Natalie Kyneswood awarded Wellcome Trust Early-Career Award to investigate trauma-informed justice in UK courts

The Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (CSLS) is delighted to announce that Dr Natalie Kyneswood has been awarded an Early-Career Award by the Wellcome Trust for a five-year project entitled: ‘Care in the courtroom: trauma-informed specialist courts and the medicalisation of justice’. The project commenced on 1 January 2025 and will run until September 2029.

‘Trauma-informed care’ was originally a set of techniques developed by clinicians in health care settings to avoid pathologising or re-traumatising people who had experienced traumatic events. ‘Trauma-informed’ approaches have been adopted as means of responding to social problems in other sectors, including welfare, education, employment and, more recently, criminal justice. Within the UK, there are plans to improve victim-survivors’ experience of the prosecution process by introducing trauma-informed initiatives in sex offence cases. However, plans to assimilate trauma-informed principles within adversarial justice systems are considered ‘radical’ and it is, as yet, unclear what form they will take or how they will work.

Natalie will investigate the role of trauma-informed interventions in transforming trial procedure, courtroom environments and the treatment of victim-survivors of sexual violence. She will do this through a comparative study of trauma-informed court practice across different jurisdictions, including empirical case studies of Specialist Sexual Violence Support (SSVS) project courts in England and the creation of a trauma-informed Sex Offence Court for Scotland.

So far, research into the links between health and criminal justice have focused on defendants, recidivism, and the root causes of crime. This innovative study will contribute to theory and praxis by exploring medico-legal interventions aimed at victims of traumatic crime. Natalie will work closely with victim-survivors and UK government during key phases of the project to help shape policy and best practice while specialist courts evolve and embed. 

This work builds upon Natalie’s previous ESRC-funded research at the CSLS into the extension of pre-recorded cross-examination in sex offence cases.