Johanna Niemi 2 Gender and Criminal Law Policy

2005 The implementation of a policy for equality can either take the form of special programmes or mainstreaming. In the Finnish criminal policy, gender has mostly been invisible, but a national programme to combat violent crime, published in the spring of 2005, identified violence against women as a special problem and proposed special measures to address it. While the programme referred to alcohol and social exclusion as the general explanations for violent criminality, it did not raise the idea of mainstreaming of gender issues. The article analyses three legal reforms: the reform of assault (battery) in 1995, the reform of prosecution rules in cases of violent crime in 1995, and the introduction of an Act on the Restraining Order in 1999. While the issue of gender was invisible in the first two reforms, the third reform was a special measure to combat violence against women. The first two reforms have resulted in more lenient prosecution and sanctions for violent crime, and for violence against women in particular. The enactment of the restraining order created a special procedure to address this kind of violence, instead of resorting to ordinary criminal procedures. The main conclusion is that the incorporation of sex and gender into the legal reforms requires both awareness and gender expertise, because the implications of sex and gender are not always as axiomatic as one might expect.