Blog – Bristol Social Harm and Crime Research Group

The unspeakable murder of Sara Sharif

Posted on December 11, 2024December 12, 2024 by nasrul.ismail

By Professor Aisha K. Gill*

On Friday 15 November 2024, Sara Sharif’s father, Urfan Sharif, admitted to beating his daughter with a metal pole while she lay dying. Jurors at the Old Bailey heard that the 10-year-old was discovered dead in a bunkbed in the family home in Woking, Surrey, on 10 August 2023. Sharif, 42, and his wife Beinash Batool, 30, were found guilty of her murder at the Central Criminal Court of murdering the schoolgirl after perpetrating a year-long “campaign of abuse” against her. Sara’s uncle Faisal Malik 29, was found not guilty of murder but guilty of causing or allowing the death of a child. This horrifying case exposes the inadequate response of key services in cases involving Black and minoritised children like Sara.

Sara was born on 11 January 2013 in Slough, Berkshire, to Polish mother Olga Domin and Pakistani father Urfan Sharif, a taxi driver who moved to the UK in 2001.The couple married in 2009 but separated in 2015 and then divorced. Sara lived with her mother until custody was awarded to Sharif in 2019. She then lived with her father, her stepmother, Batool, the couple’s four children and her uncle, Malik, in Woking.

William Emlyn Jones KC suggested all three defendants were involved in Sara’s murder, although Sharif initially blamed Batool for Sara’s injuries: there were “multiple unexplained fractures in 25 locations” on Sara’s body, including a fracture to a bone in her neck, the vertebrae in her spine and in her hand. However, three weeks into the trial, he dramatically reversed his position and admitted to tying Sara up with the tape and hitting her with a cricket bat, metal pole and mobile phone in the days before she died. Asked why he had suddenly changed his evidence, he responded: “She was my daughter. I’ve been nasty, I’ve been mean with her. I couldn’t care for her; I didn’t do what a father should have done, and I’ll take responsibility for everything.”

The timeline for this horrific case of violence and abuse goes back to April 2023, when Sharif informed Sara’s school that she would be withdrawn and home-schooled with immediate effect. It was disclosed by a neighbour that “just before the Easter holidays [in 2023] she was in school and had cuts and bruises on her face and her neck.” The neighbour’s daughter asked what had happened and Sara said she’d fallen off a bike.

Shortly before her withdrawal from formal education, Sara’s primary school agreed to make a referral to social services because of a teacher’s concerns over bruises Sara had sustained; the court heard that a report was entered into the school’s child protection monitoring system on 10 March 2023. Yet six days after receiving this referral, Surrey County Council closed the investigation – why? Similarly, while the council and the police confirmed that they had contact with the family, the police described their interactions as “limited” and “historic”. Why was there no tracking by social services and the school of the reasons Sara was taken out of school given the “visible cuts and bruises on her face”?. Why was there no monitoring of Sara after she was taken out of school?

The case raises serious questions about the paucity, at least initially, of these key service responses and of critical safeguarding by teachers and others at Sara’s school. We now know from the court case that the abuse was being perpetrated by multiple adults in her family, and that she endured the ordeal for many months. Her teachers, social services and the police failed to protect her by adequately investigating the visible signs of abuse she was experiencing, and this underscores the fact that crimes like these involving Black and minoritised children often go under-investigated—at least until the victim has been killed.

Part of the issue here is that police officers are inexperienced and ill-equipped when it comes to tackling such crimes. There has been very little research exploring the specific problem of child abuse from a multidisciplinary perspective. One reason for this gap is that the recent foregrounding in media and policy discourses of child abuse in racially minoritised communities has taken place through the lens of cultural essentialism, occluding the causes of child abuse by focusing on racialised elements, such as the role of traditional cultural practices. As Black and racially minoritised children are located at the intersection of multiple, overlapping structural inequalities, their specific experiences of victimisation are still largely overlooked in the criminological literature, even though solid progress has been made during the last decade in understanding child abuse in British Asian communities. For instance, my research has highlighted the role of cultural factors in concealing child abuse, including how notions of ‘honour’ often act as barriers to disclosure. Although honour and its inverse, shame, have been explored in many scholarly discussions of gendered violence in Asian communities, more work could enable culturally competent responses to child abuse cases, particularly by recognising the unique barriers and difficulties that racially minoritised victims face—these include shame, fear of being disbelieved, and self-blame. Identifying these factors and exploring how they can inhibit and facilitate disclosure would strengthen preventive strategies and improve treatment, support and understanding for all victims.

In Sara’s case, many bystanders also failed to disclose what was happening to her. One of Sara’s neighbours told the court they heard screaming, “constant crying” and “banging” coming from the Sharif family’s previous home, a flat in West Byfleet: “It almost seemed like [the children had] been locked in a bedroom, that constant rattling of a door, trying to get it open,” they said. They had often heard Batool “almost hysterical, screaming” at the children and her use of abusive language towards them. The neighbour once asked Batool if everything was OK and had “the door shut in my face”; they did not take their concerns further, and nor did the next person who lived in the flat, who told the court they thought they heard “smacking” from downstairs followed by a scream. Asked whether they had contacted the authorities, they said they “convinced [themselves] that everything was OK”: “I spoke to people and was told to mind my own business and ignore [it].” Someone who lived near the Sharif family’s next home, the house in Woking where Sara was killed, told police they heard a child’s scream in the days before the murder. “It did not sound good. I wondered to myself whether I should tell someone… I did not hear another scream or any other noise so I did not take it any further.”

It’s difficult to confront the fact that none of these neighbours intervened. But while barriers to disclosure in specific contexts remain opaque, it’s incredibly difficult to encourage bystanders and victims, especially children, to disclose swiftly and thus prevent further abuse. This can only be achieved by locating child abuse within an intersectional framework that enables effective examination of the dominant paradigms that may reduce this form of violence to a cultural or religious problem. All support agencies must work together to implement a more nuanced understanding of child abuse that addresses both the commonalities and particularities of such crimes across and within communities. It is therefore imperative that any review of the institutional failure to protect Sara from her family brings together all relevant partners—the police, health, social care and education—and robustly examines their practices to prevent a murder like this from happening again.

Author details

Aisha K. Gill, Ph.D., FRSA CBE is an internationally and nationally acknowledged grassroots gender-based violence activist/researcher with over 20+ years’ experience, focused on Black and minoritized communities’ women and girls’ experiences of forced marriage, rape, policing, sexual violence, child exploitation, FGM/C, and femicidal violence in the name of ‘honour’, which relates to issues around the intersections between law, policy and practice. She is currently Professor of Criminology and Head of Centre for Gender and Violence Research at the University of Bristol. In 2024, she was appointed Board of Trustees of Ashiana Network. [https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/aisha-k-gill | 📧 ak.gill@bristol.ac.uk ]

Photo credit: Aisha K. Gill

Why the announcements of Justice Secretary Mahmood on reducing the number of women in prison are good news.

Posted on November 4, 2024 by jo.large

by Catalina Ortuzar*.

The recent announcement of UK Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood of plans to create a Women’s Justice Board aimed at reducing the number of women in prison would mark a significant improvement in efficiency and fairness of the Justice system in England & Wales, but also an excellent example for the rest of the world to follow.

In contrast to the overall global incarceration rate, which is increasing slowly (Penal Reform International & Thailand Institute of Justice, 2024), the imprisonment of women is growing at an accelerated pace (World Prison Brief, 2022). This is despite most women’s imprisonment being for non-violent, low-level offences: property, fraud and drug offences are the main crimes committed by women in prison (Penal Reform International & Thailand Institute of Justice, 2024).

Most female offending is economically motivated (Prison Reform Trust, 2022; Salisbury & Van Voorhis, 2009). In England and Wales, a third of women are in prison for shoplifting and fraud (Prison Reform Trust, 2022). In 2021, sixty three per cent of all female prison sentences were for less than 12 months (Prison Reform Trust, 2022). Research has consistently demonstrated how even short periods of incarceration can have major impacts on their lives and opportunities for reintegration into society (Petach & Pena, 2021; Sheely, 2020). These effects are typically more profound for women because of the gendered roles they fulfil and the stigmatisation of women as criminals (Larroulet et al., 2020; Looney & Turner, 2018). Further, intersectionality plays a crucial role in the severity of the consequences of incarceration on women. Aspects of a person’s identity, such as race, gender, class, age, and religion, come together to compound lived experiences of discrimination and disadvantage (Crenshaw, 1989). For women the intersectional effects of prison not only affect opportunities for work, but also opportunities to perform gendered roles, such as motherhood (Gueta & Chen, 2016).

This is particularly significant when we consider how many women in prison are mothers. In England and Wales more than half of women inmates are mothers (Prison Reform Trust, 2022). In many poorer countries, the proportion is higher still. In Latin America, more than 80% are mothers. Most are single mothers (Interamerican Development Bank, 2018). As sole carers this has long-lasting negative effects on their children, extending the impact of women’s incarceration onto innocent and typically poor families, who are thrown into a cycle of poverty and exclusion (Bush-Baskette, 2000; Giacomello & Youngers, 2020).

Reducing the number of women in prison is not just a question of criminological profiles or intersecting vulnerabilities, it also, importantly, extends to applying more proportionate, better suited sentences. Prisons – designed by men for men – are not designed for women. One proximate consequence is unfair punishment: prison not only deprives women of their liberty but also their dignity when their needs and rights are overlooked, exacerbating their vulnerabilities even further (Courts and Tribunals Judiciary UK, 2024).

Because women are a minority of the prison population (roughly 4% in England and Wales), institutions that cater for women are geographically dispersed. Women who serve sentences far away from their families suffer from the privation of regular visits and ability to exercise their roles as mothers or carers, intensifying their sense of isolation and exclusion.

Other evidence revealing the unsuitability of prison for women include outsized impacts on physical and mental health. Incarceration overlooks the fact that most women in prison are victims of violence, abuse and neglect (Bloom & Covington, 2001; Dehart, 2008) and have complex needs. This is reflected in higher rates of self-harm and mental health issues in women’s prisons both in England and Wales (Ministry of Justice & HM Prison & Probation Service, 2023) and elsewhere (Van Voorhis, 2012)

Reducing the number of women in prison does not mean that women offenders will not be sentenced, simply that justice should be proportionate to their crimes.

Creating a women’s justice board might improve the capacity of the Justice System to address women offenders within their specificities, consider their gendered roles and complex needs as victims of violence, and punish their crimes without breaking their connections to community and family, where they will eventually return.

Because women in prison worldwide share similar characteristics – in relation to offence type, mental health problems and being mothers – this effort may become an example for other countries to follow. Simply building more prisons to address the growing number of women in prison will merely deepen the problem of exclusion and marginalisation of women who have committed minor offences, creating negative, long-lasting effects on their lives and their communities.

Addressing the specificity of women in prison potentially constitutes an important step towards reducing the use of prison for minor offences in general and looking for more effective and fair responses to crime and crime prevention.

*Catalina Ortuzar is a Chilean PhD researcher in the School of Social Policy, University of Bristol, UK. Her research lies at the intersection of exclusion, illegal markets, prison studies, social harm and feminist criminology. Her current research is about the labour trajectories of women in prison for drug offences in Chile.

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Racism and the food system: from asylum hotels to overfishing in Senegal

Posted on September 27, 2024September 27, 2024 by nasrul.ismail

By Monish Bhatia and Roxana Cavalcanti*

Editorial note: This article also includes examples of sexual violence experienced by women living in poverty. Some readers might find this distressing.

UK asylum hotels and food

Over the past decade and half, we have been part of migrant solidarity groups (formal and informal), as well as researchers on social inequalities, race and justice. Since the beginning of 2023, we have worked on a new project with migrant women from the Global South living in the UK, uncovering the complex impacts of the ever-hostile immigration regime against the backdrop of the expanding asylum-industrial complex.

Women’s experience

Some of the initial themes in our research have flagged the disruption of reproductive justice. For example, women seeking asylum are being housed in Home Office ‘Dispersal Accommodation’, referred to as hotels, for over one year. They experience the hotels as a form of confinement in the sense that they have no choice as to where they live, they have no access to a kitchen and therefore are not able to cook for themselves or their children. All the women in our study found the food provided in the hotel to be seriously lacking in hygiene, safety, and nutrition. Most of the women had experienced significant weight loss and become iron deficient. They were frequently served meat that was not properly or entirely cooked and occasionally received rotten meat. Some were given extremely spicy food to the point that it caused severe pain and other physical reactions.

‘We have only had problems with the hotel food. […] I still can’t get used to it, to be honest, because at first my stomach was sick … not being able to cook, the fact of not being able to do what we are used to […] they use too many spices. My husband and I were sick several times because of the food.’ (Lisbeth, alias)

Living at the hotel meant having access to a basic, small, and rather congested room with a bathroom (some communal). The space was chronically insufficient for those with infants and children, and more importantly, it lacked access to equipment to store and prepare fresh meals or heat the food. Lisbeth explained that she ended up having a complicated pregnancy, developing gestational diabetes and gallstones. Also, she did not have facilities to safely store breastmilk and infant formula. Her and her children’s health (born and unborn) were constantly put at risk due to the impossibility of storing and accessing healthy, adequate, safe, and hygienic food while being housed at the hotel awaiting the processing of her asylum claim. She explained:

‘They don’t want to operate on me yet [for gallstones], because there is a long waiting list, they say. It is very complicated because the pain is very strong. I have gone to the emergency room about six times by ambulance because I can’t stand the pain anymore and all they can do is give me morphine.’ (Lisbeth)

Photographic evidence

Recently, a group of activists provided photos of food taken at several hotels, located in various parts of England. The photos were taken by residents of the hotel, shared with activists, who then shared the photos with us. The photos included meals with raw chicken, other foods served with body hairs, out-of-date yogurt with insects all around it, and more generally food that make one’s stomach churn.

Image 1: Undercooked/raw chicken served at a dispersal accommodation hotel for asylum seekers outside London, photo taken by a resident of the hotel.

Image 2: Out-of-date yogurt with insects, served at a dispersal accommodation hotel for asylum seekers outside London, photo taken by a resident of the hotel.

Image 3 and 4: Meals with body hairs served at a dispersal accommodation hotel for asylum seekers outside London, photos taken by a resident of the hotel.

Corroboration from practitioners

We have heard the same reports from women during interviews and from practitioners who felt the complaints were not being addressed. We also received a range of medical letters that provided evidence of hospitalisation, food poisoning and explained how children experienced iron deficiency, and had allergic reactions. For instance, one letter stated:

‘Daniel [alias] has been referred to us from our A&E. He is a refugee child who came here with his family and is currently on iron and vitamin D supplements. Daniel has been complaining of abdominal pain, poor appetite and is losing weight.’ (NHS Children’s Hospital letter addressed to hotel)

Another letter explained:

‘Nora [alias] is a patient at the surgery and suffers from gastritis and bloating following eating certain foods causing her pain and vomiting. [lists foods that affect patient] Could you please take this into consideration at meal times.’ (Nurse practitioner)

The letters also revealed the on-going damage to children from consuming unhygienic, unsafe, and unhealthy foods. One of the letters explicitly raised concerns and urged the Home Office/hotel to consider health needs and implications of food:

‘Joe [alias] came to the clinic today with symptoms related to his underlying medical condition … He has a metabolic deficiency such that any food containing broad beans can provoke serious symptoms. These need to be completely absent from his food. A child with a metabolic deficiency will also benefit from a good quality diet with fresh food.’ (Dr Smith, alias)

We noted that some individuals had made repeated requests for safe and clean food or changes to the food to suit their health needs. They were disbelieved, disregarded and ignored, and foods eventually resulted in ill health or triggered reactions in underlying health conditions. These individuals were later assessed by a medical practitioner and given a medical note, which they submitted as evidence, and some were then believed to be ‘genuine’ and given a cleaner and tailored meal.

The above issues with hotel food are ongoing and should provoke urgent attention. But this appalling injustice should not be divorced from the wider world food systems that are drenched in racism and violence, and can force impoverished unemployed or landless workers from the Global South to make perilous journeys to find work in the harshest of conditions in more ‘developed’ economies and advanced areas of food production.

Food systems, racism and violence

Twenty years ago, around twenty undocumented migrant workers from China drowned in Morecambe Bay in the North of England picking cockles. The cockles were sold to Spanish restaurants. On the other side of the world, there are widespread abuses and killings taking place in the Thai fishing industry. Reports highlight that forced/trafficked migrant workers are made to work in dire conditions to catch fish for fishmeal that is fed to prawns destined for western supermarkets (in Britain and US in particular). Similarly, recent reports indicate that migrants coming to Britain on the farmworker visa scheme face serious exploitation and abuse. These farm products later end up on the shelves of major retailers. In Senegal, the fishing crisis (overfishing, dwindling fish stocks, and consequent rise in unemployment) has led to migrants making perilous and life-threatening journeys to Europe in search of work. NGOs have blamed the fisheries agreement between the EU and Senegal for the destruction of the environment and livelihoods. A similar pattern has been noted across the world, for which the wealthier nations, corporations, and neo-colonial arrangements are to be blamed.

Hardly a week goes by without a news report of migrants working in the food industry subjected to immigration enforcement measures (and their wages likely seized under the Proceeds of the Crime Act). For instance, in 2023, food delivery workers were arrested for ‘illegal working’ and some were deported from the country. Similarly, while gentrified neighbourhoods have developed a particular taste for (white-washed) immigrant cuisines – on the other hand, migrants who work in these restaurants are routinely subjected to immigration raids and harassment.

These are not disparate issues; for what connects them are food systems that exploit, dispossess, oppress, confine, and kill migrants – systems that link back to slavery and colonialism. What is particularly striking is how every last drop of value is squeezed out of the racialised poor and migrants by the food system at every stage of production, consumption, and even management of waste (which links back to the rotten and insect-infested food at asylum hotels).

Understanding the globalised food system

The food system affects and is affected by the economy, politics, health, society and the environment. A whole host of financial arrangements locally, nationally, and globally facilitate the food supply. Corporations exploit resources and extract value from food and sell it at a significant profit. They feed an unethical, unhealthy, and unfair system in which vulnerable groups are further disadvantaged. Food politics dictates the laws and policies around food – its production, regulation, control, inspection, and consumption. These, in turn, have an enormous influence on the diet, food safety, and overall sense of well-being, and can result in poor health through both infectious diseases (e.g. E. coli, listeria, salmonella, etc.) and non-infectious life-threatening diseases (e.g. diabetes, cancers, heart issues, etc.).

If we look closely enough, access to food can reveal patterns of institutionalised relationships to poverty, dispossession, colonialism, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy – and unmask those who benefit from them. Food is survival, but it is also used for an agenda hostile to survival by those in power. Hunger, malnutrition, and food-related deaths are deeply political and strategic.

The food system keeps certain groups impoverished, denies them access to adequate, healthy, and safe food, and subjects them to an agenda hostile to survival driven by racism and capitalist greed. It is well known that private companies are given lucrative government contracts to manage asylum accommodation and provide food. But neither contractors nor subcontractors have ever received a criminal or civil punishment or fine for providing unsafe and unhealthy food and for causing widespread suffering (although, some were fined under the Housing Act 2004 for the poor state of the property and operating a house with multiple occupants without a licence).

Reproductive and racial injustices

Food insecurity and material deprivation can be the reason for undocumented migrant women entering into intimate relationships. As one medical practitioner explained:

‘By getting into such relationships women open up to several sexually transmitted diseases. I attend to women who have been raped back in their home countries and they have been put in such situations in the UK where they repeatedly trade sex for shelter. For them, it is an ongoing trauma. Sometimes they openly say that “I am with this guy because he has put a roof over my head – I can eat, and my child can eat”.’

The lack of immigration status, limited/no access to the labour market, and low/no income create barriers to accessing food, which have a knock-on impact on sexual and reproductive health, pregnancy and childbirth, and the ability to bring up children in safe, healthy and risk-free environments. Food inequality is one of the strategies of racial control.

Hunger is indeed used as a deterrent and punishment, or rather as one of the weapons in the war on racialised poor, asylum-seeking and migrant groups. In a recent House of Commons Report (2023), it was noted that 4.7 million people, including 12 per cent of children, live in food poverty and do not receive adequate quality or quantity of food. Food poverty disproportionately affects black African, Caribbean, black British, Arab, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi households – who also experience higher rates of non-communicable diseases.

Hunger and malnutrition can leave trauma imprints. As highlighted in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, there is a reciprocal relationship between food insecurity and depressive symptoms, and parents who reported depressive symptoms experienced employment difficulties and financial hardship. Also, food insecurity and adversity during childhood result in poor mental health in later life – indicating an intergenerational transmission of trauma.

Hunger and malnutrition are not apolitical. Yet more attention is needed to make sense of how racialisation and food security intersect, a key issue that deserves further analysis. And anti-racist and migrant justice activism needs to consider food systems, as they are key ways in which racist-capitalist states continue to impoverish and oppress. More importantly, the struggle for justice needs to be transnational and make connections e.g. with Black Lives Matter and other movements for climate justice, housing justice, reproductive justice, and decolonisation. By focusing on the food systems and connecting the local with the global, we can come one step closer to addressing reproductive and racial injustices and the abolishing of borders.

*Monish Bhatia is a sociologist/critical criminologist working in the areas of migration, state, racism and violence.

*Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. Her research interests lie at the intersections of southern, postcolonial and decolonial theory, transnational feminisms and carcerality.

This article is republished from Institute of Race Relations under a Creative Commons license.

Recent legal reforms, sexual violence, and the perils of “madness”

Posted on September 18, 2024 by nasrul.ismail

By Emma Yapp and Dr Sarah Markham*

In 2019, British journalist Sirin Kale wrote an article for Vice entitled ‘What it’s like to be raped and told you can’t talk about it with anyone’. The article referred to a legal policy published by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in 2002, which recommended that anyone pursuing criminal justice reparations for sexual violence should not talk about what happened in therapy before a trial. The policy was intended to protect survivors from mental health evidence being used to impugn their credibility, but effectively pitted mental health support and legal redress against each other as mutually exclusive choices. Despite the well-established psychological aftermath of sexual violence, people were being told that they had to choose between comprehensive mental health support and criminal justice.

Following this media attention, the CPS conducted an overhaul of legal policies covering sexual violence and mental health. In addition, a feminist activist campaign for legislative reform has recently been successful, which enshrines in law additional restrictions around the disclosure of mental health evidence in sexual violence trials. Despite these developments, my PhD research demonstrated the various ways in which stereotypes and norms surrounding “trauma” and “madness” continue to bear on the adjudication of sexual violence testimony. Although both training and guidance on mental health and sexual violence has previously been provided for legal professionals by psychiatrists, it is my contention that such training must be informed by socio-legal and critical feminist research, to counter the prejudicial effect of stereotypes at the intersection of mental health and sexual violence. In this blog, I detail a few choice examples to demonstrate the harm of prejudicial ideas about sexual violence and mental health, and to assert that these legal reforms must be implemented alongside effective training materials for legal professionals.

My analysis of legal judgments and policies revealed a highly sceptical legal view of mental health in relation to sexual violence experienced in adulthood. Presently, admission of mental health evidence invariably re-introduces a corroboration requirement – survivors have to be corroborated by either a medical expert or an eyewitness for their cases to be successful. This reflects the law’s general scepticism of sexual violence testimony, and the increased psychological scrutiny brought in by the new wave of prosecutorial policies. By way of illustration, in the enduring CPS guidance on psychological evidence in sexual violence cases, criminal justice professionals are advised to consider ‘the evidential value of a diagnosis of PTSD’, while advocating an ‘understanding of pre-existing mental ill-health’ and cautioning that ‘corroboration must be actively sought and inconsistencies or lies must be dealt with rather than wished away’. This language is strongly suggestive of the twentieth century practice of conducting psychiatric evaluations of sexual violence testimony, encouraging prosecutors to seek either evidence of ‘corroboration’ or ‘mental ill-health […] inconsistencies or lies’.

In one particularly stark example from the case law, stereotypes about women, madness, and “attention-seeking” behaviour informed the adjudication of mental health evidence. Edward Gabbai had initially been convicted for sexual violence against multiple people in 2018. Part of the basis for his appeal, and the one that was ultimately successful, entailed accessing “fresh evidence” in the form of extensive psychiatric notes pertaining to one of the women he was convicted of assaulting, all recorded before she had met Gabbai in December of 2016. In 2014, the woman in question had seen a university counsellor who had taken notes of a previous experience of sexual violence. Referring to these notes, the judgement reported: ‘after discussion of her history of mental health problems and drug-taking, the notes record “see Thought Sheet… I took him back to my flat. I didn’t say no to begin with. Lying. Attention-seeker.”’ The court interpreted the use of the first person in quotation marks as ‘self-descriptions’. It was ultimately these ‘self-descriptions’ that served to acquit Gabbai, as it was suggested that the woman’s propensity towards ‘lying’, and her “attention-seeking” sexual behaviour, could have led to him having a reasonable belief in her consent.

The injustice of prejudicial ideas about mental health also impacts police treatment of sexual violence cases, producing additional harms for people who identify with psychiatric diagnoses and have experienced sexual violence. Philosopher Miranda Fricker has coined the idea of “testimonial justice”, where the denial of the legitimacy of a person’s testimony can produce both practical harms, barring their access to legal redress or healthcare, and can be a painful and dehumanising experience. This idea was drawn on explicitly by one of my interview participants, Elaine, who used the term to describe her interaction with the police when she reported her experience of sexual violence. Elaine had a diagnosis of depression at the time of reporting, and the police repeatedly told her that they were not ‘disbelieving’ her, although Elaine felt that this was a euphemistic way of saying that they did not believe her.

When I asked Elaine to elaborate on testimonial injustice and how this made her feel, she said ‘it made me feel devalued. It made me feel as though, what, you know, that what had been done to me didn’t really matter it didn’t really count […] it almost gave it a permission’; later she added that it made her feel ‘worthless’. The ‘testimonial injustice’ impacted Elaine’s sense of herself, which ‘never really recovered’. In this sense, there is an extent to which the prejudicial reception of her testimony actually caused her to feel ‘devalued’, and it additionally incurred practical harm in denying her access to legal redress. The harms Elaine experienced were not limited to the violence itself, but compounded by this subsequent experience of testimonial violence: the harms of prejudicial ideas about mental health and sexual violence extend beyond the courtroom.

The recent legal reforms covering sexual violence and mental health are intended to afford the mental health records of those who have experienced sexual violence improved protection. They may now only be requested if they have substantial “probative value”. However, these reforms cannot effectively counter the prejudicial reception that Elaine received, nor the emphasis on the “probative value” of evidence of ‘corroboration’ or ‘mental ill-health […] inconsistencies or lies’ in the current CPS guidance on psychological evidence. Further, similar legislation in New South Wales, Australia, has been criticised for leaving too much discretionary latitude to judges. The enduring endorsement of harmful stereotypes surrounding mental health and sexual violence amongst professionals at every stage of the criminal justice process means that it is now imperative that these reforms be accompanied by training concerning the practical and affective harm that these prejudicial ideas can cause.

* Emma Yapp has just joined the University of Bristol as a Senior Research Associate on Natasha Mulvihill’s Powerful Perpetrators project, which investigates sexual misconduct conducted by professionals in positions of power, including legal and medical professionals.

Dr Sarah Markham is an academic mathematician and someone with lived experience of epistemic injustice.

Why overcrowded prisons are more dangerous than releasing prisoners early

Posted on August 16, 2024August 16, 2024 by nasrul.ismail

By Nasrul Ismail*

Last month, the government made its first move to address the overcrowding crisis in UK prisons. The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced a plan to release some prisoners after they have served 40% of their custodial sentence, rather than the current 50%.

The new policy will also include plans to safely manage those released in the community, and people serving sentences for violent, sex-related or domestic abuse crimes will be excluded.

Mahmood said this temporary emergency measure is necessary to pull the justice system back from the brink of total collapse. The UK’s prisons have become chronically overcrowded over the past 40 years, making them dangerous for prisoners and prison staff, and putting more pressure on the criminal justice system.

Previous governments have failed in their attempts to reduce overcrowding. Recent measures to build more prisons and use police cells as overspill sites of detention did not reduce overcrowding.

The decision to release some prisoners early shows that imprisonment doesn’t have to be the default – it is a political choice.

One criticism of this approach is that releasing prisoners early will jeopardise public safety. But evidence from other countries shows this is not necessarily the case. California reduced its prison population size by some tens of thousands, by moving prisoners to county jails and probation programmes, some early. A public health study found that this had no effect on the host city’s level of violent crime.

Reducing overcrowding can decrease violence and improve health and safety both within and outside prisons. Scandinavian countries design imprisonment to be more humane, rehabilitative and inclusive, empowering individuals to reintegrate into society and lead fulfilling lives post-release. Prison institutions in these countries are more stable, and their reconviction rates are comparatively lower than in other countries, including the UK.

Overcrowding, on the other hand, imposes degrading living and working conditions on prisoners and prison officers. In England and Wales, there are currently four prisoners per staff member (compared to the European average of two). Staffing cuts from 2012-16 continue to affect prisons today.

Lengthy confinement within locked, poorly maintained and overcrowded cells triggers boredom and restlessness, and contributes to violent incidents. In a recent address at the Prison Officers’ Association Annual Conference, I highlighted the 28% increase in self-inflicted deaths and 61% rise in self-harm incidents between 2013 and 2023. There has been a 37% surge in assaults among prisoners and a 223% increase in assaults against prison officers over the same period.

Access to rehabilitation

Overcrowding also makes it difficult or impossible to provide rehabilitative and community services in prisons.

A recent report by the HM Inspectorate of Prisons shows that four in ten prisoners spent nearly all day in their cells without proper access to education, employment and sports activities. As a result, some prisoners turned to illicit drugs to manage the isolation and boredom induced by the long periods of being locked behind cell doors.

Lowering the prison population through early release could free up access to education, employment and training programmes for existing prisoners. These foster a safer, more controlled environment, and reduce drug misuse and violence in prisons.

Nine out of ten prisoners will eventually be released back into the community. These programmes are vital for helping them reintegrate into society, and addressing the high reoffending rate. However, the probation and housing systems on the outside are also severely overstretched, so reform is needed throughout the system, not just in prison space.

Wider reform

A temporary early release programme is a reasonable solution for the immediate capacity issues. But it won’t give the criminal justice system the wholesale reform that is much needed after years of neglect.

Four in ten sentenced prisoners are serving non-violent sentences, in which their offending is often riddled with poverty, health and inequality issues.

Reform should include more moderate and proportional sentencing by reducing sentencing length and making greater use of suspended sentences. Probation services also need improvement, to support people within their communities rather than through incarceration.

Scholars across Europe and North America have shown that progressive sentencing policies – for example, prioritising community sentences over custodial ones – enhance long-term public safety. They keep people out of prison and away from the risks associated with imprisonment.

Reducing the need for more prison facilities also lessens taxpayers’ burden. Prisons are costly and should be considered a last resort for addressing crime. Preventative measures in communities are more cost-effective and provide better support. For example, drug rehabilitation programmes cost less than half of a prison place. Bringing back youth clubs can address antisocial behaviour among teenagers, a key point in the Labour manifesto.

Evidence shows that overcrowded prisons are more dangerous than released prisoners. This new government is making a political choice to favour a more moderate and rational approach to criminal justice than past governments.

*Nasrul Ismail is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. His research focuses on the governance and delivery of prison health.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Making Obstetric Harms Visible: Participating in an Obstetric Violence Advisory

Posted on April 25, 2024 by jo.large

by Rachelle Chadwick

Reproductive and obstetric harms have not typically been included as areas of concern in critical and/or feminist criminology or zemiology studies. However, since the 2000s, obstetric violence (healthcare related abuse during pregnancy and birthing) has been recognized as a legal wrong and form of violence against women in several Latin and Central American countries (e.g. Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Panama). Efforts are also underway across a range of diverse global contexts (e.g. United States, South Africa, Australia, Spain) to name and strategise against this form of gendered harm and abuse. While legal attention has only recently turned to the issue of obstetric violence, feminist sociologists and anthropologists have long been engaged in trying to draw attention to the violations (of autonomy, dignity, personhood) that often occur during childbirth. As a young PhD student in South Africa, I was drawn to doing research in this area after reading British sociologist, Ann Oakley’s (1980) ‘Women Confined: Towards a Sociology of Childbirth’, in which she explores the pervasive distress that many women experience during and after birth. This prompted me to conduct research in South Africa exploring birth experiences across a range of race and class divides. My doctoral work on South African birth narratives was conducted before ‘obstetric violence’ was coherently named as a global concern and form of gender violence.

In the last ten years or so there has been an outpouring of research, activist mobilisation, and feminist writing on obstetric violence. As a result, international bodies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations (UN) have issued statements and reports on the issue. For example, in 2014, the WHO identified mistreatment during birth as a cause for transnational concern and in 2019, the UN released its report on a human-rights approach to obstetric violence. In various parts of Africa, efforts are also underway to tackle the problem.

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Seeking justice for victims of corrosive substance attacks

Posted on March 7, 2024April 25, 2024 by nasrul.ismail

By Aisha K. Gill*

In London at the end of January, a 31-year-old woman and her daughters suffered horrifying injuries after being assaulted with an alkaline corrosive substance. Sadly, corrosive substance attacks such as this are not isolated incidents. Over the last 15 years, they have been on the rise across the world, including in the UK.

These attacks involve splashing a corrosive substance, frequently sulphuric or nitric acid, onto the victim’s face or body. Corrosive substances melt the skin tissue, often exposing or dissolving the bones underneath. They can lead to permanent disfigurement – scarring and/or a narrowing of the nostrils, eyelids and ears – and permanent damage to sight and hearing.

Attackers who target the face in particular aim to maim and disfigure their victim, but not necessarily to kill. This can cause devastating social and psychological difficulties for victims, including ongoing health problems, social isolation, a loss of social and economic status, and poverty and destitution.

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