(Mis)trust

The research team (consisting of both academics and peer researchers) defined trust in justice as the expectation and subsequent experience of fair, unbiased and respectful treatment from legal authorities. They assessed level of trust in justice from participants’ stories about their lifetime contacts with legal authorities.

The substance of participants’ justice stories resonates with existing research and speaks to many recognised and long-standing concerns relating to access to justice, fair process and the current operation of the criminal and family courts.

However, they also offer more detailed and personal accounts of how individuals’ perceptions of the justice system are shaped over a lifetime, including by wider socio-demographic circumstances and community. Accounts broadly reflected the following themes:

1. Long-standing mistrust that was entrenched through recent court encounters
2. Prior trust that was undermined by recent encounters
3. Aspects of recent encounters – often cooccurring with negative factors – which helped to build or sustain trust or to ameliorate mistrust.

Long-standing mistrust 

• Histories of encounters with the police that were considered harmful or unjust, including being stopped and searched, affected expectations of receiving fair treatment from other parts of the justice system. These concerns were especially prevalent among participants from minoritised ethnic groups.
• Experience of poor treatment from police as a crime victim contributed to historic mistrust. Many women had been victims of domestic or sexual violence and told stories of the police losing evidence, disbelieving women or failing to act.
• Historic mistrust of social services was common, and childhood experiences of social services and the care system marred expectations of the fairness of public law proceedings concerning participants’ own children.
• Participants noted a lack of ethnic diversity among justice professionals and the social-cultural divide between themselves and the judicial decision-makers who they felt could not understand their lives. 

Unfairness, inhumanity and inefficiency

• Perceptions of gender and racial bias and social discrimination were compounded by the perceived unfairness, inhumanity and inefficiency of court processes.
• Participants felt at the mercy of an overstretched and under-resourced legal system. Most participants depended on publicly funded legal representation. This was often experienced as sporadic, rushed and impersonal.
• Concerns about evidence were common in accounts of family law proceedings. ‘On the balance of probabilities’ sometimes meant that experiences of domestic abuse were considered out of scope. Others complained of ‘facts’ being accepted at face value and without being tested.
• A perceived lack of training amongst justice professionals about domestic abuse and its various impacts was a common cause of complaint. More widely, a failure to consistently
  provide special measures for victim-survivors of domestic abuse displayed to participants a lack of care about their safety during proceedings.
• Participants described court proceedings as intimidating, ‘cold’ and highly formal. They had often felt excluded, in the background, or silenced and simply ‘processed’ – rather than listened to as individuals and treated with compassion, dignity and respect.
• Judges who had appeared ‘robotic’, and who made no effort to understand the person or the wider circumstances behind the legal case, created a sense of inhumanity. Some participants had expected to have more ‘voice’ and a chance to speak to the court in their own words.
• Endemic delays and postponements at every stage of the criminal justice process echoed well-documented concerns about the current operation of the courts, created disengagement and increased anxiety. Delays relating to family proceedings took a toll on participants’ contact and relationships with their children.

Recommendations

The report concludes with a series of 17 recommendations, the first eight of which are reproduced below.

• Work with people with lived experience of the courts to co-design and inform guidance and information.
•  Adopt a problem-solving approach that supports meaningful and inclusive involvement of all parties.
• Ensure legal jargon is reduced during proceedings to improve understanding.
• Allow flexibility in court hearings to improve wellbeing: Breaks should be allowed where it is necessary and appropriate so participants can process information, ask clarification questions to their lawyers or support services, or to take time to reflect and regroup.
• Ensure sufficient and consistently available special measures – to help vulnerable and/or intimidated witnesses and parties to participate in court proceedings and feel safe
  in court spaces more generally.
• Improve awareness of neurodiversity, including speech and language difficulties, amongst professionals present in a court room and juries.
• Implement a standardised protocol for the management of virtual hearings: As part of the Courts and Tribunals Service’s Remote Participation Approach, HMCTS should ensure that those who attend proceedings virtually are not disadvantaged.
• The co-development of guidance to improve awareness and clarity on expectations of legal representation, including legal aid.

Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the header image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here