Criminalized Vietnamese women, ‘problem gambling’ and experiential rifts: Towards a criminology of diversity
| Author | Claire Spivakovsky,R-Coo Trần |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619869925 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619869925
Theoretical Criminology
2021, Vol. 25(1) 23 –43
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480619869925
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Criminalized Vietnamese
women, ‘problem gambling’
and experiential rifts: Towards
a criminology of diversity
R-Coo Trần
Independent Scholar, Australia
Claire Spivakovsky
University of Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
When issues emerge in women’s imprisonment, criminology often responds with
narratives of ‘difference’. In this article we respond to the call of Barbara Hudson, and
generate a ‘criminology of diversity’ instead. We present the case of Vietnamese women
in Victoria, Australia, whose incarceration is increasing at an alarming rate. According to
government discourse, this increase occurs because Vietnamese women in Victoria have
a distinct ‘problem gambling’ pathway to crime that is supported by Vietnamese lending
arrangements. Seeking to disaggregate and denature this essentialist and reductionist
narrative, we draw on the accounts of specialist Vietnamese community workers to
explore the various meanings and significance of gambling in the lives of Vietnamese
women in Victoria. We further engage with the work of Paul Gilroy on diasporic
identities and Ghassan Hage on vacillations to illustrate what is gained by recognizing
the overlaps, parallels and points of divergence that form within and between ‘different’
groups.
Corresponding author:
Claire Spivakovsky, Senior Lecturer, Criminology, University of Melbourne, School of Social and Political
Sciences, Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia.
Email: cspivakovsky@unimelb.edu.au
869925TCR0010.1177/1362480619869925Theoretical CriminologyTrần and Spivakovsky
research-article2019
Article
24 Theoretical Criminology 25(1)
Keywords
Diasporic identity, essentialism, gendered pathways, problem gambling, racialized
criminality, Vietnamese women
The rates of incarcerated women around the world have increased rapidly over the past
few decades. Conventional explanations for this are constructed in terms of women’s
‘gendered pathways’ to crime (Daly, 1992), and the ways women’s pathways are ignored
within ‘gender-neutral’ laws and policies (Bloom et al., 2004). However, these gendered
narratives pay insufficient attention to the politics of race (see Belknap, 2007), mass
mobility (see Parmar, 2017) and the effects of global divisions (see Carrington, 2015). As
a consequence, minority women and women of colour are often either absent from gen-
dered analyses of imprisonment, or presented as a homogeneous group. It is the almost
exclusive reliance on gender disparity that this article disrupts, seeking to shift our atten-
tion away from analyses of gendered or racialized ‘difference’ and towards the overlaps,
parallels and points of divergence that occur within and between groups. To do this we
draw attention to the criminalization pathways of the overlooked demographic of
Vietnamese women, who currently experience one of the fastest-growing rates of incar-
ceration in Australia. In the Australian state of Victoria, the number of incarcerated
Vietnamese women has increased by 481% since 2000, more than double the increase
recorded within the general women’s prisoner population (176%) (see Figures 1, 2 and 3).
The reasons why more Vietnamese women in Victoria are being incarcerated are
largely unclear. Prisoner census data indicate that in 2000, illicit drug offences accounted
for approximately 55% of Vietnamese prisoners in Australia, and that by 2017 this figure
had increased to 72% (ABS, 2017). However, as these data are not broken down by sex,
it is unclear the extent to which Vietnamese women are accurately represented by these
statistics. Scholarship on Vietnamese women’s imprisonment is also sparse; bar the pre-
dominantly unpublished work of Le (2014; Le and Gilding, 2016), the only studies avail-
able focus on the criminal activity of Vietnamese men, and their ‘drug pathways’ to
crime (see Beyer et al., 2001; Dixon and Maher, 2005).
Despite this lack of research, for the past 15 years the Victorian Department of Justice
and Regulation’s policies (herein ‘the Department’) have inexplicably cited ‘problem
gambling’ as the cause of Vietnamese women’s offending. Appearing first in Better path-
ways: Integrated response to women’s offending and reoffending (VDJR, 2005), it was
proposed that Vietnamese women engage in criminal activity because they need to ‘repay
illegitimate loans offered by “loan sharks” to recover gambling-related debts’ (VDJR,
2005: 16). It was suggested that the ‘apparent vulnerability of Vietnamese women to
predatory [gambling-related] lending’ is what leads these women to their ‘subsequent
involvement in serious drug offences’ and what constitutes their ‘very different profile’
to other imprisoned women (VDJR, 2005: 16). Twelve years later, the problem gambling
narrative persisted, with minor adjustments. In Strengthening connections: Women’s
policy for the Victorian corrections system (VDJR, 2017), the Department clarifies that
the ‘significantly different’ offending profile of Vietnamese women in Victoria
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