Genders, crime and criminal justice: Power, victimization and institutional harm

Across sociological, criminological and socio-legal scholarship, gender has long been recognized not merely as a variable shaping experience of crime and victimization, but as a foundational axis through which deviance is defined, governed, and sanctioned. From early interactionist accounts to feminist and critical criminology, the production of deviance has been understood as a relational and institutional process, embedded in power relations rather than in individual transgression. Classic contributions by Becker (1963) and Lemert (1951) already showed how deviance emerges through processes of social reaction and labeling, while feminist legal scholarship later exposed how these reactions are deeply gendered, relying on normative assumptions about morality, respectability, and proper conduct (Smart, 1989).