ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the themes and ideas developed by critical researchers into criminology and criminological psychology. The term 'critical perspectives' covers a great range of viewpoints and it would be impossible in a single short chapter to do justice to this diversity. Critical Race Theory has emerged since the 1970s as a multidisciplinary project to challenge societal and institutional racism. The chapter also explores how critical thinking about gender and race has led to conceptions of crime, criminality and victimisation that contrast with those of the mainstream. Feminists also tend to reject individualistic accounts of victimisation such as 'battered woman syndrome', which construe the responses of victims of intimate partner violence as in some way defective or pathological. Apart from perpetuating gender stereotypes, this is bad science as the field collectively has failed to gather data about woman offenders.
