Acknowledging Female Victims of Green Crimes: Environmental Exposure of Women to Industrial Pollutants
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1557085116673172 |
| Author | Michael J. Lynch |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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Article
Feminist Criminology
2018, Vol. 13(4) 404 –427
Acknowledging Female
© The Author(s) 2016
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Environmental Exposure
of Women to Industrial
Pollutants
Michael J. Lynch1
Abstract
Green criminology has drawn attention to the widespread forms of green victimization.
However, green criminology has neglected female victims of green crimes, and area
to which feminist criminologists can contribute. To draw attention to these issues,
this article examines the medical and epidemiological literature published since 2010
related to the forms of green victimization women experience. Implications for
examining the green victimization of economically marginalized female populations,
the need to integrate feminist and green criminological research, and suggests that
feminist analysis can also inform ecofeminist studies by more fully elaborating a
position of the environmental/green victimization of women are presented.
Keywords
ecofeminism, epidemiological evidence of victimization, women’s green victimization,
corporate victimization of women, green criminology, integrating feminist and green
criminology
Green criminology has done much to draw attention to the widespread forms of green
victimization human and non-human species and ecological systems experience. To
date, however, green criminological studies continue to neglect female victims of
green crimes and have made only passing reference to women’s green victimization
(WGV; Davies, 2014; Gaarder, 2013; Lynch & Stretesky, 2001). At the same time,
1University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA
Corresponding Author:
Michael J. Lynch, Department of Criminology, Associated Faculty, The Patel School of Global
Sustainability, University of South Florida, Fowler Avenue, SOC 107, Tampa, FL 33620-8100, USA.
Email: radcrim@tampabay.rr.com
Lynch
405
feminist criminology has also paid little attention to the victimization of women by
green crimes. The green crimes that affect women are varied, and here, we are con-
cerned with women’s routine exposure to industrial pollutants as an example of WGV.
This article addresses the need to integrate feminist and green criminological views to
facilitate discussions and explorations of WGV.
Women affected by exposure to toxic chemicals comprise a class of invisible vic-
tims in the criminological literature. The emergence of feminist criminology in the
1970s was an important turning point in criminological research that began to draw
attention to women’s victimization, especially from domestic violence. Feminist crim-
inology emphasized that women’s victimization resulted from “the inescapable mate-
rial reality of women’s . . . relative structural position” (Walklate, 1990, p. 27). Decades
later, few studies had expanded the concept of female victimization to include calls for
research on the corporate victimization of women (DeKeseredy & Goff, 1992; Gerber
& Weeks, 1992; Rynbrandt & Kramer, 1995). From a green criminological perspec-
tive, women’s exposure to environmental toxins emitted into ecosystems by corpora-
tions is an important source of green victimization, and is an area of research to which
feminist criminology can contribute.
Following examples in Lynch and Stretesky (2001), the present article explores
WGV by examining studies from the medical/epidemiological literatures that relate to
the effects of chemical exposure on women’s health. That literature suggests that
women are harmed by exposure to environmental toxins in various ways, causing
them to experience green victimization (see also, Katz, 2012).
To begin this analysis, we first define WGV. The section that follows reviews ideas
from feminist criminology relevant to examining WGV. Next, we examine current
literature on WGV, and the criminological omission of WGV, noting that there has also
been little attention paid to these concerns even by ecofeminists. We then examine the
measure of exposure to environmental toxins found in medical/epidemiological litera-
ture with respect to the definition of green crime using studies published between 2010
and 2014. That short research horizon sufficiently illustrates the kinds of issues that
can be explored as examples of WGV. In the final sections, we draw attention to the
green victimization of economically marginalized women in developing countries and
as migrant farm workers. Drawing criminological attention to the green victimization
of marginalized women can hopefully generate discussions that can affect policies that
minimize their green victimization and generate an integrated feminist–green crimino-
logical explanation of WGV.
The Concept of Green Victimization
Green criminology has directed attention to green crimes for more than 25 years defin-
ing green crimes both as violations of law and as social harms that occur via environ-
mentally damaging behaviors. Those harms/crimes have direct adverse ecological
impacts (e.g., ecological degradation/disorganization through pollution, deforestation,
etc.), and adverse indirect effects that impair the health of species (humans, non-human
animals, plants) residing in affected ecosystems (Beirne & South, 2007; Brisman &
406
Feminist Criminology 13(4)
South, 2013; Lynch & Stretesky, 2003; Walters, 2010). Some green harms, however,
such as poaching and wildlife trafficking, result from direct species harms independent
of harms to ecosystems. From the above, it follows that green victims are, quite simply,
living entities (humans, non-human animals, plants, ecosystems, etc.) harmed by green
crimes. These harms and the forms of victimization they produce are almost always
violent because they involve exposure to chemicals that have transformative physical
effects, or involve behaviors that “violently” re-arrange ecosystems or produce death,
injury, and disease (Jarrell, Lynch, & Stretesky, 2013; Lynch & Barrett, 2015).
The present article refers to WGV or the green victimization of women. These
terms are interchangeable. WGV has yet to be sufficiently articulated in the green
criminological literature. In the present work, WGV specifically refers to the forms of
harm women experience when they are exposed to toxic chemicals in the ecosystems
they encounter.
From scientific studies of toxic pollution, we know that environmental pollution is
ubiquitous, meaning that all forms of life are exposed to some level of toxic environ-
mental pollution (Lynch & Stretesky, 2014). Nevertheless, not all life-forms are
exposed equally, nor do all life-forms necessarily experience the same detrimental
consequences from toxic exposure. These observations imply that the specific “green
victimization experiences” varies across types/groups of victims, as well as across
individuals in the same victim group (e.g., across individual humans or across indi-
vidual non-human animals). Children, for example, are affected differently than adults
by exposure to environmental toxins. Illustrating the importance of gender, medical
studies of toxic exposure also indicate that women are affected differently than men.
Before turning to those issues, it is important to place WGV within the context of
feminist criminology.
Feminist Criminology and the Green Victimization of
Women
Feminist criminology emerged in the 1970s in response to the neglect of female vic-
tims and offenders and stereotypes of women that were infused throughout the crimi-
nological literature. Feminist criminology was not merely a call to attend to women as
neglected criminological subjects, but to expand criminological theorizing about gen-
der and to make gender a central theoretical starting point for theorizing about crime,
victimization, and justice (Daly, 1998). With respect to the current discussion of WGV,
this implies a need to understand how gender relations and gender inequality affect
two intersecting problems: first, the neglect of WGV, and second, conceptualizing
WGV as part of the broader social structure of gender relationships.
With respect to the first point, criminologists’ neglect of WGV is a product of the
intersection (or lack thereof) of feminist and green criminologies within the historical
context of criminological traditions that over-emphasize individual-level explanations
while neglecting how gender, as part of social structure, affects conceptualizing female
victimization. The latter part of that argument was long ago recognized and addressed
by Daly and Chesney-Lind (1988), and has promoted numerous discussions of gender
Lynch
407
as an essential part of social structure that criminological theories must address (for
review, see Miller & Mullins, 2006). Unfortunately, feminist and green criminology
have had little interaction, limiting the conceptualization of WGV in both literatures.
Green criminologists have not attended to the intersection between victimization and
gender promoted by feminist criminology, while feminist criminologists have over-
looked green victimization as an important example of violence against women.
In terms of the second point, feminist criminology contains the seeds for conceptu-
alizing the gendered nature of WGV as a structural outcome. Of particular relevance
is feminist criminology’s focus on gender inequality...
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