Pamela Cox

Juvenile Justice Reform and Policy Convergence in the New Vietnam

This article analyses juvenile justice reform in Vietnam and suggests how this connects with key transformations in wider Vietnamese cultures of control. It offers a grounded investigation of themes raised in recent discussions of policy transfer in the global criminal justice field. It concurs with others that global processes of policy convergence have their local limits, using Vietnamese examples to illustrate where this convergence comes about in practice and where it does not. It explores efforts to professionalize existing community justice practices through a discussion of perceived needs for ‘training’ and for the expansion of ‘counselling’. In doing so, it aims to show how justice practices that might be called ‘neo-welfarist’ are emerging in one of East Asia’s most remarkable political hybrids — the new Vietnam — a communist state that has embraced economic liberalism and, in the process, is creating a new kind of ‘social’ sphere.

Marginalized Mothers, Reproductive Autonomy, and ‘Repeat Losses to Care’

Over 70,000 children are ‘looked after’ by local authorities in England and Wales. Emerging research suggests that a significant proportion of their birth parents have either already lost a child to permanent adoption or will go on to lose others. These ‘repeat loss’ cases raise difficult questions about marginalized mothers and their reproductive autonomy. This article considers past and present tactics used by the state in its attempts to limit that autonomy, including institutionalization, sterilization, long‐acting contraception, and permanent adoption. It argues that the gradual democratization of intimate citizenship over the past century, defined as a persons ability to choose and direct their intimate relationships, has obliged the contemporary state to develop new tactics which aim to build personal capacity and to balance enhanced child protection with enhanced reproductive autonomy.

Futures for feminist histories

Books reviewed in this article: Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought Barbara Laslett, Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres, Mary Jo Maynes, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Jeanne Barker-Nunn (eds), History and Theory: Feminist Research, Debates, Contestations Joan Wallach Scott (ed.), Feminism and History

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.

Evaluating integrative services in edge-of-care work

ABSTRACT Children living on ‘the edge-of-care’ are typically known to local safeguarding authorities and are considered likely to face risks to their safety. Many are subject to a child protection plan and/or involved in ‘pre-proceedings’ processes. A growing number of their parents face (un)diagnosed mental health difficulties as well as economic and social precarity. This article draws on a mixed methods evaluation of a pilot service in the East of England offering a therapeutically led attachment-based intervention for families. The service cross-cuts health and social care, allowing psychologists and psychotherapists to work alongside social workers and other practitioners. The evaluation examined psychological and safeguarding outcomes and explored practitioner perspectives. A key outcome was that 85.4% of families were enabled to remain, or reunite with their child, compared with an estimated 50% of ‘edge-of-care’ cases nationally. This supports the need for similarly oriented interventions that could help lower the incidence of child removals.

Knowing their Place: domestic service in twentieth-century BritainLUCY DELAP

away from the scene of the crime to listen to teacher. Nor does he shy away from speculating about what really happened to Harry Pace. His conclusion that Pace killed himself by taking arsenic over a six-month period is baffling, however. Pace often threatened to do himself in, but why would he have given himself such a protracted, painful, undignified and passive death when he had a violent, impulsive disposition and ropes aplenty to hand? The story as Carter Wood unfolds it, led this reader to believe that Harry Pace was murdered by his wife. She had motive, means and opportunity, and was lucky enough to come to trial at a time when a sense of collective shame about poor mothers and their children was high, and newspapers and their readers (from all walks of life) were avid for working-class heroes and heroines. Beatrice Pace’s unshakeable (and morally indefensible) conviction that she had done the right thing for herself and her family enabled her not only to face down her prosecutors, but to hold her nerve in the months afterwards.

Feminism and Criminal Justice: a historical perspective ANNE LOGAN

Anne Logan’s valuable book traces women’s engagement with criminal justice policy in England and Wales in the first half of the twentieth century. It focuses on the activities of women linked to feminist organisations or sharing a feminist outlook, broadly defined. Logan draws on a range of historical sources, spanning personal papers, parliamentary records and periodicals to map the changing contours of what she describes as a ‘feminist-criminal-justice reform network’. Her account is divided into five substantive chapters. The first of these sets out the key groups involved in criminal justice reform and the remaining four assess the impact of their interventions in specific fields in which women played a particular role: juvenile justice, women in the criminal courts, women in the penal system and the care of victims. Logan’s work makes a very useful contribution to the modern history of women and criminal justice. A number of studies have now looked at the experiences of women and girls in the criminal justice system as offenders and victims. Others have examined the role of women in formal and informal policing. This book expands on this by focusing on women’s involvement in defining and delivering justice beyond their now quite well-documented roles in the police force and moral welfare organisations. Logan shows that women engaged with the criminal justice system through three, often overlapping, channels: as volunteers (as, for example, magistrates, jurors and after-care workers), as professionals (such as lawyers, probation officers and secure estate staff), and as lobbyists (involved in a wide range of associations concerned with penal reform and/or gender equality). Many of the women featured in the study multitasked their way between all three categories in the course of their careers. Others saw these categories as a source of tension between women, with professional women sometimes being highly critical of the efforts of ‘untrained amateurs’. One of the most important aspects of this book is its documentation of the sheer scope of women’s associational cultures and its claim that these were significant Women’s History Review Vol. 21, No. 2, April 2012, pp. 325–337