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- Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online delivers more than 67,000 titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. It includes documentaries, films, demonstrations, and other content types. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
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Featured Films
- We're Alive (streaming, UCLA) Almost 50 years ago, three UCLA student filmmakers made a bold documentary about incarcerated women. Then it vanished. But thanks to some Bruin detective work — and a huge stroke of luck — the students’ forgotten film is now providing a new focus on the lives of women within the justice system.
- Crash Course Sociology: Gender Stratification (Streaming, Academic Video Online) Today we're looking at how society becomes stratified along gender lines. We'll discuss Raewyn Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinities and emphasized femininities. We'll explore gender socialization in the home, media, and schools. Finally, we'll explain how gender stratification results in different outcomes by gender in education, occupations, earnings, and criminal activity.
- Visions of abolition from critical resistance to a new way of life (streaming, Academic Video Online) The voices of women caught in the criminal justice system and leading scholars of prison abolition, examining the racial and gendered violence of the prison system.
- Rape Myths on Trial (streaming, Kanopy) In this provocative presentation, Anne Munch, a career prosecutor and advocate for victims of gender violence, examines how cultural attitudes shape the outcomes of rape and sexual assault cases. Drawing on years of experience prosecuting sex crimes, Munch shows how rape cases often turn on the involvement of an "unnamed conspirator" -- the complex of myths and stories we tell ourselves as a culture about sex, gender, power, and responsibility. Using examples from real cases, and harrowing evidence from actual 911 calls, Munch reveals how the assumptions that juries bring into the courtroom often stack the odds against victims, and at the same time challenges us to think critically about how our own assumptions might unintentionally reinforce victim-blaming.
- The Rise of Female Violence (streaming, Academic Video Online) From assault to robberies and domestic violence, convictions of young women for violent crimes are skyrocketing. Explicit videos of violent girls are now celebrated on social media. And celebrities like pop star Cheryl Fernandez-Versini and Hollywood starlet Emma Roberts have been arrested for assault without any professional repercussions. Why are so many young women so angry? Has gender equality prompted them to take on the dark side of masculinity and make it their own? Has our culture normalised their behaviour? Featuring social experiments designed to gauge public reactions, this eye-opening film explores our deeply ingrained attitudes to female violence.
- Belly of the Beast (streaming, Alexander Street Press) When a courageous young woman and a radical lawyer discover a pattern of illegal sterilizations in California's women's prisons, they wage a near-impossible battle against the Department of Corrections. With a growing team of investigators inside prison working with colleagues on the outside, they uncover a series of statewide crimes -- from inadequate health care to sexual assault to coercive sterilizations -- primarily targeting women of color. This shocking legal drama captured over 7-years features extraordinary access and intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated people, demanding attention to a shameful and ongoing legacy of eugenics and reproductive injustice in the United States.
- Why Women Kill (streaming, Academic Video Online) Convicted women prisoners in Alabama and Texas reveal how they came to commit murder.
- Women in Prison (streaming, Academic Video Online) The documentary takes a look at women in prison, exploring some of the reasons why they were incarcerated. Discusses how poverty, domestic violence, drug abuse, and sexual abuse contribute to female criminality. Interviews with inmates, prison officials and psychologists highlight the many shortcomings of the current system and point to the changes that must be made as more and more women are sentenced to jail time. Many of the women interviewed are from the Central California Womens' Facility, Madera, CA.
- The Silent Truth: Crimes Against Women in the Military (streaming, Academic Video Online) Has the Army ever covered up the rape and murder of a female soldier? Even worse, have they done so repeatedly? At least 94 United States military women died overseas during the Iraq War. Of these deaths, some 20 occurred under suspicious circumstances with the additional characterization of 'suicide.' The Silent Truth revolves around the death of 19-year-old US Army Private LaVena Johnson, who was found dead on the military base in Balad, Iraq, in July of 2005. The US Army determined her cause of death to be suicide by a self-inflicted M-16 gunshot.
- 900 Women: Inside St. Gabriel's Prison (streaming, Academic Video Online) A documentary about the lives and struggles of six women in Louisiana's most notorious prison for women: The Louisiana Correctional Institute For Women. Housing 900 of the state's most dangerous women, the program follows six of the women as they try to survive the trials of life in prison as daughters, mothers and grandmothers. Mary, 68, the oldest woman in the prison, is serving a life sentence for two murders. Twenty-four-year-old Adine Rayford delivers her second child and is forced to leave it at the hospital as she returns to prison. Heather Zerangue, a young girl from New Orleans who had a brief career in modeling before coming to prison, approaches her first parole hearing. Keanna, a young mother of three serving time for a heroin deal, is released. The program follows Keanna out of prison and back again as she is rearrested and placed in jail.
- Stories from The Riverside: Women Jailed for Killing Their Abusers (streaming) This documentary visits Gatesville Penitentiary in Texas, where three female inmates convicted of murder and serving sentences ranging from 25 to 40 years describe the domestic violence that would eventually bring them to prison. Sonia, Brenda and Lee Ann relate in their own words stories of the isolation and fear that bound them to their threatening husbands. From their stories, a pattern of violence emerges, creating, in effect, a portrait of family violence in America today.
- When the Bough Breaks-- Children of Women in Prison (streaming, Academic Video Online) hat happens to children when their mothers are incarcerated? In prisons throughout the United States, 80% of all female inmates are incarcerated for non-violent offenses, and 80% are mothers of vulnerable children. This sensitive documentary is an up -close look at children coping with their mother's incarcerations.
- What I Want My Words to Do to You (streaming, Academic Video Online) Playwright & activist Eve Ensler guides viewers into the hearts of female prisoners as they delve into the facts and emotions surrounding their crimes-- and their lives as women--as they engage in a series of writing exercises and discussions. An outgrowth of Ensler's writing workshops at Bedford Hills Correctional Center, a maximum-security facility, WHAT I WANT MY WORDS TO DO TO YOU pairs footage of the actual prisoners talking and writing about their experiences with stirring dramatic readings of their words by actresses Mary Alice, Glenn Close, Hazelle Goodman, Rosie Perez and Marisa Tomei.
- Prison lullabies (streaming, Academic Video Online) Prison Lullabies is the remarkable portrait of four women living on the bad side of luck, struggling with drug addiction, arrested for dealing and prostitution and serving prison time with one common bond: they are pregnant. Amy, Monique, Joann and Ann Marie -- they all have given birth behind bars. For these women who are on intimate terms with sexual abuse, poverty and addiction, the Taconic Correctional Facility in New York State offers a rare gleam of hope. One of only five prisons in the U.S. to provide a nursery program for inmates,
- Crime after Crime (streaming, Academic Video Online) Crime After Crime tells the dramatic story of the legal battle to free Debbie Peagler, a woman imprisoned for over a quarter century due to her connection to the murder of the man who abused her.
- Sexual Assault: Naming the Unnamed Conspirator (streaming, Kanopy) Examines how cultural attitudes shape the outcomes of rape and sexual assault cases. Reveals how the assumptions that juries bring into the courtroom often stack the odds against victims, and at the same time challenges us to think critically about how our own assumptions might unintentionally reinforce victim-blaming. The result is a stunning look inside our criminal justice system and an incisive analysis of American culture's warped views of women's sexuality.
- Take me to a place outside (streaming, Academic Video Online) This film aims to present aspects of the experience of imprisonment of eight female offenders in a British prison. Using a variety of experimental techniques, and drawing upon theories of perception and imagination in Visual Anthropology and Theatre Studies, Take Me to a Place Outside explores the relationship between the 'real' and the 'unreal', the physical and the imagined, and the inside and the outside - as rendered through the experience of incarceration.
- The Burning Bed (dvd) Farrah Fawcett stars in one of her most critically acclaimed roles as Francine Hughes, a Michigan mother of three - and a battered wife. On the night of March 9, 1977, she is driven to murder. She sets afire the gasoline soaked bedroom where her ex-husband Mickey is sleeping - then confesses to the police. Based on a true story, this unforgettable film is a searing dramatization spanning twelve tormented years of family life. Francine
Podcasts
- (Rerelease) SOC216 – Feminist & Critical Criminology (Guest Edition) (The Social Breakdown) We've got a throwback for you from our second season! Dr. Nicholas Chagnon joins us to get into the nitty gritty of critical feminism and feminist criminology. We untangle the many aspects of feminism, and learn how these perspectives analyze women’s reproductive rights, as well as how they approach criminology from a female-centered perspective. This episode continues to be one of our most downloaded, so take a listen if you haven't already!
- Women & Crime As criminologists, we study females who have been victims of crime, those who have committed crimes, and those involved in the criminal justice system through their work. In this podcast, we tell the stories of these women, but we also look at the causes of female crime, and victimization. We will cover cases in which women have been wrongfully convicted and exonerated, and we will use a criminologist lens to look at how women are treated in the criminal justice system.
