Understanding the experiences of criminalised women as they navigate
punishment and criminal justice supervision within the community is an area
that has been largely overlooked within mainstream criminology. The
implementation of Transforming Rehabilitation (2013) fundamentally
changed the delivery of women’s community punishment, with a more
formal move to integrating unpaid work and probation supervision into
gender-specific community settings, such as women’s centres. This
movement led to a contradiction between the pains of punishment and the
aim of female empowerment traditionally associated with women’s centres.
Despite this change, how women experience punishment in the community
in a post-Transforming Rehabilitation era is still largely unknown.
This research uses Participatory Action Research (PAR) within a Feminist
methodology to co-produce with criminalised women a piece of research
that draws attention to their daily experiences whilst subject to community
punishment. This approach captures the ‘view from below’ and in doing so
identifies how criminalised women must visibly manage trauma whilst
demonstrating desistance to female practitioners to successfully navigate
through the penal field. These practices are deeply gendered, with the
female practitioner playing a significant gendered regulatory role via the
mechanism of mimesis. Consequently, demonstrations of motherhood,
homemaking, and physical transformation becoming key signifiers of
reform.
From the findings and analysis of this co-produced study, and within the
space created by the Feminist PAR methodology, a new model that theorises
how women navigate gendered criminalisation presented itself. This model
offers a framework for understanding how punishment in a gender-specific
support setting creates a specific mechanism of control that utilises
gendered expectations as part of a regulatory process of gendered social
control and reform. By understanding how punishment intersects with
women’s daily lives, directly from criminalised women, this theoretical
model offers the potential to explore the significance of gender and
institutional social control beyond the penal field.