Challenging Justice Inequalities
with Children in Conflict with the Law
This project focused 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.
The project co-produced 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 aimed to establish an inclusive and distinctive knowledge-base from which to enact intersectional justice-making, attentive to individual experiences and identities, alongside structural inequalities.
A Youth Advisory Group (YAG) of nine justice-experienced children helped to shape and undertake this research. The YAG co-produced and co-delivered Phase 2 of the project, which involved zine-making workshops with children and interviews with Police Officers to explore intersectional experiences of policing.
The project is drawing to a close and will end in February 2027.
Our focus
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.