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19 April 2016: Women as victims and perpetrators of crime

Our conference audience at the Royal Statistical Society in London.

What journeys do women take when they enter the Criminal Justice System? How and why do they differ as either a victim or perpetrator? Are women misrepresented, misjudged and misinformed?

Last week, a University conference, Women and the Criminal Justice System - past, present and future, addressed these questions using groundbreaking Essex-based research projects focusing on domestic violence and mothers who kill their newborns.

Applying the latest academic and policy analysis to the key issues surrounding the position of women in the criminal justice system, the conference brought together academics and professional practitioners from the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, the Prison Reform Trust and the Crown Prosecution Service.

Dr Jackie Turton from the Department of Sociology at Essex said, “Women’s involvement in the criminal justice system is under researched, particularly when it comes to female offenders of serious and violent crime. We know the system is failing women in many ways but we need robust and impactful research to tell us how and why.”

The Conference was organised by the Centre for Criminology, the Department of Sociology and the School of Law at the University of Essex, in conjunction with the Royal Statistical Society, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England (CHASE) and Palgrave publishers.

Our Centre for Criminology will build on the success of this conference and will be organising similar events in the future.