Introduction

It perhaps seems frivolous to consider the serious subject of how women experience punishment as simply ‘playing a game’. The experiences of criminalised women are varied and complex, often dictated by a woman's intersectional position within society (Clarke and Chadwick, 2017). Yet by grouping together those aspects of criminalised women's experiences that are shared, we can begin to understand how criminalised women's lives are shaped by institutions of social control and structures of punishment. Conceptualising these shared experiences through a boardgame, allows the subjugated experience of navigating community punishment as a criminalised woman to be conveyed to academic researchers, criminal justice practitioners, policy makers and students in ways that are easily understood. By placing knowledge of experiences that are far outside our own realm of understanding into the simplistic framework of a boardgame, we can make what is hidden, visible.

This chapter narrates the findings of a piece of feminist participatory action research (Harding, 2018; Harding, 2020b) completed with criminalised women in the North West of England. Using creative methods such as creative writing, photography (photo voice and photo elicitation) and narrative map making, this research aimed to capture the way in which punishment intersects with women's daily lives. In order to communicate the findings of this research to multiple audiences, a research-informed boardgame was produced that was later used as a tool to communicate women's lived experiences of community punishment to probation practitioners at the ‘Women in NAPO conference’ in 2018. While the simplicity of a boardgame contrasts with the complexity of criminalised women's experiences, its accessibility can act as a starting point to consider how these experiences can challenge, unsettle and disrupt existing understandings of how criminal justice punishes women and how criminological researchers theorise those at the margins of the criminal justice system – understanding women's navigation of community punishment as playing a rigged game.

Examining criminalised women is not a new endeavour. Heidensohn (1968; 1985; 2012) has highlighted the importance of understanding criminalised women across her long career, while Smart (1977) first called for more attention to be paid to the female experience in the late 1970s. Since then, the multiple works of Carlen (1983; 1985; 1989; 1998) and Carlen and Worrall (2004) have led the way in critically understanding women in prison.