Doing Crime Prevention, Doing Gender: Canadian Women's Responses to Police-Produced Gendered Crime-Prevention Messaging.

This article examines how race, social class, and gender intersect to shape Canadian women's responses to police-produced gendered crime-prevention messaging. Drawing on focus groups and interviews with a racially diverse but predominantly middle-class sample, the study identifies three main orientations toward police safety advisories: resentment, pragmatism, and gratitude. Racially marginalized women predominantly express resentment, critiquing police messaging as exclusionary and ineffective, while many white women adopt a pragmatic stance that balances safety with expectations of respectability; a smaller subset of women across racial groups express gratitude, trusting police guidance and feeling confident in their crime-prevention practices. The research highlights how women strategically enact these safety imperatives not only to mitigate risk but also to perform respectable femininity within racialized and classed social norms, emphasizing the precarious and performative nature of ideal victimhood in public spaces.