Sentencing Council to research young people's attitudes and development

A review of the current understanding of the development of cognitive maturity in young adults, and a study exploring attitudes to sentencing among young people, including young offenders, will be included in the Scottish Sentencing Council’s commissioned research programme for 2019-20.

The projects will help in the development of the advisory body's guideline on sentencing young people, which is due to go to public consultation later this year.

Work will also continue on sexual offences, in which the Council plans to commission research to build on the outputs from its current projects. In addition, it will continue its support of the Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences PhD internship scheme with a project in late autumn.

Professor Neil Hutton, chair of the Council’s Research Committee, explained: "The Council is always keen to work with skilled researchers to ensure independent, high quality evidence is available to support our development of sentencing guidelines. We would encourage all those who may be interested in bidding for our future research projects to get in touch at to register their interest."

The new projects add to three commissioned research projects which began in late 2018. These include an in-depth exploration of public perceptions of sexual offences and death by driving offences (focusing both on the public generally and those directly affected by these offences), a survey of public attitudes to sentencing in general, and a review of academic literature on sentence discounting. The current projects are expected to report back to the Council later this year, with final reports published thereafter.

Invitations to tender for the 2019-20 programme of work will be issued in due course. Anyone interested in bidding for future research projects should register their interest with the Scottish Sentencing Council by emailing sentencingcouncil@scotcourts.gov.uk

Wherever possible, the Council will seek to publish the research, on the publications page of its website.