Recording: Gender and Environmental Crime

Gender norms shape how women and men perpetrate environmental crime, as well as influencing their respective roles as ‘defenders’. These norms can be heavily localised. In Malawi, local, rural women are recruited by brokers to search for pangolins as they conduct the highly gendered practice of foraging for firewood. However, Asian women living in Malawi have been found guilty of playing senior roles in international ivory trafficking syndicates, suggesting gender norms are culturally rather than geographically bound. Furthermore, a greater understanding is emerging of how the long-term impacts of environmental crime – like climate and food security threats - put women and girls at disproportionately greater risk. Kenya has seen an increase in child brides as desperate families swap their daughters for cattle during man-made droughts, and depleted groundwater sources in India mean women and girls – to whom the burden of water collection falls - have to travel longer distances to fetch and carry supplies, increasing the risk of sexual violence.

This is the fourth webinar in a five-part series exploring organised crime and gender, held by RUSI in collaboration with the Thames Valley Violence Reduction Unit and the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath.

Dr Helen U. Agu, Lawyer and Senior Lecturer/Head of Department of International and Comparative Law, University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus. Her research interests focus on gender and wildlife crime as well as climate justice.

Dr. Meredith L. Gore, Associate Professor of Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change in the Department of Geographical Sciences at University of Maryland, College Park. Her research uses risk concepts to build new understanding of human-environment relationships and is designed to build scientific evidence for action.

Dr Francis Masse, Assistant Professor of Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Northumbria. His research focuses on how efforts to address environmental and wildlife crime re-shape human-environment relations, conservation space and practice, and state security and development concerns.

Chairperson: Anne-Marie Weeden, Senior Research Fellow and Environmental Crime Lead, RUSI.