Feminist approaches to justice: contributions to CSW66. Editors’ introduction

ABSTRACT

Our introduction to this special issue explains the background of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and the civil society panels in which these articles were originally presented during CSW66. The articles included are all examples of international feminist criminology, They analyze national and global issues related to women in prison, women in the judiciary and policing, women activists and women victims/survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. Our effort in editing this special issue is to connect academic research to the work of United Nations policymakers.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• gender equality
• international
• United Nations
• Commission on the Status of Women
• feminism

We thank Dr. Janice Joseph, President of the World Society of Victimology and longstanding advocate of global research on women in criminal justice, for her foreword and are pleased to provide this introduction to our guest-edited special issue. This special issue is composed of five articles developed from presentations at NGO parallel events during the Sixty-Sixth Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), held March 14–25, 2022. It marks the third time we as co-editors have collaborated to organise these events as well as edit a special issue, and we are grateful to Editor Mahesh Nalla for this opportunity with the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice.

The UN Commission on the Status of Women was established in 1946. It is a functional commission of the UN Economic and Social Council and is the main intergovernmental body exclusively devoted to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women. Over the past two decades, it has become the global meeting place for activists and advocates for gender equality (including, to a lesser extent, researchers and academics). This is due in part because there have been no World Conferences for Women since the fourth one in Beijing in 1995. It is also due to the creation of UN Women in 2010 and its recognition of the importance of civil society participation. Finally, it is due to the enthusiasm of NGOCSW, the large civil society coalition that contributes advocacy and evidence to the intergovernmental deliberations of the CSW.

Every year, the CSW holds its annual session at UN headquarters in New York (and during the pandemic, virtually). Every session of the CSW has a priority theme and a review theme that frame discussions and the main outcome document, Agreed Conclusions. For CSW66, the priority theme was “Achieving Gender Equality and the empowerment of all women and girls in the context of climate change, environmental and disaster risk reduction policies and programs” and the review theme was “Women’s economic empowerment in the changing world of work” (reviewing the agreed conclusions of the sixty-first session of the CSW). Although many topics are discussed at CSW sessions, these two themes are usually chosen carefully for their timeliness, and frame much of the Agreed Conclusions (Commission on the Status of Women Sixty-Sixth Session, 2022). Since 2015, much of the discussions and Agreed Conclusions of the CSW align with Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals.

NGOCSW is a broad coalition, with affiliated branches in the world regions. NGOCSW/NY is the main organiser of NGO contributions to the CSW via its scheduling of parallel events. Parallel events are NGO-sponsored sessions that are held alongside the intergovernmental deliberations of the CSW. Months before the CSW, NGOCSW informs its members about the key issues to be discussed at the upcoming session of the CSW and prioritises its own suggested goals for the Agreed Conclusions, consulting with its membership. Before the emergence of Covid-19, the in-person parallel events organised by NGOCSW/NY attracted thousands of women from around the globe. In recent years, the virtual parallel events organised by NGOCSW/NY have attracted tens of thousands of women as panellists and attendees.

As academics, we represent four NGOs with ECOSOC consultative status: International Sociological Association, World Society of Victimology, American Society of Criminology, and Criminologists without Borders. We synergise to organise co-sponsored parallel events through NGOCSW/NY to address the priority and review themes and the general topics of international feminist criminology. Each year, our panels not only focus on the priority and review themes, but on feminist approaches to justice – especially on issues faced by women as victims/survivors, criminal justice professionals and women in conflict with the law. We do so recognising that, although the CSW, and many parallel events, seek to educate policymakers about various women´s issues, not all are focused on research and not all encompass our focus on these topics at the intersection of criminal justice. Our contributions, therefore, aim to provide research evidence and highlight relevant perspectives regarding women as victims/survivors, criminal justice professionals, and women in conflict with the law (including incarcerated women).

Our experience organising these sessions has evolved over the past four years, and each year, we follow through with insights from previous years. We have learned that, while most NGO parallel events now focus on violence against women, it is much rarer to find parallel events on the criminal justice response to violence against women, women as criminal justice professionals, or women in conflict with the law. In particular, the issues confronting incarcerated women are largely invisible at the CSW, as Daniela Jauk-Adamie, in her article in this issue, makes clear. We thus strive to always include these issues in our panels. We have also learned that, given the location of UN headquarters in New York City, there is a disproportionate number of sessions and speakers focusing on the United States. We thus aim for global representation in our panels. This special issue reflects that effort, with articles from Egypt, Brazil, India, and cross-national perspectives.

To ensure permanence of our work, we have been recruiting our best presenters to submit articles for special issues of journals, that we co-edit. This is our third such special issue. For CSW63 in 2019, we pursued a special issue of the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy (IJCJSD), an open access journal published by the School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology, and Dr. Ranjan took on the lead co-editor role of soliciting manuscripts from our panellists and managing the entire peer review process to publication. That special issue was entitled “The Social Protection of Women and Girls: Links to Crime and Justice at CSW63” and was enormously successful (Ranjan et al., 2020). Dr. Kerry Carrington, then editor of IJCJSD, reached out to us shortly after the special issue was published to let us know that we had 17,000 downloads and over 37,000 views in the month in which the special issue was published. CSW64 was shortened to a one-day meeting due to the emergence of COVID-19 and no parallel events were held. For CSW65, we approached Claire Renzetti, the editor of Violence Against Women and a longstanding advocate of international feminist criminological scholarship. Dr. Beichner-Thomas took on the lead co-editor role, producing a special issue entitled, “Prioritizing the Elimination of Violence Against Women Worldwide: Lessons from the 65^th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women” (Beichner et al., 2022). This issue was also very well-received, and besides a podcast and free downloading of the issue granted by Sage Publications, we sent notice to the UN diplomatic community in New York, receiving quite a few positive replies.

This past year, for our CSW66 parallel events, we introduced more innovations. Dr. Barberet noticed that very few sessions were in languages other than English, which is out of sync with the practices of the UN that recognise and encourage multilingualism. For the first time, two of our four parallel events had English to Spanish interpretation. This service was donated by the Spanish Legal Interpretation Certificate Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice: Professor Cristina Lozano Argüelles and her students, Michelle Rebay and Gema García. Dr. Ranjan decided to focus one of our parallel events on her native country, India, and paired up seasoned scholars with senior practitioners. The article co-authored by Gita Mittal and Dipika Jain in this issue is a result of this strategy.

After CSW66, the three of us also realised that our whole effort deserved more attention and outreach. We thus organised a hybrid policy panel at the American Society of Criminology annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in November, 2022. The panel was entitled, “The researcher-policymaker dialogue: International Feminist Criminology and the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.” Invited speakers included Kalliopi Mingeirou, Chief, Ending Violence Against Women and Girls Section at UN Women; Houry Geudelekian, Chair of NGO CSW/NY; Marie Nougier, Head of Research and Communications, International Drug Policy Consortium, and one of the authors of our last special issue for Violence Against Women; and Claire Renzetti, Editor of Violence Against Women. We introduced the event, providing background for the panel, informing the broader ASC membership of the importance of contributing translational criminology to the work of the United Nations (and particularly, the CSW), and aiming to recruit potential panellists for CSW67.

Kalliopi Mingeirou explained the importance of academic research to the deliberations at the CSW and the work of UN Women. If academics at the national level address gaps in research and policy of interest to the CSW and UN Women, they broaden the global knowledge base, permit the global exchange of good practices, and help to identify cross-national trends to inform the work of intergovernmental bodies in accelerating progress in gender equality. Houry Geudelekian, current Chair of NGO CSW/NY, explained the history, purpose and activities of NGO CSW. The organisation was founded in 1972 and celibrated its 50th Anniversary in 2022. It was formed in preparation for the International Women’s Year (1975), the UN Decade of Women (1975–1985), and the First World Conference on Women held in Mexico City in 1975. NGO CSW’s mandate was to provide a forum for exchange of information, facilitating a corporation among its member organisations and later, assisting the international community in implementing the Beijing Platform for Action (after its adoption during the fourth International Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995), and other UN agreements. It has become a key platform for international advocacy towards the promotion of women’s human rights, gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls and welcomes the participation of academics. Marie Nougier has been responsible for the communications and publications work stream of International Drug Policy Consortium since 2008 and engages in networking, civil society capacity building activities, and policy advocacy engagement, in particular at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs. She also supports IDPC’s activities in Latin America, where she helps coordinate a project to reduce the incarceration rate of women for drug offences. She spoke of how evidence and research on women, drugs and incarceration can have an impact in international policymaking such as the CSW and the CND, referencing her own co-authored article in our special issue of Violence Against Women entitled, “Women Mobilizing for Change: Resisting State Violence from Repressive Drug Policies” (Birgin et al., 2022).

We will now detail the panels we organised in 2022, from which the articles in this special issue are drawn. In 2022, at the Sixty-Sixth Session of the CSW, our four parallel events were:

March 21st, 2022:

Feminist Approaches to Justice: South Asian Women in Justice Professions

March 23rd, 2022:

Feminist Approaches to Justice: Women Justice Professionals Helping Women in the Changing World of Work

March 23rd, 2022:

Feminist Approaches to Justice: Women, Disasters and Climate Change: The Research Speaks

March 24th, 2022:

Feminist Approaches to Justice: Achieving Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women and Girls

Feminist approaches to justice: south asian women in justice professions

This panel was chaired by Dr. Sheetal Ranjan, Montclair State University. Topics for this panel included The Impact of COVID-19 on Personal and Professional Lives of Women Police Officers in Kerala, India, presented by Dr. Sandhya Bharathadas, Director General of Police, Fire & Rescue Services, Kerala (India) and Dr. Jyoti Belur, Associate Professor, University College London (UK); Women in the Court System in India: Unveiling Gender Advocacy (As Lawyers, Litigants, Witnesses, Potential Beneficiaries), presented by Dr. Shashikala Gurpur, Fulbright Scholar; Jean Monnet Chair Professor (2021–24); Director, Symbiosis Law School, Pune, Dean, School of Law; Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Former Member, Law Commission of India (India) and Justice (Dr.) Shalini Phansalkar Joshi, Former Judge, High Court of Bombay; Distinguished Visiting Judge Scholar in Residence, Symbiosis Law School, Pune (India); Diversity, Inclusion and Gender Equality in Judicial Appointments in India: Towards a Feminist Approach Presented by Justice Gita Mittal, Former Chief Justice, High Court, Jammu & Kashmir; Former Acting Chief Justice, Delhi High Court; Chairperson, Broadcasting Content Complaints Council (India) and Professor Dipika Jain, Professor of Law, Vice Dean Research & Clinical Legal Education, Director, Centre for Justice, Law and Society, Jindal Global Law School (India) (article featured in this issue); Women’s Experiences Navigating Prisons in India, presented by Dr. Penelope Tong, Social worker and Fieldwork supervisor, School of Social Work, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai (India) and Ms. Ntasha Bhardwaj, Founder-South Asian Institute of Crime & Justice Studies (India); Doctoral Candidate, Rutgers School of Criminal Justice (USA). The recording of the session can be accessed here: https://youtu.be/92crY4abgHY. Thanks are due to Dr. Peter Kingstone, Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences for his support; Dr. AJ Kelton, Director, Digital Media CoLab of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences: and Dr. Venezia Michalsen, then Montclair State University, for leading the Q&A session.

Feminist approaches to justice: women justice professionals helping women in the changing world of work

Dr. Dawn Beichner-Thomas, UN Representative World Society of Victimology, Professor, Illinois State University, presented in this panel, sponsored by the World Society of Victimology, and served as chair and moderator. The panel’s global focus included panellists from five countries and coverage of issues worldwide. Dr. Mahesh Nalla, Editor of International Journal of Comparative & Applied Criminal Justice, Professor, Michigan State University (USA), provided introductory comments and an overview of this journal and the goals of this special issue. Dr. Dawn Beichner- Thomas, Dr. Cara Rabe-Hemp, Associate Dean and Professor at Illinois State University (USA), and Dr. Mijin Kim, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice Sciences at Illinois State University (USA) discussed US Women in Justice Professions: A Half a Century After Title VII. Dr. Venessa Garcia, Associate Professor, New Jersey City University (USA) and Dr. Anqi Shen, Professor of Law, Northumbria University Newcastle (UK) presented Equity Before Equality for Women Police Around the World: Strategies for Change (article featured in this issue). Dr. Fernanda Fonseca Rosenblatt, Professor, Catholic University of Pernambuco (Brazil); International Institute for Restorative Practices (USA), Dr. Marília Montenegro Pessoa de Mello, Professor, Catholic University of Pemambuco (Brazil); Federal University of Pernambuco (Brazil), and Dr. Carolina Salazar L’Armée Queiroga de Medeiros, Professor, Catholic University of Pernambuco (Brazil) provided an overview of Women Victims of Domestic Violence in Brazil’s Criminal Justice System: Who Are They and What Do They Say? (article featured in this issue), Dr. Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile, Professor of Criminology and Director of Postgraduate Studies, Walter Sisulu University (South Africa) explained her call for the Redefinition of Incarcerated Women’s Identities in South Africa. Ms. Mozn Hassan, Director of Nazra for Feminist Studies; Community Psychology Program, the American University in Cairo (Egypt) and Dr. Helen Rizzo, Associate Professor of Sociology, the American University in Cairo (Egypt) provided an overview of The Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Epidemic Meets the COVID-19 Pandemic: Survivors’ and Advocates’ Narratives in Egypt (article featured in this issue.) The link to the recording is here: https://youtu.be/IN10UPPPF5I

Feminist approaches to justice: women, disasters and climate change: the research speaks

This panel was chaired by Dr. Rosemary Barberet, John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY). Topics included Gendered Ways of Knowing: Decolonizing Methodologies When Studying People in the Aftermath of Disaster, presented by Dr. Bethany Van Brown, Assistant Professor, Sociology & Criminology Department, Cabrini University, Philadelphia; Maternal & Infant Justice in Disasters, presented by Dr. Sarah DeYoung, Assistant Professor, Sociology and Criminal Justice, University of Delaware and Disaster Research Center; Documenting the Undocumented: How Mexican Immigrant Women Navigate Long-Term Post-Disaster Housing Recovery and Cumulative Disaster Impacts, presented by Ms. Melissa Villarreal, Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado Boulder; Coping with Climate Change and Wildfires Through Gender Equity, presented by Dr. Christine Eriksen, Senior Researcher, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich (Switzerland); The Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Australian Domestic Violence Services and Their Clients, presented by Ms. Vanessa Ryan, Senior Researcher, QUT Centre for Justice, Queensland University of Technology (Australia); and The Psychological, Social, and Economic Impacts of COVID-19 on Female Nepali Migrant Workers, presented by Dr. Jiwnath Ghimire, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Hawaii at Manoa & Julia Crowley, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Western Carolina University. The recording for this session is available here: https://jjay-cuny.zoom.us/rec/share/13Tp7ZXGMkKgqwAjDZSo1HcENlC7aey9mOXtmS3jQJoT08jYwYJGTq3eX4d89bFA.pSvZM_DDEzy1T-fP

Feminist approaches to justice: achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls

This panel was chaired by Dr. Dimitra Laurence Larochelle, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Youth Representative at the United Nations for the International Sociological Association. Introductory remarks were given by Dr. Geoffrey Pleyers, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. The featured speaker was Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, Former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative of the UN; Initiator of the conceptual breakthrough for UNSCR 1325 as the Security Council President in March 2000; and Founder of the Global Movement for The Culture of Peace (GMCoP). Panellists addressed the following topics: Addressing Two Problems Faced by Many Women: Inadequate 1325 National Action Plans and Mandatory Retirement of Older Adults, presented by Dr. Jan Marie Fritz, University of Cincinnati; Climate, Gender Equity, and Community Resilience, presented by Dr. Emma Porio, Professor, Ateneo de Manila University (Philippines); and Prison Gardens for Women as Pathway to Climate and Food Justice, presented by Dr. Daniela Jauk-Adamie, Assistant Professor, University of Akron and Dr. Sharon Everhardt, Associate Professor, Troy University (article by Dr. Jauk-Adamie featured in this issue). The recording is available here: https://youtu.be/8o8aEH49Ojo. Thanks are due to the ISA’s three youth representatives to the United Nations for their assistance in organising this panel: Dimitra Laurence Larochelle, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France, now Université de Montréal, Canada; Sebastián Galleguillos, CUNY Graduate Center/John Jay College of Criminal Justice, USA and Ragi Bashonga, University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

This special issue, then, adds some permanence to the oral input provided by our parallel event presenters. In the larger scheme of things, what is our intellectual contribution? We believe it lies in the nuanced analyses of our authors to the priority (Jauk-Adamie) and review themes (Mittal and Jain; Hassan & Rizzo; Garcia & Shen) of CSW66 and their own emphases on women as victims/survivors (Fonseca Rosenblatt et al.; Hassan & Rizzo), women as criminal justice professionals (Mittal and Jain; Garcia & Shen; Hassan & Rizzo) and incarcerated women (Jauk-Adamie).

Daniela Jauk-Adamie examines prisons for women in the United States in a case study of the gendered implications of mass incarceration and climate change. Prisons in the United States are often located on or near toxic sites and contribute to toxic contamination; climate change and global warming worsen these conditions. The female incarceration rate has skyrocketed, and women come to the prison context with antecedents of abuse, physical and mental illness. Jauk-Adamie makes a case for researchers and policymakers to address, analyse, and include incarcerated women’s experiences of climate stress in UN mechanisms such as the UN CSW and the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders (“Bangkok Rules”). Noting the invisibility of the voices of incarcerated women at the CSW, she forcefully argues for their inclusion in the larger framework of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Venessa Garcia and Anqi Shen provide a global overview of the integration of women in law enforcement, detailing the differences between countries that have embraced equality, equity and culture-specific models, arguing that in all countries, great barriers still exist to the recruitment, retention and promotion of women in policing, and their inclusion in all aspects of police work. No country has achieved full gender equality in its police force. They maintain that equity must be achieved before women police can obtain equality, and propose a policy aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals that allows equity to come first to create an equal platform for women in policing, setting the stage for a later achievement of gender equality.

Mozn Hassan and Helen Rizzo provide a detailed analysis of activism over the last 30 years against sexual and gender-based violence in Egypt. Their article forefronts both human rights defenders and victims/survivors of SGBV. They argue that several focusing events as well as the support of transnational advocacy networks have helped to mobilise action. While research on the abeyance of social movements under authoritarian rule suggests that they will become dormant, Hassan and Rizzo counter that Egyptian feminist mobilisation during the pandemic brought to the public sphere the untold stories of violence that occurred through online and social media platforms. Nevertheless, the current political atmosphere in Egypt demonstrates little tolerance for dissent both offline and online.

Fonseca Rosenblatt, Montenegro Pessoa de Mello and Salazar L’Armée Queiroga de Medeiros provide an evidence-based critique of Brazil’s 2006 Maria da Penha Law, often touted as a global model by the United Nations. This law established specialised courts to deal with criminal offences committed against women in the domestic context. The authors’ evidence base draws on a larger empirical study to showcase how victims’ experiences of secondary victimisation are linked to judges’ focus on the criminal aspects of the Maria da Penha Law and to their lack of expertise in gender issues. The authors argue that the law is excessively rigid, and thus not fully gender-responsive to the needs of the women it was designed to serve.

Mittal and Jain provide a critical, intersectional analysis of the issues impeding the gender diversity of the judiciary in India, where most judges in the Supreme Court and High Courts in India are cis-gender, upper-caste men. Women judges and lawyers face structural barriers such as gender stereotypes, discrimination, harassment, and insufficient institutional and infrastructural support. While some of these barriers resonate with the international literature on women and judging, others are specific to India. The authors advance reforms to create gender equality in the judiciary in India and align their efforts with those of SDGs 5 and 16.

Together, these five articles demonstrate that much remains to be done in terms of creating gender equal and gender-responsive institutions and that the interests of women, whether as offenders, victims/survivors or criminal justice professionals, are intertwined. We think this work needs to be undertaken by both the CSW and UN Women, but also by the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ) and UNODC. Two of us (Beichner-Thomas and Barberet) argued to this effect in statements we gave on behalf of our NGOs in the Thematic Discussions of the CCPCJ on the Implementation of the Kyoto Declaration (Pillar II’s Advancing the Criminal Justice System) https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/commissions/CCPCJ/session/31_Session_2022/thematic-sessions-kyoto.html. Whereas Beichner-Thomas’s statement addressed reducing women’s reoffending through rehabilitation and reoffending, Barberet’s statement focused on mainstreaming a gender perspective into criminal justice systems. We also support recent mobilisation by civil society to ensure that NGO voices are better included in the work of the United Nations, pursuant to ECOSOC Resolution 1996/31(NGO Committee Consultations with NGOs in Consultative Status with ECOSOC, 2022; Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, 1996). In our case, this means more inclusion of the research community. We are convinced that a better dialogue between UN policymakers and the research community around women, crime and criminal justice will reap rewards for both parties, and we are committed to continue to do our part in furthering this dialogue.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosemary Barberet

Rosemary Barberet, PhD, is a professor in the Sociology Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, where she has directed both the MA and BA programs in International Criminal Justice. Her publications have dealt with self-reported youth crime, women and crime, crime indicators, comparative methodology, and victimology and include the award-winning Women, Crime and Criminal Justice: A Global Enquiry (Routledge, 2014). Fluent in Spanish and French, she held positions in Spain and the UK from 1990 to 2005. From 2014 to 2018, she was the editor of Feminist Criminology. She represents the International Sociological Association (ISA) and Criminologists without Borders at the United Nations. She is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal for Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice.

Sheetal Ranjan

Rosemary Barberet, PhD, is a professor in the Sociology Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, where she has directed both the MA and BA programs in International Criminal Justice. Her publications have dealt with self-reported youth crime, women and crime, crime indicators, comparative methodology, and victimology and include the award-winning Women, Crime and Criminal Justice: A Global Enquiry (Routledge, 2014). Fluent in Spanish and French, she held positions in Spain and the UK from 1990 to 2005. From 2014 to 2018, she was the editor of Feminist Criminology. She represents the International Sociological Association (ISA) and Criminologists without Borders at the United Nations. She is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal for Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice.

Sheetal Ranjan, Ph.D., is a Professor of Justice Studies & Sociology at Montclair State University, USA. Her research interests include violence prevention and intervention with a primary focus on applied research. She has received Federal funding from the Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women ($600,000) to establish William Paterson University’s Campus Violence Prevention Program. Her recent awards in partnership with Jersey Shore University Medical Center ($6.5 million dollars) has helped establish community programs (e.g., Project HEAL and Elevate) that bring healthcare approaches to justice issues. She currently serves on the Policy Committee of the American Society of Criminology and on UN Women’s End Violence Against Women (EVAW) global roster of experts. She has served as past chair (2017–2019) of the Division on Women & Crime (DWC) of the American Society of Criminology. In her term as DWC’s chair, she led its First Congressional Briefing at the Capitol Hill and its first participation in the Commission on the Status of Women CSW63 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City and continues to do so each year.

Dawn Beichner-Thomas, Ph.D., is a professor in the Criminal Justice Sciences Department and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Illinois State University. Her research interests include victimology, justice system-involved people and their families, prisoner reentry, and restorative justice. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the World Society of Victimology and represents the organization at the United Nations. Dr. Beichner-Thomas is Vice Chair of the American Society of Criminology’s Division of International Criminology. She is also a research consultant for the Peoria County Problem Solving Courts and the YWCA Labyrinth Outreach Services to Women, a nonprofit organization which provides reintegration services to women returning home from prison and jail.

Dawn Beichner-Thomas

Rosemary Barberet, PhD, is a professor in the Sociology Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, where she has directed both the MA and BA programs in International Criminal Justice. Her publications have dealt with self-reported youth crime, women and crime, crime indicators, comparative methodology, and victimology and include the award-winning Women, Crime and Criminal Justice: A Global Enquiry (Routledge, 2014). Fluent in Spanish and French, she held positions in Spain and the UK from 1990 to 2005. From 2014 to 2018, she was the editor of Feminist Criminology. She represents the International Sociological Association (ISA) and Criminologists without Borders at the United Nations. She is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal for Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice.

Sheetal Ranjan, Ph.D., is a Professor of Justice Studies & Sociology at Montclair State University, USA. Her research interests include violence prevention and intervention with a primary focus on applied research. She has received Federal funding from the Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women ($600,000) to establish William Paterson University’s Campus Violence Prevention Program. Her recent awards in partnership with Jersey Shore University Medical Center ($6.5 million dollars) has helped establish community programs (e.g., Project HEAL and Elevate) that bring healthcare approaches to justice issues. She currently serves on the Policy Committee of the American Society of Criminology and on UN Women’s End Violence Against Women (EVAW) global roster of experts. She has served as past chair (2017–2019) of the Division on Women & Crime (DWC) of the American Society of Criminology. In her term as DWC’s chair, she led its First Congressional Briefing at the Capitol Hill and its first participation in the Commission on the Status of Women CSW63 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City and continues to do so each year.

Dawn Beichner-Thomas, Ph.D., is a professor in the Criminal Justice Sciences Department and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Illinois State University. Her research interests include victimology, justice system-involved people and their families, prisoner reentry, and restorative justice. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the World Society of Victimology and represents the organization at the United Nations. Dr. Beichner-Thomas is Vice Chair of the American Society of Criminology’s Division of International Criminology. She is also a research consultant for the Peoria County Problem Solving Courts and the YWCA Labyrinth Outreach Services to Women, a nonprofit organization which provides reintegration services to women returning home from prison and jail.