Book review: Mothering Justice: Working with Mothers in Criminal and Social Justice Settings
| Author | Rachel Goldhill |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0264550516668425 |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice
Probation Journal
Book reviews
2016, Vol. 63(3) 376–381
ª The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0264550516668425
prb.sagepub.com
Mothering Justice: Working with Mothers in Criminal
and Social Justice Settings
Lucy Baldwin (ed.)
Waterside Press; 2015; pp. 320; £25, pbk
ISBN: 978-1-909-97623-8
Reviewed by: Rachel Goldhill, Senior Lecturer, University of
Portsmouth
In Mothering Justice the mantra of child centredness is held up for closer inspection.
Of course the well qualified academics and practitioners who author this book
believe that a child’s welfare is of the utmost importance. Where they differ is in their
belief that doing the best for the child always involves supporting the mother-child
relationship as fully as it can be, wherever possible. The authors’ biographies,
which reveal varied, impressive achievements and skills, include their credentials as
mothers. Lucy Baldwin, the editor, describes her experiences as a teenage single
parent, recounting the support she received from two significant professionals, her
midwife and health visitor; without them she feels her life may have been quite
different. Sinead O’Malley’s background is described as social worker, teacher,
survivor and mother of a six-year-old boy.
Strength of feeling around the importance of motherhood permeates the text
whilst also emphasizing that some mothers are more acceptable within society than
others. For example, Chapter 10 gives an account of a wealthy middle class
business woman whose four-year-old daughter swallows her mother’s cocaine,
believing it to be sherbet. There is an investigation but few ongoing concerns remain
and the case is rapidly closed. This compares sharply to the other case studies of
women in the book with backgrounds of poverty, exclusion, neglect and abuse,
which will be instantly recognizable to those working in probation fields.
An early chapter on social workers’...
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