Criminological futures and gendered violence(s): Lessons from the global pandemic for criminology

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to foreground the gendered crime consequences of the global pandemic and to raise questions emanating from them for the future(s) of criminology. The paper reviews some of the criminological response to the pandemic offered during 2020. The global pandemic was constituted by some as providing the opportunity for a natural experiment in which criminological theories and concepts could be tested in real time and by others as an opportunity to further raise the profile of crimes more hidden from view, particularly domestic abuse. For the former, domestic abuse is constituted as an exception to what might be learned from this experimental moment. For the latter, gendered violence(s) are central to making sense of this moment as ongoing, mundane and ordinary features of (women’s) everyday lives. This paper makes the case that the evidence relating to the gendered consequences of Covid-19, renders it no longer possible for the discipline to regard feminist informed work (largely found within the latter view above) as the stranger, outside of, or an exception to, the discipline’s central concerns. It is suggested that the future(s) of criminology lie in rendering that stranger’s voice, focusing as it does on the continuities of men’s gendered violence(s) in all spheres of life, as the discipline’s central problematic.