Book Review: Criminalized Mothers, Criminalizing Mothering
| Author | Sarah Singh |
| Published date | 01 October 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663917710975b |
| Date | 01 October 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
about 20 minutes to fill out and produced a ‘class classification’). As a social scientist, I
was struck by the ways the authors painstakingly take the survey apart and provide the
epistemological and ontological thinking behind its clever and simple design. I cannot
recall a similar sociological study that has grown from an internationally publicized
survey – the largest survey of social class ever conducted in the United Kingdom.
Readers will be fascinated by the attention to detail given in the take-up of the survey
and the distribution and disparities found at the local levels. In and of itself, the take-up
of the survey reflected the marked geographical divisions in why some people are
interested in class and others are not. As Savage notes, ‘it is the more affluent who seem
to be more interested in the topic of class, even though they might also be sceptical of the
survey results’ (p. 11). And on the same page ‘ ...Of the 161,000 respondents, not a
single cleaner or worker in elementary (basic) services or plastics processing answered’.
The book offers a superb methodology and analysis of how the GCBS questions were
calibrated. For students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, the book will provide a
rich and relevant insight into how to produce rigorous data from survey research and how
to marry together online digital engage ment with more conventional modes of data
collection. I refer here to the inclusion into the study of one of the UK’s leading
researchers of the precariat, Lisa McKenzie, who lent her ethnographic skills to inter-
rogate why the precariat had not engaged with the survey. The methodological richness
of this book is certainly a key strength.
The first key finding is that in the United Kingdom today there is a clearly defined
wealth elite at the top and the precariat at the bottom, alongside huge numbers of people
located in five middle-class structures that are fluid and mobile in their orientation. The
second, perhaps more significant, finding is that Britain is facing new mountains of
inequality fuelled by a ‘housing aristocracy’, regional, national and intra-city divides
and the elite educational and professional institutions that are affiliated to political
parties (and no longer to occupational classes). The ‘cultural class analysis’ fundamental
to the framing of these findings reveals extremely interesting things about how classify-
ing processes themselves are necessarily morally loaded and inherently hierarchical and
proliferate a politics of stigmatization. This is somewhat ironic, given the GBCS is itself
a survey that seeks to classify!But this misses the point of this book, which is to place
under a political microscope the ways in which we discourse on class and how
we positon ‘our own class’. Sadly, it is this politics of classification that has led to the
precariat becoming invisible in modern Britain today.
LAURA PIACENTINI
University of Strathclyde, UK
MINAKER J and HOGEVEEN B (eds), Criminalized Mothers, Criminalizing Mothering. Bradford:
Demeter Press, 2015, pp. 422, ISBN 9781926452012, $34.95 (hbk).
Criminalized Mothers, Criminalizing mothering has a far broader focus/reach than the
title perhaps implies; exploring the connections between criminalization, social
654 Social & Legal Studies 26(5)
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