Why doesn't our judiciary reflect the diverse society it serves?
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Version 0 of 1. What percentage of court of appeal and high court judges would you guess are women? What about the proportion of black and minority ethnic (BME) members of the judiciary? If your guess is that the diversity within the judiciary mirrors that within the general population, then the actual figures, published last week with little fanfare, might disappoint you. Just eight out of 38 court of appeal judges and 21 out of 106 high court judges are women. The overall percentage of female judges across the courts is 25%. Of court judges who declared their ethnicity, only 5.9% gave their background as BME. The picture is significantly better in tribunals, however, where 44% of judges are female – although just 9.5% declared their background as BME. The situation isn’t entirely bleak. The statistics suggest gradual change – the percentages are rising slowly, and are higher for younger age groups. Of court judges under 40 years old, 53% are women, compared with just 13% of over-60s. Of court judges in their 40s, 11.3% are BME, compared to just 2.5% of over-60s. Although this is encouraging, people who fit within those age brackets make up a relatively low proportion of the judiciary. Just 60 out of 3,238 court judges are aged under 40. Change may be happening, but it isn’t happening quickly enough. Meanwhile, the makeup of our judiciary remains woefully out of step with the population it exists to serve. As with the under-representation of women in politics, this is arguably one of the professions where diversity matters the most – its members need to understand, as well as reflect, the full range of the society for which they work. The fact that only 29% of MPs are women (22% before the election) takes on particular significance when it becomes clear that recent cuts have hit women hardest, for instance. The Fawcett Society recently reported that a staggering 74% of the money saved from benefit and tax changes since 2010 has come directly from women’s pockets. So, too, the under-representation of BME people within the judiciary should be cause for particular concern, given the fact that offenders from ethnic minorities are more likely than their white counterparts to be sentenced to prison for certain categories of crimes. According to an analysis of more than 1m court records carried out by the Guardian in 2011, black offenders were 44% more likely than white offenders to be sentenced to prison for driving offences, 38% more likely to be imprisoned for public disorder or possession of a weapon, and 27% more likely to be imprisoned for drugs possession. Asian offenders were 41% more likely to be sent to prison for drugs offences than their white counterparts and 19% more likely to go to jail for shoplifting. A pale, stale, male-dominated legal system also throws up questions given the number of recent cases where members of the judiciary have seemed to suggest victims of rape and violence are partially responsible for their own assault. In February this year, a judge sentencing two men for raping an 18-year-old student said: “Your victim was very unwise to allow herself to drink so much that she became so thoroughly inebriated.” He then described her as “extremely foolish”, before adding: “She became so drunk that she was vulnerable and defenceless to your exploitation.” This judge’s comments came in the same month as the barrister David Osborne wrote a blogpost entitled “She was gagging for it”, in which he decried the “politically driven agenda” that “has been thrust down the throats of court-users about the deplorably low percentage of rape allegations that lead to conviction”. He added: “In my book, consent is consent, blind drunk or otherwise, and regret after the event cannot make it rape.” Then, in April, a day after the body of murdered 21-year-old student Karen Buckley was discovered in Glasgow, a judge adjudicating on a different case (of 21-year-old Leanne Roberts assaulting a woman outside a bar) remarked: “I find it incredible that young people can get so drunk that they don’t even know who they’re with. One only has to think about the horrible situation in Glasgow to see how serious this could have been. It’s very, very worrying how young girls put themselves in such very, very vulnerable positions.” His words came despite the fact that there was no suggestion that Miss Buckley was drunk on the night she died. In July, an Irish judge ruled that a man who regularly raped his heavily medicated girlfriend in her sleep over a period of almost a year should serve no jail time. Why? Because his crime would not have been discovered had he not confessed, saying: “In truth, this case comes here today out of his own mouth.” Of course, this is not to suggest that every white judge is racist, or that every male judge blames the survivors of sexual assault for the crimes enacted on them. A variety of different reasons have been suggested for disparities in sentencing, including but not limited to discriminatory sentencing practices. And, indeed, the problem of victim-blaming is not confined to male judges – in January, Joanna Greenberg gave a non-custodial sentence to a teacher convicted on two counts of sexual activity with a child by a person in a position of trust, telling him: “There is no evidence you groomed her. If anything, it was she who groomed you. You gave way to temptation at a time when you were emotionally vulnerable because of problems with your wife’s pregnancy. She was intelligent and used that intelligence to manipulate people emotionally.” Yet, it still bears asking: is a white, male-dominated judiciary fully able to serve justice to a far more diverse community than that represented within its own ranks? |