Professor Stan Gilmour speaking at the launch of the Toolkit.
Vienna (Austria), 20 December 2023 - Gender stereotypes pervade all aspects of life, influencing experiences and societies in ways both direct and indirect. The world of transnational organized crime is no exception. All people in contact with the crime are influenced by preconceived biases – consciously or not.
In policies, legislation and practices into which gender has not been mainstreamed, men are often seen predominantly as perpetrators and women as victims, which can lead to impunity or unjust treatment by criminal justice systems.
Meanwhile, gender imbalances in the criminal justice system have an impact on the treatment of accused persons, prisoners, witnesses and victims. Criminal justice institutions cannot provide equal and equitable responses if their workforces are not representative of the broader population.
But how does a lack of gender sensitive approaches impact those actually involved in organized crime? To help answer that question, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) sat down with Professor Stan Gilmour, former Director of the Thames Valley Violence Reduction Unit. Having been a police officer in the United Kingdom for over 30 years, Gilmour now runs a consultancy working to link research and policy decisions related to public services, including tackling crime.
Gilmour spoke to UNODC before an event launching UNODC’s Toolkit on Mainstreaming Gender and Human Rights in the Implementation of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.
I got interested in gender and organized crime when I was a local police commander in England. I could see that the women and girls that we were coming across were more than just girlfriends or associates of criminals. Rather, some of them were actually involved in running organized criminal groups.
It made me think that we were missing out on a large group of people within a network who were making sure that the network kept running. I decided that – to better investigate the organized crime networks and prevent exploitation – we needed to do something to understand more about the roles that these girls and women played.
My work in the United Kingdom centres around data collaboration for more effective public health and trauma-informed approaches to policing. The lack of data within the whole system prevents us from seeing the entire picture and the risk factors that draw people into organized crime in the first place.
That's specifically true of data relating to girls and women. Because most data relates to boys and men, many interventions are therefore scaled to prevent boys and men from entering organized crime. A large part of my work is making sure that we have the data that we need to take our whole-of-society approach to prevention.
Yes, we've taken a number of different “soundings” from people involved in organized crime directly, as well as from their families. Often, we hear that this is the first time they've been listened to. And we offer them a way out of organized crime, by helping them to connect to support services, find a job, or get into education, away from the lifestyle that they've landed in, which many times they would rather not be part of. Individually, they have been very grateful. Some have been able to return to their home country after having been exploited within the UK. Parents have thanked us for allowing them to have their children and loved ones return to them, away from the capture to which they had succumbed within organized crime groups. This gives me confidence that we are doing the right thing for society – and for individuals and families.
UNODC’s Toolkit on Mainstreaming Gender and Human Rights allows policymakers and legislative drafters to better understand the roles of women and the effect of gender within transnational organized crime. But the Toolkit itself has equal relevance to practitioners. It contains lots of good information and checklists. Practitioners can look at, read, research, and challenge their own behaviors and their own organizations to improve the gender equity and human rights within their investigations. It will allow them to really focus their approach and their investigations, specifically around prevention and working in whole-of-society approaches to combating organized crime.
Access the Toolkit on Mainstreaming Gender and Human Rights in the Implementation of UNTOC here:
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/organized-crime/intro/implementing-untoc/toolkit-gender-and-human-rights.html
