Ebook: Women, Crime and Social Harm: Towards a Criminology for the Global Age (Series Published for the Onati Institute for the Sociology of Law)

This book is by and about women. The book examines the harms and crimes to which women are subjected to as a result of global social processes, and their efforts to take control of their own futures. The papers explore the criminogenic and damaging consequences of the policies of the global financial institutions, as well as the effects of growing economic polarization both in pockets of the developed world and most markedly in the global south. Reflecting upon this evidence, in the Introduction the editors necessarily challenge existing criminological theory by expanding and elaborating a conception of social harm that encompasses this range of problems, and exposes where new solutions derived from criminological theory are necessary. A second theme addresses human rights from the standpoint of indigenous women, minority women, and those seeking refuge. As inadequate and individualized as the human rights instruments presently are, for most of these women a politics of human rights emerges as central to achieving legal and political equality, and protection from individual violence. Women in the poorest countries, however, are skeptical as to the efficacy of rights claims in the face of the depredations of international and global capital, and the social dislocation produced thereby. In the end, there is no solution without politics. In both the opening and the closing sections of this book, there are papers which address this. What continues to be special about women's political practice is the connection between the groundedness of small groups and the fluidity and flexibility of regional and international networks. This is the effective politics of the global age. Women, Crime and Social Harm, then, is a new criminology for and by women, which opens up a new criminological terrain for both women and men, and which cannot easily be read without an emotional response.