Exploring Female Motivations for Drug Smuggling on the Island of Barbados

Abstract

Within international discourse, female motivations for crime have received relatively little attention when compared to male offenders. Feminist contributions have shed light on this underresearched area with the majority of studies being conducted in the developed world. Using a sample of inmates convicted for drug smuggling on the island of Barbados, this article seeks to provide culturally specific data on the subject. Using a qualitative methodology, the study finds that in keeping with feminist research in the field, the motivations of the women were dominated by various forms of victimization that accounted for their present incarceration.

Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China: An Empirical Study

“…Interviewing is a particularly valuable method for feminist researchers to gain insights into the world of their research subjects (Hesse-Biber, 2007) and a body of academic studies on female criminality has relied on interviews in the prison environment with convicted offenders (see Bailey, 2013;Chui and Gelsthorpe, 2004;Keo, 2014). However, access to prisoners is not an approach typically adopted by academic researchers in China.…”

“…Following Bailey (2013), the interview was divided into four sections to document as much detailed and accurate information as possible: (1) As in other prison systems (see, for example, Bailey, 2013), recording devices are strictly prohibited by the Chinese prison authority. As a result, interviews were recorded by note-taking in Chinese and the field notes were word-processed and simultaneously translated into English as soon as practically possible after the interviews on the same date.…”

Motivations of women who organized others for prostitution: Evidence from a female prison in China

“…Previously, a body of feminist studies on crime were conducted in the prison environment (see Bailey, 2013;Chui and Gelsthorpe, 2004;Comack, 1999;McCorkel, 2003) and qualitative approaches have been commonly adopted (see for example Bosworth, 1999;Bosworth et al, 2005;Ham and Gerard, 2014;Pallot et al, 2012;Price, 2012). Here, the empirical work was undertaken in a Chinese female prison and semi-structured interviews were used to gather the female sex work organisers' narratives and biographies.…”

It’s a hard knock life the survival strategies of Dutch Mulas in Peruvian prisons

“…The importation theory holds that the manner in which people cope mentally with detention is determined by their way of life prior to their imprisonment [10,17]. Supposedly, detainees are more often victims of painful life experiences, such as physical and/or sexual abuse, than people without a criminal record [18][19][20][21]. Green et al [20] for example state that Bthere is an increasing understanding of the fact that many women in prison or jail for committing crimes are crime victims themselves.…”