Maintaining jury trials is critical to women survivors’ access to justice

The Secretary of State for Justice has today announced plans to erode our right to jury trial in an attempt to address the significant backlog of cases in the Crown Courts.

Chronic underfunding – not jury trials – is driving the collapse of our courts. Scrapping jury trials is an attack on one of the fundamental safeguards of fairness in our adversarial justice system. Jury trials are one of the few ways in which the courts seek to recognise and address the misogynistic and racist attitudes embedded in our criminal justice institutions. Women face unequal treatment, and research shows that Black and minoritised women face racist outcomes in the absence of a jury.

Abandoning our commitment to jury trials is ill thought through and will have far-reaching and discriminatory consequences, as well as acting as a drain on an already over-burdened and inefficient system. There is a real lack of evidence to show that this panicked response to a system that long ago reached breaking point will effectively address the backlog. It will leave the wider, more complex causes of these problems untouched.

At Rights of Women, we hear firsthand from survivors who have been re-traumatised by a criminal justice system that was not designed to support them, and from women who have themselves been criminalised as a direct result of the abuse and violence that has been normalised in our society. The court backlog, which is damaging to both defendants and victims, was not caused by the existence of jury trials but by regressive approaches to criminal justice and a failure to address the underlying causes of offending behaviour and Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG).

The VAWG sector has long called for increased investment not only in the criminal justice service but, more importantly, in prevention and early-intervention – calls that have gone unheeded. To introduce this sensationalist measure as an attempt to address the trauma women experience in this system is counter-productive and ignores the tireless advocacy of so many survivors and the organisations that support them.

As specialist lawyers supporting women survivors, we urge government to consult on evidence-based reforms that protect access to justice and tackle the prevalence of VAWG at its root. A Government committed to addressing violence against women and girls would do better to focus on preventative strategies and work to address wider social injustice.