Jackie Turton

Reducing recurrent care proceedings: initial evidence from new interventions

Abstract The English family justice system faces a crisis of recurrence. As many as one in four birth mothers involved in public law care proceedings in English family courts are likely to reappear in a subsequent set of proceedings within seven years. These mothers are involved in up to one-third of total care applications, as they are – by definition – linked to more than one child . Few birth mothers experiencing the removal of a child to care are offered any follow-up support, despite often facing multiple challenges including poverty, addiction, domestic violence and mental health problems. Since 2011, however, a number of new services have been established to begin to address their unmet needs. This article summarises the findings of the first academic-led evaluation of two of these initiatives. Presenting evidence from a mixed-methods evaluative study, it concludes that the new services were able to foster relationships that ‘worked’ in reducing recurrent proceedings. None of the women engaging with the services went on to experience what could be described as a ‘rapid repeat pregnancy’ within the evaluation window. Just as significantly, a number of clients reported some improvement in their psychological functioning, and the practitioners involved reported positively on their experience of delivering and managing innovative services. The article closes with a discussion of the challenges of evaluating personalised, strengths-based interventions and the possibilities of evidencing empowerment in these cases.

Women and the criminal justice system - moving beyond the silo

Women’s experiences of crime as both offenders and victims are different to their male counter-parts. They commit less crime, and the crime they commit is generally different to men’s, with less involvement in violent crime, criminal damage or professional crime. Women are much more likely to be victims of sexual and physical assault at the hands of a man they are acquainted with and in the context of relationships. However, women’s involvement with the criminal justice system often results in their isolation, stigmatisation and inadequate support—whether they are victims, offenders or both. This volume considers women’s involvement in criminal justice as a whole—to move beyond the silo of seeing two distinct groups by recognising that for many women there are similarities in both pathways to offending and pathways to victimisation. Furthermore, it aims to put women at the centre of the debate on crime and punishment. Too often in political discussions, academia and media reports, women’s involvement in the system is marginalised, ignored or lost in the concerns about male crime. This introduction highlights the key areas of debate and introduces the contributions by the authors in this collection.

Understanding violent women

Violent women pose a specific challenge for feminist scholars. Nevertheless, it is important for both the offender and her victims that feminists engage with this form of offending. This chapter considers some of the data concerning women’s violence, the public and professional responses to violent women and how researchers have attempted to understand their behaviour. Focusing around ‘extreme’ deeds, we use two forms of offending—women who kill, and women who sexually abuse children—to explore what we know about female violence and the significance of gender in both social and legal contexts.

Betrayal of Trust: Victims of Maternal Incest

As the chapters in this book indicate, the concept of trust is complex as it is used to inform numerous and diverse discourses (Bessant et al., 2005). The virtual notions of trust and trustworthiness are even more problematic when considering the relationships and responses of children and young people to the adult world. The intention of this chapter is to identify some of the particular problems experienced by victims of maternal incest. Here we explore the interplay between the individual dimensions of trust, concerning the child’s intimate and emotional relationship with an important other, alongside the broader social dimensions that should enable the sexually abused child to disclose.