Search

This paper addresses how 'justice' is understood, sought, and experienced by Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) victims/survivors of Gender Based Violence (GBV) within the UK. The key aims of this paper are to explore (a) experiences of GBV for BME victim/survivors, (b) their experiences and perceptions of justice, and (c) factors enabling, or posing barriers to justice, including immigration status. We situate BME women's experiences and conceptualisations of justice within an ecological approach [Hagemann-White, C., et al. 2010. "Factors at Play in the Perpetration of Violence Against Women, Violence Against Children and Sexual Orientation Violence – A Multi-Level Interactive Model (Part of the Feasibility Study to Assess the Possibilities, Opportunities and Needs to Standardise National Legislation on Gender Violence and Violence Against Children for the European Commission – JLS/2009/D4/01." Publications of the European Union, Luxembourg] and within Bourdieu's conceptualisation of 'social capital' [1986. "The Forms of Capital." In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by J. Richardson, 241–258. Westport, CT: Greenwood]. We found that migrant women lack access to vital aspects of social capital, that make access to justice particularly challenging, and that immigration status poses key barriers in migrant women's experiences of accessing justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactional justice is concerned with how far victims feel (i) respected by justice officials ('interpersonal justice') and (ii) informed about the progress of their case and the justice process overall ('informational justice') [Laxminarayan, M., Henrichs, J., and Pemberton, A. (2012). Procedural and interactional justice: a comparative study of victims in the Netherlands and New South Wales. European journal of criminology, 9 (3), 260–275; Laxminarayan, M. (2013). Interactional justice, coping and the legal system: needs of vulnerable victims. International review of victimology, 19 (2), 145–158]. This paper explores the experience of interactional justice for victims of 'honour'-based violence and abuse (HBVA) who report to the police in England and Wales. HBVA refers to abuse perpetrated with reference to ideas of 'shame' and 'honour'. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 36 victims of HBVA across England. This paper documents their experience and extends the framework of interactional justice proposed by Laxminarayan et al. (2012). First, we identify intersectionality, in particular, the positions of gender, ethnicity and immigration status within the victim–officer encounter, as central to interpreting the interpersonal experiences of HBVA victims with police. Second, we find that how information is used and delivered can be as important as the content and timeliness of communication. Twenty of our sample of 36 participants were happy with the initial police response, but only 9 were happy with their reporting experience overall. We argue that focusing on HBVA victims' interaction with justice actors could enable us to understand and improve HBVA victims' experience of, and satisfaction with, the justice system overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines key trends within Indian feminist analysis on prostitution, and is based on primary fieldwork around feminist organizations in India and on research conducted on prostitution in the states of Maharashtra, Delhi, West Bengal and Orissa. The article argues that there are at least three ways in which Indian feminists have addressed the issue of prostitution - as silence, as hurt and violence and as potential choice and liberation. I suggest that all these perspectives are limited in that they do not necessarily take in the wide range of experiences encountered by women in prostitution, and may well feed into mainstream patriarchal views on prostitution. The first trope looks at the ways in which 'mainstream' Indian feminists did not raise issues of sexuality, thereby relegating questions of prostitute rights to the margins. The second approach is based on radical feminist critiques of prostitution as violence and hurt, and legitimizes itself by drawing on the articulations of those sex workers and activists who draw on the experiences of hurt, anguish, violence and coercion that form a part of their lives. Finally, I look at prostitute rights organizations that seek to create an alternative to these analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the adoption of criminal laws as a strategy to fight forced marriage in Great Britain. It focuses on the debates surrounding this strategy, the existing legal provisions on forced marriage, and the national consultation on criminalization. Under British penal system, forced marriage is viewed within the framework of domestic violence and is deemed illegal under the Marriage Act 1949. Debates on the criminalization of forced marriage ensued with the start of a national consultation ascertaining the effectiveness of combating the situation through the institution of a specific criminal offence.