Poverty, Probation and Empowerment
| DOI | 10.1177/026455058903600407 |
| Date | 01 December 1989 |
| Published date | 01 December 1989 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Poverty,
Probation and
Empowerment
David Cochrane of the Worksop and Retford team in
North Nottinghamshire illustrates how it is possible, even
in seemingly mundane ways, to challenge the ’psychology
of powerlessness’, generated by changes in economic and
social policy and the dominant ideology of individual
responsibility.
e face a elimate in
which the exercise of
power by working peo-
ple through their unions
has been severely curtail-
ed and most unemployed
people have been reduced
in status from claimants to
supplicants. These changes
are underpinned by the
dogma that only the fear of
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dire necessity will motivate and
that welfare ’hand-outs’ simply
create a corrosive indigence. As
in Victorian times poverty is
rendered an expression of some-
one’s moral and psychological
inadequacies rather than something
for which we
all share a responsibility.
in a parallel way the dominant
ideology in probation work has
177
substantially returned to models of
accept that their poverty is somehow
individual pathology with the em-
justified, or that even if they see it as
phasis on ’Offending Behaviour’, the
unjust they are powerless to act against
core of which is the task of confront-
the injustice. This latter attitude could
ing individuals with the need to accept
usefully be viewed as resulting from an
individual moral responsibility for their
accumulation of experiences through-
acts. Clearly this is both necessary and
out a person’s development. (As such
useful but it needs to be honestly
it is a dimension of a person’s history
balanced with the less comfortable and
we
are unlikely to explore.) These ex-
accessible task of addressing ’structural’
periences are mediated through all the
issues with clients. Given that the Pro-
usual agencies: Family, School, Work
bation Service is beset by threats of
or the DSS, and perhaps most recently
privatisation and Audit Commission
the Criminal Justice System.
criteria it is not surprising that Proba-
What I am suggesting here is that
tion workers feel unconfident about
how we might ’do’ empowerment is
overcoming a sense of powerlessness
viewed in a similar cumulative fashion.
in themselves and their clients.
The issue then becomes: how can the
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Probation Service provide an orchest-
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rated variety of empowerment-building
experiences which challenge the
What, if anything, can be done?
fatalism which enables
Elsewhere in this
poverty to
Issue Tony Broadbent
persist? Some partial answers to this
lists a variety of ways in which we can
question are suggested under three
engage in the task of tackling the
headings: Individual and Group work,
poverty of the people we are trying to
Social Action and Client Participation
help. The specific focus of this paper
in Service management.
is to provide some comments on the
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idea of empowerment which he uses
Individual
.
contact and
,
as a heading for a certain range of
group
i
work
activities. The suggestion here will be
that ’empowerment’, by which I mean
A person’s experience of being
what we do to enhance a client’s
respected and having some sense of
control over his or her life, is a dimen-
personal power begins from the minute
sion of all the work we undertake. The
they walk in the door, having received
most helpful definition of poverty is
their first invitation to have contact
arguably that which talks in terms of
with us. How
...
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