Special Measures were introduced for vulnerable and intimidated witnesses in UK Courts in 1999 in part in response to survivors voicing complaints of re-traumatisation. Recent research with victim-survivors finds that special measures are vital to securing justice in that they make the court process “bearable” (Moroz and Dinesman 2024). However, uptake is deemed to be patchy and victim organisations argue that special measures are not sufficiently utilised or sufficiently robust (Victims Commissioner 2021; Moroz and Dinesman 2024). Data collected by way of interviews with legal professionals on the other hand, indicates that some barristers believe that special measures have a deleterious impact on outcomes precisely because they limit embodied displays of trauma (Carline et al. 2021). Others, meanwhile, have questioned the impact of special measures on procedural fairness given the comparative lack of adjustments made for vulnerable defendants (Fairclough 2021). 

Based on a two-year ethnography including court observations and analysis of 35 closing speeches in four group-based trials of child sexual exploitation, this paper explores court users’ informal and formal reactions to special measures during court hearings, and analyses how barristers explain - and attack - special measures when speaking directly to juries. I find that special measures reduce the possibility of emotional testimony, which can serve the prosecution as well as the defence, but do not appear to protect against retraumatisation. Further, as defendant vulnerabilities are commonly ignored by prosecutors, special measures can be presented to juries as undermining the equality of arms necessary to ensure a fair trial.

About the speaker

Natasha Carver is Senior Lecturer in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research analyses legal constructions of racialized and gendered identities and how these identities are negotiated by those who are subject(ed) to their force. Her monograph Marriage, Gender and Refugee Migration (Rutgers University Press, 2021) won the British Sociological Association 2022 Philip Abrams Prize for the best sole-authored first book in the discipline of sociology. Her current research projects focus on a) group-based prosecutions of Child Sexual Exploitation and b) FGM safeguarding law and policies and impacts on justice outcomes and health inequalities.