Gueta Keren
Department of Criminology, Bar-Ilan University, 52900, Ramat-Gan, Israel.
Health Justice. 2020 Jul 25;8(1):19. doi: 10.1186/s40352-020-00120-8.
The perspective of intersectionality has gained widespread scholarly interest and been employed across many different disciplines, including criminology. This perspective focuses on interlocking systems of oppression and the need to work toward structural changes to promote social justice and equity. The present article aimed to explore the potential of intersectionality for advancing health research and policy regarding justice-involved women, in different phases of the judicial process, based on the extant literature.First, employing an intersectional approach to analyze the issue of health during the pre-incarceration period may facilitate identification of the structural and representational factors underlying the barriers that women face in obtaining health services, which elevates the risk to their health. Furthermore, adopting an intersectionality perspective to explore women's health during incarceration may shed light on vulnerable, invisible subpopulations of women such as incarcerated older women and their health problems, and help identify the structural barriers to carceral health services and the role of stigma in inflicting and normalizing harmful practices within prison walls. In addition, an intersectionality lens highlights the risk of unintended use of scholarly knowledge regarding the health of justice-involved women. Last, an intersectionality perspective is particularly relevant for research of the reentry of justice-involved women. In particular, it can be used to examine gender-sensitive reentry services that ignore other axes of marginalization, such as class and race, generating a powerful dynamic that results in partial service, denial of access to therapeutic resources, and possible exposure to health-damaging environments.Through an exploration of the extant literature on justice-involved women, I endeavored to demonstrate that an intersectional framework offers powerful tools to both challenge and strengthen gender frameworks within criminology. This will make it possible to move beyond consideration of gender alone, to understand how systems of oppression based on race, age and other social locations intersect and combine to construct health disadvantages among justice-involved women. This highlights the needs for a new research agenda and policy that integrate the intersectional framework with health theories to provide a more developed understanding of health among justice-involved women.
交叉性视角已引起广泛的学术关注，并被应用于包括犯罪学在内的许多不同学科。这一视角关注相互关联的压迫系统，以及为促进社会正义和平等而努力实现结构性变革的必要性。本文旨在基于现有文献，探讨交叉性视角在推进涉及司法程序不同阶段的涉案女性健康研究及政策方面的潜力。首先，采用交叉性方法分析入狱前阶段的健康问题，可能有助于识别女性在获得医疗服务时面临障碍背后的结构性和代表性因素，这些因素会增加她们的健康风险。此外，采用交叉性视角探索女性在监禁期间的健康状况，可以揭示如被监禁老年女性等易受伤害、不为人所见的女性亚群体及其健康问题，并有助于识别监狱医疗服务的结构性障碍以及耻辱感在监狱内造成有害行为并使其常态化方面所起的作用。此外，交叉性视角凸显了对涉案女性健康的学术知识被不当使用的风险。最后，交叉性视角对于研究涉案女性重新融入社会尤为相关。特别是，它可用于审视忽视阶级和种族等其他边缘化因素轴的性别敏感型重新融入社会服务，这种服务会产生一种强大的动态效应，导致服务不全面、无法获得治疗资源以及可能暴露于有害健康环境之中。通过对现有关于涉案女性的文献进行探索，我力图证明交叉性框架提供了强大工具来挑战并强化犯罪学中的性别框架。这将有可能超越仅考虑性别的范畴，去理解基于种族、年龄和其他社会定位的压迫系统如何相互交叉并结合起来，在涉案女性中造成健康劣势。这凸显了制定新研究议程和政策将交叉性框架与健康理论相结合的必要性，以便更深入地理解涉案女性中的健康问题。
