Profile of incarcerated women in French-speaking Belgium: leaving invisibility to discover vulnerabilities

Female criminality is a phenomenon that is attracting more and more interest, particularly due to the advent of the feminist movement in the human and social sciences. Despite the growth of studies on the subject, women are still relatively invisible in traditional fields of criminology. The present research focuses on the profile of women in prison in French-speaking Belgium. The core of this presentation is therefore to draw a descriptive portrait of women convicted and incarcerated between 2019 and 2021 based on data contained in their prison file (N=1044). Through the mobilization of a quantitative approach, these data reveal that these convicted women are, for the majority, incarcerated for offences against property and goods - of a non-violent nature - and also present a series of vulnerabilities on the social, economic, individual and relational levels (low level of education, professional and housing precariousness, presence of consumption, dysfunctional social relationships, etc.), thus underlining the existence of an undeniable link between vulnerabilities and female delinquency. The objective of highlighting these characteristics is to add to the knowledge about women offenders and to establish a starting point to identify possible specificities related to this population and, as such, offer a future comparative basis with the male population.