© British Association of Social Workers
Probation Officers Working with Men
Jonathan Scourfield is currently a tutorial fellow in the School of Social and Administrative Studies, University of Wales, Cardiff. He is a former probation officer and conducted the research on which this paper is based with the support of a Cropwood Fellowship at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.
Correspondence to Jonathan Scourfield, School of Social and Administrative Studies, University of Wales Cardiff, 50 Park Place, Cardiff CF1 3AT, UK.
Summary
Recent debates on making masculinities explicit in work with offenders are reviewed as the context for a qualitative research study. Interviews were conducted with probation officers and files and pre-sentence reports read with the aim of exploring the construction of masculinities within the probation service. Tensions about gender were found within and between the three areas of professional rhetoric, practice and internal relations. The most significant finding is a gap between rhetoric and practice. While most officers interviewed spoke of an interest in focusing either directly or indirectly on their clients' identity as men, the files and reports found only a very small amount of direct work on this. There was a larger amount of evidence of work that could be seen as indirectly challenging masculinites, but another significant part of the files and reports on men reflected a tendency towards ignoring gender or even colluding with oppressive masculinities.
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