Jean Spence

What's at risk? The proliferation of risk across child and youth policy in England

The concept of risk has found increasing prominence in social policy, human services management and front-line practice in recent years. This is particularly the case in relation to children and young people, who, in the UK, have been subject to a range of interventions based on the identification of population-based risk factors. Through the analysis of UK publications (primarily covering England) relating to children and young people during the Labour Government (1997–2010), this article identifies how risk has proliferated across a wide range of youth-related fields, becoming a social, political and moral entity in itself rather than a tool for primarily criminological prediction and intervention. The article concludes that this proliferation demands further empirical study and theoretical scrutiny beyond the criminal justice sphere in which it is often contained and also questions the extent to which the construction of youth both ‘at-risk’ and ‘as-risk’ is a useful and effective way of driving policy and practice interventions.

“Side by Side With Our Men?” Women's Activism, Community, and Gender in the 1984–1985 British Miners’ Strike

This paper explores the gendered concept of community with reference to the activism of women during the UK 1984–1985 miners’ strike. Drawing on texts from the period and reflective discussions twenty years later with women associated with the strike, it interrogates the ways in which the idea of community was used to accommodate the activism of women. We argue that the apparently gender-neutral ideal of mining community carried meanings that had ambiguous political implications for the women and that the strike highlighted paradoxes that question established understanding of female strike activism.

The politics of the doorstep : female survival strategies and the legacy of the miners’ strike 1984–85.

This paper considers the legacy of continuing activism of women in the North East of England who organized in support of the 1984–85 miners’ strike. It refers to the traditional responsibility of women in mining localities for the maintenance of neighbourhood and kin relations and using the example of a key activist in one ex-mining village, it argues that the values associated with ‘mining community’ remain relevant as a reference point for a self-conscious, politicized reshaping of local relationships in post-industrial conditions. The material basis for this self-conscious approach has shifted from the masculine sphere of mining work and its associated community institutions to the feminized sphere of location and neighbourhood.

Collecting Women’s Lives: the challenge of feminism in UK youth work in the 1970s and 80s

A distinctively feminist youth work movement which flourished between the mid 1970s and the late 1980s has been submerged by organisational change. The feminist political critique which encouraged young women’s agency has been replaced by equal opportunities policies and problem‐based interventions. Documentary evidence of feminist youth work is now scattered, in danger of being lost like the history of the pre‐war Girls’ Club Movement which succumbed to ‘mixed sex’ approaches. This article is informed by the evidence in a small private archive, by empirical research with women youth workers undertaken in North‐East England in 1988 and 1993 and by the author’s personal recollections. It discusses how feminist efforts to enhance the agency and autonomy of working‐class young women and of female youth workers were fractured in the drive towards centralised managerial control characteristic of public sector conditions after the election of the Conservative Government in 1979.

Female involvement in the miners' strike 1984-1985 : trajectories of activism.

This paper is based on recent primary research interviews with women who were active in the 1984-1985 miners’ strike. The paper claims that one depiction of womens engagement in the strike has been privileged above others: activist women were miners’ wives who embarked on a linear passage from domesticity and political passivity into politicisation and then retreated from political engagement following the defeat. This depiction is based on a masculinist view which sees political action as organisationally based and which fails to recognise the importance of small scale and emotional political work which women did and continue to undertake within their communities. In reality many women were politically active and aware prior to the dispute though not necessarily in a traditional sense. Womens activism is characterised by continuity: those women who have maintained activism were likely to have been socially and/or politically active prior to the dispute.

Gender and Class Negotiations in an Edwardian Welfare Organisation: a Tale of Two Women

This article considers the role played by two women in the establishment of a ‘Waifs Rescue Agency and Street Vendors’ Club’, opened for boys in the East End of Sunderland in 1902. The parts played by the women enabled the male managers to resolve tensions relating to discourses of ‘rescue’ associated with a Barnardo model of social work, and the realities of the practical need of local boys for a place of recreation more appropriate to club work. The club minutes illustrate the association between middle‐class female power and the caring aspects of child rescue enshrined within social work. Resistance of local families to rescue afforded a place for working‐class female intervention but only if it remained invisible and under the protection of the middle‐class female presence. The story of the two women explains how institutional masculine power was reasserted through a reconfiguration of practices and relationships.