Research areas
Since 1980, I have been researching a variety of justice mechanisms: criminal justice, restorative justice, Indigenous sentencing courts, civil justice and money justice, and informal (non-state) justice. My current research is on institutional justice, which is one of three fields of knowledge that examine responses to large-scale victimisation; the others are transitional justice and historical justice. The three use multiple justice mechanisms, e.g., criminal, civil and money justice, and other forms of redress (see Daly 2024 for three-way-comparison and Daly 2025 on ‘justice’ more generally).
My research falls into six areas, listed below chronologically, although there is overlap.
Here’s a summary of each and how they came about.
Feminist and critical race theories, crime, and criminal justice
Beginning in the 1980s, my publications fell into two sub-areas. One was feminist and critical race theories and their implications for criminology and socio-legal studies. The second was research on sex/gender and race, men’s and women’s pathways to criminal court, and disparities in court decisions.
The 1980s and 1990s were the decades of ‘difference,’ as understood by poststructural theorists, and what was called class-race-gender or multiple inequalities, which today is called intersectional feminism. I was more at home with class-race-gender but explored poststructural ideas. In 1998, a colleague and I found a way to reconcile the two approaches, which had generated two competing images: the ‘real women’ of feminist social science and the ‘woman of discourse’ (i.e., criminological, legal, medical, or other discourses). We argued that neither alone was sufficient and strong versions of either should be avoided (Daly and Maher 1998).
My last effort to review developments in feminist and critical race was in 2010: it was time for the next generation to take up the baton.
Restorative justice and Indigenous sentencing courts
In 1995, I relocated from the U.S. to Australia on a Fulbright scholarship to study restorative justice, with the encouragement and support of John Braithwaite and other Australian colleagues (see Daly 2022, chapter 1). In 1998, I launched the South Australia Juvenile Justice (SAJJ) 2-year research program. It produced a raft of publications on the conference process, the limits of restorative justice, and ways of assessing re-offending. I identified gaps and limits in restorative justice, while also seeing its potential in responding to youth sex offences (Daly 2002, 2006, 2022). This was the first phase of my research on restorative justice; two others—the race and gender politics of justice and the continuum of conventional and innovative justice responses—are discussed in research area (3).
In 1999, a new kind of court, an Indigenous sentencing court, began in Adelaide and spread to other Australian jurisdictions. We studied the courts in South Australia, New South Wales, and Queensland (Daly and Proietti-Scifoni 2009; Marchetti and Daly 2007, 2017). These courts were not a type of restorative justice or therapeutic jurisprudence. Thus, in 2007, I created the term innovative justice to capture a set of diverse alternatives to conventional criminal justice; some of which (not all) were types of restorative justice.
Over the years, I have used the term ‘innovative justice’ to refer to (1) practices that seek to address victims’ justice needs or interests (Daly 2011) and (2) practices that focus on the causes of offending and pathways to desistance (such as Indigenous sentencing courts). However, my principal theoretical and research focus has been on responses to victims of sexual, partner, and family violence. Examples are restorative justice conferences, victim-offender meetings, people’s tribunals, memorials, days of reflection or action, cultural performance, women’s police stations, women’s courts, and more recently, new communication technologies and online spaces. Innovative justice responses may be part of criminal justice, work alongside, or be independent of it.
Responses to sexual, partner, and family violence
Restorative justice and First Nations practices such as sentencing circles became controversial when debating their merits for sexual, partner, and family violence cases. (Note that while sentencing circles and Indigenous sentencing courts have a similar purpose, their implementation differs.) In the late 1990s and early 2000s, debates were fierce, but there was scant research on actual practices.
I framed the character of debates as the race and gender politics of justice, a term that encapsulates the different emphases First Nations (or Indigenous people or other racialised political minority groups) and feminist groups take in seeking justice. Simplifying, the former emphasise alleged wrongdoers’ interests, and the latter, victims’ interests. I fully recognize that political positions are more complex than this, but the character of debate takes this form. Today, debates are framed as anti-carceral and carceral feminism, but the couplet is overly dichotomous and oppositional. I have argued we cannot dispense with criminal justice but must consider restorative and innovative justice practices, and we should view responses as residing on a continuum that includes hybrid forms (Daly 2011, 2013).
Debates on restorative justice for sexual, partner, and family violence brought me to Australia in 1995, but I could not undertake empirical research then. I did so in the early 2000s in a project with Sarah Curtis-Fawley and Leanne Weber, in which we created a dataset of 385 youth sexual assault cases handled in court and by conference over a 6.5-year period, and we interviewed conference coordinators, victims, and victim advocates in South Australia and New Zealand (the Sexual Assault Archival Study, or SAAS) (Daly 2006). Solo and with others, I have written many articles on conventional and innovative responses to sexual, partner, and family violence (e.g., Curtis-Fawley and Daly 2005; Daly and Bouhours 2010; Daly and Curtis-Fawley 2006; Marchetti and Daly 2017; see also Marchetti 2019, Indigenous Courts, Culture and Partner Violence). To address the sources of conflict and ambivalence in the race and gender politics of justice, I proposed an intersectional politics of justice (Daly 2008).
A significant problem in early debates was our use of the term ‘gendered violence’ to include diverse types of violence. This resulted in people talking past each other: some had in mind partner violence, while for others, it was child sexual abuse. Debates overlooked differences in context, victim-offender relationships, victim age, and whether victimisation was on-going or not. It was also important to clarify that innovative justice mechanisms could not replace a criminal justice system but had to work alongside efforts to reform it (Daly 2008, response to Annie Cossins). The reason is that no innovative justice mechanism has a method for determining whether an accused person is responsible for an offence.
In the first decade of 2000, I began to read the literatures on sexual and violent victimisation in war zones, developing countries, and institutional or closed settings. I did so because I wished to include innovative justice practices that were outside western affluent democracies at peace (e.g., informal or local justice) or outside a standard individual context of victimisation (e.g., institutional contexts). This resulted in my taking a larger, more global view on responses to sexual and violent victimisation, one that included different country contexts, organisational or institutional settings, and victim-offender relationships.
I created the Sexual Violence and Justice Matrix to depict different contexts of offending and victimisation, problems victims faced seeking justice, and justice mechanisms available (e.g., criminal or civil justice, informal justice, redress or reparation schemes). Within each matrix cell, the research task was to assess and compare victim/survivors’ experiences with one or more conventional and innovative justice mechanisms, using my construct of victims’ justice interests for participation, voice, validation, vindication, and offender accountability-taking responsibility (Daly 2014, 2017). By taking this approach, I reasoned we could build a body of empirical evidence on the strengths and limits of conventional and innovative justice responses to diverse forms of sexual and violent victimisation. I applied the construct to court and conference handling of sibling sexual violence cases (Daly and Wade 2017) and to 19 cases of institutional justice in Australia and Canada (Daly 2014), which was my first book-length text on institutional justice.
Money justice
My research on redress schemes for institutional abuse of children led to a curiosity about the meanings of money as justice to victims of violence, and the actual amounts awarded. Money justice takes varied forms: payments to plaintiffs in civil suits and to victims in state and non-state schemes for wrongs (Daly and Davis 2021). Robyn Holder and I carried out a study of state schemes for victims of sexual violence to determine money’s meanings to victims and whether social inequalities were evident in amounts awarded (Daly and Holder 2019; Holder and Daly 2018). Four decades ago, Lawrence Friedman (1985, Total Justice) coined the term ‘total justice’ to refer to a ‘general expectation of justice … [and] of recompense for injuries and loss in the U.S.’ Total justice can be seen as defining a mindset, and money justice, as defining the actual practices, outcomes, and meanings of money. Because there is overlap in research areas (4) and (5), some publications are in both.
Institutional justice
My latest project, with Juliet Davis, the Institutional Redress Project (IRP), is the largest I’ve ever undertaken. Along with other staff who worked on the project over the years, we have written detailed case studies on 68 cases of institutional abuse and neglect and related historical/policy wrongs HPW (e.g., forced assimilation by child removal or forced labour) in 22 countries or self-governing territories.
Institutional justice is a term I coined to refer to responses to all forms of child (and at times, adult) institutional abuse and neglect—contemporary and non-recent (formerly ‘historical’) and HPW—by state- and faith-based entities. Reponses include criminal justice, inquiries or other investigations, money justice (civil justice and redress schemes) and other redress elements (e.g., apologies and commemorative activities).
Our aim is to identify patterns in when and why the problem arose, to provide an authoritative record of responses from the earliest relevant inquiry (1973) and redress scheme (1988) to the present, and to compare countries and responses over time with quantitative datasets and case studies. Other published research in the field has focused on only state or faith-based cases or for a small number of countries and public inquiries (typically in English-speaking jurisdictions). To date, there has been no comparative analysis of cases and case outcomes using quantitative variables. A book on project findings is underway. In the meanwhile, this website provides articles, book chapters, media stories, and submissions (commentaries) to Australian and New Zealand state- and faith-based authorities.
General criminology, criminal justice, and justice
This area has publications that do not fall easily into the previous areas. They include a 1983 book on weapons and violent crime (3rd author with two UMass academics); an edited text on Australian criminology (with Andrew Goldsmith and Mark Israel, two editions in 2003 and 2006); and solo or with others, articles on criminology and criminal justice in textbooks, some of which some compare justice mechanisms. Other publications are rock ‘n roll criminology, women’s activism surrounding the Srebrenica genocide in the Bosnian war, and case study research methods. A featured publication on justice, written for the Sutherland Award, is in this research area.