Jennifer Silcox, Assistant Professor

PhD, Sociology, Western University

Jennifer Silcox is a criminologist who specializes in gender, youth crime, and media. She is currently collaborating with faculty at the University of South Carolina on two projects relating to news coverage of violent girls in US and Canadian media outlets. Additionally, she is part of a team at the London Health Sciences Centre and St. Joseph’s Health Care London exploring youth perceptions of human dignity in mental health care. In the community, she has worked with non-profit organizations carrying out public outreach with women in prison and women and girls involved in the sex trade. As well, she has worked with youth in conflict with the law as part of their rehabilitation and diversion. On campus, she has helped with sexual harassment and violence education, workshops on transgender inclusivity in the classroom, and restorative justice panels assisting student victims of sexual hazing.

Areas of Specialization

Selected Publications

• (Forthcoming) Silcox, J. Institutionalized ‘Bad Girls’: Adolescent Female Folk Devils in Canadian Newspapers between 1991 and 2014. Feminist Media Studies.
• (Forthcoming). Andersen, T.S., Silcox, J., & Isom, D.A. Exploring U.S. News Media Portrayals of Girls’ Violence in the 1980s and 1990s: The Emergence of a Moral Panic In K. Boyle & S. Berridge (eds.). Routledge Companion to Gender, Media, and Violence (2nd ed). New York: Routledge.
• Silcox, Jennifer. 2022. "Youth Crime & Depictions of Youth Crime in Canada: Are News Depictions Purely Moral Panic?" Canadian Review of Sociology 59: 96-114.
• Stevens Andersen, T., Jennifer Silcox, Deena Isom. 2021. Constructing “Bad Girls”: Representations of Violent Girls in the Canadian and U.S. News Media." Deviant Behavior 42(3): 353-365.
• Silcox, Jennifer. 2019. "Are Canadian Girls Becoming More Violent? An Examination of Integrated Criminal Court Survey Statistics." Criminal Justice and Policy Review 30(3): 477-502.