The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence

Men typically commit more violent crime than women which has led to the concept that it is a male offence. Consequently, there is a tendency to suggest that female offenders are so atypical and abnormal that they require explanation, rather than accepting that all genders are capable of violent behaviour. Women who kill tend to challenge conceptualisations of normative femininity. Accordingly, in an attempt to understand female violence, historians and criminologists have placed women who kill into explanatory categories. Female murderers have often been portrayed as ‘mad’, ‘bad’ or ‘sad.’ This framework is responsible for the infantilisation, monsterisation and victimisation of violent women. It has also led to womanhood being put on trial: women are not only condemned for their crimes but also for failing to live up to feminine ideals. Nevertheless, the ‘mad’, ‘bad’ or ‘sad’ framework can be useful to historians as it is often the only narrative that survives. However, it needs to be recognised that while this framework allows historical perceptions of women's violence to be studied, women's narratives are often absent, distorted or overlooked.

Infanticide stands out as a crime which, in England and Wales, has been marked for at least 200 years by deep-rooted continuities in its representation and treatment by both the criminal justice system and the media, despite the massive political, economic, social, legislative and cultural changes that occurred over this period. Particularly remarkable about this long-standing discourse is its routine emphasis that the guilty mother is also a victim of tragic circumstances that led to the crime and deserving of sympathetic treatment. It also invariably sets infanticide apart as a ‘special case’ which does not necessarily fit with either medical or legal definitions of diminished criminal responsibility. Perhaps surprisingly, this framing of women who commit infanticide stresses not only their ‘normality’ prior to the offence but also their ‘respectability’, a sharp contrast to the sometimes overtly misogynistic representation of other types of women offenders. This chapter argues that it is above all ‘respectability’ that profoundly shaped the cultural script relating to infanticide in England and Wales between 1800 and 2000, and that this continues to exert a powerful legacy on the relatively small number of cases that now comes before the courts in the twenty-first century.

This chapter focuses on women's descriptions of their own violence in nineteenth-century Ireland, as revealed in prisoner petitions held in the National Archives of Ireland. It uses the case files of women imprisoned or sentenced to death for violent crimes such as infanticide, manslaughter, murder, wounding and assault. This chapter takes an empirical approach and considers the ways that women explained and rationalised their violent acts. An analysis of the petitions offers an insight into women's views of their own violence, gendered attitudes at the time, and women's sense of the factors that might lead to a commutation of sentence. The accuracy or truthfulness of the petitions is not important in this study; instead, the chapter explores the self-image that women wanted to portray and the tactics that they opted to use to seek a reduction in their sentences. As shown in this chapter, most women emphasised their passivity: they typically claimed to be innocent, coerced or provoked into violence.

The criminal justice system uses oversimplified stock narratives that place women who kill into limiting categories of ‘bad’, ‘mad’ and/or ‘victim’. These narratives deny women's agency by portraying their actions as lacking humanity, rationality and/or intentionality. Many feminist scholars argue that new narratives are needed to recognise women who kill as fully human, volitional subjects. This chapter uses the case of Maria Barberi to examine why and how defences founded on a victim-based agency fail. In 1895, Barberi killed Domenico Cataldo in a Manhattan barroom after enduring months of psychological, physical and sexual abuse. Her defence was grounded in the unwritten law – a widely held belief that people had the right to avenge their honour (when impugned by infidelity, seduction or sexual assault) with lethal violence. The case went through four stages: the initial trial, resulting in a murder conviction and death sentence; a nation-wide clemency campaign; an appeal; and a retrial, resulting in an acquittal. Throughout this process, Barberi's agency was undermined by negative stereotypes of gender and ethnicity, the political goals of women's rights activists, and Barberi's own self-interests. Ultimately, this case demonstrates that agency-based narratives are both difficult to deploy and desperately needed.

Violence continues to escalate globally, despite efforts that are being made to curb it. Even though men constitute the majority of the perpetrators of violence, it is indisputable that some of the violence is also perpetrated by women. Qualitative in nature, this chapter is located within the interpretive research approach. Arguments made in this chapter are grounded in a socialist feminism approach, which foregrounds the importance of class and gender. Thus, this chapter drew from desk review and an empirical study conducted in Lesotho, utilising the Female Correctional Institution in Lesotho as the study site. The chapter explores women's perpetration of varied forms of violence. It aims at shedding more light on the drivers of violence perpetrated by women. The study unearthed that women's violence is mainly driven by poverty, gender inequalities, lack of social capital and self-defence. The author argues that future theoretical engagements and policy responses to women's violence could benefit from empirical evidence, which critically engages feminist approaches. The chapter is envisaged to contribute to the current debates on feminist approaches to women's violence.

Since female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) entered the wider Western consciousness in the 1970s, feminist debates surrounding these practices have wrestled with the tensions between recognising the specificity of women's experiences of oppression and challenging gender-based violence (GBV) as a global phenomenon. Crucially, although intersectionality is now readily applied to analyses of different forms of GBV, the international anti-FGM/C discourse has been slow in embracing more nuanced analyses of women's vulnerability. This chapter draws from still often-overlooked Black and postcolonial feminist thinking to problematise the radical feminist legacy which continues to prescribe the dominant explanations to women's participation in FGM/C in terms of ‘Third World’ un-educatedness and lack of feminist consciousness. In framing women's participation as a patriarchal bargain (Kandiyoti, 1988), this chapter argues that women's complicity in FGM/C takes place amidst complex constraints which inhibit women's spaces for action in FGM/C-practising societies. The chapter reflects findings from qualitative research which has interrogated women's experiences of continuums of interpersonal and structural violence to make sense of women's participation and constrained resistance in FGM/C-practising contexts. In doing so, this chapter problematises the gender and racial binaries which continue to influence decontextualised understandings of women's acts of ‘honour’-based violence.

Over the last few decades there has been increased interest in studying the phenomenon of violence among people with intellectual disabilities (ID). Research addressing offending and victimization among this population suffers from generalised androcentrism by extrapolating findings to women, and is also homogenising, ignoring any individual and gendered differences. Existing research also demonstrates a clear focus on vulnerability and increased risk of victimization, but very little attention has been paid to women with ID as perpetrators of crime. Many factors play a role in the process of victimisation and offence, which implies the need to deconstruct the hegemonic vision of violence and examine its different manifestations and nuances. Therefore, this chapter provides a critical and historical review of the role of women with ID as victims and perpetrators of crime, by synthesising the different levels of analysis of the subject using an intersectionality approach. In conclusion, the evidence so far does not elucidate the prevalence or characteristics of these offenders. What we do know is that this group faces interacting, individual, social and environmental difficulties. They report high rates of victimisation and mental health comorbidity. Altogether they reveal an overlapping status of victim and offender.

Current responses to women's violence are rooted in stereotypical views that delink women's violence from the context of gendered inequality and social marginalisation that mediates it. In this chapter, we draw from feminist scholarship on women's violence, including violence by female sex workers (FSWs), and qualitative data to examine different forms of FSWs' violence against their male clients and the contexts that shape their use of violence. Twenty-seven in-depth interviews were conducted with FSWs recruited through snowball sampling in Uyo, Nigeria. Thematic analysis revealed three forms of violence: ‘situational violence’ – an individual-centred, self-defensive and spontaneous response to conflict situations; ‘collective violence’ – pre-meditated violence used by a group of FSWs to revenge the victimisation of its member, and ‘symbolic violence’ – the un-planned outcome of FSWs' violence that has the effect of deterring client violence and inducing cooperative behaviour. FSWs use violence to deter or counter threatened or enacted client violence and to exact revenge for past victimisation. They also use violence to enforce rules, extract payments and establish solidarity. FSWs' violence is contextualised within the everyday experience of client violence. This violence is not only reactionary; it is a pragmatic attempt to negotiate structural and gender dynamics that shape risks in sex work.

Now and again the discourse of women's violence being ignored and minimised emerges, but what is already known about this subject? Within the domestic abuse literature, there appears to be a weighty discord between Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) and family conflict researchers. Both groups present very distinct findings regarding the motives and prevalence of women's use of violence. This theoretical chapter aims to provide an historical and contemporary grounded overview of how women's use of violence in domestic abuse incidents has been depicted in the literature within these two groups of researchers (VAWG and family conflict). This analysis will be especially focussed on the underlying rationale behind women's violence and its prevalence and impact.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetrated by women is an infrequently discussed topic. The lack of knowledge about female perpetrators of IPV results institutionally in insufficient prevention training and discursively in inadequate appreciation of the women's realm. Thus, this chapter will examine the debates on female IPV in the area of tension between violence prevalence research and the gender-based approach in social sciences and shows that female IPV as a women's reality of life is not limited to resistance violence and is far more complex. By collecting data from 58 female IPV cases, the author develops a typology of female offenders of IPV. Case files documented by the counsellors at violenTia, a German counselling specialist working with women perpetrating violence in their partnership, were examined. The counsellors' notes in the case files were analysed by methods of the empirically grounded type construction, that is the notes were thematically coded and dimensionalised and the case files were grouped according to empirical regularities, followed by an analysis of the contexts of meaning, the type construction and the characterisation of the types constructed. As per the findings, four types (1–4) and one subtype (3′) of female IPV were developed. The main dimensions of the typology are the structure of violence (asymmetrical/symmetrical), the pattern of violence (systematic/situational), the agency of violence (who has the ability and capacity to use violence) and attribution of meaning to violence (for example, explanations and legitimisation). The author concludes that types of female offenders show strong external heterogeneity. A finding which is important for appropriate treatment settings. Female perpetrators often lack the words to describe violent behaviour and repeatedly have unprocessed trauma. Accordingly, to understand and prevent IPV, it is necessary to widen perspectives on female offenders without reducing them to traditional gender stereotypes.

In spite of the growing evidence of intimate partner violence (IPV) against men, limited scholarly work exists on this topic. To date, few studies have explored the motivations and socio-cultural underpinnings of violence against men in Kenya and sub-Saharan Africa in general. Using the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey and employing logit models, we examined associations between women's controlling behaviours and IPV among 3,262 Kenyan men aged 15–54 years. Over 60% of the Kenyan men surveyed reported their female partners were controlling. Compared with those who did not, men who reported controlling behaviours were significantly more likely to have experienced three types of violence (physical, sexual and emotional). Educated Kenyan men had higher odds of experiencing physical and emotional violence than the uneducated, and they reported higher levels of control by their female partners. Our findings suggest that IPV against men may be goal-oriented, but there is also evidence that it may be a reaction to male-perpetrated abuse.

Woman's use of violence has been mainly conceptualised through woman's experiences of victimization. However, more recent perspectives emphasise the female agency, responsibility and meaning of woman's violence. Listening to the voices of victims of women's abuse is a powerful way of learning about woman's use of violence and its impact on the victims. We conducted focus groups with 41 men from four countries who experienced female-perpetrated abuse. Four major types of abuse were identified: psychological abuse and coercive control followed by physical violence and sexual violence. Psychological abuse ranged from verbal assaults and gaslighting to provoking physical altercations and reporting false accusations. Patterns of control included deliberate isolation, threatening false accusations and financial domination. Men reported that women initiated physical violence for various reasons, including jealousy and rage. Some women used different objects that could seriously hurt, including knife, while others slapped, bit, punched or kicked. Several men reported female-perpetrated sexual abuse. Woman's use of violence in the intimate relationship should be treated seriously. A more gender-inclusive approach to partner abuse is required that can focus on a better prevention of abuse for all victims.

Obstetric violence is the mistreatment of women in the setting of obstetric care, which includes preconception, medically assisted reproduction, pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum. Obstetric violence follows and perpetuates the devaluation and subjugation of women in patriarchal societies, where socio-cultural conceptions contribute to a view of the female body as faulty and deviating from the male prototype. These shape the perception that female reproductive processes require technological corrections. The medicalisation of reproductive processes and the mechanisation of a normal life event, with the threat of death and other life-changing consequences, disempower women and objectify the body and its functions.

The entrance of women into the workforce and the specialised fields, feminising care professions, failed to shift this paradigm. Female health workers are trained in the procedures instituted by dominant patriarchal structures, expressing values encoded in the professional culture and the institutions where they work. As women conform to the models they are exposed to during their training, perpetuating corporate hierarchies and practices, they act as agents and perpetrators of obstetric violence. Thus, obstetric violence also constitutes a specific type of violence against women at the hands of other women.

Violence as a foundational element of police work is continuously reaffirmed and justified through police labour as ‘violence workers’ (Seigel, 2018). Hiring more female police officers has recently been seen as a way to reduce police violence. However, would employing more female officers change the relationship between policing and violence? Arguments in favour of more female police tend to rely on stereotypical understandings of gender, emphasising that women are naturally less aggressive and more likely to be caring and compassionate, often obscuring the violence enacted by female police officers in doing so. Female officers may be more likely to engage in violence out of necessity due to police culture and occupational norms around the use of force. Examining female police across countries such as the United States, Nigeria and Slovenia, this chapter establishes female police violence as a broader pattern, reflects on how female officers participate in police violence and addresses the extent to which masculinised police culture structures the expression of police violence. This chapter concludes with a discussion of why hiring more female police officers is not an adequate solution for reducing police violence, as police officers enact and are complicit in violence, regardless of gender.

The participation of women in contemporary non-state armed groups is an undeniable fact. In recent years, research in international politics has provided a more complex view of both the scale and nature of their contributions, as well as why women choose to engage in political violence – when they do indeed choose to do so. This chapter offers an overview of the literature in this area, while expanding the discussion towards new and emerging questions. In particular, the chapter seeks to engage a growing literature on the legal and social aspects of women's involvement in armed conflict. Discussing women's roles as perpetrators of atrocity and war crimes – including as agents of torture, sexual violence and genocide – it addresses concerns about the meaningful integration of gender into post-conflict and transitional justice processes. This includes discussions about agency and the problematic entanglement of victim/perpetrator narratives in the cases of female ex-combatants.

Existing literature on the post-war agency of women combatants focuses on macro-level political and economic processes as measures of their agency in the post-war society. I try to present a more complicated and complete picture of women ex-combatants' experiences of post-war agency by including socio-cognitive process to understand their post-war experiences. After categorising the extant research into four categories – post-war as regression; structural forces shaping post-war regression; situated agency of women ex-combatants; and micro-politics of post-war – I introduce the concept of ‘strategic silence’. This concept indicates the capacity of female ex-combatants to consciously stay silent and to highlight the collective gains and empowerment for women while sacrificing the self. Secondly, I introduce the concept of ‘epistemic resistance’ which captures their ability to resist dominant narratives of social transformation by the Maoists in Nepal. I focus specifically on narratives around marriage during the insurgency. I conducted 39 extensive interviews during my fieldwork in Nepal (2017–2018) involving female ex-combatants, their leaders (male and female) and experts. This chapter makes an important intervention in feminist security studies and feminist international relations through a specific focus on gender in post-war reconstruction and peacebuilding.

Historically, counter-terrorism's attitude towards women has been complicated, partly because both counter-terrorism and terrorism were for many years considered almost exclusively a male business. This approach has also been reflected in the media's sensationalised representation of women involved in political violence. This chapter explores how women's participation in non-state political violence is still largely explained through traditional conservative notions of sexual difference that characterise women as irrational and highly influenceable, eliminating the possibility of any informed discussion. Focusing on the British case, the chapter shows how the actions of female militants are still bound to gendered narratives and limited to specific frames that generally portray violent women as highly sexualised and pathologised. Depictions of female terrorists and ‘radicalised’ women are based on stereotypes that reinforce the image of women as weak, easily influenced, naïve, driven by romantic emotions, deceitful and in constant need of protection and supervision. From an intersectional perspective, the chapter also explores the orientalist imaginaries of Muslim women who are seen as victims and as individuals lacking empowerment and agency. The discussion highlights ultimately that explanations of women's violence must go beyond myths that explain women's involvement in political violence via a wide range of personal and emotional factors, to examine political motivations and consideration of the complexity of their decisions, and the wider context.

Representations of female perpetrators of political violence contribute to society's thinking about women, gender, violence and agency. Analysis of this discourse is vital to understand its influence on society's knowledge of women and violence. The study investigates how gendered narratives are used to frame female ex-combatants in Nationalist and Unionist newspapers in the post-conflict society of Northern Ireland. The media is a central agent in the construction of knowledge; and this is significant for women who have perpetrated crimes or (political) violence. The existing research found that violent women are narrated and interpreted through gendered discursive frameworks to dismiss or make sense of their violence. However, in the Northern Irish case, although the women are constructed within gendered frames, this does not deny their agency in past political violence.

Examining how ideas about violence and agency relate to gender, this chapter considers women's participation in armed struggle during the 1960s–1980s. Drawing on a small selection of case studies, it specifically explores women's involvement with left-wing urban guerrilla groups in Italy, West Germany and the United States. I examine different examples of political violence connected to ‘women's issues’, discuss the experiences and reflections of women involved and look at how such activities were received by the broader women's liberation movement. With a foundation thus established, the chapter interrogates the implications of the examples covered in relation to the social organisation of gender, touches on their significance to feminism and concludes with a consideration of the subversive and potentially liberatory possibilities associated with women's political violence.

In this chapter, we analyse the role of women in armed Basque nationalist and separatist terrorist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) from a gender perspective. ETA women were essential agents in the armed conflict, but their image in the mass media and society has been very different from that of their male colleagues (Rodríguez Lara, 2017). Also, their role in the terrorist gang has described a sexually based functional specialisation. In addition, this chapter seeks to contribute to the area of feminist studies on women and political violence. Women's role in one of the most important armed nationalist groups in Europe, ETA, stands as a suitable case study to understand how the mass media (press, journalism), audiovisual content, and social representations of ETA have portrayed these women. The final conclusion of this chapter is that women were not portrayed in the same way as their male colleagues. Women of ETA were doubly penalised because they were women and because they were terrorists.

Women's violence is periodically raised as a cause for concern both in the media as well as in discussions among the general public in other platforms, such as online forums. These concerns are linked with anti-feminist efforts to discredit the benefits of feminisms and to counter feminist knowledge on gendered patterns in violence. In this chapter, I discuss the ways these concerns and the associated discrediting of feminism have been manifested in various contexts, including academic research on intimate partner violence. My specific focus is on online forums, where women's use of violence is frequently highlighted for the purpose of creating an image of reversed gender discrimination experienced by men. I illustrate how such meaning-making is employed in online discussions derived from various online discussion forums in Finland. The empirical example is focussed on identifying discursive methods frequently employed in the online contexts and specifically illustrates how those methods are employed for the rhetorical effect of othering feminists, highlighting the severity of women's violence as a social problem and portraying men instead of women as victims of inequality. I conclude with a discussion on connections between this meaning-making and broader patterns in anti-feminist mobilisations of the issue of women's violence.

Filicide, the killing of a child by a parent, is one of the only crimes committed by women and men in roughly equal numbers. Women's violence against their children, however, more profoundly confounds common understandings of the links between gender and family violence, leading to its ambivalent treatment within the media. When men kill their children, they are usually characterised as either monsters or as sad, failed men. When women kill their children, they are usually represented as bad mothers or mad mothers suffering under the burdens of the pathological female body. In both cases, a mental illness/distress lens is common, though how it manifests is inflected by gender. This chapter examines recent Australian news representations of maternal filicide-suicide. Focussing on the mental illness/distress frame in news, it examines the ideological work this frame does in decontextualising and de-gendering maternal filicide, framing women's mental illness/distress in ‘psychocentric’ terms that strip it of political or social significance and subjecting it to an individualised lens that obscures the gendered aetiologies of women's use of violence.

Murder is overwhelmingly a male affair (UNODC Global Study on Homicide, 2019). So, when women kill, their crimes gain a lot of attention and even more hysteria in both courts and media. This chapter will analyse the cases of Sally Challen, Belinda van Krevel and Maxine Carr to show that portrayals of women who are involved in killing exist on a continuum, from abused victims to those simply ‘born evil’ to the incomprehension of those whose crimes render them outside society altogether; or in simple terms, from sad, to bad, to mad. In all cases, the agency of the women is presented as incomplete or impossible, indicating our inability in heteropatriarchy to acknowledge that women are as capable as men of exhibiting the full spectrum of human behaviour. Denying agency, particularly to violent women, allows Western societies to avoid having to face and thus, attempt to understand, the female capacity for aggression.

Myra Hindley is typically described as an ‘icon of evil’. In the 1960s, Hindley and her boyfriend Ian Brady sexually tortured and murdered at least two girls and three boys, aged between 10 and 17 years, in the Manchester area of the UK. All except one were sexually assaulted. She has provoked a huge amount of public commentary for more than three and a half decades after her conviction. This chapter asks how Hindley's actions were understood and interpreted at the time. Central themes are the concept ‘evil’, sexual violence, pornography, permissive society and patriarchy, as refracted through gender and class.

The figure of the femme fatale is attached to a range of contested meanings around femininity, sexuality and violence. Despite its ambiguity and its origins in art, myth and fiction, the term has proven popular in giving a name to violent articulations of female power in non-fictional settings by journalists. In this chapter, I outline the figure of the femme fatale as an archetype of women's violence that appears throughout Western popular culture, and provide an overview of the term's definitions and cultural meanings. In doing so, I trace the figure's movement across different forms and genres of popular culture. I identify a number of themes in the existing scholarship around the figure: feminist criticism of the figure; the value that feminist film scholars have found in the figure as a symbol of power and sexual transgression; the relationship between the femme fatale, race and the colonial imagination; and the way the idea of the femme fatale has been used in reporting of real-life women's violence.

Killing Eve (BBC 2018–2022) has been hailed as a feminist television show. Its cinematic production values call upon a history of espionage on screen, encompassing international intrigue and glamorised hyperviolent action sequences. Is this violent aesthetic a cathartic reference to newly visible feminist discourse or are we just being sold a new version of old fantasies?

In this chapter Killing Eve is examined in relation to a history of violent women spies on screen, from Emma Peel (The Avengers 1961–1969) to Sydney Bristow (Alias 2001–2006). While Villanelle (Jody Comer) appears to present an amoral account of postfeminist ‘empowerment’, Eve (Sandra Oh) carries echoes of second-wave feminist concerns with community, morality and ethics. With each season the differences between Villanelle and Eve unravel, raising questions about what constitutes ‘quality’ television and how that might intersect with old-fashioned ideas about women's liberation. While the show depicts each character as ‘liberated’ in some respects, they are both entangled in corporate nets which repeatedly put them in danger and pull them back into violence as a form of labour.

While popular genre fictions like detective novels are often centred around formulaic plots and stereotypical characters, they also undergo several exciting changes when adapted in a diverse array of cultural and linguistic contexts. My chapter examines the first female detective of a Bangla crime writing series, Detective (Goyenda) Krishna as a figure that challenges patriarchal stereotypes related to violent women and dismantles the illusory neatness of binaries associated with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ femininity. The gun-toting, vengeance-seeking literary detective is also examined as mediating shifts and transitions in gendered practices and norms in Bengal – its socio-political as well as literary contexts – as it negotiated ideas of decoloniality from the first decade of the twentieth century and emerged as part of a new, partitioned nation in 1947. She is seen as a creative response to the changes related to gender that had been gradually taking shape in colonised Bengal and as articulating radically re-imagined possibilities and opportunities related to female subjectivities in a newly decolonised nation.

The figure of the female revenger has haunted the western imagination as far back as some of the earliest extant texts, most starkly in Euripides' tragedies Hecuba and Medea (c. 430–420 bc). She has tended to take on one of three forms: the scorned woman, the vengeful mother or the victim of physical violence, almost always sexual violence.

This chapter presents an interdisciplinary and transhistorical understanding of the troubling figure of the violent female revenger in her shifting incarnations. The investigation traces conceptual strands through a variety of cultural texts, focusing on specific instances that are both situated historically and simultaneously analysed for the ways in which they reflect recurring priorities and cultural anxieties through the centuries.

After considering key ideas such as revenge and justice and gender and revenge, the chapter looks more closely at the so-called rape-revenge genre, moving from the earliest examples such as I Spit on Your Grave (1978) to more recent films which are considered for the ways they intersect with the global feminist protest movement #MeToo, and other key cultural moments such as the Harvey Weinstein case and the very public trial of the USA Gymnastics national team doctor Larry Nassar: Revenge (2017), The Nightingale (2018) and Promising Young Woman (2020). The chapter draws direct lines of connection between imaginative works, cultural types and stereotypes, and lived reality in order to come to a fuller understanding of the female revenger.

This chapter explores the presentation of women's violence in Tamil mega serials. Tamil mega serials are produced in India and aired six days a week on satellite television channels. The story revolves around households with extended families living together and issues affecting women such as family well-being, motherhood and fertility. Women mostly take the role of the main protagonist and antagonist in Tamil serials. This chapter analyses the presentation of violence in 10 episodes of Chandralekha, a Tamil mega serial. Perpetrators of violence in Tamil serials are mainly female antagonists and other characters supporting the antagonists. The rivalry between the protagonist and antagonist centres around the struggle for property or the love of or marriage with a man. The type of violence ranges from mild to severe kinds of physical violence, and non-physical violence. The presentation of violence in Tamil serials reflects gender inequality in society. The meaning of some forms of violence in mega serials is closely related to the traditional gender roles and notion of traditional femininity in society.

This chapter offers feminist perspectives on the violence exercised by female avengers in popular audiovisual products about narcotrafficking from Mexico and Colombia. Through the case studies of the narcotelenovela Rosario Tijeras (RCN Televisión, 2010) and the B movie Sanguinarios del M1 (Alonso Ortiz Lara, 2011), we explore how recent Latin American narco-narratives rearticulate the ‘rape-revenge’ film. Following Valencia's conceptualisation of necroempowerment (2012), we argue that female characters respond to rape with ruthless methods in an effort to regain agency. We combine existing literature in feminist film studies with postcolonial readings of the specificities of rape-revenge in the narco-universe where the violence these heroines use as retaliation is already the norm for their male counterparts. A close reading of revenge sequences underscores how vengeance can constitute a cathartic outlet for enraged female characters, challenging stereotypes of feminine passiveness and subverting gender hierarchies. However, it also perpetuates a patriarchal order based on toxic ideals of individual power achieved through bloody methods. We examine how empowerment can entrap female protagonists and serve to differentiate the types of violence that each gender has access to, and we discuss the problematic representation of rape as a transformative moment necessary for women to later become powerful.

While the rest of the world focused on girls' issues around education, girls' victimization in the family, girls' problems with sexual assault and harassment, and girls forced into early marriage, the US seems curiously mired in a series of media-driven moral panics about girlhood. The last few decades have seen worries about girls: girls going bad, mean girls, and girls who are bullies, girls mimicking boys' violence, and girls getting sexually trafficked and engaging in prostitution. Given this, it is important to review several key themes: the current evidence about the actual dimensions of female delinquency and trends in juvenile arrests, particularly girls' arrests for non-traditional offences; the role of race in girls' delinquency will also be explored. This analysis will document the need to explore gendered consequences in the policing of girls' misbehaviour. Specifically, the chapter will explore the implication of girls' increasing presence in a largely male-oriented juvenile justice system and the feminisation of juvenile justice in the United States.

This chapter examines the nexus between women's experiences of domestic abuse and their subsequent violent offending, as viewed through the lens of keyworkers in a women-only charity. The role of female subjectivity, stereotypes of femininity and the gendering of behaviours is discussed, alongside an exploration of the paradox of the female ‘victim-offender’. Qualitative semi-structured interviews with the keyworkers, drawing on the author's experience of working in the system, enable individual voices to be captured in detail, resulting in a rich narrative piece. This is analysed thematically and framed conceptually by the work of Judith Butler on gender performativity and precarious existence, and Jessica Benjamin on the ‘Third’ and the potential of recognition to transcend the experience of gendered violence. The discussions lead to the conclusion that the keyworkers' attention to interpellatory dynamics and intersubjectivity effects powerful individual change. However, the impact of this is limited, as the criminal justice system itself acts as Benjamin's ‘moral Third’, maintaining its status quo of inequality and gendered violence through patriarchal attitudes and a corresponding language of exclusion.

Brazil occupies third place in the world ranking in terms of the prison population in the National Penitentiary System, reflecting a policy of zero tolerance and mass imprisonment of citizens in conditions of vulnerability. Even though incarcerated women are a minority group in Brazil, there is an increase in the percentage of them being subjected to criminal control. According to the latest official data, the number is approximately 38,000 women, representing an increase of 675% between 2000 and 2016 – which puts Brazil in third place among those countries that most imprison women, behind the USA and Thailand. Criminal selectivity works in an explicit way, given that the majority of incarcerated women in Brazil are young, Black, poor and semi-literate. The crime of drug trafficking accounts for more than 62% of female imprisonments, which is a much higher percentage than that of men for the same crime (41%). From a feminist perspective, this chapter analyses and reflects on the specific characteristics of female criminality related to drug trafficking, highlighting how the intersection between gender, race, class and age informs the criminalisation process of women in Brazil.

This chapter examines the relationship between neocolonialism, neoliberalism and the overrepresentation of Indigenous women and girls in Canada's criminal justice system. Indigenous women are 60% more likely to be convicted of violent offences than non-Indigenous women and they make up 42% of all federally sentenced women – while First Nations people represent approximately 5% of the total Canadian population. With an abolition feminist and decolonial theoretical framework, we argue that even when Indigenous women do commit violent crimes, their criminalisation is contingent on the legacy of colonialism. This includes the ongoing genocide against Indigenous women and girls and a neoliberal criminal justice system that reproduces gendered racial state violence and perpetrates the portrayal of stereotypes about Indigenous women, rendering them as inherently violent and ‘risky’. We examine why and how such a disproportionate number of Indigenous women end up involved in cycles of violence, with subsequent disputes with the law. This chapter advances the field of feminist criminology by building on feminist analyses of penal abolition to critique global neoliberalism and the interlocking systems that sustain the ongoing violence in which First Nations women and girls are involved.