This panel is focused on women’s experiences of desistance from crime. While women’s voices are increasingly recognized within criminological dialogues, many of their specific experiences remain sidelined across both criminal justice policy and practice, as well as within criminological theory. This themed panel includes presentations from four different research projects centering women’s experiences of (attempts at) leaving a life of crime, condemnation and exclusion behind. The different papers present examples of both retrospective life-history and longitudinal research perspectives, allowing the richness of lived experiences to truly come alive and the intersection of individual agency, social structures, and cultural contexts in women's efforts to disengage from crime to be scrutinized. Our presentations will accordingly dissect the complexities inherent in desistance processes, interrogating the interplay between personal choices, systemic barriers, and supportive interventions. The research presented have been undertaken in England as well as Sweden, with women from diverse and minority backgrounds, encompassing variations in age, ethnicity, sexuality, and religious affiliation. The overall aim for the panel is to make space for voices less commonly heard in mainstream desistance scholarship, and open up for a discussion on women’s experiences that can elucidate a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the processual shift in lifestyle that desistance journeys entail, along with how different intersecting identities can come to play a role in such periods of change.

In recent years, desistance work has spent little attention on understanding how and why people might choose to relocate on release. Yet even if a desister has the desire to geographically move, they may face significant practical barriers. Based on an exploratory study, this work highlights the experiences of Muslim women who have left prison, and their wishes to relocate on release. They explain their reasons for wanting to move, and the challenges they face in making that aim a reality. The paper locates their voices among existing desistance theory. It also explains why relocation must be taken more seriously as a valid and potentially helpful choice for some desisters, such as those experiencing profound shame in their communities and families. In considering the practicalities of this finding, we offer some reassurance about the nature of relocation and some suggestions for minimising both workload and risk for those supporting such relocation.

While gendered conditions and norms increasingly are being explored in desistance research, much less is known about how these interrelate to other intersecting aspects of a person’s identity. This paper present early findings from a qualitative research project that specifically positions the experience of women who identify as belonging to a minority group in Sweden at centre stage. Firstly, the paper will comment on how women with experiences of criminality in different ways self-identify as upholding a marginalised position in relation to what may be described as ‘mainstream society’, thereby shedding new light on how the term ‘minority’ is conceptualised for a group that experience stigma connected to different sections of their identity. The paper will then move on to exploring how minority women voice their story of desistance-related change. Particular focus will here be given to how intersecting identities and social positions are constructed as being of relevance at different stages of this journey, including how specific cultural narratives are drawn on to make sense of such change processes. The paper aims to make a contribution to diversifying women’s voices in desistance, as well as widening the criminological gaze to penal cultural settings outside of the Anglophone arena.

In this paper I examine trans-institutional stigmatisation during childhood and young adulthood. Drawing on longitudinal research with 36 young women criminalised as children in England during a particularly punitive period in youth (in)justice, I aim to illustrate how criminal stigma intersects with class-based condescension and assessments of worth(lessness) and low value at school, in children’s social care and in welfare/workfare settings. I argue that negative judgements and labels are reproduced within and across institutions over time. Once formally designated an offender, a woman’s eligibility for personal and financial support may be restricted via state-sanctioned policies through which financial aid, access to services or paid employment are (discretionarily) subject to behavioural conditions. While many of the young women in the current study did not meet the thresholds commonly employed to measure ‘persistence’ in, or ‘desistance’ from offending, the shadow of a youthful criminal record nonetheless weighed very heavily. The paper underlines the importance of examining stigma as multi-faceted in nature, and as both state-produced and experienced through everyday institutional interactions.

This presentation draws on findings from a longitudinal study of women’s desistance. Since 2016, the project has followed ten women from Sweden and their attempts to leave a life of crime and drugs behind in search of something else; something unfamiliar to them yet labeled ‘normal’ by mainstream society. The study design’s repeated and continuous in-depth interviews center the women’s voices and experiences as they struggle to approach the mainstream from a position of marginalized or excluded others. In addition to women’s own voices, which have long been sidelined across research, policy and practice, this presentation will also touch upon the meaning of voices no longer present. The women’s narratives are punctuated by themes of death, loss and bereavement. This looming presence of death shapes their desistance journeys, influencing their perspectives, choices, and trajectories. The aim of this presentation is to offer a nuanced understanding of women's desistance, highlighting the multifaceted challenges and complexities inherent in their journeys towards rehabilitation and societal (re)integration.