Between Policy and Practice: Community Justice for Women in Scotland

This PhD explores whether and how the gender-specific needs of women with convictions are addressed within Scotland's national community justice policies and the community-based responses to women with convictions. The study responds to a central question: Why do the same problems persist in community justice for women despite decades of reform?

Drawing on qualitative data from 30 interviews with policy officials, service commissioners, strategic leads, and frontline practitioners, the project explores how gender-responsive justice policies are understood and enacted across Scotland's community justice system. t focuses on how national policy goals are interpreted in local service design and frontline delivery, and investigates how these relationships are experienced and navigated in practice - particularly in relation to how women are supported, supervised, and punished in the community.

The research is guided by three overarching concerns: (1) how gendered justice policies emerge and evolve; (2) how justice practitioners understand and support women's desistance; and (3) whether women's needs are recognised and met in community justice settings. By analysing perspectives across different levels of the system, the study investigates how institutional priorities, assumptions, and pressures shape justice for women, as well as how they can obstruct or enable meaningful change.

The thesis adopts a feminist, reflexive approach and is informed by the perspectives of those working directly in and around community justice policy and practice across Scotland. Rather than focusing on one particular reform or segment of the workforce, it considers the wider, interconnected conditions that shape change, and the challenges of sustaining meaningful progress in an area of justice where many of the problems are already well understood, yet persist.