Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Expertise from Manchester Metropolitan is helping to shape government policy on safeguarding children in social care. Professor Michelle McManus appeared as an expert at a special education select committee (May 2024) alongside leaders from charities and government. She is a specialist in multi-agency safeguarding arrangements, looking at how people, systems and organisations work together to make communities and services better.

Manchester Law School students use their knowledge and training to provide pro bono legal services to help members of the community whilst enhancing their skills and experience. The scheme provides law students with an opportunity to apply their knowledge and skills to real legal situations, to gain valuable experience and make a real difference to themselves and others.

A review of a pioneering scheme to defer the prosecution of low-level offenders has highlighted key benefits, including avoiding criminalisation and associated negative social impact, as well as challenges, such as addressing racial disparities. Researchers from Manchester Met and charitable foundation Barrow Cadbury Trust have published their final report findings (2023) of a review of Chance to Change, a deferred prosecution scheme piloting in West Yorkshire and London, supported by the Ministry of Justice.

Manchester Metropolitan University and the Open University, the University of Oxford, the University of Glasgow and The University of Edinburgh were awarded just under £750,000 by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) (2021). The project – Witness to Harm, Holding to Account: Improving patient, family and colleague witnesses’ experiences of Fitness to Practise proceedings – will see researchers undertaking a mixed methods study with the UK’s health and care regulators about the experience of the public as witnesses in professional health and care regulatory proceedings.

Researchers from Manchester Law School have extensive experience across a number of areas including: honour-based abuse (HBA) and forced marriage (FM) (https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/114429/pdf/); the growth of LGBT/SOGI rights activism in international legal arenas; victims and witnesses of international and transnational crimes e.g. genocide, crimes against humanities, war crimes and slavery (Memorandum of Understanding between the UK and Rwanda for the provision of an asylum partnership arrangement (Parliament.UK).

Homicide Abuse Learning Together (HALT) addresses important gaps in existing knowledge of domestic homicide. It aims to learn from the experiences of families who have lost a relative to domestic homicide, victims/survivors of domestic abuse; professionals and domestic homicide reviews (DHRs) to prevent future domestic homicides.

The Crime & Well Being Big Data Centre aims to deliver world-class theoretically driven, methodologically innovative and internationally relevant research to help tackle the complex crime, health and disorder issues facing society. Our research projects engage with a range of issues in the areas of crime, policing, justice and health and well-being and are underpinned by methodological innovation and the development of secure and intelligent data systems.

Our research group: Race, Religion, Ethnicity and Community explore the development of religious, racial and ethnic identities over time, while informing contemporary discussions of community, conflict and dialogue. Exploring the history of these identities and encounters helps us to understand contemporary issues such as structural inequality, religious violence and community formation.