Increasing access and transparency: evaluating transcript provision for rape victims in Scottish legal proceedings

Purpose – This viewpoint is in response to the Scottish Government announcing a yearlong pilot scheme to make court transcripts available to complainants of rape who have had their case heard in the High Court. This is the outcome of a campaign led by survivors to make accessible records of their trial. Here, a five-question model is applied which cautions the use of written records of spoken interaction by asking, how adequate are they for the purpose intended to serve? 

Approach – Five questions are asked of transcripts, or written records, from a previously developed model (Richardson, Haworth & Deamer, 2022): (i) Are they an accurate representation of the spoken interaction that took place?; (ii) Who has agency, whose ‘voice’ is represented in the recorded account?; (iii) Do lay and professional parties have ownership over the record?; (iv) How usable is the record; and (v) How resource efficient it is to produce?

Findings – The application of these questions to the yearlong pilot scheme offers a view on how transcripts, as written records of spoken interaction, must be considered not as direct replicas of the interaction that took place, but as a subjective text created by professional parties. In making these available, ownership is significantly increased. However, whether they are adequate for the purpose they intend to serve is yet to be known. 

Originality – The originality of this viewpoint is offering a framework in which to locate some of the potential considerations by which to evaluate the pilot scheme. In considering how ‘high’ or ‘low’ answers to the five questions might ‘score’ and recognising that as the scheme develops these issues intersect, consequences may be predicted by what is already known. For example, by increasing resource efficiency, you might decrease accuracy of representation – and vice versa.