Diversifying Justice: Revealing viable pathways for South Asian women

Co-PIs: Dr Nughmana Mirza and Dr Lisa Bradley who are supported by Nicola Dickson, research assistant.

Summary: 
Very little is known about South Asian (SA) women’s help-seeking during and following domestic abuse (DA), nor their experiences of criminal justice (CJ). The purpose of this research is to draw out vital implications for DA policy and practice by focusing on the end-to-end justice experiences of this particularly vulnerable but under researched population, and in doing so improve the CJ experiences of people in Scotland.

The research aims to:
• Explore SA women’s conceptions of DA and justice, and how they are shaped by socio-cultural factors.
• Develop knowledge of the ways in which SA women seek help during and following DA, and the ways in which such help-seeking pathways intersect with CJ.
• Gain a fuller understanding of the subtle and unsubtle barriers to justice that SA women victims of DA face within a Scottish context and consider what might be changed to ease their access to CJ and other support services.
The objectives of this work are to:
• Use a participatory action research (PAR) approach to gain access to, capture the experiences of, and actively involve a marginalised population through this research.
• Take into account the specificities of experiences gathered, whilst working with participants to reveal CJ and other public services as viable pathways to justice for SA women.
• Shape the development of person-centred justice policies and practices through diversifying existing understandings through the inclusion of the experiences of SA women victims of DA.
• Extend such learning for policy audiences more generally, including policy sectors such as education, health, social services and communities, and through modes of inter-agency cooperation and partnership working.
• Contribute a Scottish perspective to international debates surrounding the intersections of race, justice, and DA for SA women and consider how such learning might be extended to other minority populations.

The study is funded by the Scottish Government and will be completed by October 2022.

To find out more about the research please visit https://diversifyingjustice.com