Women’s Issues in Probation Practice

Abstract

This chapter relates thinking which has emerged from the women’s movement to some areas of probation work, with an emphasis on its implications for practice. A fundamental challenge has been posed to our traditional understanding of the role and position of women. In this welfare capitalist society women are viewed as subordinate to men; this attitude is justified by attributing a set of characteristics to women solely on the basis of their sex. These stereotypical views of women as invisible (subsumed in ‘he’ and ‘men’), dependent on men, ruled by their biology, confined to the home, as mothers and sex objects, have now been challenged. As significant as the thinking itself is the way in which it developed. Women met together and shared their personal, material and emotional experiences; from this emerged a political understanding of their oppression. The analysis thus synthesises the personal and the political, providing new, radical ways of approaching issues. For instance, women’s experiences of marital difficulties can no longer simply be explained in terms of personal problems but also as a consequence of the power differential in marriage.