Gender and crime revisited: criminological gender research on international and transnational crime and crime control

End Impunity! Reducing Conflict-Related Sexual Violence to a Problem of Law

“…Moreover, they express concern about the costs of a punitive focus in terms of women's perceived and real agency (Gruber ). Overall, critical scholars see the focus on carceral measures as a neoliberal project, challenge the idea of criminal punishment as the scale by which victims’ dignity and value can be measured (Houge et al ), and “note the many tensions between criminalization strategies and feminism's general goals of ending women's subordination, dismantling hierarchy, and seeking distributive fairness” (Gruber : 603). From this perspective, the extreme focus on criminal law is seen as a distraction from the broader efforts needed to fundamentally address the challenge of sexual and gender based violence.…”

Criminological Lessons on/from Sexual Violence

“…While sexual violence is a field in which activists have been especially successful in mobilising and establishing global instruments and platforms (Houge, Lohne and Skilbrei, 2015), it is important to understand national manifestations and versions. Sweden is particularly interesting in this case, as it is considered a driving force in shifting European and global agendas and also takes its global reach and impact into consideration when designing policies (Holmström and Skilbrei, 2017;Towns, 2002).…”

“…Criminologists are familiar with calls for law and order being driven by what the public assumes to be true about crime. Public outcries over crime, especially sexual assault, are known to be channelled towards calls for new laws and stricter punishment (Houge, Lohne and Skilbrei, 2015), but in the last years, in Sweden and beyond, the call is for stricter immigration control to curb crime. This is the case when debaters, instead of calling for harsher criminal laws to curb rape, call for the reinstatement of border control and deportations, as in the case of Sweden.…”

Sexualized war violence. Knowledge construction and knowledge gaps

“…See section on Ideological and disciplinary grounding below. assess perpetrator-and victim constructions, perspectives and re-presentations, in the legal system, in the overall public on local, national and international levels, and, not least, in scholarly publications on this thematic (Houge et al, 2015).…”

“…In contest for attention towards a side of warfare that has been silenced for too long, other acts of violence and forms of suffering are neglected, both scholarly and politically. From a historical tendency where victims of rape and sexual violence were ignored and made invisible, we run the risk today of excluding people of severe and genuine needs through an exclusive focus on survivors of sexual war violence (Houge et al, 2015;Lemaitre and Sandvik, 2014)…”