Intersecting Injustices: Race, Class, Gender and the Criminalisation of Young People in South Wales
This project inherently addresses equality and diversity. It is designed to advance understandings of minoritised young people’s experiences with, and opinions of, criminalisation, policing and the criminal justice system.
It also considers how those experiences elucidate the practice and culture underpinning policing and criminal justice in South Wales. Finally, the project will explore what action is required to bring about meaningful change, in policies, attitudes and practice, within the areas identified by the research.
The research is deeply embedded in the communities in Cardiff and aims to amplify the voices of those communities in order to bring about impactful change. To carry out the project successfully, the candidate will be a member of a racially minoritised community and have knowledge of and interest in improving youth justice in Cardiff.
Summary
This project looks at how factors such as race, age, gender and class influence the way young people are treated by the police and justice system in South Wales.
Recent reports demonstrate that racially minoritised people in Wales are over-represented in prisons and police stop and search statistics, and under-represented in the judiciary and legal professions; these discrepancies are greater than in England.
The high-profile deaths of Mohamud Mohammed Hassan and Moyied Bashir, Kyrees Sullivan and Harvey Evans, and the protests that followed them illustrate the problems facing the region and the troubled relationship between minoritised young people and the police. This project will use participatory and action research methods, working closely with community and youth organisations to explore the impact of these cases as well as the day-to-day ways in which young people’s lives are affected by policing.
Aims and research questions
This project aims to produce a piece of original research that responds to the urgent issues of the policing of young people – in particular, minoritised young people in Wales. It seeks to understand the experiences of minoritised young people who find themselves in conflict with the criminal justice system. What are the factors that influence further system contact? What are the factors that mitigate system contact? The project also aims to propose alternatives to punitive justice and racialised policing.
Using abolitionist frameworks, you’ll seek to answer research questions such as:
- What kinds of relationships do young people have with the criminal justice system?
- How do race, gender and class affect the experiences young people have with the criminal justice system?
- What kinds of alternatives to punitive justice and racialised policing should we be aiming for?
Methods
To address the research questions and achieve the project aims, the research requires active engagement with young people. It’s expected that the PhD student will deploy innovative participant action research methodologies to work closely with groups of young people in marginalised areas of Cardiff, especially those that experience over-policing. The successful candidate will develop appropriate methodologies in collaboration with the young people with whom they will meet. There is also an expectation that the PhD student will engage in a placement with an external organisation relevant to the project.
This PhD research is empirical and qualitative. The research methodology will include qualitative methods such as interviews, focus groups, and/or other innovative participatory action research methods. It is anticipated that the PhD student will write an accessible report of findings in addition to a doctoral thesis. Conceptually, the student will be encouraged to engage with contemporary debates on critical race theory, critical criminology and penal abolitionism. One of the aims of the project will be to envision how any suggested changes could be implemented in Wales.
