‘Within my work environment I don’t see gender as an issue’: Reflections on gender from a study of criminal justice social workers in Scotland

Trish Mcculloch,Viviene E Cree,Eve Mullins,Steve Kirkwood

doi:10.1177/0264550520939153

Trish Mcculloch, Viviene E Cree + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1177/0264550520939153

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Journal: Probation Journal	Publication Date: Jul 17, 2020
Citations: 1	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Edinburgh, University of Dundee

Abstract

Community justice professionals operate within deeply gendered territory, yet there has been little attention to how gender is understood and embodied by the workforce. Building on findings from a mixed method study, this article explores professional perceptions of how gender plays out in criminal justice social work (CJSW) in Scotland. Our findings demonstrate that gender is an important but neglected dimension of CJSW. We conclude that advancing gender in this field requires a more inclusive theorising of gender in professional education and research, a more practical commitment to gender equality in policy and practice, and more routine opportunities for dialogue on issues of gender and justice within and across these domains.

Highlights

Criminal justice social work (CJSW) in Scotland operates within a landscape which, until the present time, has been underpinned by a set of ideas and assumptions about gender that have been largely taken-for-granted at all levels
As CJSW and probation services across the United Kingdom and beyond continue to grapple with gendered questions of identity, purpose, and method (Porporino, 2018; Robinson et al, 2016), located within broader global debates about how to conceptualise and advance justice within post-socialist neoliberal territories – where values of individualism, responsibilisation, and social control dominate (Arruzza et al, 2019; Fraser, 2005), we set out to ask: how do gender issues play out today in CJSW’s identity and practice? We explored this question in three ways: through a review of archival, documentary, and research literature; a Scottish-wide online survey and three focus group interviews with practitioners in two local authorities in Scotland
We found little explicit evidence of the sexist assumptions expressed by Bilton in the introduction to this article, in respect of how CJSW was perceived within the profession

Summary

Introduction

Criminal justice social work (CJSW) in Scotland operates within a landscape which, until the present time, has been underpinned by a set of ideas and assumptions about gender that have been largely taken-for-granted at all levels. Social Work is carried out largely by women, with women clients and with a gendered raison d’etre that places women’s need for protection at its core. Contemporary justice systems are beginning to acknowledge the need for a more inclusive approach to understanding gender, while, at the same time, grappling with particular gendered challenges in the form of increased reporting of domestic abuse, ‘record levels’ of sexual offences and a drive towards gender responsivity in the service’s work with women (BBC, 2019; Burman and Gelsthorpe, 2017; Scottish Government, 2019). The competing agendas here are, at the very least, tricky to negotiate, if not downright contradictory, and yet gender remains an underexplored dynamic within criminal and community justice, in respect of how gender is understood, experienced, and embodied by these workforces

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