The first in a new monthly bulletin from the Breaking out of the Justice Loop team
Welcome to the first in a new monthly bulletin from Breaking out of the Justice Loop: a collaboration that aims to unleash bold ideas to achieve genuine systems change for women’s justice.
- Introducing Breaking out of the Justice Loop
- The importance of lived experience
- Future Generations: Preventing the criminalisation of young women and girls
- Spread the word
Introducing Breaking out of the Justice Loop
In March 2027 it will be 20 years since Baroness Corston published The Corston Report, her landmark review of women with particular vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system.
Anniversaries are a mixed blessing. They give us a moment to pause, take stock, acknowledge previous efforts and question how far we’ve come. Too much time looking backwards, however, can prevent us from tackling today’s challenges and working for a better future. We’re more interested in change than nostalgia and we’d rather use this particular anniversary to get to work.
As the anniversary of The Corston Report approaches, we want to ask two questions.
- What is it really like for women and girls in the criminal justice system today?
- What will it take to change the justice system, and the systems around it, so that far fewer women and girls are drawn into it in the first place, and those who are get the support they, their children and their communities need?
Jean Corston’s review was radical, humane and far-sighted, but much of it still reads as a to-do list. Successive governments accepted her recommendations, then largely failed to deliver them – often abandoning them completely. But Corston’s plan had gaps too. While she acknowledged the need to steer young women and girls away from crime, recognition of their distinct routes into the justice system through care, exploitation and the youth justice system were largely outside her remit. And although women with lived experience of prisons and community centres were consulted, they were not empowered to shape or lead the work itself.
Those gaps are where Breaking out of the Justice Loop begins. Every element of this programme will be co-produced with women’s justice professionals who have lived experience themselves. This first bulletin is a statement of intent.
Our first event in November, and the report that follows, will ask what needs to happen to stop young women and girls from being criminalised, now and for generations to come. Later strands of this project will examine the economics of reform and explore what a public health approach to women’s justice might mean.
We are the National Women's Justice Coalition (NWJC), Birth Companions, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and independent contributors, working with the NWJC’s National Voice and Advisory Panel of women with lived experience of the justice system. And we’re bringing lived, learned and professional expertise together, because the criminal justice system will not change unless women lead that change.
We hope you’ll join us.
Abbi Ayers, Naomi Delap and Liz Hogarth OBE
The importance of lived experience
We strongly believe women with lived experience should be leading and shaping the projects and decisions that affect us. At the end of the day, we’re the ones who have actually lived through these experiences. We know what works, what doesn’t work, what’s missing and what needs to change. You can’t learn lived experience from a textbook or by sitting in a classroom. You have to have lived it.
Something we feel really strongly about is that women shouldn’t have to change who we are to be taken seriously. Yes, we understand we need to conduct ourselves professionally, but that doesn’t mean changing the way we speak, using big fancy words or forgetting where we’ve come from. Our voices, our backgrounds and our experiences are exactly what make us valuable in these spaces.
And if we’re serious about breaking the justice loop, then lived experience can’t just be something organisations bolt-on tokenistically. We shouldn’t just be invited into rooms to share our stories and then have decisions made for us. We should be involved from the beginning – shaping the agenda, leading the conversations and helping make the decisions. We don’t just want a seat at the table. We want lived experience to be the table.
Because nothing about us should ever be decided without us and nothing will change unless women with lived experience are leading that change.
National Voice and Advisory Panel (NVAP)
Future Generations: Preventing the criminalisation of young women and girls
Wednesday 11 November 2026, 1.00 pm - 4.00 pm
How do we prevent the criminalisation of young women and girls, now and for future generations?
To answer that question, we are bringing together a collection of experts to share policy, practice and lived experience perspectives on:
- The key issues facing young women and girls today
- Getting systems to work better and prevent criminalisation
- Who should be accountable for preventing the criminalisation of young women and girls, and what would make change last
While the roundtable discussion will be in person, we will be live-streaming the whole event.
To find out more, and to register to attend the event online, please visit the event page.
Spread the word
If you know others who would be interested in following this programme, please do forward them this bulletin and encourage them to sign up.
We would like to thank The JABBS Foundation for Women and Girls for supporting this important work.
