ABSTRACT
1The area of desistance has of late become a growing interest within criminology (Bottoms et al, 2004), with the field recently having matured to the point of enabling global perspectives (Shapland et al, 2016a). As in so many other areas of criminology, however, a critical exploration of gender is fundamentally lacking in the vast majority of this work. In turn, this is reflective of the mainstream marginalisation and distortion of female experiences of crime and criminal justice in what has traditionally been a quintessentially male criminological world. As noted by Naffine (1996: 1); criminology has been, and very much remains, to be about ‘academic men studying criminal men’. Despite meeting great resistance, the past few decades have nevertheless witnessed the emergence of challenges to ‘malestream’ criminology from feminist vantage points. Feminists working in the field have accordingly made significant contributions to the development and establishment of new perspectives. Consequently, the extent to which crime and offending is gendered has been firmly placed on the criminological agenda (Silvestri and Crowther-Dowey, 2008) and the invisibility of women in the field is gradually beginning to be rectified (Barberet, 2014).
