British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
14TH BRITISH ACADEMY POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP SYMPOSIUM
Abstract
Parenting and Youth Justice
Dr Rachel Condry
There is an increasing emphasis in Government policy on 'problem families' and how their difficulties can be addressed in order to reduce offending and anti-social behaviour. The youth justice system has been subject to a number of reforms in recent years that have made the child and his or her parents responsible for offending. This paper outlines current and ongoing research exploring the processes and ideas underlying parenting work in youth justice.
The research investigates how decisions are made about working with parents, what that work involves, how parents perceive this work and make decisions about participation, and expectations of parental responsibility and involvement in responses to children's offending. The research methods include observing parenting work in youth offending teams and interviewing parenting workers, interviewing parents who have been given Parenting Orders and parents who are participating on a 'voluntary' basis, interviewing youth offending team managers, and tracking parenting policy developments. The findings of the research are to be placed in the broader context of sociological and legal debates about the state regulation of parenting and family life and sociological debates about 'intensive parenting' and the ever-increasing expectations of parents in contemporary society.
This paper focuses particularly on the first part of the project, considering what it is like to do parenting work within current legislative and policy frameworks.
Dr Rachel Condry is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Law Department, London School of Economics. Her current research explores the processes and ideas underlying parenting work in youth justice. Her doctoral research on relatives of serious offenders explored ideas about shame and guilt, stigma, processes of grief and trauma, narrative and motivational accounts, gender, and self-help and constructed an original theoretical framework to understand how stigma and shame are transmitted through family ties. This research was published as a book, Families Shamed: The Consequences of Crime for Relatives of Serious Offenders, in May 2007. She has written about her research in The Guardian and Sunday Telegraph, and been interviewed on the BBC World Service's Outlook, and BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour and Thinking Allowed. From May 2008 Dr Condry will be a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of Surrey.