Abstracts

in order of presentation

Elisabetta Croci Angelini

Challenging the Norm: Women’s Acceptability of Physical Intimate Partner Violence in Low-Resource Settings and Paths to Change

This paper examines women’s attitudes toward physical intimate partner violence by husbands across 51 low- and middle-income countries from 1999 to 2020. Using panel data from MICS and DHS surveys, we analyze the role of human development and legal gender equality. Acceptance of physical IPV has declined significantly over time, particularly in countries with a higher level of development, as measured by the Human Development Index. Legal reforms promoting women’s economic rights are also associated with lower acceptance, though their effect is weaker. Despite progress, acceptance remains high in some contexts, underscoring the need for sustained policy and norm-changing efforts.

Rafik Santrosyan

The Archive Against Silence: Yekaterina Bahatur and the Gendered Politics of Historical Memory

Who has the authority to decide which experiences of violence become part of history? This paper examines the fiction of Armenian writer and dramaturge Yekaterina Bahatur as a counter-archive of gendered violence that records forms of suffering often excluded from official historical and literary narratives. Once a prolific and widely published author whose work spanned the late Tsarist and Soviet periods, Bahatur has since largely disappeared from literary memory, a fate that mirrors the very processes of erasure her writing interrogates. Across her prose and dramatic works, Bahatur shifts attention away from spectacular acts of crime toward the everyday violences of poverty, war, displacement, patriarchal authority, and institutional neglect, centering women whose lives rarely enter the historical record. Drawing on feminist archival theory and memory studies, I argue that her narratives challenge dominant structures of historical legitimacy by transforming the experiences of socially marginalized women into acts of cultural remembrance. Through readings of selected texts, including Gloomy Days, A Contemporary Etude, Mookooch, and An Ordeal, the paper explores how her work preserves lives and forms of harm that official archives and public memory frequently overlook. Bahatur's own marginalization within Armenian and Soviet literary and women’s history reproduces the mechanisms of archival exclusion that her fiction exposes. Recovering her work, therefore, is not simply an act of literary rediscovery but an intervention into the politics of historical memory itself. By placing Bahatur in conversation with contemporary debates on gender, violence, and archival authority, this paper argues that the archive is not merely a repository of the past but a contested site where women's experiences—and women writers themselves—are remembered, legitimized, or consigned to silence.

Silvia Signorato

Beyond Protection: Investigating Violence, Empowering Women

The presentation undertakes a critical examination of the procedural and evidentiary impediments inherent in the prosecution of revenge porn, concentrating specifically upon the dual exigencies of victim reporting and the acquisition of evidence. The discussion will systematically elucidate the multifarious challenges attendant upon the reporting process, before progressing to a sustained analysis of the competing imperatives between securing electronic evidence and overcoming the formidable jurisdictional complexities that arise when such data are stored extraterritorially, frequently beyond the reach of domestic legal instruments and mutual legal assistance frameworks. In so doing, the speech aims not only to diagnose these persistent obstacles but also to provoke scholarly reflection on the urgent need for procedural reform and cross-border judicial co-operation extending beyond the Member States of the European Union.

Simon Hobbs and Megan Hoffman

“Make sure you are in a place to keep scrolling”: The Survivor-Influencer as Ethical True Crime Creator on TikTok

Popular associations between ‘TikTok’ and ‘true crime’ immediately conjure images of sordid websleuthing, the careless spread of misinformation, and armchair detectives willing to overstep moral and ethical boundaries in a bid to share their findings with voracious audiences. This type of “ghoulish” social media coverage has, Sarah Manavis observes, seen “the rise of a new type of influencer, one that is unaware of the cruelty and harm their exploitative content can inflict – or who wilfully ignores it” (2023). While this “new type of influencer” has dominated headlines and shaped opinions of true crime on social networking platforms, we are keen to show that social media has also become a space wherein the thin boundaries between content creators and audience members have coalesced in such a way that long-accepted genre conventions are being experimented with, critiqued, and even overturned (Hobbs and Hoffman 2025; Hobbs and Hoffman 2022). We argue that, due to a combination of opportunities for low-threshold content creation, a user-friendly algorithm that rewards a range of tonally different approaches, and the presence of a large and active community of true crime consumers, TikTok has given rise to another type of true crime personality: the survivor-influencer.

This paper analyses survivor-influencer content, whereby the physical presence and verbalising of female survivors’ stories on TikTok stand as a means for these women to reclaim power, both as survivors of gender-based violence and as commodified subjects of true crime stories told by others. We will explore posts by TikTokers Kimberly Corban (@kimberly.corban) and Kara Robinson Chamberlain (@kararobinsonchamberlain) as case studies in order to consider how these survivor-influencers demonstrate TikTok’s potential as a significant site for the creation of ethical true crime media. By discussing how these women’s social media accounts include a combination of true crime-related content (such as retellings of their stories or updates on their cases) and more conventional social media fare, as well as their deployment of TikTok memes, humour, emotion and advocacy, we suggest that this strain of social media true crime has the potential to encourage audiences to reassess their relationship to the true crime genre. Content creators like Corban and Chamberlain, who are sexual assault survivors, are by their visibility consequently challenging traditional ideas of true crime victimhood seen throughout the genre’s history, reshaping how audiences perceive women victims/survivors as well as drawing attention to the pressing ethical issue of how the genre has largely misrepresented the nature of crimes against women. Furthermore, in their engagement with sometimes-taboo issues surrounding sexual assault and trauma recovery, Corban and Chamberlain’s utilisation of social media sees them become peer leaders, enabling their follower communities to share, learn, and potentially heal, thereby disrupting the true crime genre’s tendency to turn “[the victim’s] violated body into a voyeuristic object to be looked at without identification, empathy or a desire for justice” (Boyle 2005, xv).

Kenya Herrera Bórquez

The discomforts of violent women: A dialogue with Dahlia de la Cerda’s “Perras de Reserva” and “Medea me canto un corrido.”

This paper explores problematic portrayals of women in Mexico. Previously (Herrera, 2019), I examined how women's bodies and subjectification are represented within narcoculture. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I compared the lived experiences of women involved in Mexican narcoculture with narconarratives—works from literary, musical, cinematic, and visual arts that depict drug trafficking, as defined by Oswaldo Zavala (2014). Many narconarratives depict women as objects of desire, reinforcing stereotypes about their sexuality. Beyond their physical beauty and overt sexuality, these women are often shown as violent and unscrupulous, using seduction to gain money and power by dominating men. This hypersexualized portrayal often leads outsiders to judge them negatively, fostering mistrust and fear. Recently, Latin American literature has experienced a new wave of young female writers who challenge these stereotypes, moving away from romanticized views of Latin America and focusing instead on themes of structural violence and feminism. As a result, more complex and nuanced portrayals of women’s relationships with violence have emerged. Among these, the protagonists of Mexican writer Dahlia de la Cerda’s stories are depicted as problematic women navigating poverty, organized crime, and violence. In her short stories, these complex women unsettle and challenge traditional notions because they do not fit neatly into the victim or perpetrator archetype; they can embody both roles to survive. I aim to use de la Cerda’s writing to foster a deeper understanding of women who enact violence and are judged for it.

Cinzia Spinzi

Who Has the Authority to Tell Violence? Narrative Voice, Testimony, and Epistemic Power in Contemporary Cinema

Contemporary cinematic narratives of gender-based violence do not simply represent acts of harm; they participate in the cultural processes through which violence is interpreted, legitimised, and made socially visible. This paper examines three recent films—She Said (2022), Women Talking (2022), and Anatomy of a Fall (2023)—as discursive spaces in which competing narratives of violence are produced and negotiated. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1989; Wodak and Meyer 2009), multimodal discourse analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) and feminist theories of violence, testimony, and recognition (Butler 2004, 2009; Smart 1989), the study investigates how cinematic narratives construct authority over stories of harm: who is allowed to speak, whose accounts become credible, and how different forms of evidence acquire legitimacy.

The study approaches violence not as a self-evident event but as a discursive construction shaped by narrative structures, institutional practices, and representational choices. Following Seltzer’s (2007) concept of “wound culture,” the analysis considers contemporary narratives of violence as sites where suffering becomes meaningful through processes of mediation, authentication, and public recognition. In this framework, the representation of violence involves not only the depiction of injury but also the social and linguistic mechanisms through which particular experiences become intelligible as injustice.

Methodologically, the paper adopts a qualitative critical multimodal discourse analysis of the selected films. The corpus has been chosen through purposive sampling because the three films represent distinct configurations of epistemic struggle: institutional investigation (She Said), collective testimony and memory (Women Talking), and juridical ambiguity (Anatomy of a Fall).

The analysis combines narrative approaches to perspective and focalisation (Bal 2017; Herman 2002) with linguistic and visual analysis of agency, attribution, evaluation, and social actor representation. Particular attention is paid to how dialogue, camera perspective, framing, and narrative organisation position victims, survivors, perpetrators, investigators, and audiences within competing regimes of knowledge.

The analysis of She Said focuses on the transformation of individual experiences of abuse into publicly recognised testimony. The film reveals how survivors’ narratives must pass through institutional and journalistic frameworks before becoming legitimate forms of evidence. Women Talking shifts attention from individual disclosure to collective meaning-making, exploring how women create alternative epistemic communities when official structures fail to acknowledge their experiences. Through its emphasis on dialogue and deliberation, the film challenges dominant assumptions about whose voices constitute authoritative knowledge. Conversely, Anatomy of a Fall unsettles the possibility of a stable truth by presenting violence as a contested narrative object shaped by legal discourse, gendered expectations, and competing interpretations of identity and responsibility.

The paper argues that these films complicate conventional representations of gendered violence by moving beyond simplified binaries of victimhood and agency. Instead, they reveal violence as embedded within broader struggles over discourse, visibility, and recognition. Cinematic storytelling emerges as a form of epistemic power: the ability to frame events, assign responsibility, and determine whose suffering becomes culturally legible.

By examining contemporary cinema as a site where violence is narratively and multimodally constructed, this study contributes to interdisciplinary debates on gender, media, and justice. It demonstrates that films do not merely tell stories about violence; they actively participate in shaping the conditions under which certain stories are believed, remembered, and recognised.

Laura Vitis

Safety and ethics: Women’s experiences of listening to true crime podcasts focused on violence against women and girls

It is well established that women are key listeners of true crime podcasts and these podcasts often focus on violence against women (Vitis, 2021). Empirical research with true crime podcast listeners has focused on listeners as a broader group, examining listener motivations and preferences using survey methods, interviews and content analyses of online reviews (Boling & Hull, 2018; Heinen & Greenspan, 2025; Vitis & Ryan, 2021; Zozula, 2026). In addition, qualitative research capturing women’s experiences of listening to true crime podcasts has begun to emerge (Boling, 2022; Rodgers, 2022) and explore how true crime podcasts relate to women’s own experiences of violence, understandings of crime, the criminal justice system or safety. Adding to this body of work, this paper presents findings from a research project examining how women listen to true crime podcasts focused on violence against women and girls and the nature and impact of their listening experiences. This project recruited 19 participants and utilised a detailed qualitative approach which combined solicited diaries and semi-structured interviews to examine participants general and specific experiences of listening to Australian true crime podcasts focused on men’s violence against women and girls. As part of this study, participants listened to eight true crime podcast episodes focused on violence against women and girls and shared diary entries on each episode. This paper discusses participants affective experiences of listening and the ways these podcasts related to their understandings of gendered violence, sense of safety and true crime ethics. This paper situates these findings within the broader field of safety work while also considering the importance of recognising listeners as unique subjects.

Maria Gabriella Mieli

Who Tells the Story of Wartime Rape? Gender, Testimony, and Injustice

This paper examines the politics of narration surrounding wartime rape, asking who has the authority to tell the story of sexual violence in conflict and under what conditions survivors’ testimonies become legible as injustice. Wartime rape is not only a physical and psychological violation of the individual body; it is also a gendered act of domination that attacks communities, identities and social bonds. Yet the meaning of this violence is never produced by the event alone. It is shaped through legal procedures, media narratives, institutional archives, humanitarian discourse and cultural memory.

Drawing on peacebuilding perspectives, the paper explores the tension between testimony and representation. Survivors’ voices are essential for recognition and justice, but they are often mediated by courts, journalists, NGOs, researchers and political actors. This mediation can make suffering visible, but it can also transform women’s experiences into evidence, symbols or narratives controlled by others. The central question is therefore not only whether wartime rape is remembered, but how it is remembered, by whom, and for what purpose.

The paper argues that justice requires more than the documentation of sexual violence as a crime. It requires an ethical framework of listening that restores agency to survivors and recognizes them not merely as victims, but as witnesses, narrators and participants in the reconstruction of social life after conflict. Civil society organizations and women’s peace networks such as Universal Peace Federation and Women’s Federation for World Peace can play a crucial role in creating safe spaces for testimony, preventing secondary victimization and linking memory to reconciliation.

By placing gender, testimony and epistemic power at the center of the analysis, the paper seeks to contribute to a broader understanding of wartime rape as both an injustice to be judged and a story whose narration must be returned, as far as possible, to those who have endured it.

Kathleen Rodgers

Teaching Against Fear: Critical Pedagogy and Women’s Representation in True Crime

This paper investigates the use of critical pedagogy to examine and challenge women’s fear of crime within a course entitled Women, Violence, and True Crime. The course is grounded in Bourdieu’s (1991) concept of symbolic violence and Pumla Gqola’s (2022) “female fear factory” framework. The paper examines how these theoretical perspectives can be used to critically explore the role of true crime in shaping understandings of violence against women and in producing and reinforcing women’s fear of crime. Drawing on critical feminist pedagogy, the classroom can be understood as a site of unmaking—a process through which normative assumptions, identities, and relations of power are destabilized and reworked (Cole, 2016), echoing feminist projects of undoing gendered and other oppressive forms of subjectification.

Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic violence,” this paper relies on the assertion that repeated messages about fear are embedded in the features and discourses of multiple forms of media. As Gqola writes (2022: xii): “patriarchy relies heavily on the symbolic; on the arrangement of certain events as though they are not constructed, as though their internal organisational logic is natural, automatic, and inevitable.” But popular true crime media in particular, disproportionately targets women audiences, and positions fear as both entertainment and survival strategy (Vicary and Fraley, 2010; Horeck, 2019). The course at the centre of this paper interrogates how fear is constructed in true crime. Students engage with their own fear, as well as true crime media itself, analyzing podcasts, documentaries, memoirs, and digital communities in light of feminist theories of fear. Central questions include: How are women taught to fear? What cultural work does true crime perform? And how can the classroom move beyond passive consumption toward critical engagement?

Self-reflection is at the centre of the course. Particular attention is given to the tensions students navigate between empowerment and anxiety. While many women describe true crime as a tool for preparedness or self-protection, the course challenges the assumption that vigilance equates to safety (Vicary and Fraley, 2010; Rodgers, 2026). By introducing the concept of the “female fear factory,” students critically assess how institutions, media ecosystems, and patriarchal structures reproduce fear as a mode of social control while simultaneously marketing it as entertainment.

Ultimately, this presentation argues that teaching women and true crime offers a productive site for examining contemporary feminist concerns surrounding violence, media consumption, and affect. The course encourages students to situate personal fears within broader cultural and political systems, transforming true crime from spectacle into critical inquiry. In keeping with this conference’s goal of “challenging the normative frameworks that regulate women’s agency, testimony, and justice,” the paper outlines the political objective of using critical pedagogy to “unmake” these frameworks in the minds of students.

Lubna Yaseen

من يروي قصة النساء ي ف جرائم الحرب ي ؟

ا قراءة صحفية في السرد الإعلامي والذاكرة الجماعية

(Who Tells the Story of Women in War Crimes? A Journalistic Reading of Media Narratives)

This paper explores why some stories of women affected by war crimes gain lasting media attention and become part of collective memory, while others receive only limited public recognition despite the gravity of the violence they endured. It traces the journey of these stories from the moment the crime occurs to their circulation in the media, examining the factors that shape their visibility and public impact.

The study is based on a journalistic reading of media coverage, supported by field attempts to communicate with survivors from Sudan. These efforts showed that fear and social stigma continue to affect the documentation and public narration of many violations. The analysis therefore relies primarily on published media reports and documented sources, while drawing on these field observations to better understand the circumstances that allow some stories to enter public discourse.

The paper compares four women whose stories received extensive media attention—Rania al-Abbasi, Razan Zaitouneh, Alaa al-Najjar, and Hanadi Al-Nour Dawood—with two documented Syrian survivors whose experiences remained outside the circle of broad media attention and never became enduring public symbols. It also includes the Italian activist Martina Comparelli as an international comparative case after her testimony following detention during the Sumud Flotilla mission attracted wide coverage in the European media.

Each case represents a different path to public visibility. Rania al-Abbasi's story became closely associated with the disappearance of her entire family. Razan Zaitouneh's long-standing human rights work strengthened public engagement with her case after her abduction. Alaa al-Najjar came to symbolize the human cost of war through the loss of her children. Hanadi Al-Nour Dawood drew attention as a physician who was killed while caring for displaced civilians. Martina Comparelli illustrates how first-hand testimony, access to European media, and transnational solidarity networks can significantly expand the reach of a story.

The paper examines a range of factors that influence media visibility, including the public profile of the individual, the structure of the event, visual imagery, timing, continuity of media coverage, previous public recognition, solidarity networks, access to media platforms, and the ways stories are communicated and shared with different audiences.

The study concludes that media visibility develops through the interaction of these factors, creating different pathways through which women's stories become part of collective memory. By comparing these cases, the paper offers a broader perspective on the representation of women in war-crime reporting and on the role of media narratives in shaping public memory.

Nicoletta di Ciolla

A Force of Their Own: Female Authority and the Investigative Body in the crime narratives of Giuseppina Torregrossa and Cristina Cassar Scalia

This paper presents two contemporary Italian female-authored crime fiction series and examines the divergent and, in significant respects, opposed models of female epistemic authority that they construct through their detective protagonists.

In Drawing on narrative focalization theory, feminist epistemology, and Butler's theorisation of the frames through which reality becomes legible, it analyses the work of Giuseppina Torregrossa and Cristina Cassar Scalia — both Sicilian, both practicing physicians — whose investigative protagonists embody strikingly different relationships to gender, institutional authority, and the knowledge-practices of crime detection.

Torregrossa's police inspector in the so-called ‘Marò series’ is figured as emphatically feminine: physically conspicuous, romantically uncertain, and persistently self-questioning about the compatibility of her professional role with conventional femininity. She repeatedly interrogates whether marriage, domesticity, and motherhood might be more appropriate to her gender than investigative work, which she constructs as an essentially masculine domain. Her epistemological mode is correspondingly intuitive and affective: she solves cases through gut feeling and embodied attunement more than through procedural or forensic method. Cassar Scalia's Vice Questore Vanina Guarrasi, by contrast, is defined by professional focus and personal sacrifice: she has separated from her partner — a judge — precisely to protect herself from the emotional vulnerability that his exposure to organised crime violence would entail. Guarrasi does not renounce femininity entirely but rather subordinates it to institutional competence; crucially, her investigative epistemology integrates intuition within a broader, gender-neutral repertoire of forensic and procedural skills.

Read together, these two protagonists stage a debate — internal to contemporary Italian women's crime writing — about the terms on which female authority over violence can be exercised and legitimated. Torregrossa's inspector occupies a structurally ambivalent position: she succeeds despite her self-perceived unsuitability, and her intuitive method can be read both as a subversive feminisation of the investigative gaze and as a reproduction of gendered stereotypes about women's relationship to rational knowledge. Guarrasi, by contrast, models a form of female agency that neither rejects nor is defined by gender: she inhabits institutional power on terms that are self-determined rather than concessive.

The paper argues that these contrasting epistemologies of detection — what each protagonist knows, and how she knows it — participate in the broader cultural adjudication of gender-based violence by modelling for the reader competing possibilities for female authority within the specific institutional and social landscape of contemporary Sicily. In a national context where gender inequality remains a critical political issue and where women's access to institutional power is persistently contested, the fictional detective becomes a site at which questions of credibility, agency, and epistemic legitimacy are negotiated and imaginatively resolved.

Simone Borile

Nuovo fenomeno sociale delle baby gang femminili: Processi di affiliazione, riconoscimento e territorializzazione

(Female Youth Gangs as an Emerging Social Phenomenon: Affiliation, Recognition, and Territorialization)

The processes through which adolescents affiliate with groups characterized by violent behaviour appear to be marked by the adoption of communicative codes that are intrinsically aggressive, in which violence assumes a function of existential and identity recognition. From this perspective, violent behaviour emerges as a collective practice, embedded in para-tribal logics, where the use of physical force is ritualized and socially shared within the group.

Physical dominance has become a central feature of contemporary forms of group violence, functioning both as a mechanism of legitimation and as a vehicle for the internalization of new value systems, often grounded in limited critical awareness, deficits in empathic processes, and a marked propensity for the spectacularization of action. Violent acts thus become symbolic resources aimed at gaining approval and enhancing one's status within the group.

Within this dynamic, digital technologies operate as powerful amplifiers, increasing the visibility of aggressive behaviour and contributing to its dissemination and normalization. So-called emotional consumerism encourages individuals to transgress ethical and moral boundaries in a context dominated by processes of social self-display and a constant visual-voyeuristic tension.

Against this backdrop, violent behaviour within female groups represents a significant departure from the traditional stereotype of the girl as victim. Instead, it should be understood within a renewed cultural framework in which young women appropriate mechanisms of recognition, territorialization, and the assertion of physical power, at times in ways that are indistinguishable from—or competitive with—those of their male peers.

What emerges is a novel paradigm of female behaviour, consistent with a society oriented toward the immediacy of approval, the logic of "everything and immediately," and the need to stand out through highly performative, spectacular actions with a strong emotional impact.

Lili Pâquet

Collaborative Life Writing with a Yazidi Survivor of ISIS

Victim-survivors of trauma are often drawn to give voice to their life experiences, which can act as a catharsis for the storyteller. A rich area of writing studies surrounds the process of trauma-informed writing and teaching.

For Nori, a Yazidi woman from Iraq who was kidnapped by ISIS and held prisoner for four years until her escape, telling the story of what happened to her has become a vital part of her healing process. With human ethics research approval, I am meeting with a group of four people: myself as writing expert in trauma life stories, Nori as storyteller, and two people employed by the NSW (Australia) Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors (STARTTS) to collaboratively aid Nori in transcribing her survival story and helping her find an avenue to publication. Nori speaks English very well, but has the support of Hassan, a STARTTS employed Kurmanji translator to aid in veracity and detail, and of her counsellor, Sorin.

My research collection and analysis is ‘participant-as-observer ethnography’, in which “the researcher participates with the other participants while observing firsthand. The researcher is immersed in the activities of the participants” (Grigsby 4-5). Field notes are “the simplest way to represent observations” (Marvasti 10). But, as Fetterman points out, “The ethnographer enters the field with an open mind, not an empty head” (3).

Traumatic life stories have become central to a public reckoning with gender-based violence. These stories were predominant in the media, politics, law, popular culture, and scholarly research following #MeToo and the prosecution of Epstein. Recent data from Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that sexual violence and domestic homicide have risen. Powell argues that Australian women are faced with re-traumatization and low conviction rates for offenders, and that “a more victim-centred approach is needed in conceptualizations of justice including restorative justice approaches and, perhaps radically, forms of community or informal justice outside of the state” (573). Fileborn describes needs of female victim-survivors as including real participation and an active voice. Often, the media treats first-person narrative of survivors as “the raw material of experience” for third-parties (Serisier 56). I aim for this research to contribute to practical ways that communities can collaboratively support women in telling stories in their own voices. I am particularly interested in how this research can contribute to findings on women from non-anglophone backgrounds who have less opportunities to tell their stories, through collaboration with translators and counsellors.

Angela Procaccino

Breaking the Omertà Code: The Role of Women in Challenging Mafia Silence and Power

In recent decades, women’s participation in proceedings involving Mafia-type organised crime has gained increasing legal and criminological significance. Moving beyond the stereotypical image of the silent and subordinate Mafia woman, women’s cooperation with the justice system has had a profound impact on Mafia family structures and on the territorial control exercised by criminal organisations.

This presentation examines the dual role played by women: first, as justice witnesses (testimoni di giustizia), who, despite not belonging to the criminal organisation, provide crucial evidence because of their family and social proximity to Mafia members; and second, as justice collaborators (collaboratori di giustizia or pentiti), who break the omertà code and activate the legal mechanisms designed to encourage cooperation with judicial authorities.

The presentation will be organised around two main themes:

Legal and procedural dimensions. An overview of the distinction between justice collaborators and justice witnesses, with particular attention to witness protection measures, support programmes, and socio-economic reintegration.
Motherhood as a strategy against organised crime. An examination of how judicial measures separating Mafia fathers from their children have become an instrument for weakening criminal organisations, together with the specific challenges faced by mothers of minors and the initiatives promoted by judges and legislators.

The presentation argues that women’s testimony, cooperation with the justice system, and their role as mothers have become powerful agents of symbolic and cultural resistance to Mafia organisations, undermining internal cohesion and disrupting the intergenerational transmission of criminal values.

Michael Salter

Virtue hoarding in the primary prevention of violence against women and children

The primary prevention of violence against women has emerged through a synthesis of feminist activism, public health epidemiology, and state governance. Across Australia, this synthesis has produced a substantial policy and institutional architecture oriented toward the prevention of gender-based violence through cultural, attitudinal, and behavioural transformation. Over the last decade, governments have invested heavily in prevention initiatives centred on educational reform, ethical self-reflection, and the reshaping of gender norms.

Two years ago, in the context of ongoing increases in gender-based violence and related homicides, journalist and advocate Professor Jess Hill and I published a White Paper challenging the conceptual foundations of Australia’s primary prevention framework. The debates that followed revealed profound disagreements not simply about policy effectiveness, but about the ontology of violence itself: what masculinity is, how violence emerges, and where responsibility for social transformation should be located.

In this paper, I argue that Australian primary prevention has become organised around a hegemonic liberal politics of ethical self-transformation that displaces attention from the political economy of violence onto the moral conduct of individuals and communities. Drawing on Catherine Liu’s concept of “virtue hoarding”, as well as scholarship on neoliberal governance, responsibilisation, and moral regulation, I suggest that contemporary prevention discourse increasingly functions as a classed mode of institutional and professional distinction. Within this framework, prevention strategies become differentiated less according to empirical effectiveness than according to their perceived moral legitimacy.

I argue that this moralisation of prevention reflects broader neoliberal forms of governance identified by scholars such as Wendy Brown and Nancy Fraser, in which structural contradictions are displaced into projects of individual ethical reform. While invoking abstract commitments to accountability, respect, and cultural change, dominant prevention paradigms remain strikingly reluctant to confront the role of predatory industries, digital infrastructures, labour precarity, housing inequality, and commodified sexual economies in the production and amplification of violence. Responsibility for prevention is thus devolved onto communities — including women and children themselves — who are expected to transform the social conditions of their own emergence while the economic structures implicated in violence remain comparatively insulated from regulatory intervention.

Rather than rejecting prevention, this paper calls for a re-politicisation of the field: one that reconnects gender-based violence to political economy, institutional power, and material inequality, rather than treating violence primarily as a problem of deficient ethics, attitudes, or masculinities.

Anna Romagnuolo

Female Crime in Rhyme: Gendering Criminality in Anglophone Folk Literature

Crime has long been a central subject of Anglophone popular verse, from broadside execution ballads and murder ballads to nursery rhymes and folk songs. While male offenders populate these traditions in large numbers, women are far more frequently represented as victims than as perpetrators. Yet the comparatively rare cases in which women become the agents of violence have proved particularly memorable within popular imagination, suggesting that female criminality occupies a distinctive place in cultural memory. This paper investigates how female criminals are discursively constructed in popular crime verse and asks whether their representation differs from that of male offenders.

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that will mostly rely on discourse analysis, gender studies and literary criticism, the paper examines a small representative corpus of texts portraying women accused or guilty of homicide drawn from Anglophone popular oral literature. Concepts from folklore studies are employed primarily to contextualize the transmission, variation and cultural persistence of these narratives rather than as an independent analytical framework.

The paper explores whether male offenders are more frequently individualized, contextualized or even romanticized, whereas female offenders tend to be represented through a limited repertoire of gendered archetypes - the murderous mother, the jealous sister, the tyrannical or murderous queen, whose crimes simultaneously violate legal and social norms. Their exceptional visibility in popular verse thus appears to stem not only from the violence they commit but also from their transgression of culturally prescribed models of femininity. By examining the intersection of gender, crime and collective memory, the paper seeks to show the role of popular oral literature in shaping enduring cultural representations of female criminality.

Sam Naidu

Anger, Violence and Female Detective Heroism in African Noir

In Female Anger in Crime Fiction (2024), Caroline Reitz concludes that “Female-centered crime narratives are largely skeptical of and increasingly disinterested in official justice, in ways that are both threatening and liberating” (63). In this paper, I will explore how recent African noir represents ambiguous female characters (heroic detective figures, victims of crime and perpetrators) that operate outside the ambit of official policing and judicial systems. These characters call into question detection methods, raise awareness of gender-based violence, and deepen our understanding of the intersectional systems and structures (the “female fear factory”) that render females vulnerable to, and sometimes complicit in, crime. Pumla Dineo Gqola defines the “female fear factory” as a “combination of seemingly contradictory processes” that “manufactures female fear” through the “threat of rape and other bodily wounding”. It reminds women that “they are not safe and their bodies are not entirely theirs”. This fear is “an effective way to keep women in check and often results in women curtailing their movement in a physical and psychological manner” (2022: 78-79). This paper argues that African noir exposes and subverts the “female fear factory” by inscribing ambiguous female figures who are vulnerable and curtailed, yet nonetheless contest official hegemonic and patriarchal systems. Readings of the Netflix series Blood Sisters, as well as a selection of novels by Leye Adenle and Kwei Quartey will be offered to answer the core question: Does the anger and the resulting violent, defensive, or retributive actions of these female detective figures represent a new type of _feminism _in Africa? In addition, the paper will consider the significance of both authors (Adenle and Quartey) being male and the texts’ use of satire for added noir affect.

Zoe Landsberg

“We told ourselves a different story with a different ending”: Female Perpetrators and Violent Female Femininity in Issa Lopez’s True Detective: Night Country

Within the crime genre, the figure of the female perpetrator has been growing in popularity. Drawing on the work of Judith Halberstam and Serena Dankwa, Sabine Binder links the potency of this figure to masculinity when she coins the term “violent female masculinity” to describe the mechanisms underpinning the female perpetrator’s capacity to harm (2020, 82). In True Detective: Night Country (2024), Issa Lopez challenges the linkage between female violence and masculinity through her portrayal of female perpetrators. This paper argues that she does so by deploying the night trope and the magical realist mode to foreground a narrative of female violence that might be described as demonstrating particularly ‘violent female femininity.’ Definitions of masculinity and femininity will be drawn from Genevieve Lloyd, who discusses how masculinity is culturally produced in ways historically associated with dominance, rationality, and knowability, while femininity has been associated with passivity, emotionality, and mystery (1984, 3). To begin, the paper references Elisabeth Bronfen’s connection between the night trope, invisibility, and femininity in Night Passages (2013) to understand the significance of Lopez’s use of the Alaskan polar night in framing her crime narrative. The paper then considers how Lopez combines the night trope with the magical realist mode to reclaim the monstrous feminine through her female perpetrators. Here, Lopez’s portrayal of the violence committed by her female perpetrators is shown to rely more on affect than physical brutalisation for its spectacle. Finally, the paper examines how the role of affect positions these perpetrators’ collective crime as an example of violent female femininity instead of violent female masculinity, marking a shift from generic expectations of how female violence operates. In this way, Lopez uses True Detective: Night Country to question what it takes for female violence to be taken on its own terms, without having to derive its legitimacy from the realm of masculinity.

B.B.P. Hosmillo

Wilfulness and Insurgency: Methodologies of Queer Resistance in Life Writing

This paper develops a creative-critical framework for understanding queer autobiographical poetry on same-sex intimate partner abuse through the interrelated concepts of wilfulness and insurgency. Drawing on the composition of my poetry collection A Form of Torture (2026), I argue that writing queer trauma is never a transparent act of testimonial recovery, but a formally fraught and ethically contested practice shaped by epistemic illegibility, affective rupture, and structural exclusion. At the centre of this paper is the claim that poetic composition can function as a mode of resistance precisely because it refuses the (cis-hetero)normative conditions under which injury is expected to become publicly legible. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, Carl Phillips, and Grace Lee Boggs, I theorise wilfulness as the insistence on returning to traumatic material despite exhaustion, fragmentation, and institutional silence. Exceeding questions of craft or aesthetic decision-making, wilfulness names a politically charged commitment to remain with experiences that dominant cultural and legal frameworks frequently refuse to render intelligible. In response to autobiographical traditions that often equate authenticity with disclosure, I introduce the concept of unspeakable privacy as an ethical poetics of withholding. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s formulation of the ‘right to opacity,’ I argue that not all experiences of harm are available—or should be made available—to public consumption. This paper resists the demand to translate suffering into coherent narratives of confession, evidence, and recovery by examining how opacity can function as an ethical safeguard against the extractive logics through which marginalised pain is often consumed. From this tension between persistence and refusal emerges autobiographical insurgency: a counter-archival and formal practice that disrupts dominant epistemologies of harm by refusing the stabilisation of queer intimate partner abuse within existing legal, cultural, and scholarly paradigms. To examine how such wilful and insurgent poetics operates in practice, I focus on two interrelated dimensions of my creative process: poetic form and archival materiality. Firstly, I examine how A Form of Torture constituted a deliberate return to a lyric tradition whose historical capacity to accommodate queer desire was systematically diminished under British colonial rule. By drawing on the important archival scholarship of Shad Naved and my adaptation of the Urdu ghazal’s fractured architecture, my work reactivates a suppressed queer genealogy while transforming the ghazal couplet into a contemporary structure for articulating coercion, intimacy, and relational fracture. Secondly, I examine the material residues that persist after my experience of abuse and continue to organise its afterlife. A Form of Torture did not emerge from memory in any singular or stable sense; rather, it developed through sustained encounters with what violence left materially proximate: audio recordings, digital messages, damaged domestic objects, clothing worn during assaults, transport receipts, photographs, letters, and fragments whose meanings could not be stabilised as either evidence or recollection. Ultimately, this paper positions queer autobiographical poetry as an epistemic and aesthetic intervention—a radical site from which dominant grammars of injury are not merely documented, but fundamentally unsettled.

Viviana Gaballo

Beyond the Frame: Imagining New Narratives of Justice and Equality

This concluding paper reflects on the three-part journey of the Women in Crime III conference—from Analysis through Awareness to Action—and considers the future of feminist scholarship on gender, crime, and narrative power. Drawing on the rich interdisciplinary dialogue that has unfolded across the conference sessions, I argue that the stories we tell about gendered violence are never merely descriptive; they are performative, shaping legal outcomes, public policy, and the very possibilities of justice. Building on the work of Butler (2004, 2009), Ahmed (2014), and Crenshaw (1991), this paper examines how the conference's themes—linguistic framing, narrative authority, epistemic power, institutional practices, and social action—cohere into a call for transformative engagement with the structures that regulate women's agency, testimony, and access to justice. I propose a conceptual framework that moves beyond critique toward the active imagination of alternative narratives capable of challenging hegemonic frameworks and fostering more just and equitable futures. In doing so, I outline a research agenda for the next iteration of the Women in Crime network, centered on four pillars: (1) amplifying marginalized voices and counter-narratives; (2) bridging academic research with policy and practice; (3) fostering cross-cultural dialogue and comparative analysis; and (4) embracing emerging digital and participatory platforms as sites of narrative resistance and transformation. The paper concludes by inviting conference participants to join in shaping this agenda, ensuring that the conversations begun in Padua continue to resonate beyond the frame of the conference and into the wider world of scholarship, advocacy, and social change.

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