Gendering research on online illegal drug markets

Abstract

This paper reviews and critiques research on online illegal drug markets, arguing that existing conceptualizations and methodological approaches have resulted in a very limited discussion of women and questions of gender. The first part lays out the stereotypes and unarticulated assumptions that enable questions about women and gender to be side-lined, as follows: (i) that online anonymity rules out knowing about gender in online drug markets; (ii) that online drug markets are male-dominated spaces; and iii) that women are limited to minor or peripheral roles in those markets. Our aim is to make apparent and challenge the marginalization of enquiry about women and gender in existing scholarship about online illegal drug markets. In the second part, we draw on scholarship on women and gender in the drug trade more generally to consider what studying online illegal drug markets might add to our understanding of both women’s participation in these markets and the way in which gender is more widely performed. We consider whether online markets may facilitate women’s participation (due to anonymity, for example), or whether online drug markets replicate gendered stratifications characteristic of offline markets. We also explore the potential significance of women’s participation in online illegal drug markets for harm reduction services. In conclusion, we suggest that future research should challenge the assumption that we can understand online markets without thinking about gender and outline the steps toward building a gendered perspective in this area.

Keywords:

• Online drug markets
• clearnet
• darknet
• cryptomarkets
• drug markets
• drug dealing
• women
• gender

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Alex Stevens, Alexia Maddox and Carolyn Pedwell for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Both online and offline drug markets include degrees of anonymity and/or pseudonymity and unfortunately there is not space to discuss here. Rather, we wish to problematise the assumption that gender is invisible online.

2 The Global Drug Survey is a large, international, annual cross-sectional web survey whose respondents are broadly similar in demographic terms to the – albeit smaller numbers of – drug users identified in national household surveys (Barratt et al. 2017).

3 Gwern Branwen, in documenting 312 cryptomarket-related arrests or ‘legal trouble’ between 2013 and 2015 found 92% were men (Branwen [date unknown]). In one case, an undercover DEA operation resulted in the arrest of a man and woman in South Carolina after the woman was observed posting further consignments of the drug disguised in pregnancy test boxes (Greenville News 2018).

Additional information

Funding

The research for this paper was in part supported by the Award of George Soros Visiting Professor to Judith Aldridge at the Central European University in Budapest in 2017.