Criminology, gender and security in the Australian context: Making women’s lives matter
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Author | JaneMaree Maher,Sandra Walklate,Kate Fitz-Gibbon,Jude McCulloch |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617719449 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
719449TCR0010.1177/1362480617719449Theoretical CriminologyWalklate et al.
research-article2017
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2019, Vol. 23(1) 60 –77
Criminology, gender and
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480617719449
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context: Making women’s
lives matter
Sandra Walklate
University of Liverpool, UK; Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Jude McCulloch
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Kate Fitz-Gibbon
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
JaneMaree Maher
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
This article examines how it might be possible to make women’s lives matter in
contemporary criminological understandings of security. In doing so it considers the
conceptual complexity of security, and reflects on the criminological engagement with
that complexity and the feminist contribution to it paying particular attention to current
concerns with everyday security. The article deploys the contemporary Australian
policy agenda on family violence to illustrate the paradoxes to be found within these
current pre-occupations. Drawing on feminist informed work that situates violence
against women within the conceptual framework of everyday terrorism, it concludes by
offering further consideration to the meaning of everyday security and the implications
that this has for contemporary criminological concerns with security.
Corresponding author:
Sandra Walklate, University of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford Street South, Liverpool,
L69 7ZA.
Email: S.L.Walklate@liverpool.ac.uk
Walklate et al.
61
Keywords
Everyday security, everyday terrorism, family violence, security
Introduction
In this article we seek to develop a criminological understanding of issues associated
with ‘everyday’ security urged by Crawford and Hutchinson (2016). In so doing we do
not wish to challenge the conclusion proffered by them or to undermine their acknowl-
edgement of the already existing feminist informed interventions on these issues. Rather,
the exploration offered here focuses on how criminology might address everyday secu-
rity practices and associated institutional practices if the question of gender was put at
the centre of this particular agenda. In order to advance this argument, this article falls
into four parts. The first considers the conceptual complexity of security, and applies a
gendered lens to the security terrain. The second reflects on extant criminological
engagement with security and associated feminist interventions. The third section draws
out the paradoxes evident in this discussion using the contemporary tensions and contra-
dictions of the Australian policy agenda on ‘security’ comparing and contrasting
responses to intimate partner violence and public terrorism as illustration. The final part
of this article posits some new aspects in considering ‘everyday security’ and the conse-
quent implications these raise for contemporary criminology.
Thinking about security
It is without doubt that the concept of security has become a key focus of the 21st cen-
tury. As Crawford (2014) argues, the capacity of this concept reflects both paradoxical
and precarious features where the search for greater security can also result in the oppo-
site effect: heightened insecurity (see also Mythen and Walklate, 2016). Moreover it is
well recognized that the study of security has, to date, been dominated by those con-
cerned with international relations: a pre-occupation with security as a ‘big noun’. Within
international relations the area of work labelled ‘critical security studies’ and its associ-
ated schools of thought (Copenhagen, Aberystwyth and Paris), has been significant in
defining security and/or the processes of securitization. Such dominance notwithstand-
ing, other disciplinary perspectives offer equally fertile ground for thinking about secu-
rity. In reviewing the potential for cross-disciplinary dialogue, Bourbeau (2015) points
out that security is not simply nor straightforwardly a ‘mode of governing’ (Neocleous,
2008: 4). His edited collection imagines security in diverse ways: as being thick or thin,
objective or subjective, strong or weak, always in the making (processual), operating at
different levels and with different degrees of intensity. As Zedner (2009) acutely observed
‘security’ is a promiscuous concept. Indeed others have labelled security as ‘sticky’
(Fanghanel, 2014), ‘scalar’ (Valverde, 2014) and ‘polysemic’ (Ranasinghe, 2013). Thus,
as Mythen and Walklate (2016: 1110) comment:
it is easy to conclude that such a multifaceted and multidimensional concept existing at the
nexus of criminology, sociology and international relations can mean a range of different things
62
Theoretical Criminology 23(1)
depending upon the disciplinary microscope being used. As a concept, security has undoubtedly
been stretched.
Within criminology, security has tended to be discussed in terms of a zero-sum game—
something that somebody has at someone else’s expense (see inter alia, Hudson and
Ugelvik, 2012). Thus it is evident that security is incalculable, inherently precarious and
certainly not a ‘one size fits all’ conceptual tool (Bourbeau, 2015). Yet, despite this com-
plexity and ‘stretchiness’ there has been a remarkable consistency in all of this work in
presuming security to be a ‘big noun’: a collective or at least a ‘club’ good (Hope, 2000).
However, as Crawford and Hutchinson (2016) argue security is also an everyday phe-
nomenon: a ‘small noun’. It is within our everyday practices that we manage our onto-
logical security ensuring our minds do not become factories of fear (Tillich, 1952).
Following the view of Crawford and Hutchinson (2016) we too argue there has been
a remarkable lack of appreciation of the everyday nature of security and particularly of
its gendered nature within contemporary criminology. Here, as elsewhere, pre-occupa-
tions have been with security as a big noun. In the context of international relations,
Robinson (2011: 61) has commented on the ‘reliance on the “ungendered” human being
as the primary referent of human security’: a reliance that is connected to the ‘rights-
based normative framework on which human security relies’. This human rights frame-
work pervades discussions of security from policy directives through to the disciplinary
domain assumptions challenged by Robinson. The presence of feminist security studies
within international relations notwithstanding (see True, 2012), the relative invisibility
of gendered analyses is telling. Following Renzetti (2013: 7) we take gender to refer to
the socially constructed expectations associated with masculinity and femininity and in
what follows it is possible to discern similarly ungendered domain assumptions within
criminological understandings of, and engagement with, the concept of security.
Criminology and security
In an interesting and provocative analysis of criminology and security, Froestad et al.
(2015) suggest security has always been the central focus of the discipline. Through an
historical analysis they argue that security, understood in the Hobbesian sense as a free-
dom from the ‘war of all against all’, underpins a core disciplinary concern with ‘free-
dom from interpersonal harms’ (2015: 177). The manifestations of this central
pre-occupation have varied. According to their analysis, the discipline has shifted from
primarily a ‘crime-ology’ towards a ‘risk-ology’ and is potentially morphing to a ‘secu-
rit-ology’ (2015: 187). At the centre of all of these shifts however is security, understood
as freedom from interpersonal harms. While not adjudicating on the validity of this over-
view of the discipline, this framing offers a valuable entry point into considering the
criminological embrace (or otherwise) of security in the context of our argument.
Froestad et al. (2015) argue that the ‘hitting and taking’ crime focus of criminology
has led the discipline to ask ‘what is to be done?’ about crime. This question has been
framed through a number of different theoretical and methodological tendencies, con-
ventionally distinguished by the labels positivist, radical and critical. Each of these ten-
dencies offer different understandings of what is included and/or excluded in ‘hitting and
Walklate et al.
63
taking’; these move from those events which occur between individuals, to those which
are perpetrated by states on individuals, to those that are perpetrated between states.
While ‘hitting and taking’ cannot encompass the whole of the criminological project, it
is of value in centring our consideration of women’s everyday (in)security, particularly
in terms of family violence. Since it is predominantly, though not exclusively, women
who experience this form of violence (where ‘hitting and taking’ can be taken to denote
not only physical actions but also the denial of freedom and independence outside of her
relationship), mostly at the hands of men.
Each of the theoretical or methodological tendencies referred to above argue for dif-
ferent interventions into such ‘hitting and taking’. For the most part this cumulative work
has led to the disciplinary pre-occupation with the management (read prevention) of
crime and the role of institutional actors in those management processes. Both of these
pre-occupations have, until very recently, been...
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