Napier Talks: For Sarah There Is Only One Life

Professor Richard W. Whitecross is at the Lindsay Stewart Lecture Theatre on Wednesday 4 November, from 5:30pm to 7:30pm, with For Sarah There Is Only One Life. It's part of the Napier Talks series, which is back this term asking a simple but heavy question: what does justice actually feel like for the people experiencing it?

Whitecross uses the story of Sarah and her son Will to show how domestic abuse exposes some of the deepest gaps in our modern justice systems. The core of the talk is the distance between institutional process and lived experience. He describes how criminal courts, family courts, social services, and policymakers often treat these as separate cases, while the families involved are living a single, interconnected reality. It's a way of looking at how the system fragments a person's life into different files and departments, while the person at the centre is still just living through it all at once.

He describes the session as part personal journey and part public challenge, and it's framed as an invitation to rethink how we support families, protect women and children, and build institutions that can see the people behind the process. It's not just a lecture to listen to and leave; it's meant to be a starting point for a wider conversation about how the system works—or doesn't—for the people it's supposed to serve.

The evening is open to alumni, friends, and anyone interested in the subject, and there's a networking reception after the talk, so you can stick around and keep talking. Registration is free via Humanitix, and it runs from 5:30pm to 7:30pm at the Lindsay Stewart Lecture Theatre, Edinburgh Napier University.