ABSTRACT
Traditional approaches to understanding women’s pathways into the Criminal justice system (CJS) tend to focus on the myriad issues, or problems, that manifest in their lives: including trauma, family violence, substance abuse and homelessness. This chapter demonstrates how the very systemic responses established to address these issues tend to either exclude criminalised women, or actively enable and exacerbate their criminalisation. Given the number of major reforms to these areas in Victoria, Australia, this chapter uses this jurisdiction as a case study, drawing on the findings and a range of organisational submissions made to two recent State Government inquiries into homelessness and family violence. It adopts a critical, intersectional analysis to demonstrate how family violence and homelessness or housing support services embrace simultaneously interventionist and exclusionary practices that can discriminate against criminalised women in the community, heightening their risk of re-criminalisation. Furthermore, it shows how these systemic practices are informed and enabled by broader interlocking structures of oppression including racism and sexism. These findings suggest an urgent need to move away from understanding violence in the lives of criminalised women as simply interpersonal, to also systemic and structural. Doing so allows us to consider more transformative policy responses to women’s criminalisation, including abolitionist approaches.
