Recognition and Justice? Conceptualizing Support for Women Whose Children Are in Care or Adopted

Janet Boddy,Bella Wheeler

doi:10.3390/soc10040096

Abstract

This paper examines the views of mothers who have experienced (or are judged to be at risk of) recurrent removal of children into care or adoption. Drawing on their accounts of working with an intensive 18 month support program called Pause, we argue for the relevance of conceptualizing policy and practice with reference to Honneth’s theory of recognition and Fraser’s arguments about the need to address misrecognition through redistribution, attending to gendered political and economic injustice. The analysis draws on qualitative longitudinal interviews with 49 women, conducted as part of a national UK Department for Education (DfE)-funded evaluation of Pause. Each woman was interviewed up to four times over a period of up to 20 months, both during and after the Pause intervention. Case-based longitudinal analysis illuminates how stigma can obscure women’s rights and needs—including welfare entitlements and health, as well as rights to family life—and shows how support can act to enable both redistribution, advocating to ensure women’s rights in a context of diminishing public welfare, and recognition, challenging stigmatization through recognition of women’s motherhood, and of their rights to care, solidarity, respect and fun.

Highlights

Participants were sampled from a mix of older and more recently established Pause practices, to represent different local authority and delivery characteristics, including a ‘care leavers pilot’ that targeted women aged 16 to 25 who had been in care during childhood and had one or more children in care or adoption
Communication between birth mothers and the professionals involved with their children is inevitably complex, but our analysis suggests that this may be less difficult when women are recognized and supported in managing motherhood at a distance
The women we interviewed all had extensive experience of multiple different agencies being involved in their lives, and as detailed above this was often experienced in ways that could be understood as misrecognition, both frustrating and stigmatizing

Summary

Introduction

‘Understanding the wounds of stigma as social and political injuries can assist in the forging of networks of care and solidarity’. [1] (p. 29). The historic absence of policy attention or service provision for mothers whose children are removed into care or adoption, and those who experience repeat removals, can be recognized as socio-political misrecognition in Fraser’s [23] terms These women are subjected to ‘stigma power’ [1] 152) argued for the potential of recognition theory to enhance ethical thinking and practice in child and family social work She highlighted Honneth’s emphasis on reciprocity as key to emancipatory practice, recognizing the power differential between the woman/family and the professional, and helping to shift towards working in a relationship ‘where each participant has something to offer and to receive’. Mutual engagement in fun activities might help to avoid a deficit-focused and stigmatizing ‘way of seeing’ [28] (p. 731), as part of an enabling practice that responds to inequalities of power by addressing social justice and ‘establishing the misrecognized party as a full member of society, capable of participating on a par with other members’ [23] (p. 26)

Aims

Methods

Findings

Recognition as Praxis

Discussion and Conclusions