Definition
Feminist criminology is the strand of the discipline that places women, gender, and patriarchal power at the centre of the analysis of crime, victimisation, and criminal justice. It began as a critique — that mainstream criminology had built its theories from the offending of young men and then assumed those theories also explained women — and developed into a positive research programme on women as offenders, victims, professionals, and subjects of social control.
Carol Smart's Women, Crime and Criminology (1976) opened the modern phase by demolishing the existing literature on female offenders. Frances Heidensohn's Women and Crime (1985) extended the critique to victimisation and to the gendered character of social control more broadly. Pat Carlen's ethnographies of women in prison gave the framework its empirical depth, and later intersectional work by black and post-colonial feminists pushed it to address race and class as constitutive of gendered experience.
Why it matters
How it works
Methodologically, feminist criminology favours qualitative work alongside survey research, since the experiences it studies — coercion, fear, household violence, prison life — are poorly captured by official statistics. Theoretically, it draws on broader feminist work to explain patterns: why women offend less but are punished more severely when they do; why women's victimisation concentrates in intimate relationships; why criminal justice institutions reproduce the gendered division of labour they were supposed to neutralise.
The field is internally diverse. Liberal-feminist work focuses on equal treatment; radical work centres patriarchy and violence; socialist-feminist work ties gender to class; post-colonial and intersectional work refuses to treat "women" as a single category. The shared core is the insistence that any criminological theory that cannot make sense of women's offending and victimisation is incomplete.