Welfare Not Warfare : The Continuing Struggle for a Gender-Responsive Criminal Justice

The numbers of women and girls coming under the remit of criminal justice agencies has been increasing significantly over the last few decades however females still remain a minority population within the workings of every criminal justice system in existence. As a result their voices remain largely silenced, their experiences largely untold and their needs rarely met. A growing number of nations, states and organisations however, have began to acknowledge that existing criminal justice and penal practices have not been sufficiently attentive to women’s needs and have discriminated against women as a result. This paper looks at how an apparent turn to gender-responsive policy-making arose in the late twentieth century, it explores the nature of its impact, its sustainability into the future of policy-making and the strength and power of the critique or backlash to gender-responsivity