Abstract
In a recent commentary on the Big Society agenda, Thompson (2011: 11) states:
If, dear reader, you once thought feminists were scary, beware of the new breed of sharp-suited social entrepreneurs currently schmoozing Whitehall, selling ways of commodifying Big Society initiatives targeted towards the problematic, the vulnerable and the poor – most frequently women – so that private financiers and bond holders can make profits on their investments. This is not about giving power and choice to the people. It is about selling off the welfare state and the last remnants of the social democratic dream to the cheapest bidder.
The gendered relations implied in the statement above for contemporary (criminal justice) policy are clear. The purpose of this commentary is to unpack, albeit briefly, how gender manifests itself within the Big Society agenda and the potential that it may have for criminal justice policy reflecting on the assessment offered by Morgan. In order to do this I shall take, as my criminal justice policy example, responding to domestic violence.
It is without question that the rhetoric around the Big Society idea has provided a vehicle, and indeed a gloss, for the introduction of policies and practices based upon the assumption that they will cost less to deliver. As Morgan’s piece intimates, this is the case across every sphere of public spending including the criminal justice system. Whilst there are clearly variations across the UK concerning the efficacy of this rhetoric (it being much less of a feature of policy debate in Wales and Scotland, for example), the impact of the contemporary economic climate has resulted in austerity measures everywhere. Whilst this wider economic context is clearly taking its toll in different and differential ways, the Big Society agenda and its associated assumptions carries with it particular fears for particular sections of society, and as Thompson, cited earlier, suggests, most notably women.
Recent figures point to the nature and effect of the wider economic context on women particularly in relation to employment. The Office for National Statistics recently reported that, in the three months to January 2012, the figures for unemployed women went up by 19.15% as compared with an increase for men of 0.32% in the same time period. Moreover, the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), reported that ‘by 2015, the government expects to shed more than 700,000 public sector jobs – and twice as many women as men will lose their jobs through this great cull’ (OBR, 2011: 9). Despite the observation made by Thane (2011: 15), Research Professor in Contemporary History at Kings College, London, that:
Women will work to fill the gaps in devastated services. More grandmothers will give up work to care for grandchildren so that their daughters can work, or for frail and disabled neighbours without other support;
the Fawcett Society has commented that:
Women on average earn less, own less, and are more likely to retire in poverty than men. They can ill afford to bear the brunt of cuts. It is those who have the least to lose – women who are unemployed or on low incomes, pregnant women, families, single mothers and pensioners, and victims of sexual, domestic or other violence – who will lose the most.
Between the two world wars Eleanor Rathbone campaigned hard for the payment of a universal family allowance (now known as child benefit) to a mother of any class. Eleanor Rathbone secured this, as a right, to be paid to women just before her death in 1946. In her view, this was one way of recognizing the work that women did, not only with and for children and their husbands, but also in terms of their wider contribution to the community as a result. The current policy context implicitly fails to recognize this contribution, made particularly by those women who choose to embrace full-time child-care. Moreover, whilst as criminologists we know work is criminogenic – insofar as it can provide the context for offending behaviour and victimization – it is also the case that paid employment is crucial for many people, but arguably for women particularly because it provides a means by which to desist from offending or escape victimization. Both child benefit and the availability of paid work, whilst not necessarily securing financial or any other kind of independence for all women, are crucial to some women in surviving in their everyday lives under more optimistic economic conditions let alone the present ones. Access to these can make the difference between shoplifting or not, prostitution or not, and exposure to other kinds of criminality, or not.
Against this wider (gendered) economic backcloth, Morgan offers us a taste for how the Big Society agenda might impact upon a number of areas of criminal justice; namely, policing, what he calls ‘justice reinvestment’, and sanctions from the court. In what follows, I shall explore one area ripe for ‘Big Society’ intervention that cuts across all the criminal justice areas discussed by Morgan: responding to violence against women. The voluntary sector and community based groups, essential features of the Big Society, have a substantial history of activism and service delivery in this arena and I shall consider the extent to which the cautious optimism implied in Morgan’s analysis in welcoming the ‘Big Society’ agenda for criminal justice more generally may or may not be justified in relation to responding to violence against women in particular.
Without doubt domestic violence stands in a different place in the policy agenda than it did in the 1970s (Hague and Malos, 2005). Indeed the launch of an integrated violence against women policy, ‘Together we can End Violence Against Women and Girls’ (Home Office, 2009), recognizes the central importance of dealing with this problem and the ramifications that it can and does have on health and well-being, as well as on the economy. Despite the fact that such violence is now considered to be, publicly at least, unacceptable (Mooney, 2007), others have observed significant continuities between the present and the past in terms of the efficacy of policy responses to such violence (Stanko, 2007). The ‘change but no change’ that such observations allude to are consistently debated in terms of the problem of the ‘implementation gap’: the policies are right, we just need to work harder to make sure that those on the ground implement them appropriately. Given all the policy developments relating to this issue that can and do make demands on policing, the courts, and sentencing, there are two questions worth considering here: whether or not such an implementation gap is the problem here and, if it is, to what extent the Big Society agenda might be an opportunity to start thinking differently about how we tackle this issue.
To deal with the second question first: why might responding to domestic violence be ripe for the Big Society agenda? Well, if the Big Society agenda is serious about harnessing communities, getting the best out of people, and building on what it is that we all know, and can do for each other and ourselves, then harnessing all of that energy towards improving life for all citizens, including victims of domestic violence, would seem to be one area in which some success might be likely. Indeed, despite all the policy activity over the last 25 years directed towards the practices of the criminal justice agencies notwithstanding, there has always been the potential for a differently oriented policy response to this problem which gives a fully recognized (and fully funded) role to the community. This approach, adopted in some places in Canada (see e.g. Ursel, 1992), includes adequate funding for refuges, appropriate and adequately funded programmes for men known to be violent, programmes in schools to challenge the use of violence as a way of resolving disputes, alongside a criminal justice response. Herein then lies the opportunity for a meaningful embrace of the Big Society project. Yet The Fawcett Society, in launching its Life Raft for Women’s Equality (2011), has ‘Help Support Women and Girls who are the Victims of Violence’ as one of the cornerstones if its campaign. It is in this arena, they suggest, that despite ministerial statements to the contrary ‘specialist services up and down the country – many of which provide literally life-saving help to women – are currently facing considerable cut-backs, putting both their current provision and future stability in jeopardy’. Moreover, Walby (2009: 1) reminds us that, whilst incidents of domestic violence appear to have decreased between 2001 and 2008,
there are higher rates of reporting of domestic violence to the police and other services. This means that while the rate of domestic violence has been falling, the use and costs of public services have not declined. Indeed, as compared with 2001 these costs for 2008 are higher as a result of inflation.
So if current policy strategies for dealing with violence against women, the centring of the criminal justice response, presents increasing costs to the criminal justice bill at a time when such costs are under very close scrutiny, all the more reason for thinking about effective alternatives. Taken alongside the cutbacks being experienced by community-based groups documented by the Fawcett Society, there is, as yet, little evidence that this might be taking place. The reasons for this are complex but in part reflect the rising tide of punitiveness for all kinds of crime, domestic violence included. As Westmarland (2011: 301) has commented:
Despite acknowledgement that to end violence against women requires investment in primary intervention (to prevent violence from happening in the first place) and secondary intervention (to prevent violence from continuing or increasing once identified) work, such investment has not yet surfaced . . . Until then, any prevention work will remain piecemeal, and it continues to be difficult to imagine a world free from violence against women.
Here Westmarland is echoing the more holistic response alluded to earlier. It implies that there is potential for crime and disorder partnerships to embrace the Big Society moment within the spirit of prevention rather than the spirit of meeting performance targets. This is an opportunity worth thinking about. Moreover, whilst women are usually the victims and men the perpetrators of domestic violence (though the roles can be reversed) we must not lose sight of the importance of understanding domestic violence as a gendered crime. Any policy response to address the recourse to violence as an aspect of ‘coercive control’ (Stark, 2009) needs to take account of this. Again there have indeed been attempts at more coherent policy response to male violence, particularly trialled in Scotland during the 1990s (see for example, Dobash et al., 1996). However, Radford and Gill (2006) suggest that cost-effectiveness is already driving the allocation processes of those eligible for appropriate probation programmes to tackle their use of violence with only those deemed the most risky likely to be referred. So the Big Society notwithstanding, the austerity measures currently driving the criminal justice system appear to be taking precedence.
This brief review of the contemporary policy context in relation to domestic violence clearly suggests that tensions remain between policy aspirations and the capacity to deliver on such policies. These tensions are not helped by the fact that, ‘the Government has shocked other Europeans by objecting to domestic violence being described in the “Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women” as a “violation of human rights”, in preference for the phrase, “constitutes a serious obstacle to women’s enjoyment of human rights”’ (reported by Thane, 2011: 15). To answer the first question posed earlier in relation to the contemporary policy response to domestic violence, the gap that is of concern is not one of implementation. As the response to government response to the European Convention illustrates, the gap is conceptual (Lewis and Greene, 1978): the boys just don’t get it!
To summarize, the evidence to date suggests that Big Society is unlikely to offer the policy in which the change in direction necessary to balance criminal justice response with other interventions that may meet the needs of the victims of such violence more appropriately, like for example funding refuges, funding preventative work in schools and so forth, will take place. This, in part, is a result of the deep embrace of the recourse to the law that has characterized policy responses over the last few decades, and partly because it is has become ‘de rigeur’ in policy circles to substitute the word gender for sex as though, as a result, the question of gender has been dealt with. This is not the case. The scary thing is that the entrepreneurs inhabiting Whitehall are very unlikely to know this and if they do are even more unlikely to say so.
Footnotes
Biography