Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This chapter explores how, despite the UK’s international obligations to afford young people mechanisms through which to express their views when parents separate, the lack of automatic rights for young people to be heard in mediation curtails their ability to exercise their article 12 rights and agency, creating an effective barrier to greater child-inclusive mediation (CIM) uptake. It explains how there is general unawareness that children have such rights and there are four further critical impediments to greater uptake: a lack of consensus on the purpose(s) of CIM; systemic barriers such as costs and lack of awareness of accessible information about the CIM process for parents and/or children; lack of practitioner confidence, in both the process and ability to deliver CIM well; and the gatekeeping roles of both mediators and then the parents, considering these impediments in turn.
This chapter sets out our analysis and findings from the authors’ Healthy Relationship Transitions study concerning differences between mediators in how the CIM is conducted. It goes on to outline the views of the young people in the focus groups and interviews in the study on age restrictions on CIM. It then explores how satisfied young people (and parents) were with the process of CIM.
This chapter sets out the aims for the book as a whole and its structure. It explains it will explore the law, theory and practice of family dispute resolution from a children’s rights perspective, with a particular focus on the value of child-inclusive mediation (CIM). It sets out how it draws on new empirical research where, for the first time, children who had experienced CIM were interviewed alongside their parents, mediators, other relationship professionals and wider groups of young people. It indicates that the book will examine this process through the lens of the requirements of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and suggests that a shift away from parental autonomy-driven mediation to a process underpinned by a relational family mediation approach, which includes children’s views directly, might begin to fulfil children’s international law rights, as examined in the subsequent chapters.
This chapter sets out our findings regarding which families were able to resolve matters in child-inclusive mediation. It reflects on the extent to which the child’s views had been acted upon and informed agreements reached about child arrangements to consider whether Lundy’s fourth requirement of an article 12 compliant service for children whose parents separate, ‘influence’ (Lundy, 2007: 937), was met. It further discusses, then compares, young people and parents’ satisfaction with outcomes and the longer-term impact on the family and family relationships. For the minority dissatisfied with the outcome, it concludes by reflecting on what seemed to be driving their disappointment.
With the study of law’s relationship with racial justice in mind, this chapter draws on theories of antiracism and progressive lawyering to set out four principles for antiracist lawyering: reflection, creativity, collaboration, and accountability. It argues that lawyers who wish to promote racial justice should engage in reflection, should adopt creative approaches to lawyering, should collaborate, and should remain accountable to their clients.
This concluding chapter summarizes the analysis throughout the book, drawing on the case of Shamima Begum to highlight the limits of law in the struggle for racial justice. It also considers how law has been used to advance racial justice in former colonies of the British Empire. It considers the legal case for reparations for slavery, the use of law to secure compensation for victims of racial injustices in Kenya, and the use of law to challenge the death penalty in Barbados, a vestige of colonial rule.
The introduction draws attention to the paradoxical nature of the relationship between law and racial justice, highlighting how the law can be used to both help and hinder the struggle for racial justice. We might assume that the legal system will be allied to the idea of racial justice because it is said to be underpinned by the principles of neutrality and fairness, and there are various Acts of Parliament that appear to give effect to these principles such as the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010. However, there are examples of law failing to advance racial justice and sometimes facilitating racial injustices. The Introduction sets out the central contention of this book: that there are historical, cultural, and systemic reasons for the limits of law.
This chapter sets out some definitional and conceptual issues. It defines the term racial justice and outlines six key concepts of Critical Race Theory that underpin the analysis in the rest of the book: structural racism, the social construction of race and racism, intersectionality, interest-convergence, lived theory, and the inherent limits of legal processes. It also outlines the problems with ubiquitous terms such as BAME, equality, diversity, and inclusion.
As the British Empire disintegrated in the aftermath of the world wars in the first half of the 1900s, immigration laws were developed which replicated the effect of colonial rule. These laws maintained the two-tiered legal system that had developed during colonial rule, ensuring that people racialized as something other than ‘White British’ were denied the full protection of the law. Yet at the same time, laws to promote good race relations were introduced, which appeared to make the legal system a tool for racial justice, rather than racial injustice. It is with this in mind that we can better understand racial injustices today, in education, criminal justice, employment, housing, and healthcare systems.
This chapter is concerned with the use of law to create and perpetuate racial injustices during the era of the British Empire. It explores the use of law to justify and facilitate imperialism and colonial rule and to legitimize slavery. It considers how law was used to impose social control over indigenous populations and the ways in which law created the phenomenon of structural racism. In effect, a two-tiered legal system was created: one for those classed as White British, and another more disadvantageous system for those classed as something other than White British.
