Victims and Agents: Harm, Gender and Drug use

Literature concerned with drug use and gender depict drug using women as either victims or rebellious agents, through an artificial separation of victimisation and agency, such insights have failed to acknowledge women's simultaneous experience of both concepts. Consequently, a lag has occurred between criminological knowledge and the lived realities of drug using women. This PhD proposal seeks to address this gap through the application of qualitative participatory research methods to explore drug using women's simultaneous experience of victimisation and agency from an intersectional perspective. Research repeatedly demonstrates that women's pathways into drug abuse are characterised by unsolved traumatic histories of domestic violence, childhood sexual and violent abuse, low self-esteem and mental health issues such as acute or chronic depression (Dutton, 1992; Logan, et al., 2002; Breckenridge, et al., 2012; McKeganey, et al., 2002; Verona, et al., 2016). While it is paramount to acknowledge the harm intertwined with women's drug use, such research, albeit unintentionally, constructs drug-using women as powerless beings understood only through their experiences of trauma. Alternative literature suggest that female drug users are agents rebelling against gendered oppression and expectations (Friedman & Alicea, 2001; Inciardi, et al., 1993). For example, Friedman and Alicea's (1995) argued that the upper middle-class women of their sample would use heroin to challenge and resist gendered expectations of women as 'pure', 'silent' and 'subservient' beings. However, considering only the possibility of drug use as resistance reproduces a romanticised view which dangerously ignores the oppressions and violence drug-using women endure. The shortfalls of both victim and rebellion centred theories of drug use are mirrored within feminist debates. The feminist project challenges the deeply embedded male view of victimisation by drawing attention towards women's subordination and oppression experienced through gendered violence such domestic abuse, rape and pornography (Mawby & Walklate, 1994). Roiphe (1993) and Wolf (1994) argue that such a focus reinforces stereotypes of women as dependent child-like beings and instead offer "power feminism" to focus upon women's agency, choice, and responsibility. However, this 'all-agency' approach instead construct's women as heroic figures who need no assistance in resisting gendered oppression (Collins, 1990). It becomes apparent that neither all-victim or all-agent approaches are adequate in understanding women's lived realities and experiences. The deficits of both victim and rebellion centred theories of drug use and the all-victim and all-agent feminist approaches, are symptomatic of an artificial and oversimplified dichotomy drawn between agency and victimisation. Both agency and victimisation are understood in absence of one another. Agency is understood as the individual or collective capacity for self-directed and purposeful action (Williams & Popay, 1999; Archer, 1995). While victimisation implies the absence of agency through the one-way application of power (Mahoney, 1994). It becomes starkly apparent that an alternative conceptualisation of victim, such as those provided by Lamb (1999) and Phillips (1999), is necessary to acknowledge women's agency and passivity, strength, vulnerability, resistance and dissociation. Therefore, to address the flaws of gendered theories of drug use this proposal seeks to apply an alternative version of victimisation in understanding women's drug use by focusing upon the following questions:
1. How, when and in what forms do concepts of victimisation and agency appear in women's accounts of their drug use?
1.1 What role does victimisation play in women's drug use?
1.2 How might agency, self-directed action or resistance be enacted by drug using women?
2. What is the relationship between women's experiences of victimisation, agency and drug use?