Gendered Crime

Abstract

Of the estimated 3.6 million international students undertaking tertiary education in a host country (UNESCO, 2014), approximately half are female. Reports in 2011 indicated there were approximately 325,474 female international students in the US, 213,834 in the UK and 224,469 in Australia (AEI, 2012; UNESCO, 2014; UPI, 2011). Despite the importance of safety to international students, and these large numbers of female international students, media and academic literature has, to date, primarily focused on violent crimes against male international students by strangers (Forbes-Mewett and McCulloch, 2015). This chapter explores less visible crime and violence against female international students by male perpetrators.

I think there’s probably quite a lot of sexual crimes [against international students] going on out there….It’s been put off the agenda because of all the violent street stuff that was going on, so all the hidden sort of crime. I mean I think it probably doesn’t attract the same attention because it’s women and it’s about sex, it doesn’t attract the same sort of concern as the overt violence against particular communities, I mean we certainly had people say to us that for a number of women they’d come over and it was a break away from such a male dominated culture that they were having a wild time and that was all fine. Because when they went back home they’d have to be under the thumb again, so that there was a whole number of ways that it was sort of playing out in the conversations we had.

(P65 Senior Government official, Australia)