APPG on Women in Contact with the Criminal Justice System

The APPG’s purpose is to increase the knowledge and awareness of the experiences of women in contact with the justice system and promote approaches that reduce criminalisation and meet women’s needs.

A joint meeting between the APPG Women in Contact with the Justice System, APPG Domestic Violence and Abuse and Centre for Women's Justice.

We're highlighting the links between domestic abuse and women’s alleged offending. Women in contact with the justice system are often survivors of domestic abuse. What is perhaps less well understood is the ways in which women’s experience of abuse, including coercive control, can directly lead to their own criminalisation. Women who are coerced and frightened into offending, who use force in self-defence, or who face malicious allegations by their perpetrators as part of a pattern of coercive control, are being punished rather than supported.

Survivors of abuse need support, not punishment. 57% of women in prison or under community supervision report that they are victims of domestic abuse.

In this APPG meeting we held a parliamentary screening of a new short film from Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) in which five women explain how they ended up facing prosecution in circumstances which resulted directly from their own experience of domestic abuse. Ahead of the meeting we created a briefing on the criminalisation of survivors of domestic abuse, available to download below.

Women remanded to custody account for over half of the women received into a prison within a given year. Remand use is disproportionate to the offences women are accused of 85% of women on remand have been charged with a non-violent crime. Almost two thirds of women remanded to prison are either found not guilty or a given a community sentence.

Racially minoritised and migrant women are disproportionately represented amongst those on remand. In 2021, 30% of female Black defendants were remanded in custody at Crown Court – this was higher compared to female Asian defendants (28%) and female white defendants (26%). At Magistrates’ Court, female Asian and Black defendants were more likely to be remanded in custody (both 10%), compared to white women (7%). Research also has found that foreign national women are more likely to be remanded in custody while awaiting trial or sentencing than British women, often for less serious offences, due to an assumed risk of people absconding overseas.

We organise the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Women in contact with the justice system (APPG). This helps us influence politicians and put forward suggestions for change in the system. We became the secretariat for the APPG in 2023. This was previously held by the Howard League for Penal Reform (under the name the APPG for women in the penal system).

• Kate Osamor MP, Chair
• Baroness Fiona Hodgson of Abinger CBE, Vice Chair
• Marsha De Cordova MP
• Caroline Dinenage MP

• Paula Barker MP
• The Rt. Hon the Lord David Blunkett
• The Rt. Hon. the Lord Bradley
• Karen Buck MP
• Baroness Burt of Solihull
• Baroness Lister of Burtersett CBE
• Ian Byrne MP
• Alex Cunningham MP
• Janet Daby MP
• The Rt. Hon Baroness Garden of Frognal
• Mary Glindon MP
• The Rt. Rev Lord Bishop of Gloucester
• Baroness Hamwee
• Carolyn Harris MP
• Helen Hayes MP
• Dr Rupa Huq MP
• Kim Johnson MP
• John McDonnell MP
• Navendu Mishra MP
• Grahame Morris MP
• Jess Phillips MP
• Yasmin Qureshi MP
• Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP
• The Rt. Hon. Liz Saville-Roberts MP
• Jeff Smith MP
• Claudia Webbe MP
• Catherine West MP
• Hywel Williams MP / AS
• The Lord Woodley

Women in Prison's Director of External Affairs and Campaigns, Nicola Drinkwater is clerk for the group. The group is registered in the Register of APPGs.

This is not an official website of Parliament. It has not been approved by either House. APPGs are informal groups of Parliamentarians with a common interest in particular issues. The views expressed are those of the group.