the positivist sense or the foundation for a superior knowledge as
standpoint epistemology suggests. One of the insights of post-structural theory is that
experience is always constituted within discourse and, is itself part of the process by which
seemingly natural identity categories (such as lesbian, homosexual, woman, Black and so

23
on) are constructed. This created a conundrum for my research. How could I position
qualitative accounts of violence as the starting point for my analysis of homophobic violence
when I accepted that lesbian women do not simply have these experiences but, rather,
become who they are through those experiences? Concerns of this kind have led some post-
structural feminists to reject experiential accounts as a suitable object of analysis. In
contrast, other feminists have rejected post-structural thinking as appropriate for feminist
research on violence (Hester, Kelly and Radford, 1996) (as mentioned above, feminist
antagonism towards post-structural theory also relates to the ways in which it
conceptualises power).

I was frustrated by the chasm that seemed to have developed between these different
feminist epistemologies and determined not to have to choose between the notion of ‘real’
women and ‘women of discourse’. There were two layers to the methodological strategy I
developed. First, despite post-structural criticism, I accepted the political and intellectual
enterprise of making women’s experiences of homophobic violence visible as an
indispensable first step in understanding the cultural contexts that encourage such violence
and the ways it functions in the reproduction of larger power relations of heteronormativity.
Second, I equally accepted that empirical narratives of violence neither speak for
themselves nor represent a foundational form of knowledge. My purpose was not to make
experiences of homophobic violence visible for their own sake but, instead, to make them
visible so as to render them available for critique and analysis. Rather than thinking of
identity as the authoritative and ‘real’ origin of these experiences, I approached the
lesbian/gay/bisexual identities of my research participants as a medium through which they
voiced and interpreted their encounters with violence. Ultimately, I conceptualised
homophobic violence as an embodied experience that feeds into the constitution of identity
categories in ways that are deeply problematic yet constantly resisted.

24
 Constitutive Voices

Samantha, a young white woman who identified as gay, described how an experience of

homophobic abuse engendered a belittled sense of sexual identity yet was ultimately

resisted:

‘It’s kind of like being told, “We don’t think you’re as good as us, or we don’t think you

belong here with us.” But you know that really most of the time you don’t feel that way.

… You only feel it when you come up against it … later on, this huge part of who I am

takes control again and says, “Fuck off, I know who I am!’’ (Mason 2002: 111).

Feminist methodology does not ask us to accord a superior or ‘untouchable’ epistemological

status to the experience of violence. It asks us to find the best way possible to investigate
and analyse the multiple avenues via which violence and power reinforce each other.

CONCLUSION
It would be heartening to be able to conclude a chapter on feminist research in criminology
with the observation that Carol Smart has recently made about the discipline of sociology,
which is that feminist approaches have influenced sociological research practice to the point
that they have ‘become taken for granted or normal practice’ (Smart, 2009: 297). Despite
the now respectful relationship between feminist and mainstream criminology, it would be
going too far to say the same about feminism’s influence on criminology. However, just as
feminism as a political movement and a theory have shaped the way that we think about
and analyse crime and the criminal justice system, so too have research approaches
favoured by feminists influenced the methodologies that many criminologists use.

As feminist methodologies are increasingly applied to a wider range of criminological

subject matter (such as terrorism, hate crime and state crime), the debates that we have
identified above in the context of research on gendered violence will continue to challenge
criminologists who wish to benefit from the methodological innovations and insights of

25
feminism, irrespective of their field of study. These include: the difficulties of
operationalising intersectionality in research praxis; the problem of how to break down the
dichotomy between victim/agent without denying the deeply patterned nature of
victimization and criminalization; the need to acknowledge and redress the uneven power
dynamics intrinsic to the research process; and the question of how to design research
projects that do justice to experiential accounts of crime and criminalization as
simultaneously ‘real’ and constructed. Feminist methodology has no quick answers to these
dilemmas about knowledge production but it recognizes the importance of continuing to
ask the questions.

FURTHER READING
Stanko, Elizabeth and Curry, Paul (1997) ‘Homophobic violence and the self ‘at risk’:
Interrogating the boundaries’, Social and Legal Studies, 6(4): 513-532.

Dobash, R. Emerson and Dobash, Russell P. (eds) (1998), Rethinking violence against
women. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

See also the following journals:

Violence Against Women http://vaw.sagepub.com/ [last accessed 20 December 2009]

Feminist Criminology http://fcx.sagepub.com/ [last accessed 20 December 2009]

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