Meet SFU Criminology’s newest faculty member: Bridging criminal law, policing, and public health

SFU Criminology is thrilled to announce the addition of Andrea Krüsi to our talented faculty team. She brings a wealth of expertise at the intersection of criminal law, policing, and public health.

Specifically, her expertise centers on how evolving approaches to criminalization and policing of sex work and HIV non-disclosure shape gendered health and social inequities among marginalized populations.

What is the most important issue that your research addresses, and why is it important to you in particular?

A central focus of my research has been to investigate how criminal laws, and policing interact with structural vulnerabilities (e.g. racialization; poverty; im/migration status) to shape experiences of gender-based violence, HIV/STI risks, and access to healthcare in criminalized and marginalized populations with a specific focus on analyzing how the criminal legal system and public health interventions reinforce and reproduce particular classed, racialized, and gendered subjects. The overarching goals of my research are to:

1. Establish an empirical evidence base that directly informs policy, practice and law reform to reduce health and social inequities among criminalized and marginalized groups;
2. Characterize how the impacts of criminalization are being mitigated though community-led interventions (e.g., community safety patrols, sex worker-led violence reporting mechanisms).

Over the course of my academic career, I have invested significant effort in working with community-based organizations on advocating for evidence-based policy and practice. This work is very close to my heart. However, given the iterative and sometimes glacial pace of policy change, I am excited to work with community organizations and marginalized and criminalized people on documenting and supporting grass-roots community-led initiatives that aim to mitigate some of the harms perpetuated by involvement with the criminal legal system.  This is important to me as it allows for evidence-based advocacy both at the structural- and the community-level.

Share the story of how you entered your profession.

When I first came to Vancouver almost 25 years ago as an ESL student, I started volunteering with prominent community activist Jamie Lee Hamilton in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Jamie Lee Hamilton spent much of her career advocating for sex workers’ rights, the transgender community and justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. (For more on  Jamie Lee Hamilton check out: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/122/article/776088/pdf). My time volunteering at Jamie Lee Hamilton’s Grandma’s House in the late 1990’s, a time when sex workers continued to go missing from the Downtown Eastside, profoundly shaped my career and research documenting how criminalization shapes the occupational health and safety of sex workers.

What is something about your career that we would be surprised to learn?

As a national expert on the occupational health and safety of sex workers, I was invited to provide Expert Testimony based on my team’s research at the Superior Court of Ontario in 2022 in the context of a Charter Challenge regarding the constitutionality of Canada’s sex work laws brought forward by the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform. Similarly, I was also invited as an expert witness by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to assist with the Committee’s review of the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act in spring 2022. This work has fostered a keen interest in how scientific findings, including qualitative studies, are taken up by the courts and in the political arena and the key role of methodological integrity.

What are you most looking forward to in your work at SFU and in the School of Criminology?

I am really looking forward to connecting with the students, faculty and staff at the School and working collaboratively to address community challenges related to criminalization, policing and public health. I am also excited to work with colleagues at the School to continue to build on the advancement of qualitative and mixed-methods research and teaching in Criminology.

What are your hobbies?

I am a marathon runner. Running for me provides the perfect antidote to sitting at my desk all day. Running allows me to be more present in the moment, experience nature, feel gratitude for what my body can accomplish (and endure) and on a good day I feel the endorphin induced ‘runners high’.

Can you share an interesting fact about yourself?

My first language is Swiss German, which is predominately a spoken language without explicit rules in written form. Due to my Swiss accent when speaking English, I frequently mix up the sounds for V and W among others.