Steve Kirkwood

Integration and reintegration: Comparing pathways to citizenship through asylum and criminal justice

The development of scholarship related to particular categories of people who are subject to different forms of social control often results in subfields that become or remain isolated from each other. As an example, theory and research relating to the reintegration of ex-offenders and the integration of asylum seekers have developed almost completely independently. However, both processes involve people who are marginalized and stigmatized through legal and social processes, and policies and practices in the two fields share somewhat similar concepts and goals. This article therefore seeks to identify insights through a critical comparison of these two areas of research, theory and practice, with the intention of enriching our understanding of both. This comparison highlights that the frameworks reviewed here enable us to move beyond a narrow focus on service user’s behaviours, needs or risks, and into an examination of questions of identity, belonging and justice.

Restorative Justice Cases in Scotland: Factors Related to Participation, the Restorative Process, Agreement Rates and Forms of Reparation

This research draws on four years of data from three restorative justice services in Scotland to explore the factors associated with service user participation, agreement rates, the use of direct or indirect restorative processes, and different forms of reparation. Among other things, the results show that participation is more likely if the accused is contacted before the victim, if the alleged offence involves vandalism, and if the accused is male or young or does not have a recorded history of offending. The results suggest that, given appropriate ethical and safety considerations, the default practice should be to approach the accused first. The implications of the results are discussed within a theoretical framework.

Desistance in action: An interactional approach to criminal justice practice and desistance from offending

Research on the role of narrative and identity in desistance from crime tends to rely on interview methods. This article argues research and theory on desistance and interventions for addressing offending would be enriched by the qualitative analysis of interactions between criminal justice practitioners and service users. This approach is illustrated by applying discourse analysis and conversation analysis to video recordings of a groupwork programme for addressing offending behaviour. The analysis shows that: (1) service users may exhibit ambivalence to pro-social identities; (2) practitioners may orient to this resistance and encourage positive change; (3) other group members’ change narratives constitute resources to support desistance. This illustrates how an interactional approach to desistance can enhance understandings of practice and change processes.

Towards an interactional approach to reflective practice in social work

Reflective practice is a key aspiration within social work; being a reflective practitioner is considered to be a foundational attribute of the social work professional. However, achieving reflective practice is not straightforward. Reflection is inevitably subject to issues of memory and recall, so that the recollection of a case is likely to differ in important ways from the original instance. Moreover, giving an account of an event to ones peers or supervisors involves aspects of justification and self-presentation that may emphasise selectively and ignore key details of the original event, whether through a process of conscious omission or subconscious forgetting. This article reports on a knowledge exchange project that sought to enhance criminal justice social workers’ reflective practice through the use of the Conversation Analytic Role-play Method, an approach that is methodologically and theoretically grounded in the study of talk-in-interaction, drawing on video re-enactments of real encounters between practitioners and service users. We argue that by engaging collaboratively in this way, the practitioners and researchers learned a great deal about how practice in criminal justice social work is ‘done’ and also about the wider context within which criminal justice social work is practised.

Asylum-Seekers and the Right to Work

For many people, the right to work is taken for granted. It is assumed that being in employment of some kind, earning a wage to support yourself and your family, is something to which everyone is entitled. However, it is also often accepted that there is not necessarily an automatic right to work when someone is outside his or her country of nationality, where work visas and other restrictions might apply. As highlighted in the quote above, the UK and other jurisdictions tend to restrict the scope for asylum-seekers to work, in effect making it illegal for people to work before and unless their application for asylum is accepted. Currently in the UK, asylum-seekers who have waited more than 12 months for a decision on their asylum claims, and who are deemed as not responsible for the delay, are eligible to apply for permission to work, although this is restricted to jobs on the shortage occupation list (Gower, 2011). The effect of these restrictions is such that it results in a total ban on working for almost all asylum-seekers. The quote above also makes a connection between entering a country on the grounds of seeking asylum and entering for employment purposes, in this sense restricting asylum-seekers’ rights in order to prevent someone entering to work under the guise of seeking asylum. This argument — whereby the ends are treated as justifying the means, and any negative impact on asylum-seekers may be portrayed as regrettable and unintended — leads to unfavourable outcomes for asylum-seekers and demonstrates an overriding focus on deterrence and exclusion.

Encountering #Feminism on Twitter: Reflections on a research collaboration between social scientists and computer scientists

The growth of social media presents an unparalleled opportunity for the study of social change. However, the speed and scale of this growth presents challenges for social scientists, particularly those whose methodologies tend to rely on the qualitative analysis of data that are gathered firsthand. Alongside the growth of social media, companies have emerged which have developed tools for interrogating ‘big data’, although often unconnected from social scientists. It is self-evident that collaboration between social scientists and social media analysis companies offers the potential for developing methods for analysing social change on large scales, bringing together their respective expertise in technological innovations and knowledge of social science. What is less well known is how such a partnership might work in practice. This article presents an example of such a collaboration, highlighting the opportunities and challenges that arose in the context of an exploration of feminism on Twitter. As will be shown, machine-learning technologies allow the analysis of data on a scale that would be impossible for human analysts, yet such approaches also heighten challenges regarding the study of social change and communication.

Evaluating social pedagogy in the UK: Methodological issues

In recent years, various social services in the UK have piloted using social pedagogy – a broadly education-based approach to bringing about social change originating in mainland Europe – as a way of improving practice, particularly in residential childcare. Pilot evaluations of initiatives to introduce social pedagogy to children’s services have produced generally positive results, although the evidence remains modest and the studies are affected by a range of methodological limitations. In this article, we critically review existing evaluations, supplemented by insights from our experience as independent evaluators for a social pedagogy pilot for services supporting people with learning disabilities, to present an account of the challenges and opportunities of evaluating social pedagogy in the UK. We argue that some of the main challenges relate to defining social pedagogy, measuring the baseline prior to implementing social pedagogy training, understanding individual and organisational change, measuring outcomes and applying an appropriate approach for the evaluation. We conclude with recommendations for those intending to evaluate social pedagogy, and similar initiatives, in the future.

Places of Safety — Constructing Countries of Refuge

There is a range of evidence to suggest that asylum-seekers in the UK are fleeing dangerous situations in their countries of origin as shown in the previous chapter. These situations include persecution based on: gender (Crawley, 2010); sexual violence and the murder of family members (Sherwood & Liebling-Kalifani, 2012); torture (Behnia, 2004); and oppression and violence (Neumayer, 2005). A unifying characteristic of asylum-seekers is that they are from areas experiencing conflict and a lack of human rights. Taken together, this suggests that asylum-seekers were born into extremely dangerous countries and have been forced to leave for reasons of safety. In this chapter it is shown how refugees construct the UK as a place of refuge and — importantly — safety, which constitutes a specific place-identity (Durrheim & Dixon, 2005). While the UK is presented as a place of safety, it is not necessarily presented as a happy place or an ideal place to live, but safety is placed above this. While safety provides the main explanation for asylum-seekers coming to the UK, asylum-seekers’ claims about safety are not always accepted (the following chapter addresses the notion of the ‘bogus’ asylum-seeker who is deemed to be interested in financial gain), so claims about asylum-seekers being interested in safety are shown to be contested and debated. In addition to this, the safety of the UK as a host country is also debated, with some suggesting that asylum-seekers being housed in deprived communities can increase the safety in those areas, while others suggest that the presence of asylum-seekers can be damaging to safety.

Refugees, Asylum-Seekers and Integration

The concept of integration is often used in academic literature, policy discussions, the media and everyday conversations when discussing the experiences of migrants. Despite (or perhaps because of) its wide use, the term is used in a variety of ways, some of which are contradictory. The word may be used in ways that are vague, and as highlighted by the above quote from Castles and colleagues (2002), this raises questions about what people are meant to integrate into exactly. Given its versatility and prominence, this chapter explores how the notion of ‘integration’ is used among people who are involved in this process, as asylum-seekers and refugees who experience ‘integration’ at first hand, as professionals who assist asylum-seekers and refugees with ‘integration’, and as local members of the community who do (or do not) ‘integrate’ with asylum-seekers and refugees in their area. By analysing the ways in which it is used, we should gain a better understanding of the rhetorical force of this concept as well as how certain accounts function to sustain, criticize or alter policies and social relations between asylum-seekers, refugees and local members of the host society.

Relationships with Local Residents — Antagonism, Racism and Belonging

Research has found that public attitudes in the UK towards asylum-seekers and refugees are characterized by ambivalence and can include open hostility (Kushner, 2006; Lewis, 2005, 2006). More worryingly, many refugees and asylum-seekers in the UK have experienced discrimination or harassment (Bowes, Ferguson & Sim, 2009; Mulvey, 2011), including some high-profile murders, such as that of Firsat Dag in Glasgow in 2001 (Coole, 2002). However, there have also been instances where members of the local community have come together with asylum-seekers and refugees and advocated on their behalves (Bates & Kirkwood, 2013). As reflected in the quote above from Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee from Sudan, those fleeing persecution would hope to find peace and happiness in their place of asylum. So what do our interviewees have to say about relations between asylum-seekers, refugees and local residents?