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The purpose of this paper is to explore the incidence and impact of exposure to sexual victimisation for women in the criminal justice system. Key ongoing vulnerabilities in respect of mental health and substance abuse, and their contribution to women’s offending, are examined. Treatment responses to address these women’s trauma in custodial settings are then discussed. It is argued that a therapeutic approach is required to provide a holistic response to victimised women offenders. Unfortunately, instead of doing so, many prisons’ ethos and approaches may actually produce a further layer of vulnerability. The paper concludes with commentary on future directions for research and practice.

The researchers undertook a desk-based literature review, using search terms such as “women”, “corrections”, “sexual abuse and/or victimisation” and “trauma”. The literature was analysed through a feminist framework, adopting a vulnerability paradigm.

The paper analyses the incidence and impact of sexual victimisation on women prisoners and notes that comprehensive trauma-informed care in custodial settings is needed but highly problematic within a prison context.

The researchers focused primarily on Australia, and the conclusions may therefore be of more limited relevance to imprisoned women in other countries.

The paper suggests good practice requirements for delivering trauma-informed care to victimised women prisoners. Non-custodial alternatives to imprisonment are likely to be more sensitive to many female offenders’ layers of vulnerability.

This paper highlights the relationship between women offenders’ sexual victimisation histories, substance abuse, mental illness and offending behaviour, and demonstrates the need for and challenges in delivering trauma-informed care. The originality derives from the examination of the three rules of abuse (and prisons) and how they correlate with multiple vulnerabilities, which leads to the conclusion that prison is not the best place for rehabilitation of most women.

Over the past decade, criminology in Australia, Canada and other settler colonies has increasingly engaged with activist challenges to the penal system. These anti-carceral engagements have been levelled at its laws, institutions and agents. Following a long history of criminology explicating and buttressing penal institutions, the criminological gaze slowly transitioned in the 1970s to a more critical lens, shifting focus from the people who are criminalised to the harms of the apparatus that criminalises. However, the focus remained steadfastly on institutions and dominant players – until much more recently. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the strength of activist organisations and grassroots movements in affecting change and shaping debates in relation to the penal system. This chapter will explore the role of activism in informing criminological scholarship during the pandemic period and how criminologists, in turn, have increasingly recognised the need to build alliances and collaborations with grassroots activists and engage in their own activism. The chapter focuses primarily on Australian and Canadian criminology and its growing imbrication with the prison abolition movement, especially in the shadow of ongoing colonial violence. It considers how activist scholars, including ourselves, attempt to build movements for structural change in the criminal system and beyond.