How is ‘justice’ understood, sought, and experienced by victims/survivors of gender based violence? A review of the literature

Recent decades have seen an expansion in the use of criminal and civil justice systems to address gender based violence in the UK and elsewhere. Yet there remain substantive gaps in the ability of victims/survivors to obtain justice through these systems; in our understanding of what ‘justice’ actually means to victims/survivors; and in how different social identities and inequalities intersect to shape those perceptions, access to and experiences of, justice. This paper presents the findings of a systematic search of the literature regarding justice and gender based violence. First, we elucidate a number of theoretical models of justice within the literature which offer a more expansive meaning to ‘justice’ for victims of gender based violence than the traditional criminal justice approach. Our second finding was unexpected. We explore how a ‘systematic’ approach to identifying literature relevant to our research in fact left significant gaps. In addition, the literature we did identify had specific characteristics in terms of substantive focus, geographical origin or methodology, among other factors, which we suggest has implications for knowledge production in the field of gender based violence (and beyond).