School of Law’s Dr Catherine O’Sullivan Co-Edits Special Edition of Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

9 Oct 2020

The special issue brings together a variety of international and multi-disciplinary perspectives on female sex offending.

Dr Catherine O’Sullivan from the UCC School of Law has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice with Dr Siobhán Weare (Lancaster University), Dr Margaret Fitzgerald-O’Reilly and Dr Susan Leahy (both University of Limerick). The journal, which is published quarterly and guest-edited by experts in the topic being studied, “focuses on a critical issue in contemporary criminal justice in order to provide a cogent, thorough, and timely exploration of the topic”. This special edition focuses on the under-researched area of female sex offending and aims to add to the understanding of the many forms that sexual violence can take.

Dr O’Sullivan co-wrote the introduction, ‘Female Sex Offenders and Sex Offending'. As the introduction notes, this special edition of the journal features six articles which “bring together a variety of international (USA, UK and Ireland) and multi-disciplinary (health, legal, criminological and psychological) on female sex offending. Novel data and insights are provided on prevalence and predicators of female-perpetrated sexual violence, the lived experiences of victims and criminal justice system responses”.  

Commenting on the issue, Dr Catherine O’Sullivan said:

This issue’s focus on female offenders is not intended to minimise the preponderance of male perpetrators of sexual violence.  Instead it seeks to increase awareness for the sake of the victims of female perpetrated sexual violence and also provides further support for the feminist criminologist view that it is not sufficient to “add women and stir” to theories developed with reference to male offenders when trying to understand crime perpetrated by women especially when those theories also suffer from blind-spots in relation to men and masculinities.

Further information on the special edition of Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, which will be published in November, can be found here: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/ccja/36/4