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27 Women & Crim. Just. 1 (2017)

handle is hein.journals/wwcj27 and id is 1 raw text is: Women & Criminal Justice, 27:1-3, 2017 5 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge ISSN: 0897-4454 print/1541-0323 online t Taylor& Francis Group DOI: 10.1080/08974454.2017.1268014 EDITORIAL Policing Women's Bodies: Law, Crime, Sexuality, and Reproduction As we consider the election of Donald Trump as President Elect of the United States, there is perhaps no better time to reflect on the role of the state, and particularly the criminal system, in the policing of girls and women's bodies. After all, we are facing the most amazing spectacle imaginable: a prominent and credible woman candidate (the first in the nation's history) was defeated by a rank misogynist, racist, and ardent opponent of abortion who is promising to name to the U.S. Supreme Court a judge committed to overturning Roe v. Wade. High profile political leaders that reduce women to their bodies are by no means a new development. Recall that Napoleon Bonaparte famously said that Women were nothing but machines for producing children (New Foundations, 2016). It is often noted that the sexualiza- tion of women's bodies, indeed in some instances, the reduction of women to their wombs, is the cornerstone of patriarchy. All too often, though, after making this point, criminologists, even feminist criminologists, tend to wander away from a vital exploration of the ways that this occurs. As a result, the ways that both the sexualization of girls and women and the ways that the state (and its key institutions) police the women they have reduced to sexual objects, remains both undertheorized and underresearched. This special issue is a modest effort to solicit and collect thought pieces on the specific ways that the state, and particularly the subsystems that comprise the criminal justice system, are implicated in policing women's bodies and their sexuality. And it is the editor's hope that the range of papers offered will go a long way to starting a conversation about the ways in which this issue should be further explored in the years to come. No complete theory of gender and the state will be possible until we fully appreciate and document the role of police, courts, and prisons in the ratification and enforcement of male power over women's sexualized bodies. Lisa Pasko's Beyond Confinement: the Regulation of Girl Offender's Bodies, Sexual Choices, and Behavior provides a very critical look at perhaps the most visible institution committed to policing girls' sexuality: the juvenile justice system. Historically, the juvenile court in it's earliest days functioned clearly to police and punish the sexual immorality of girls, in much way that Sharia courts in conservative Islamic countries function. While some might assume that those days are long gone, after nearly a century of juvenile justice reform, this paper refutes that notion. Pasko's telling interviews reveal the curious ways that even today's court officers find themselves drawn into the use of the most draconian of court

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