Challenging Justice Inequalities
with Children in Conflict with the Law
This project focuses on children in conflict with the law, i.e. under 18s who encounter justice systems as a result of suspected, alleged, or confirmed involvement in offending behaviour. The Scottish youth justice system spans police contact, the children’s hearings system, the criminal court and other justice institutions.
We aim to coproduce a unique programme of child-led research to explore the interactions between protected characteristics (e.g. age, race, faith, sex/gender, sexuality, disability, gender reassignment), poverty and children’s experiences of justice. In doing so we aim to establish an inclusive and distinctive knowledge-base from which to enact intersectional justice-making, attentive to individual experiences and identities, alongside structural inequalities.
We will recruit a Youth Advisory Group of 10 justice-experienced children to help us shape and undertake this research.
Our focus
Phase 2 of Challenging Justice Inequalities
Our Youth Advisory Group (YAG) have now developed stage 2 of the project.
Title: ‘Doing intersectionality ‘in justice’: exploring intersectional experiences of policing with children and front-line police officers in Scotland’
Aim: To explore how intersectional identities have shaped, and continue to shape, young people's interactions with police in Scotland over the last decade and how police officers understand, respond to, integrate and embody intersectionality within their own policing practices and professional lives.
In non-academic terms: We want to find out how young people’s different identities affect their contact with police in Scotland, and how police respond to and understand these experiences, using insights from the last ten years to see what has changed and what has stayed the same.
Method: We are going to conduct a combination of interviews and focus groups with children and young people age 14-17. We will use these methods to find out more about children and young people’s experience and perceptions of the police and what they think shapes their interactions with officers. Our focus groups will include a short zine-making workshop, led by our young co-researchers. Zines will be used to support deeper discussion about these experiences.
We also plan to interview up to 20 police officers. We want to get to know these officers, and find out more about their practice in relation to both young people and protected characteristics. We will also share some of the zines that the young people make with the police officers to help us delve deeper into how they recognise and respond to young people’s experiences.
Our funder
The Nuffield Foundation is an independent charitable trust with a mission to advance social well-being. It funds research that informs social policy, primarily in Education, Welfare, and Justice. The Nuffield Foundation is the founder and co-funder of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory. The Foundation has funded this project, but the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily the Foundation.