Gender, Criminalization, Imprisonment and Human Rights in Southeast Asia

In this introductory chapter, we discuss the impetus for this edited book. We introduce activist, critical and feminist criminological theorizing and research on gender, intersectionality, criminalization, and carceral experiences. The scene is set for the chapters to follow by providing a general overview of gender, criminalization, imprisonment, and human rights in Southeast Asia with particular attention being paid to Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, and the Philippines. We consider trends and drivers of women’s imprisonment in the region, against the backdrop of the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-Custodial Measures for Women Offenders, also known as the Bangkok Rules, which were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly just over a decade ago. We reflect on the dominance of western centric feminist (and malestream) criminological works on gender, criminalization and imprisonment, the positioning of Southeast Asian knowledge on the peripheries of Asian criminology and the importance of bringing to light, as this book does, gendered activist scholarship in this region of the world.

In this chapter, we examine historical and contemporary debates about the position and situation of women in Myanmar (and to a lesser extent gender and sexual minorities). Specific reference is made to the patriarchal character of the military coup of February 1, 2021, and the emergent forms of feminist resistance that turned social norms inside out in protest against lethal repression. The way women, as well as sexual and gender minorities, are unequally positioned and face structural and social discrimination in society serves to contextualize our presentation of the findings of a collaborative case-study conducted in 2018 on issues pertaining to gender and imprisonment in Myanmar, based mainly on interviews with former prisoners in three research sites. The aim was to generate field-based knowledge about the carceral experiences of women and LGBTQIA+ persons in Myanmar – focusing on their needs and vulnerabilities, their capacities and rights, their relationships and identities, and their modes of survival as they encounter penal regimes. Findings are summarized focusing on former prisoners’ experiences of legal bias; perspectives on encounters with the criminal justice system; the inadequacy of health provision (posed as lethal neglect); and the way certain behaviors and identities are criminalized. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the degree to which there might still be space for critical scholarship in the post-coup world and poses some questions for future research.

To reduce the number of women being sentenced to death, this chapter explores and critically reflects on the calls being made by women’s rights activists in Southeast Asia for cross-border drug trafficking to be reconstituted as human trafficking. Drawing on interviews with a range of stakeholders, alongside information on 146 cases of women sentenced to death for drug trafficking in Malaysia, this chapter shows that the gendered dynamics of drug trafficking can indeed be understood as a form of human trafficking. However, there are concerns from a feminist activist perspective in representing it in these terms because the discourse of human trafficking, has been used by the patriarchal state to legitimize racialized and gendered oppression of women at borders. This has ramifications in terms of human rights, particularly with regards to women’s right to freedom of movement as well as the right to livelihood.

Whilst small, the number of women in Cambodian prisons has been growing rapidly. These women are often first-time offenders, detained on drug or poverty-related offenses. Most women are detained pre-trial, then sentenced harshly. Children in Cambodia can accompany their mother in prison, but there is no standardized process for this to occur. Conditions within the prisons have been described as substandard and extremely challenging, with a lack of appropriate nutrition, health care, and environmental stimulation. There is also a lack of humanitarian programs addressing the specific needs and challenges faced by women prisoners, and their children. This chapter provides an overview of the work of This Life Cambodia, a Non-Government Organization (NGO), which delivers targeted programs to both women and their children, during and after imprisonment. It discusses the role of the This Life in Family (TLIF) program, which provides valued support to vulnerable families at risk of separation. The program primarily targets mothers in prison from poor, disadvantaged and multiple deprived communities, who are accompanied by, or separated from, their children.

This chapter explores the work tasks assigned to women prisoners in Myanmar. The official intention of such tasks is to help rehabilitate women in prison by providing them with skills to enhance their future employability outside the prison. The chapter critically inspects this proposition based on an ethnographic case study involving interviews with previously incarcerated women. The women’s narratives allow us to juxtapose the actual practice of prison work with the aims of rehabilitation and to critically examine the connection between the types of work tasks given, the distribution of tasks to different kinds of prisoners, and the potential of such work to enhance employability post-release. We find that while prison work is provided ostensibly to prepare and equip women with skills as a form of vocational training, in fact, it rather serves the interests of private companies and the Myanmar Prison Department. We argue that the types of work are intentionally and unintentionally exploitative. The challenges faced by women concerning prison work are highlighted, and the authors propose that the Myanmar Prison Department must commit to more genuine livelihood training options that are not exploitative, but meaningful and orientated toward the employability of women prisoners upon their release.

To date, intersectional feminist criminological enquiry concerned with exploring junctions of gender and ethnicity amongst incarcerated women, has mainly come from studies undertaken in western nations. In this chapter, we present findings from research undertaken in Thailand that explored incarcerated ethnic minority women’s backgrounds, situational contexts surrounding their criminalization and criminal justice system experiences, with particular attention paid to women’s time in prison. Our purpose was to examine how gender and ethnicity intersected, impacting the lived experiences of criminalized ethnic minority women before and during their incarceration. Findings revealed the ways in which these women are marginalized inside and outside prison walls. On the outside, the women struggled with patriarchal systems of power, both within and beyond their communities. They were subjugated as women and by discourses of ethnic othering. Under-education, poverty, living with state, community, familial and intimate partner violence, trauma, and other adversity were key aspects of the women’s pre-prison lives and created the contexts from which they came into conflict with the law. The women faced challenges in accessing justice and, once imprisoned, gender and ethnicity intersected in several domains, to impact their carceral experiences.

In feminist criminology, there is a growing body of research exploring gendered pathways into prison. However, to date, this scholarship has not considered how age and gender may intersect to impact women’s criminalization experiences. In this chapter, the authors have consequently chosen to explore older women’s (aged 50+ years) narratives of their journeys to prison in Thailand using a feminist pathways approach. Results show several common threads in the stories of these women. Most were criminalized for the first time in later adulthood, had lived with various childhood and adulthood adversities, including, but not limited, to victimization and financial precarity, and had familial caretaking responsibilities. Many also recounted problems with substance misuse. Additionally, two relatively distinct pathways to prison emerged from the narratives: (1) economically motivated, (2) adversity, emotional distress, and addiction. A third pathway – intersectional, diffuse and unique – was also identified. It included themes from the first two pathways and the story of one woman that could not be categorized elsewhere. While the imprisonment pathways found mirrored those from previous pathways scholarship points of difference are noted.

Transgender prisoners are subject to violence of many kinds. They are tortured, beaten, sexually assaulted, raped, and denied access to qualified public health services. This is because legal and justice systems in most countries disregard the unique conditions, needs, and requirements of transgender people. Transgender prisoners around the world suffer from mental health issues and lack of continuous access to sexual health services and hormone treatment. Like most countries in Southeast Asia, and regardless of a significantly large population of transgender prisoners, Thailand still provides no standard policies on how transgender prisoners should be managed, and transgender prisoners’ experiences remain under-researched. Through an anthropological and gendered lens, this chapter theoretically and practically examines transgender prisoners’ gendered life experiences behind bars in Thailand, debates transgender prisoners’ vulnerabilities and the myths behind them, identifies challenges around gendered-housing, analyses cultural nuances of Thai (trans)gender performativity in prisons, discusses the impact of heterosexual-binary prison management, and offers real-world policy recommendations, which are urgently needed by the Thai justice and correctional system.

This chapter delves into the experiences and social worlds of women previously sentenced to capital punishment and now imprisoned in the Philippines. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation, the pathways of 27 women previously on death row are presented. Narratives reveal multiple constraints stemming from gendered familial, relational, and economic responsibilities, vulnerability to gendered control and violence, poverty or financial precarity. These gendered inequities were compounded by structural barriers in the context of a low-income, postcolonial nation with entrenched corruption. The women’s stories reveal four pathways to criminalization: (1) responding to violence; (2) economic precarity; (3) drug abuse; and (4) guilt by association and corrupted justice. The research reported in this chapter enriches feminist criminological knowledge on gendered pathways to criminalization by adding the voices of women in the Philippines to a now growing body of Southeast Asian scholarship. In line with previous studies, findings reveal the ways in which women come into conflict with the law because of choices made within constrained social circumstances.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlines fundamental protections for all human beings. Critically, such rights and protections are particularly applicable to those imprisoned throughout all carceral spaces: the right to physical security; freedom from torture and other cruel and unusual punishments; equal protection under the law; and a right to a community standard of living, including food, clothing, medical care, and social services. The need for special vigilance in applying these principles to justice settings for children and women entwined in these spaces has been met with the development and implementation of the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-Custodial Measures for Women Offenders (2010) or the Bangkok Rules. These Rules provide for a women-centered approach to human rights within correctional environments. The Bangkok Rules are based on several dominant themes relevant to women in prison and additionally emphasize the importance of alternatives to custody. Since their adoption over 10 years ago, there has been clear progress in implementing and promoting the Bangkok Rules throughout Southeast Asia, as we will describe in this chapter. While we applaud these efforts, there is still much work to do within the region. We argue that attention is needed both within and outside of women’s prisons to expand the promise of the Bangkok Rules beyond current efforts. In our view, the attention inside prison walls must now turn to addressing intersections between gender and other marginalized statuses, ensuring all forms of safety, dignity, and respect. Outside prison, reform of egregious and punitive drug laws is essential. Equally important, is the critical need to develop a more robust response in terms of non-custodial measures and other non-prison-based responses to women in conflict with the law.

The chapters in this book show that it is possible to conduct studies on the intersections between gender, criminalization, imprisonment, and human rights in Southeast Asia. In this conclusion, we draw out the implications of this emerging scholarship. More specifically, we critically examine how common talk about “individual needs” risks blinding criminal justice reformers to the structural, gendered dynamics that render people criminalizable and imprisonable. We explore the potential of the concept of participation to strengthen understandings and activism around gendered harms, and grapple with the thorny issue of for whom we speak. We advocate for cross-cultural understandings, developed in collaboration and through partnership, to productively challenge the ethnocentrism of criminology and propel truly transformative agendas. Three steps are identified to decenter research and activism: Scholars and activists must acknowledge the risks of attending to need while not attending to the drivers of need; resist the temptation to operate only within the limits defined by the authorities, the state, the academy, or agencies set up to protect; and generate “home grown,” counter-hegemonic solutions that push back against the tendency to universalize, colonize and deny difference.