Okay. Thank you. Let's make a start. Welcome to the centre's panel on Criminal Justice Careers.
I'm very pleased to have here today a sparkling array of guests who we have been posting to tell you a bit about their own
paths to where the jobs are currently doing and something about the organisations that they they currently or have worked for.
And the general plan is they will each speak for 10 minutes, starting with Rachel Taylor, who because she's on the board behind you,
which will be helpful formally about 20 minutes for four questions at the end of the session.
And we hope all of that would just kind of morph into into tea and cake, which will take place in the common room.
When we finished and before the approach, her lecture starts at five.
So without further ado, it's my great pleasure to welcome Rachel Taylor from Fisher Meredith Solicitors.
So, Rachel, the 10 minutes floor is yours. Thank you.
Now you have to stand in the. All right.
Good afternoon, everybody. So my name is Rachel Taylor and my sister Fisher Meredith, specialising in police and prison law.
I'm going to focus today on police law because of limitations of time.
And also because of the fact that it takes about 80% of my work at my work.
So basically, the issues that my clients come to me about, although it's a very niche kind of practice and it's quite a broad range of problems.
So things from police brutality, which is the normal kind of case that you get.
So things like assault and battery deaths in custody, wrongful arrest and wilful searches, malicious prosecution.
So when the police have taken action against somebody, when they shouldn't have done and it's malicious.
So there's there's a wrongful motivation for that.
If someone's been cautions that can be challenged and general abuses of power, it's just stop and search.
Strip search is a particularly contentious issue at the moment.
Discrimination, especially race discrimination, particularly for metropolitan police.
A lot of my cases centre around that and retention of data.
So for example, things like information, if someone's been arrested,
information of someone's attended a protest and then things like DNA or fingerprint sampling.
Disclosure of data, particularly on criminal records tickets.
So when people apply for a job for protective positions in something like teaching or working with young or vulnerable people.
There's been quite a lot of challenges about what information the police are permitted to disclose on those criminal records,
to forget its failures, to investigate this particular new and developing area of law at the moment.
So mainly for deaths and serious sexual assaults, if there are police failings around the investigation,
and then that can give rise to action and then general issues of misfeasance.
And then it really is a really dynamic area of law. The law changes all the time.
The kinds of cases that we're dealing with changes all the time. And so and it's also very kind of politically sensitive and socially reactive.
So a good example of that would be the riots in 2011, which one of the main contributing factors about what seemed to be the use of stop and search.
So it really is operating in this very dynamic, very reactive environment.
These are just a few cases which have really hit the headlines in the kind of area of law.
Just to be clear, they're not these weren't my cases, but just so that you can associate with things that you may have seen.
Okay. So the kind of actions that I can take, the groups that I can take when assisting a client are complaints judicial review.
So that's challenging action as being unlawful or challenging a particular policy as being unlawful civil action,
which basically is suing the police and then also inquests.
The reason that that's a bucket is because I've never actually conducted an inquest myself.
What I kind of do day to day is a vast range of activities,
but basically my responsibility is to advise and assist the client throughout throughout the course of any potential potential litigation.
And at the time, my clients would be very vulnerable. So there is a lot of time spent engaging with the clients, and I'm really assisting them.
A lot of the time they wouldn't have had any kind of engagement with a solicitor before.
So it can be quite a difficult process, particularly if they've they're coming to me with something that's really had quite dramatic effect on them.
So my task would be in constructing a case, obtaining evidence, forensic evidence, witness evidence, CCTV documentary evidence,
and also expert evidence, analysing and constructing the case, carrying out research because it's a very dynamic area of law.
It's something that but it's evolving all the time.
So in order to progress matters, it's a lot for research involved with maximum negotiation with the other side.
So the defendant will be the police.
So engaging in a negotiation with with them, drafting documents, conducting court proceedings and working with barristers.
And as you move towards the trial of the matter at the court, but securing securing funding down there,
that's in brackets because it's kind of aside from the substantive work, but really it should be.
Emboldened, underlined, I'm at the top because it's absolutely central to ensuring that the ongoing cases for clients, we have to do that.
Sorry, I think I just. It's Godiva now going.
So that's what I do day to day in the office. And there's also quite a lot of work and activity that I do outside of the office.
So a lot of that is campaigning. The three groups that are left that there are groups I've been particularly involved in, I do some media work.
So interviews and like newspaper that kind of articles and comments and writing as well.
I've just contributed to a book that's about to be published in September,
so one of the groups I work for work with that was listed about is stopwatch.
Stopwatch is a coalition of lawyers, of academics, of young people, of activists, basically trying to promote effective and accountable policing.
And those are the main aims that you can see listed. The stopwatch aims to do that in a variety of different ways, whether it be like campaigning,
media work, carrying out research, advocacy or actual litigation.
So that's just one of the research papers that was published years ago.
Oh, did I again? Sorry. Well the publications about stop and search use of stop and search.
This is an article in the Evening Standard last year Guardian comments.
And that's me and my friends on London Live a few weeks ago.
Okay, so I'm just a little bit about how I came to be in the position plan.
Sadly, not all of it was on offer. So I studied at Oxford, assaulted nearly exactly ten years ago.
I studied law. I then went on to LSC, where I studied a master's in criminology.
The reason for that was I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to practice law or whether I wanted to engage more ring a policy kind of work.
But I did come to the conclusion that I did have a love for the law things.
And so that's why I came back to do law.
I then did my LPC, which you need to become a solicitor of College of Law, and I'm actually a solicitor advocate,
which means that I'm I can kind of undertake the role of a barrister as well.
So I've got my high rates audience in 2008.
So just after I finished my MSC, I went to Jamaica, represented capital punishment studies,
and there I was mainly doing death row work, going to to assist with the death row cases.
And there was very little legal provision and legal support out there.
So me at 22 was my main point of contact, which I'm sure step of somewhat considerably.
I then went to Houston with Reprieve, where again I was mainly doing or exclusively doing so death row work that was mainly mitigation work.
So carrying out a lot of research investigating our clients backgrounds in order to advocate for
them that they should not be sentenced to death once they've been found guilty of that crime.
These are just a few of the organisations that I've done voluntary work for as well just over the years.
And that gives me. Thanks very much.
If you've got any questions for Rachel, talk of New York, a virtual one in which they speak of American politics,
as well as as of the last two weeks from the start of Justice Council.
And Ben, for inviting me. Yes. I'm going to do my presentation.
Kind of where am I going to talk about how I got to where I am first and then a bit about what what I do in my current role as chief executive,
the source of just the kind of search I've been doing for all of nine days.
I see. And said so I don't know how much insight I'll be able to give you, but I'll tell you a bit about what I think I should be doing.
But first of all, how did I get to where I am?
I spent almost all my career working in the voluntary sector, working for charities, working around criminal justice issues.
I should say that I got into the criminal justice world pretty much by mistake.
Having left university first time around, I didn't have any clear idea of what I wanted to do.
I went abroad for a base and then I got a job working for a national charity called Necro,
which works with lots of people coming out of prison or young people at risk of offending to help them turn their lives around.
Just in a straightforward administrative role, I applied for a whole range of charity jobs.
I went to work in the voluntary sector, wants to work for charity, and I got interviews at macro and cancer research.
And if I got the other one, I probably would be doing work around cancer research or health care,
which when I'm doing fundraising, I often think would have been an easier choice anyway.
But so I went into working for that kind of straightforward administrative role.
I think it was there that I really got interested in criminal justice issues,
having already entered the field and slowly made my way through that communications department doing a number
of roles and at the same time did a masters in criminal justice policy at the School of Economics as well.
So and that really gave me a foothold.
It gave me some credibility in terms of looking for more policy based roles.
And my next job, pretty much as soon as I finished my masters,
which MacRobert kind of let me do, I then rather and gratefully left almost straight away.
I went to be a senior policy officer working for a charity called the Fawcett Society.
What some of you may know, it's a relatively small campaigning organisation campaigning around gender equality issues.
And there I let their work on women in the criminal justice system.
Well, that meant in practical terms, in terms of what I was doing, it was a policy role in the violence.
That's what that tends to mean.
There's a mixture of producing policy reports, which obviously written reports based largely on existing evidence rather than doing primary research.
They didn't have a small element of primary research about it, which make policy recommendations for for government and for criminal justice agencies.
It also had a sort of campaigning angle to it work with a media contact with politicians and policy makers and some campaigning,
public facing campaigning work. So it was a real mixture of different elements of work around women in the criminal justice system.
From there, I moved on again to another small charity called the Criminal Justice Alliance,
which represents a coalition of around 65 other criminal justice charities campaigning for a fairer and more effective criminal justice system.
Where I kind of did similar sort of policy and campaigning work with a slightly broader remit,
largely around prisons, probation and sentencing, but also as director of admittedly a very small organisation.
It also involved doing really interesting things like payroll, finance, management,
h.r all that sort of thing that if you work in the voluntary sector ends up on some non-specialists kind of desk to try and get through.
I did that for about four years, growing the organisation slightly so I could.
It was a big incentive to fundraise and bring in people so that they could do the payroll and the finance and that sort of stuff.
And since then, I spent three years at another small charity called the Police Foundation,
which is a policing, research and policy development organisation.
And I'm now as of last week, I'm chief executive of a charity called the Restorative Justice Council.
As the name suggests, it's an organisation that works around restorative justice issues.
I can have a look at my notes here because like I said, I've only been there for ten days. I don't wanna forget anything really important that we do.
So sort of first of all, just Restorative Justice Council and what we do.
And I'll tell you a bit about why I do that as chief executive of the charity as a whole,
I'm going to assume you all know largely about restorative justice is given your
background is bringing together victims and offenders to try and repair the harm done.
I think that was a really important time for the development and spread of restorative justice is something that is
quite widespread support for all three political parties and the Ministry of Justice would like to see more of it.
There's quite a bit of evidence behind it now,
but despite all that and quite a long term push to have more of it, it's fairly marginal for the justice system.
It's availability is hugely variable between different geographical areas and different parts of criminal justice system.
And even why criminal justice agencies do restorative justice,
they often don't do very well or in some cases don't do anything that would really be thought of as restorative justice.
So our job with Restorative Justice Council and we just received some Ministry of Justice funding to do this,
is to try and set standards for sorts of justice. What does good restorative justice look like and.
How can we quality assure delivery to make sure that that's happening?
This is government funding that presents all sorts of challenges for a medium sized giants who've got about 15 or 16 staff at the moment.
Because we've also got a campaigning and lobbying arm. So on the one hand, we're taking money from governments to work for them.
And on the other hand, we're lobbying them, telling them they're doing things wrong and they should be doing it differently.
That's quite common tension in the in the voluntary sector at the moment.
It's quite straightforward because our aims, the Ministry of Justice, is a broadly in line.
Alex I've only been there a week, but undoubtedly at some points that tension will play out.
And again, it's not unusual in the voluntary sector to be dealing with that.
In terms of what I do, there's a whole sort of mixture of different things.
Like I said, I've only been there a fortnight, so mostly at the moment I just try to remember people's names and that sort of thing.
So I work out some a computer on, but I guess my role is largely fit into three broad areas.
The first bit and the most interesting bit is being the public face of the organisation, which is worrying in lots of ways,
but it is my role nonetheless and that's really about promoting restorative justice counsel and restorative justice,
and that's through engaging the stakeholders, meetings with policymakers, others, decision makers, media work, which is all glamour.
I was on three counties radio at six. I am talking about looting, yachts, restorative justice quality marked a couple of days ago,
which was every bit as thrilling as it sounds being asked why,
why is involved why resources just didn't involve going into the offender's house with a baseball bat?
A question that I literally couldn't think of an answer to. But there are there are more interesting bits of media.
There's also speaking events, conferences and a whole range of different bits of outward facing engagement.
That's, I think, the most interesting.
But the second bit is about managing people primarily, and I manage a talented and committed team who do almost all of the work of the organisation.
And my job is well, apart from taking the credit for that, it's about making sure that what we want to get delivered gets delivered and what we do
adds up to very least the sum of all those little bits and hopefully some more than that.
And the third bit, which is a really important part of my job,
it's a really important part of senior management in the voluntary sector and is something for which I've had
absolutely no training is the kind of organisational development and making sure we work as an organisation.
Almost anyone who works in a senior position, the volunteers has to do things like strategic planning, organisational management and fundraising.
It's not I'm a sort of policy wonk by background. It's not something I know very much about and it's but it is a really important part of my job.
And being able to do that, at least to a tolerably good standard, I think is a really important part of working in the voluntary sector.
And fundraising, like I said, is important part of that, and it's the bit that makes sure the organisation is going to survive into the future.
Subsequent round up of what I do now and how I got there.
I think working in the voluntary sector is really interesting and challenging for lots of reasons.
I really value the independence that it gives us,
but other people find that with that independence comes the problem of being an outsider and not being able to get access to the things that you want,
whether that's information for research or whether that's access for sort of lobbying, campaigning purposes.
And also, you don't work in the voluntary sector. You don't have any power.
You can only persuade people to do things. It's very rare that you can actually tell them to.
Some people find that some people I've worked with find that sort of outsider position very challenging.
Other people, I've always found it very beneficial.
I think the other thing to say about sort of my career through the volunteers such as I've reflected on,
is that it involves a whole number of very different non-specialist skills.
I've done all sorts of things from policy campaigning, media, like I said, things about organisational developments.
It's something,
it's a sector where you tend to be able to turn your hand to everything and where you have to be willing to learn new skills as you go along.
And I think that I've only managed to get the jobs I've got by being willing to take on different things as so many opportunities have arisen.
So that's a sort of very brief insight into a voluntary sector career challenging, I think, interesting,
largely chaotic a lot of the time, and probably not what I thought I would have been doing when I left university.
And it's often incredibly difficult to explain to people what it is that I do, too, but I'd recommend it, I think, nonetheless.
Thank you very much. And I think I'm part of songs from the Oxford Service.
Hello. And I'd approach it slightly differently. Hey, how am I suppose I am.
I'm a senior manager within the public sector. I see myself as a social worker first and foremost, and a Scottish social worker at that.
This will become more relevant later.
But what I want to do is actually look at some of the key concepts, a bit of a run through my little world, in my little head,
and actually trying to work out how can we be true to what I think are some of the key fundamental issues facing young people today?
So when I left university, which is a long time ago, I was a young person.
And I think that's the premise that as whatever career you choose and you will choose many different careers in many different forms,
I suppose one word of warning as you've become the future leaders, I guess,
is be true to the some of those fundamental values that you started out with.
And so I'm going to break this down a bit. So I'm going to talk about youth. And because I like wordplay playing, what does that mean?
We'll talk about a bit about Scotland because I love Scotland and then I'm going to just have a guess what is going to come in the future.
And I got to do that in about 8 minutes. Okay. Youth offending what is youth is a basic concept, isn't it really?
We think we know what it means. Do we? The age of criminal responsibility in England is ten.
In Scotland is eight. In Germany is 40.
And I think in Scandinavia it's 15. But in England and Wales and we say that at 18 you are fully fledged adults.
That's interesting. At 18 we know what is right and wrong, good and bad.
At 17, we know that.
At 16, we know that at ten, particularly when you think of some of the neurological research going on, our brains are developing up until 25.
So you guys, some of you, Leslie, I don't know, probably are still growing, but you are growing until you're 25.
Fantastic. You're working out.
What is the world around you? Well, that's quite interesting.
Well, so we're not quite sure what youth is. We're not quite sure what the age of responsibility is really.
So then what happens?
Then we say, okay, if you belong to some of the most disadvantaged areas socially, economically, that you have generation upon generation of abuse,
we are then going to put to you the same standard as if you had a loving parents school background, etc., etc.
Does that seem fair? Does that look okay?
Offending. Hmm. I think fences coming in that fashion.
If you happen to be, I don't know, a member of the Bullingdon Club, for example, in trash,
a restaurant in Oxford, are you likely to get arrested or invited from the next prime minister?
No idea. But if you did. If you're 17 and you're McDonald's and the age of the boss in the state, are you like to get arrested?
I'd like to be facing a jury. It's these are intentionally trying to make you think, what is it we're trying to do?
And justice for what? Actually for whom?
Why are we when we say you've just this and when we're trying to make the world a better place?
To what end? By whose definition? Scotland.
Yes. And the reason I bring Scotland into this is and I trained as a lawyer in England,
then I went to Scotland and I went studying with and my masters there.
And the big and driver then was a guy called Kil Brandon who divorced the behaviour of a child.
From the Shard itself made a system that was more child friendly,
which by that I mean that actually it said the responsibility is not with the individual, it is with society.
It is a political issue, though, I suppose.
Now that raises some interesting questions, isn't it, hanging with that child who's kicking off, who is presenting aggressive behaviour?
That is our responsibility. We are responsible for some of the stuff that happens on the county road, makes your head go wobbly, makes mine go wobbly.
Anyway, it's that sense of and then to do that I suppose within the state,
within I increasingly little but little sides agenda where the state is shrinking.
And I think some of the dilemmas John faces I face every day as well,
because there are some things are clearly not okay by anyone's definition, irrespective of your political persuasion, mostly.
Kim Brendan was also very interested in the voice of the child.
But how do articulate children who have who have been neurologically damaged, who have been repeatedly abused to give a voice, how do we do that?
How do we encourage that?
This person, who has been her son, repeated hers over and over again, can actually have the courage to say what he or she needs.
These are thoughts I go through my mind when I manage a youth spending service.
What he also is also interesting to me is the fact that in England in particular,
not Scotland, the criminal justice system is very, very difficult to understand.
And we expect children to work out how to behave in court, the same standard we would expect of children with defined issues.
That is just not okay. The future, then?
Well. I do think we are in some very interesting times.
Offending is actually reducing. We do have one of the safest countries in the world.
In fact, youth crime is at its lowest it's ever been.
Also fact, the victims of crime are often young people, which is often ignored.
The same young people. Curious. So what is going on?
No one knows. I mean, probably one of the places, if you will, that wouldn't be would be at understand the question.
Why is youth crime reducing the speculation? That's to do with the Internet.
The speculation to social media.
That's the word on the streets that actually more and more kids are actually using different types of interaction over the net.
Well, if that's the case, are they more vulnerable, less vulnerable than they are on the outside?
I haven't constantly told you. I do, because I actually think that's not important.
I like it isn't. What is important is, I think from my perspective, the values that you're going to hold, whatever career you're going to choose.
And to really think it through. I get and I get to see books when I was younger, thank God.
And there's a quote from Crime and Punishment. And and I can't remember this, but something like this.
It is. Do you understand, sir? Do you really understand what it means when you have nowhere to go?
Absolutely nowhere to go. I response.
It came to mind for every man must have somewhere to go.
I would say social work in particular gives an opportunity for a child or song is heard.
Way to go. That's it. Thank you very much.
And next week is now and you'll have to tell you what VOPAK stands for.
Right. Okay. I'm the longest in the tooth person here, and I've spanned a number of continents as well.
I graduated from university in 1972.
My first job was in 1971. As a researcher on a we were looking at drug free therapeutic communities on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
I was a criminologist and a crime, and I still am. And I can still consider myself a criminologist.
I'll sort of pick up on the plea around values because I think if I find any thread with the last 43 years, it is that thread.
I'll talk about four different parts of my life which still exist.
I'm an activist. I'm a professor.
I'm a researcher. I'm a policy person.
And my current job. I love the title.
I didn't make that up myself. I'm the head of evidence and insight for the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime.
I've worked in four large research think tanks.
I have worked for universities. I've worked for the Prime Minister, a guy named Tony Blair.
I work for police commissioners and I've worked for five of those since I was in the Metropolitan Police Service.
And now I'm working for mayor. I'm Boris.
Who might have been a member of the Burlington County.
The kinds of things that I've done in terms of both thinking about how criminology dovetails, activism and improvement.
Because a lot of what I do now is I usually have data on in one hand and a two by four in the other hand to push a criminal justice system.
And I can say that actually, because I'm working in London, I am actually working nationally and internationally.
Two weeks ago I was in New Zealand, the behest of the Minister of Justice of New Zealand,
talking about joined up justice and how New Zealand very interesting place.
Now I think on the cusp of doing some quite innovative work to start merging the
benefits of thinking about victimisation and offending in very different kinds of
ways so that they're not separate and that you have something like problem solving
courts which enable you to not separate out justice as if it is only for victims,
only about offending or only about society. In 1978, I founded a refuge for battered women.
And if anybody's ever read any of my work on violence against women,
that work was totally influenced by sitting around kitchen tables with women who were fleeing violent men.
And that's where I learned my work around thinking about violence.
It was first from the women themselves and then looking at the criminological literature and finding that actually it was totally strange.
It was in a language that, first of all, privileged in those days, stranger crime.
And if anything has changed in the 30 I sorry, 43 years that I've been doing this work,
we no longer assume that violence against women is a stranger based event.
That has changed. The other thing that I can say is things do change in your lifetime.
And the whole concept of violence against women is now one of known danger, not stranger danger of accessible danger.
Not some Bush lurker who is rare is very, very rare.
Exists, but is rare. So the kinds of careers that I had I started doing it started with the therapeutic communities work,
but also did an evaluation of the drug mandatory drug laws in New York.
That was my one of my big projects.
I was the quantitative researcher on that project and vowed that I would never, ever, ever in my entire life ever work for government again.
So sometimes you change your mind because actually you're better at being a chameleon than you are.
So one of the things that I decided to do was to go inside the belly of the beast and to do change from within and put that.
I missed the next 25 years, so I'll go back to that. I was a university professor.
I've taught in universities in the US and the UK and much of that work was looking specifically at some violence against women.
Fear of crime. One of my most hated concepts in the world.
Don't ask me about it, but I can talk to you about, if you like,
how I ended up working with Ben because I wanted to make sure that fear of crime was never spoken about ever again.
But we can talk about that later.
But a significant part of my career was being the the research director of the Economic and Social Research Council's Program on Violence,
which was a five year research program in the UK with 20 projects across the UK looking at violence in prisons,
domestic violence and pregnancy, violence in schools, lots of different kinds of forms of violence.
What that basically did for me was very much my own work was based in looking at violence against women,
was move me up into a different kind of strategic level in my own thinking and think
about how I could take the lessons of research to practitioners and policymakers.
And actually, that's when I changed.
I mean, I didn't change, which is one of the problems. I've always been a bit wacky, but what I decided to do that maybe I could do that for a living.
And that's when I made the decision to go. I applied for this job in a cabinet office and I did not expect to get it.
Oops, they hired me. That was that was a surprise.
I was very surprised to get that job.
So it was 18 months working in something called the Office of Public Services Reform, which was looking at general criminal justice improvement.
And one of my projects there was a smaller project called Citizen Focussed Policing, which was the whole work around the satisfaction of police.
Satisfaction of, of victims by police service.
And I began to realise that actually lots of the different kinds of things that I was doing in
terms of my own academic work really needed to be translated into an inside criminal justice.
So that's really why I sort of went in. I just thought, people think I'm nice, so I like to get dressed up.
I can work in those areas where they never really thought I would be such a huge
troublemaker or really challenging or as radical as I might be in my own values and things.
They they somehow let me in. Why? And I'm sure there was lots of my colleagues when I joined the Mexican police service 18 months later,
ten and a half years inside the Metropolitan Police Service. That I'm still alive.
My colleagues there never, ever thought that I where I'm sure there were bets taken perhaps and of how long I would last inside
the Met because it was it's not something that's necessarily overly compatible with my politics.
But yet because I had done research with the New York City police in the early mid seventies,
I started my my part of my Ph.D. involved riding around squad cars on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
And the work that I did in Worcester, Massachusetts,
with the battered women's refuge while I was running a master's in criminal justice course at the university.
And I had many police officers as my students, so I had no problems working with police.
When I came to the UK in 1982, I came as a refugee from a sexual harassment case.
I had to leave the United States because my case challenged the left in the United States.
The person that sued me or initially was one of the leaders of the left movement in the United States.
I was in a university position and I was an untenured sociology professor who decided not to let it happen anymore in my university.
So when I came to the UK, I came with feminist credentials that were impeccable and therefore I had an ability to to work in the
kind of radical feminist community and do work in the academic community and pass between the two.
And in those days, in the early eighties, there was quite a lot of tension going on in those different camps.
So I've been able to combine my personal experience of what it's like to be a litigant in a fairly famous case.
I had to do my own publicity in those days, and the kind of work I've done and taken through that thread that I took you through ended up in Tennant
as one of the reasons why I was such a stubborn person ten and a half years in the Metropolitan Police,
and within that context was able to do and it took ten and a half years to get some traction
with some I think now research which has is robust academically standing research that enables.
The police not to go backwards. Well, it's very easy for that to happen.
It takes less than a nanosecond for that to happen.
But there are certain kinds of things, certain stakes that are in the ground now, which I think are quite important.
Not that. Not that it has been solved.
The only a month ago I appeared on Channel four television breaking the eight and a half years of research I did on rape,
which is now you will see in the next month I can't talk about it,
but the next month there will be some things that are about to come out that will take that to another step.
What you have noticed, I would hope, for those of you who have been following the operation, Yewtree,
is the language that's presented in court has changed in those four very famous trials and have just occurred,
the most famous of which is currently going on, which is the Rolf Harris case.
So I encourage you to think about the language that's being used in those four cases and this fourth one.
The language of exploitation is now explicit in the deep sea case.
So I suggest that and actually I feel comfortable to say that I think I probably influence some of that.
So I'm in my my interest in the eye long in the tooth.
Life has been changed. I think there's a threat in that change.
It has always accompanied robust academic standards in terms of the challenges that I put in front of every single institution I've ever worked for,
including the universities, but also the police service and others as well.
So it gives you a bit of a flavour. Thank you.
I see I'm right off on speaker for this great question just from national news.
Thanks. So I work for Amnesty International and I'm in the legal office at Amnesty.
I think a lot of people know more or less what Amnesty does. The legend of its origin is that a British lawyer on his way to work one day picked up a
newspaper and saw that Portuguese students had been arrested for for toasting freedom.
Right. And so with any kind of this group and the idea was to to to sort of like highlight cases of political prisoners.
And of course, now it does much more than that. More than just those who are arrested for their politics and for who they are.
We're also looking at human rights issues generally.
And 50 years later, it's it's the largest human rights organisation in the world, in fact.
A lot of what we end up doing is, is on the basis of the research that we've undertaken wherever wherever it is that we're working.
So I'll say a few things about some of the pieces of work that I've been involved in directly to give a sense of that.
But of course, what I want to say about the research is that it's not just research for the sake of doing it, it's in order.
The purpose of it is to generate change the framework as a human rights framework.
So the idea is we've identified human rights violations.
We in the course of the research, we identify what think what things we think need to be changed and who has the
power to make those changes or should have the power to make those changes.
And then we prepare recommendations in order to see those changes actually implemented.
That's the beginning of the process that involves a whole host of work afterwards that might be lobbying
with government officials for changes in practice and in policy with lawmakers for for for legal change.
It might mean going to the courts in some instances either either either amnesty doing it or groups that we work with doing it.
It could mean a variety of other methods.
But but the idea behind the work is not just to document human rights violations, but to do it with a purpose, with the purpose of changing it.
So the basic method is that one or more of us goes, and after having sort of done the preliminary work to identify, you know,
in a broad sense, what we think the issues are, we go and we speak to the people who are most directly affected by the issue.
And so a typical example that's that might be of interest to this group is conditions of detention.
It was the first thing that I did when I was that before amnesty.
I worked for ten years at Human Rights Watch.
So I was 26 years old and I went into 15 Venezuelan prisons and and inspected sort of the conditions there and talked to hundreds of detainees,
talked to prison officials, and then did a whole bunch of interviews around the sort of the edges of that to get the get the context.
And that means sort of walking into prisons and then with a notebook sitting down with with individual detainees and getting their their accounts.
And there's a whole sort of methodological question, series of questions about that,
that we actually spend a period of of of two weeks training the researchers.
And so it's very, very, you know, we can't really go into that.
But of course, there's a whole set of protocols that we have to observe around things like the safety of the people we're interviewing,
ensuring that they know what their what risks they're taking, that we respect the fact that they're taking risks.
I mean, you all are used to this from from the context in which you have done research, but it does become fairly critical,
fairly pertinent, immediately pertinent when the consequence of something you do might be torture or death.
So we have to we have to take this law very, very seriously.
It also means some some interesting points about what the research we do does and doesn't say.
And I think that's also interesting for this group,
because more and more human rights organisations are appreciating that as important as it is to get human accounts,
to get individual accounts of what people's experiences are, that's not representative,
of course, and especially when we deal with things that aren't the individual Portuguese student who was arrested for raising a toast to freedom,
but rather patterns of discrimination or, you know, tackling inequity in other forms.
We need something that's a little bit more robust than just we talk to a few people.
So we're having to to explore a range of methods that that allows us to test the.
Reliability of what it is we're doing. By and large, fortunately, and through the use of of of testing these things through lots of secondary sources,
I think we're able to say that we were able to do most of what we do is not contested.
When you get really, really down to it by people in the situations, government officials or you know,
or those who are living in the communities that we're talking about,
of course, you know, it's always going to be a big show and dance about how we deny all these allegations and so on.
But privately, at least, officials will often tell us, okay, yeah, that but really does that really does stand up to to what our experiences.
But we do need to be much more rigorous in how it is that we do this. And so I think looking forward in the work that I do in particular,
I'm going to be calling on many more of the sort of social science kinds of research methods to be able to look at things,
whether it's in the, in the area of of criminal justice or in any of the other kinds of human rights considerations we're looking at.
And in particular, when we're looking at things that are economic, social and cultural.
I'll say to say two words about policy, because before we before we I'm the department that I'm in thinks about human rights
policy and thinks about public policy that is conducive to respect for human rights,
the promotion of human rights. And so before we undertake a particular research project,
we're thinking about what human rights policies and what what public policies we need to see from
the states or how it is that the policy framework is not consistent with respect for human rights.
So a couple of examples. I never get through them all. The one thing that we're often seeing is a disconnect in in public policies.
An example, picking up on some of the drug work,
is it it has been known for a long time what injecting drug users need not to if they want to stop doing that.
And the combination of methadone treatment and the availability of clean needles so
people just can't stop overnight sort of faith based healing is is not does not work.
So the city of Vancouver about ten years ago was was offering needle exchange programs.
And you could go and you could get you and you don't just get clean needles that you turned in a needle, use needle.
And the Vancouver police would stand outside, arrest everybody systematically who walked away from that needle exchange.
A similar a similar disconnect in social policy is the the in thinking about HIV prevention and the,
you know, condom use as a major sort of way, way, among others, of preventing the spread of HIV.
And this is and it's been known for years that that that sex workers are at particular risk of,
particularly women who are sex workers are at particular risk of getting HIV when condoms aren't used aren't used properly.
And, you know, we won't go into the whole public health literature here. But the critical thing then is that we need distribution of condoms.
You need free condoms. We need uptake in condoms.
We need you know, there's a whole series of very, very obvious steps that need to be taken that authorities, by and large accept.
Nevertheless, New York City, up until about two weeks ago and four other three other major U.S. cities, San Francisco among them,
use or used in the case of New York City,
possession of condoms as evidence of the crime of solicitation or other things connected to prostitution, to sex work.
That, of course, leads to people who engage in these activities,
not carrying the things that we're trying to get them to to use in order to prevent the spread of HIV.
This connected social policy. I have time for one more thing about policy issues,
which is I think it's fascinating the way that criminalisation is sort of at the sharp end of a series of
of other policy steps or practices that that either violate directly or potentially violate human rights.
So we've been looking a lot at at sexuality about things and things to do with starting with same sex sexual conduct,
which is criminal in much of the world,
and then thinking about the whole range of other laws, not necessarily criminal laws or the way that the systems,
legal systems and social norms work to entrench discrimination in same sex sexual conduct.
I've mentioned criminal criminal in the United States until until very, very until about ten years ago, this country did much better on that.
And Europe in general does much better on that front.
But but it does much worse in some of the other areas of what we would regard in for straight people as as basic aspects of family life.
So the ability, of course, to marry you want to,
but also to have the kind of family you want to adoption laws or for other aspects of of the ability to lead to lead the life with your family.
Amnesty's submitted third party,
amicus briefs in a couple of cases in the European Court of Human Rights that
deal with questions relating to the sort of both the stereotypical use of,
you know, what a family is to inform law and policy, and also what the attendant consequences are for the families themselves,
for four children in those families and for the members of those of those families.
So in one case that I mentioned, it's called ex versus Austria.
A a kid is a teenager is living with two parents, same sex couple who are I think they have a civil civil partnership in Austria.
He wants to adopt the second mother. He wants the second mother to adopt him so that they can be a recognised family.
And the social worker recognises that's in the kid's best interest and everybody is in agreement that this is a very, very good thing.
But Austrian law allows one male parent and one female parent.
This is not uncommon in Europe. And so there's there's this whole sort of, you know,
legal framework that does not accept sort of essentially what this family yesterday
the way the way some people at least are living their lives and are free to do so.
That is sort of I think not, of course, criminal, but it's flowing.
It's part of this larger picture of how at the sharp end criminal law is used.
But but other kinds of laws and policies are used to reinforce and entrench discrimination.
I'll stop there. Thank you very much. Right.
Well, that's been absolutely fascinating.
And we've now got 20 minutes for questions and discussion, at least before we continue that in a more informal setting.
So the floor is open. I've been doing the recording of this session this week, creating a podcast.
If I could read the page, everyone has a question so that it gets on this machine from here.
So when you see me start doing that, it's not because I'm choosing speakers.
It's stupid in any way having a question to be interpreted. It's a technological thing.
And Andrew, you have to shut up. Okay. So the question, Betsy,
is in terms of the various things that you just brought to us and which of those do you think have had the most impact on what and why?
Well, I think it's the place where I've had the most impact is the refuge for battered women, because that still exists in central Massachusetts.
It's 28 years old as an agency.
It still gives service to women and children in central Massachusetts.
So that's real. So that's a tangible.
Yes, I think I may. So I go first to people's do I did I have I made people's lives better and I think
probably that one is I would say there is evidence there to suggest it 28 years later,
it's still in operation. Other places where I think I made some tangible benefits probably in terms of the discourse around violence against women,
I think intimate intrusions, intrusions did change or challenge criminology in 1985, and that book did make an impact.
And that wasn't the only person that were saying those things.
But I think it did challenge traditional criminology in a way.
This year, the 30th anniversary of the Women in Crime Division of the American Society of Criminology, and I was the founding mama of that.
So that is another tangible benefit to women criminologists and others who do work on gender.
I've got legacies, lots of legacies. I think the confidence stuff that we've done with Ben and John has had an international
impact in terms of the current discourse around legitimacy and procedural justice.
So that one's a good one. And the rape stuff, which is just on the cusp of being published, is dynamite, and that is very good.
So that's a legacy too. And I could probably name many others, but I think I've kind of left some legacies that I'm proud of.
So the question is, I'll get it right. Did you have any tips on someone who is doing sexual advocacy work on on campus?
And what do you think the best tactics are for getting criminal justice agencies to change around these questions?
Yeah, I will answer this question,
but I also think the panellists probably also have quite a lot of experience around having to manage stubborn institutions.
I've done all of the above. I have been on totally unreasonable at times and then I have tried to be as reasonable as possible.
Sometimes I'm not very good at that,
but I think what's tried my patience the most in the last ten and a half years in the Met has been the work around rape.
And before that I also engaged my own university, my first university, with lots of thinking about how they were doing things so badly.
In terms of what the evidence says now, I think there's a lot of evidence.
So what I do now is I go in with both.
This is what the research says is what the evidence says. It is insurmountable.
This is the way this this is what it is. And your policy is over here and this is over here.
And so I the way that I worked the Met was to be, I think,
unduly patient and impatient at the same time, by continuously I rewrote the performance structure.
So that enabled them to see that they were not performing very well in rape.
They were still not performing very well.
No one else is in the country, but we are now I think we have a consensus in government that there's a crisis in the treatment of rape allegations.
I can guarantee you that there is a consensus that the we're now in a crisis.
I don't think that they they thought there was some fixes.
But now we're actually I wanted to take it to the brink around crisis and basically saying
that I thought rape was decriminalised was a way of causing a bit of better people to think.
A bit differently about what that was. And I can talk to you later about the evidence base, the evidence bases that, you know,
that alcoholism and drug use is a main background for the reporting of rape.
Youth is also a background for reporting of rape, domestic violence, mental health issues.
These are all rife in terms of the kinds of allegations, and they need to think differently about the way they manage that.
So I can talk to you specifically,
but I'm sure all of the panellists have had to deal with institutions that don't want to hear what the evidence says.
And it's those kinds of negotiations that are sometimes are done with patients and sometimes should be done without without patients.
There were times when I would be on the other side of outside the home office with the megaphone during the time
when we were on the streets around changing the law of homicide and provocation during the Credit Alabi case.
And then I'd put on a hat and sneak upstairs in the halls of Justice,
sit in very quietly and listen to the case then and go back out here around where we were.
So that to me is the epitome of the way I've left. I've lived my life.
Basically, when I when I shouted, I wish I was shouting, but when I would sit as a chameleon in a place,
I would also I have heard things in rooms and been in places at the highest level that I never thought I would ever be in.
So all of that information really taught me about you challenged institutions
in as many different ways as possible because they don't change spontaneously.
They're not a morphed organisation. They must be forced to change what they do.
Does anyone else want to come in and question?
I think personally it's that ability to assess the situation and apply what tool you have to do to get your message across.
And it can be. And also, try not to compromise your own values too much,
because there are going to be times when actually what is more important, the outcome you want to achieve or your own value.
And there is without doubt, whatever, whether you're going to policy,
whether you go into leadership, whether you're going to go, you have to compromise.
I think the acknowledgement that actually some things don't happen overnight and in my less experience,
I would say, yes, the realism that you will have to compromise that and it doesn't happen overnight.
Patience is, I think, the best. It just doesn't. So yeah, different types toolbox.
You can still be another feminist in the sense that the choice is going to be yours.
Where do you think you're going to get a better outcome? Just Yeah, I'd agree with all that.
And as I mentioned about in Mosul, I mean, one of the things that I having worked mostly in the charity sector is,
as I said, you don't have you don't have powers, you don't have levers. It's not like working inside institutions where you can.
However difficult it is, you can totally. It's about persuasion. And then it comes down to what the most persuasive route is.
And when I worked at the Fawcett Society, I think there's the problem right across the charity campaigning.
Well, there's this debate about how you have the greatest input.
So you better negotiating with a megaphone outside the building or you better sort of quietly working the corridors.
And I think it is horses for courses.
But I think some of the things where I feel that some of the work I've done has had the most influence in terms of actually changing practical things,
which is always less satisfying, but it's actually been the quieter, more conciliatory behind closed doors where you're willing to kind of go at them.
That's not always appropriate. It's not always the right way. And sometimes I think you've got to get outside and shout out and make a fuss just.
Just to get the sense that it's all. Yeah.
I mean, I would definitely agree on the multifaceted approach.
And in fact, that's kind of a reason why I do like obviously mainly practice law but also do a lot of campaigning around the edges as well.
Because one of the great things about law is that you can kind of force a decision if something unlawful,
then it's something that you can actually practically do about it, but also much of the time.
So to taking an issue like stop and search, even if it is unlawful, you may just get a payout of damages.
You haven't actually changed any kind of behaviours and that's why the kind of campaigning
things is that type is a it's a lot more important and kind of wider scale as well.
I mean the work that we do at stopwatch, we do try and kind of take every tactic available.
So working with individual police forces, also maintaining independence so that we can we can ensure that we retain our integrity,
have a position in the media and engage in research and also engage in litigation as well.
So get every option available to make your voice heard.
You take it. This is a related point.
I mean, not so much about about internal.
Well, it is about internal advocacy.
It's also about ensuring that the work that the organisation is doing is reflecting the issues that you're seeing as important.
And specifically, I'm thinking about things, issues like race or issues more generally where gender analysis is often missing.
In fact, in the specific context of human rights work, it's very,
very common to see genderless human rights analysis or everybody in the report is male.
Everybody, and all the abuses are described in a way that applies to men.
And that that that that's you know, it's I think groups like Amnesty are becoming a lot better recognising that that has to do,
in fact with the framing of the issue to start with and getting better at adapting to
this and forcing ourselves to very consciously say we have to we have to do this.
So the example that I'm thinking of is a we were looking at a slum series of slums in Nairobi and we were looking at forced evictions.
People roll up with trucks and police often and say you get to leave.
And so that was a very that was a very important set of issues. But we also were hearing a lot of other information while we were doing this.
One of the one of the pieces of information we kept hearing from women was the amount of rape that was occurring in these communities.
And part of the reason is actually fairly simple to resolve,
which is that there aren't enough public latrines available so that they're
close enough to where people have to walk far away for for various reasons.
Women are doing this at night when they're most at risk, walking long distances, and it's going to and from the latrines that this is occurring.
Now, I guess I'm somewhat hesitant to bring this up, because even though that's important,
it's a very it was a great moment for us to be able to document that and start to see some changes on that was critical.
It responded to an articulated need. It's also not precisely everything we're trying to do,
which is that it can't be that everything in the area of women's rights is about rape or about sexuality.
There has to be a lot more there. So, I mean, I think there's a lot of internal advocacy that can reinforce, particularly in a more holistic way.
Whatever the message is, whatever the range of issues is, you know, you do have to start somewhere.
But I think there is a ripple effect that happens over time as well.
For the record. For the record.
So the question, if you if people are coming out of graduate school nowadays, what's the best way they can get into the organisations?
What's the roots? They tend to get your organisation to actually work.
I was just going to advertise an internship that we are about to advertise that will be available in the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime.
So if anybody is interested, you could come and talk to me. It's it's a really difficult market at the moment.
But I think John's got some jobs giving away jobs as he.
Yeah. I mean I think yeah we get where we are.
But I think some of creating I think he's right. I was in my previous job, we were crazy.
I think it was, you know, we were flooded by applications. It's a very competitive market.
I think the big change that I've seen in the time that I've been in the kind of work place is that when I left university,
some people did internships, but a lot of people didn't or went straight into first jobs.
And I mean, where I currently work, we offer paid internships as a routine for us, often for up to six months, but not very many of them.
But when we apply for what would be seen as sort of entry level graduate jobs,
most people have a number of pretty impressive internships on their CV, which does make them stand out.
It's not it's not a requirement. But actually, when we're picking in a very competitive market, those people look good.
And I've got no doubt that what I was offering when I started out wouldn't get me on to a shortlist.
Now, by comparison of the sort of applications we got from graduate students who've done volunteering,
who've done internships, who've done all sorts of unpaid things, and that may be hugely unfair.
We try and level that out by offering one or more paid internships and making sure
that is available to people who haven't had the opportunities to do that before.
But it's a very competitive market and I think it's getting harder and harder to make your CV stand out without some sort of relevant experience.
And the only way to get that is it's doing internships, ideally paid for a lot of people to see them on paper.
I can see why. You know I one them and.
Well, I suppose I need to make a pitch for social worker. Actually, that is a market that's available.
Because if, for example, you got your masters.
But there is there are programs nationally that will sponsor you to get onto the course.
So when I'm looking for a candidate and I'm looking at senior management level, I'm looking at people who can help influence policy.
You can do have some of those conversations locally. So but you have to get your hands dirty.
And that really means the front end abuse, abusive family, dodgy farm kids, the extended network that is emotionally tiresome.
So a purely academic background will only lead you so far.
What? Particularly from my perspective, what needs to be an American?
What John saying is experience.
Whether you get and in the states, particularly as it's shrinking more and more, that combination of experience plus academic rigour is going to be.
So there are as far as space is concerned and social in particular options where you could
actually get paid to do your course and you can get your hands dirty and I mean quite.
And that then can actually test out some of the theoretical underpinning of this work in practice.
And it's all very isolated. But the higher up the food chain you can get, the more you can actually see.
What is this research? Tennis and we can influence. So now, as I tell my sister that if I was going to be a graduate,
I would be looking at some of the classic professions and teaching social work because criminal justice, social work, I don't know that lawyers say.
So, yes, I felt to be a solicitor, obviously kind of technical things that you need to do.
So you would need to do the LPC, which is possibly the most boring of anyone's life.
And then you do a training contract for two years where you are practising as a solicitor, but you are always supervised.
It's a very difficult market at the moment, particularly in my area of law.
Almost all of my clients are funded by Legal Aid, and I don't know if you will have seen anything about Legal Aid, but it's been decimated.
I can't speak about it too much, so it will make me very angry.
So it's a very difficult market at the moment, but it's also, you know, a fantastic career.
I love what I do in terms of making yourself stand out, things like internships and voluntary experience.
It's always going to look good and it is difficult.
But also, I mean, your role here, you're clearly very, very capable.
So I think, you know, if you've invested so much in your future,
then you should definitely pursue it to the end that you want to achieve, irrespective of how challenging things might seem.
Human rights is obviously a small field, so it's difficult to do,
although I think the good news is that it's gotten a lot bigger in the last 20 years or so.
So I think that it would be unlikely for somebody to start out at a place like Amnesty with quite, quite the size of it.
In my own department, we're looking at people who have already done human rights work and have done the kind of human
rights research that I was that I was mentioning earlier to be a human rights researcher.
People are looking to the kinds of things that we're looking for are not that different.
They haven't changed very much. It's extremely strong writing, extremely strong research skills, really good interpersonal skills.
Numerous languages, probably more than point two or three relevant languages, I guess.
And then the kind of the kind of formal training that is, is generally useful at law tends to be very useful.
Journalism is very useful for specific areas.
Studies are useful for the for the kind of for the kind of analysis of of of regional and country contexts.
So I think the key, though, is to try to use use opportunities during the formal sort of university as a formal.
Graduate training process just to get relevant experience and then to seek out employment.
And you know. You know. You know.
With an organisation that does human rights related work, maybe not an international one,
but doing doing this work, solving a national context is really, really helpful.
Then to get to a place like Amnesty International in some states, it's a bit of a it's a bit of a sequence northern.
Then you wait. Okay. We'll take one final question. Okay.
There was a patient is that Amnesty's reach is sometimes that is most limited in observation of the possible where is most needed.
My spin on that and the question is for what the organisation do about that.
And part of the question implies that litigation might be a way of generating change.
I think litigation is a very piecemeal, expensive, limited way of of generating change.
I think there are a lot there are lots better ways of generating. I'm a lawyer by saying this contrary to maybe to my own interests now.
I mean, I think we have to look to all the all the levers of, you know,
working with with national and working at the national level and working to the extent that international levers are useful using those as well.
So things like the the various U.N. mechanisms,
the Human Rights Council reviews the human rights record of every country on a rotating basis that are every three or four years.
Those are moments that are not enforceable legally.
They do generate recommendations that generate a certain amount of criticism among the different countries.
But of course, it's a political process because this is a political body that's doing it.
So but these are moments to try to place some pressure on on on on states.
Some states don't care about these things. The one state that often doesn't care about international pressure is, in fact,
not of this, these regions you mentioned, but is the United States right?
So we have to use we have to think about different techniques for different countries.
Even if these obvious, large, formal institutions don't don't really work.
We can also think about smaller regional bodies that do exist in places,
in places like like Asia, like different parts of Africa that you've mentioned.
And it's often more effective to get with what feels to countries like a peer to peer pressure rather than a
dynamic where they will often say may indeed often feel that they're being lectured to by Western Europe,
the North. So then finally,
I think the the there's a critical component of mass mobilisation which which
amnesty does slightly better than other large human rights groups does to do.
But but but but but other other other kinds of organising do you know, to do even better at.
So this is the idea of sort of like generating popular outrage or making it so that it becomes
impossible to ignore demands for change because because the people themselves are asking for it.
Thank you. With that, that's I find that fascinating.
It's a fascinating mix of biography, evidence and insight. I mean, just wasting your time.
We have 40 minutes in which we can continue this discussion.
Over to you, Kate. Next door for the lecture starts.
Before we do so, I just remind all the speakers, just reminding us that the lines between research, law, policy and action are extremely blurred.
The good thing that they all think you.