Women's criminalisation and offending in Australia and New Zealand / edited by Victoria M. Nagy, Georgina Rychner.

Abingdon, Oxfordshire : Routledge, 2024.

1st edition

202144

Female offenders -- Australia -- History.

Female offenders -- New Zealand -- History.

Introduction: Women's criminalisation and offending in Australia and New Zealand

1. Free women and short hair: cropping, convictism, and reform in Van Diemen's Land

2. A 'very lamentable case': Indigenous women as defendants in the upper Courts of Western Australia, 1830-1890

3. Understanding criminality in context: Melbourne's female underworld, 1860-1920

4. Women's intra-gender homicide in Victoria

5. Complicating the 'unfeminine': agency and insanity in female convictions for murder, Victoria 1880-1916

6. "The whole community is poisoned against her": perceptions and motives of female poisoners in late-nineteenth-century Australia

7. 'Female masqueraders' and vagrants: gender diversity in the criminal justice system in early twentieth century Victoria

8. Media representations of criminalised women in 1950s Aotearoa New Zealand

9. Selective gendered regime of deportation: the historical deportation of women during the White Australia Policy era

10. Herstories of alcohol and other drug use and imprisonment: understanding women's experiences of the Victorian correctional landscape, 1860-1920

11. Wāhine Toa and the Korowai: female warriors and the patch

The lived experience of kaupapa whānau affiliated women.

Ka hao te rangatahi – lived experience growing up in a gang space in Aotearoa.

Women's Criminalisation and Offending in Australia and New Zealand offers new research and analysis of women's offending and criminalisation in Australia and New Zealand from British settlement through to the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries. Drawing attention to women as offenders as understood in a multitude of ways, this collection highlights how women have been involved with crime and criminal behaviour, their treatment inside and outside of courts and prisons, and how women's deviation from societal norms have attracted negative attention throughout the decades. For Aboriginal and Māori women especially, the responses were harsher than what they could be for non-indigenous women. The chapters cover a broad range of transgressions that women have been actively involved with, including theft, drug and alcohol abuse and offences, organised crime, and homicide, as well as how women's behaviour and their bodies have been criminalised and responded to by authorities. What this collection demonstrates is that women have often chosen to be involved with crime and criminality, while on other occasions their behaviour, innocent as it was, was not considered acceptable by contemporaries, resulting in confusion and misapprehension of women who refused to fit a mould. Women's Criminalisation and Offending in Australia and New Zealand brings together historical and criminological methods, theories, and scholars to shed light on how Australia and New Zealand's colonial, later state, and national governments have sought to understand, control, and punish women. - Publisher's website.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9781032140872

xiii, 192 pages : 1 photograph ; 24 cm