Connecting the Continuum: Women's Ways of Knowing and the Criminal Courts

Lived experience criminology has tended to focus on the boundaried experiences of the carceral space, despite the criminal courts being the state’s primary route to criminalisation. In recognition that involvement with the criminal justice system is not a static process, this paper seeks to theorise the continuum of experiences of those criminalised by the state. Through the use of feminist epistemologies, this paper interrogates women’s ways of knowing through the embodied and sensory experiences of the criminal courts system in England and Wales. By pushing lived experience (LE) criminology beyond traditional methods of auto-ethnographic enquiry and connecting the harms of the state, the paper builds towards a fuller interrogation of the processes of women’s criminalisation. In doing so we aim to contribute to the growing body of feminist LE criminology and disrupt the ‘male, pale, stale’ narratives (Cox and Malkin, 2003; Earle et al., 2023) around experiences of criminalisation. In the vein of Les Back (2007) we argue for a system that listens more to all voices and appreciates more widely all forms of knowledge.