ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twenty-first century new crimes and concerns have emerged: terrorism, cyber-crime, human trafficking and other human rights violations for instance, all of which have produced new ways of women being involved in crime as offenders, or as victims. In turn, these developments have led to a redrawing of the boundaries between crime control and civil liberties. There are now new border controls, surveillance techniques as well as recourse to international human rights conventions. All these developments have taken place against a background of economic changes; one notable change concerns widening earnings inequality among full-time workers impacted upon by the development of involuntary part-time and temporary contracts, factors which have had a disproportionate impact on women (European Commission, 2009; OECD, 2011). Thus one concern is that an increasing number of women face poverty and that this has made them vulnerable to the exigencies of market forces: economic migration (including smuggling and then being forced to work under duress) and human trafficking. The feminisation of poverty (Chant, 2012), survival, and resistance to the experience of inequality and injustice is thus an important theme against which to consider women, crime and victimisation.
