ABSTRACT
The concept of 'gender-specific' justice has scored some remarkable successes in gaining attention outside of academia, and it has been widely endorsed and adopted in many different ways and in the practice of a number of organisations and criminal justice systems. In the late 1980s the term 'gender mainstreaming' entered the global policy vocabulary to refer to a strategy through which it was suggested that gender equality could be better achieved in practice if it was required consideration in the development of all policies. While these important arguments were taking place on a transnational plane, the practice of gender-specific justice continued to be developed within organisations involved in criminal justice practice in different national contexts. Any examination of gender-responsive programmes in action reveals the difficulties in sustaining alternative and feminist approaches to working with women and girls in the context of the masculinist and 'risk-crazed' discourses which currently dominate critical justice policy-making in many regions of the globe.
