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In this opening chapter, the editors review the nature of different feminist perspectives and the impact that they have had on criminology and victimology. They will pay particular attention to the influence of diverse feminist voices in both past and present and the ongoing challenges posed by the emergence of southern criminology and the recourse to law as an avenue to securing change for women living with violence.

This postscript highlights some of the most important feminist criminological contributions featured in this volume and considers their implications for future activism and social change efforts within the field of criminology – and beyond.

The key purpose of this chapter is to identify some ways of enhancing feminist conceptual, empirical, and theoretical work on violence against women. Much attention is given to addressing the harms caused by new electronic forms of woman abuse, including the role of adult Internet pornography and sex robots. This chapter also emphasises the importance of revisiting some major feminist contributions from the past.

Despite the burgeoning research on mass incarceration, women are rarely its focus. Racialised women, whose rates of incarceration have increased more rapidly than other groups, are at the best marginal within much of this literature. Within juvenile justice systems, racialised girls and young women are also disproportionately criminalised and remain markedly over-represented but are often overlooked. The absence of racialised women and girls from dominant accounts of punishment and incarceration is a matter of epistemological, ethical and political concern. Intersectionality offers one means to treat racialised women and girls as focal points for research and advocacy directed towards a reduction in criminalisation and incarceration. While intersectionality does not determine how the knowledge produced is deployed, recognising those who have been unrecognised is a necessary first step in striving to bring about positive change through praxis. Flawed mainstream accounts are unlikely to generate strategies that are well-aligned with the needs and interests of those who remain largely invisible.

Understanding the plight of victims has long been a focus of feminists in the field of criminology. Feminists have made a number of contributions to the study of victims, and here we highlight the contributions that coalesce around three central themes: (1) the gendered nature of criminal victimisation, (2) the relationship between women’s victimisation and offending and (3) violent victimisation of women (and threat of victimisation) as a means of informal social control. In this chapter, the authors trace the development of these themes, highlighting both early feminist work and modern instantiations, paying particular attention to how theoretical developments in the field of feminist victimology have contributed to the understanding of these themes. The authors conclude by discussing the contested nature of ‘feminist victimology’, examining whether such a thing can exist given the androcentric foundations on which the broader field of victimology is based.