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In the last 10 years, India has amended its laws dealing with sexual offences against women with the changes ranging from increasing terms of imprisonment for the offence of rape to state-funded compensation schemes for women and child victims. In this regard, challenges persist for the agencies of the criminal justice system in India especially the courts to realise the vision of restorative justice as these forums have to navigate the relevant statutory provisions and binding precedents. This chapter seeks to analyse the challenges faced by courts in proper reintegration of victims and offenders of sexual offences, the institutional responses of the courts and suggests reforms to the criminal justice system in India in consonance with the principles of restorative justice acknowledged in the restorative justice movement in the international discourse.

Infanticide stands out as a crime which, in England and Wales, has been marked for at least 200 years by deep-rooted continuities in its representation and treatment by both the criminal justice system and the media, despite the massive political, economic, social, legislative and cultural changes that occurred over this period. Particularly remarkable about this long-standing discourse is its routine emphasis that the guilty mother is also a victim of tragic circumstances that led to the crime and deserving of sympathetic treatment. It also invariably sets infanticide apart as a ‘special case’ which does not necessarily fit with either medical or legal definitions of diminished criminal responsibility. Perhaps surprisingly, this framing of women who commit infanticide stresses not only their ‘normality’ prior to the offence but also their ‘respectability’, a sharp contrast to the sometimes overtly misogynistic representation of other types of women offenders. This chapter argues that it is above all ‘respectability’ that profoundly shaped the cultural script relating to infanticide in England and Wales between 1800 and 2000, and that this continues to exert a powerful legacy on the relatively small number of cases that now comes before the courts in the twenty-first century.

Various philosophers and thinkers have discussed the importance of thinking and philosophising about the concept of ‘place’. A necessary structure of human experience, place is vital to the very foundation of human experience. More than the geography or arrangement of places, place is a concept that moulds human experience and contributes to understanding oneself and the world. Place has also been used to explain political motivations and issues such as citizenship, diaspora and migration. Despite its importance, place has not been problematised enough and has been neglected in studies of intersectionality. For instance, the role and influence of place in a person's diversity wheel and the interlocking web of oppressive structures have been reduced to either racial, class or gender categories. As a result, current critical theories fall short in drawing up the effects of place on intersectionality. This chapter, therefore, proposes the need to develop a critical place theory. It highlights the role that place-aspects play in the oppression and marginalisation of individuals. Moreover, it also examines the relatively new concept of placism as an analytical framework that can be used to explain varying oppressive placial structures.

This chapter explores the concept of allyship in social justice struggles. It provides a road map for self-reflection as well as acquisition of skills necessary for effective allyship. It describes appropriate roles for allies in dismantling systems and structures that protect the privilege of the majority in various contexts – privilege often unseen, unacknowledged and/or actively denied. This chapter will examine unique roles of allies in exposing, challenging, and dismantling privilege and white supremacy. Concrete examples of benefits that have accrued to white Americans through privilege – both conscious and unconscious, are assessed. The reader will be encouraged to explore personal areas of privilege and marginalization and acknowledge multidimensional identities (race, ethnicity, gender, class, ability, etc.) of individuals and unique lived experiences. Those seeking authentic positions of allyship are challenged to root out embedded privilege/white supremacy through direct action.

Past studies have proved the effect of justice on performance. However, the findings across studies have been inconsistent and there remains a substantial unexplained variance between the constructs. Therefore, justice researchers urge for further exploration of the underlying mechanism of the relationship by introducing influencers. This study responds to such call of the researchers by testing the influence of organizational identification (OID) on the justice-performance relationship in the context of Indian Public Sector Units (PSUs).

The study is grounded in the positivism philosophy. The research hypotheses were tested using cross-sectional data gathered using a pre-tested questionnaire. In this study, the authors have used covariance-based structural equation modeling commercial software (AMOS 24.0).

OID did not mediate the relationship between justice facets and performance. Rather, informational justice, followed by procedural and distributive justice had direct positive influences on performance. OID, however, moderated the procedural justice-performance such that the relationship strengthened at higher levels of OID and the interpersonal justice-performance relationship such that the relationship dampened at higher levels of OID. Interestingly, the relationship between interpersonal justice and performance was insignificant in the absence of the moderator, showcasing the strongest case of moderation.

The paper explores OID as an influencer to justice-performance relationship in Indian PSU context for the very first time, thereby highlighting unique finings. It contributes to the further understanding of the unexplained variance in the justice-performance relationship.

This paper reports on insights from an evaluation of Birth Companions (BC) (a UK-based charity) perinatal support in two prison settings in England. The initiative involved the provision of group and/or one-to-one perinatal support and training women prisoners as peer supporters.

A mixed-methods study was undertaken that involved observations of support groups and peer support supervision sessions (n = 9); audio recorded interviews (n = 33) with prison and health-care staff, women in prison, peer supporters and BC staff; analysis of existing routinely collected data by BC and notes undertaken during regular meetings (n = 10) with the BC Project Manager. Thematic analysis was undertaken supported by MAXQDA qualitative data analysis software.

BC provided instrumental/practical support, emotional support, information support, signposting to services and advocating for women to the prison concerning their perinatal needs and rights. Key themes revealed that support had an impact on the lives of perinatal women by creating a safe place characterised by meaningful interactions and women-centred approaches that facilitated access to wider care and support. The service made a difference by empowering women and providing added value for peer supporters, prison, health-care and BC staff. Key enablers and strategies for the care of perinatal women and the delivery of perinatal support are also detailed.

Through longitudinal data and the involvement of a range of stakeholders, this study evidences the subtleties of support provided by BC and the potential it has to make a difference to perinatal women in prison and those volunteering or working within the prison system.

Restorative justice (RJ) approach is currently not a mainstream practice for addressing the issue of intimate partner violence (IPV) in Singapore. In IPV, the persons affected are not limited to the persons experiencing violence (PEV) and persons using violence (PUV). There is a ripple effect when IPV happens and oftentimes, children, significant others and people in the community are negatively impacted. In short, IPV hurts self and relationships. Being relational in focus, the authors believe that an RJ approach can bring about healing and growth for persons directly or indirectly affected by the violence by building connectedness and a person’s relational capacity.

The authors proposed a framework for IPV work in the context of males using violence and females experiencing violence. Anchored in four working principles that are based on RJ, this framework seeks to guide practitioners to journey with affected parties in their healing process. In their endeavour to make a case for RJ in IPV work, the authors also offered possibilities and challenges for restorative IPV intervention in Singapore’s current landscape.

The authors strongly believe that an RJ-influenced practice has the potential to break the violent cycle by disrupting the conditions associated with IPV, including isolation, economic stress and societal norms regarding gender expectations. The authors also opined that an RJ-influenced practice can create a sustained longer-term outcome of healthy relationships through establishing non-violence behaviour as a societal norm.

This study aims to critically evaluate the trajectory of the “Child First” guiding principle for youth justice in England and Wales, which challenges adult-centric constructions of children (when they offend) as “threatening” and asserts a range of theoretical and principled assumptions about the nature of childhood and children’s evolving capacity.

Focussing on how Child First seeks to transcend the socio-historically bifurcated (polarised/dichotomised) thinking and models/strategies/frameworks of youth justice, this study examines the extent and nature of this binary thinking and its historical and contemporary influence on responses to children’s offending, latterly manifested as more hybridised (yet still discernibly bifurcated) approaches.

Analyses identified an historical and contemporary influence on bifurcated responses to offending by children in the United Kingdom/England and Wales, subsequently manifested as more hybridised (yet still discernibly bifurcated) approaches. Analyses also identified a contemporary, progressive challenge to bifurcated youth justice thinking, policy and practice through the “Child First” guiding principle.

By tracing the trajectory of Child First as an explicit, progressive challenge to previous youth justice thinking and formal “approaches”, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, they are the first to question whether, in taking this approach, Child First represents a clean break with the past, or is just the latest in a series of strategic realignments in youth justice seeking to resolve inherent tensions between competing constructions of children and their behaviour.