Here in the NatCen Social Research Crime and Justice Team, we are often asked to conduct work about very sensitive topics. A recent example is our research for the Sentencing Council (England and Wales), about the sentencing of sexual offences.
The sentencing of crime is often explored in the media and can cause controversy amongst the public. In opinion polls, crime is regularly cited as being in the top three or four most important issues facing the country. The sentencing of sexual offences, in particular, has the potential to create strong opinions and feelings. The widespread public discussion created by the Justice Secretary’s comments on the sentencing of rape, last year, provides clear evidence of this.
A key aim of the Sentencing Council is to promote a clear, fair and consistent approach to sentencing, whilst also working to improve public confidence in verdicts. Consequently, as part of the Sentencing Council’s review of sexual offence sentencing, we were tasked with exploring attitudes to the sentencing of sexual offences amongst both the general public and amongst survivors of sexual offences.
Researching an emotive issue like sexual violence requires ethical, responsive recruitment and research methods. This helps to ensure that participants – whether members of the public or survivors themselves - are involved in an appropriate and empowered way and can speak about their experiences to researchers. We felt that research with these two groups would need to be approached differently, to reflect the different experience of sexual offences. Focus groups were conducted with members of the public and one-to-one depth interviews with survivors of sexual offences.
In work of this nature, it’s also important to ensure and maintain the health of the research team. This means giving the team the opportunity and safe space to discuss the study and ‘debrief’ about any potentially distressing issues that fieldwork and analysis may raise. This research was led by a Research Director who is a Trustee of a rape crisis centre in London, who not only works closely with them but also has extensive experience of researching sexual violence and has completed training on working with survivors. Reflecting on this expert knowledge we, as a research team, were able to work together to ensure that the research was designed and conducted in a manner that was ethical, responsive and appropriate for everyone involved.
Sexual abuse and violence are not easy to discuss, but do need to be addressed with rigour to enable society to manage the challenges they pose. As difficult as the work is, we found that enabling people to discuss the sentencing of these offences in a robust, ethical and responsive way was a very rewarding experience for the research team. Of course, we hope that participants also found the process respectful and beneficial.
This project is a prime example of the difficult research that NatCen Social Research relishes - engaging hard to reach groups by applying the right methods, to inform decision makers. The research report will be released later in 2012.
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