Dr. Dawn Beichner-Thomas

Biography

Dawn Beichner-Thomas is a professor in the Criminal Justice Sciences Department and Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Illinois State University. She co-directs a post-graduate course on Victimology, Victim Assistance, and Criminal Justice each year at the Inter University Centre of Dubrovnik, Croatia that brings together students and faculty from more than twenty-five countries. Dr. Beichner-Thomas is a member of the executive committee of the World Society of Victimology, an international non-governmental organization with Special Category consultative status with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations and the Council of Europe and represents the organization at the United Nations. She is a member of the board of The Alliance of NGOs on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, one of three umbrella organizations coordinating civil society organizations around matters of interest of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime.

Her research examines gender-based victimization (including sexual assault and intimate partner violence), the overlap of victimization and offending, the adverse effects of incarceration on people and families, women returning home from jail and prison, and restorative justice. Dr. Beichner-Thomas serves as a research consultant for the Center for Justice Innovation, the YWCA Labyrinth Outreach Services to Women, and the Peoria Problem-Solving Courts.

Through her role as a liaison to the United Nations for the World Society of Victimology, Dr. Beichner-Thomas was invited to deliver an oral statement on Reducing Reoffending Through Rehabilitation to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime and has participated as an NGO observer on several occasions. She was invited to join the UN Women delegation as a global scholar for the Seventh (2025, Zanzibar City, Tanzania) and Sixth (2023, Quito, Ecuador) Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces Global Leaders’ Fora. Along with colleagues Dr. Rosemary Barberet (International Sociological Association, Criminologists Without Borders) Dr. Sheetal Ranjan (ASC Division of Feminist Criminology), and Dr. Pilar Larroulet (Criminologists Without Borders), she has co-organized parallel events held in conjunction with the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) since 2019. Each collaborative panel—centered on Feminist Approaches to Justice—includes scholars, policy makers, and advocates representing multiple world regions. Because their collaborative team’s main goal is to link research to international policy related to feminist approaches to justice, in conjunction with each CSW, they publish a guest-edited special issue of an academic journal. To date, they have published six special issues: International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy (Volume 9, Issue 1, 2020), Violence Against Women (Volume 28, Issue 8, 2022), the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, Volume 47, Issue 2, 2023), Feminist Criminology (Volume 19, Issue 4, 2024), International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice (Volume 82, 2025), Current Sociology (Volume 74, Issue 4, 2026) and have a 2027 issue forthcoming in the journal of Crime, Law and Social Change.