Neutralized,enhanced, tokenistic: The influence of formal employment of service-users on processes of co-production

Can formally employing service-users in co-production roles redress the problematic power imbalances inhibiting co-production in the public sector? In this paper, we analyze service-users formally employed in co-production roles. Through semi-structured interviews, we illustrate how actors use their voice, experience, and identity to respond to different power imbalances. First, through the process of “inverting professionalism” structural limitations resulted in neutralized co-production. Second, through the process of “embedding expertise” formally employed service-users challenged collective expectations of their role and meditated power imbalances, resulting in enhanced co-production. Finally, through the process of “perpetuating rejection” a new exacerbated power imbalance emerged when their employment became a negative resource, resulting in tokenistic co-production. We extend understandings of how formally employing service-users has potential to redress power imbalances. However, we caution against policy taking this for granted and argue that more consideration of the influence of different forms of power is needed.     

Evaluating the effectiveness of the Supporting Offenders through Restoration Inside (SORI) Programme delivered in seven prisons in England and Wales

Purpose. Supporting Offenders through Restoration Inside (SORI) is a programme that aims to: increase victim empathy in offenders; motivate offenders to change their offending behaviour; and to take personal responsibility for the harm that he has caused. A 5‐day course based on the SORI principles has been piloted across seven prison sites in the UK. The aim of the study reported here was to evaluate the effectiveness of the programme across these sites. Methods. Three psychometric questionnaires [Victim Concerns, Locus of Control, and Stages of Change (SoC) scales] were administered to the participants immediately before and after the programme had taken place (data were available for 131 participants for the Victim Concern Scale, 82 participants for the Locus of Control measure, and 96 participants for the SoC questionnaire). These psychometric measures were the primary research outcome. Statistical analyses were employed to assess whether any changes had been effected by the programme. Results. The results of this study found that: participants had an enhanced victim concern for all types of victims, were more motivated to change their offending behaviours, and were more willing to take responsibility for their actions, after completion of the course. No change was found in terms of participants seeing themselves as being more in control of their actions/environment. Conclusions. The results lend support for the notion that the 5‐day SORI course is effective in increasing participants’ levels of victim concern and motivation to change, while not really impacting upon levels of ownership for one's ownership for one's actions. Suggestions for future research and limitations of the study are discussed in the paper.     

Imperial Metaphors and Native Savagery: Law’s Imagery,Crime and Empire

For all of law’s emphasis on its originary claims, this article argues that modern law has always been heavily dependent on categories and a set of images and metaphors for constituting identities. The presence of a racialised Other in the written, verbal and visual form all reveal striking parallels in the metaphorical forms used in the categorisation of people in temporality. In essence, law’s commitment to principles of universality and equality, is practically sustained only by the reinvented and rationalized exclusions of racial particularity, and hierarchies of otherness, which are variously exotic, dangerous and irredeemable. What is clear from this binary division is that the processes of criminalizing the unruly heathens, the wayward savages and the lower strata in the early nineteenth century, was part of a process of knowledge production which drew heavily upon key images of morality and of pathology. Such a stratum, as in the parallel process in the colonies amongst the criminal savages, was anxiously understood through a proliferation of stereotypes and labels imbued with this threatening menace. This article further explores how this imagery was policed and disciplined, and also opens up the possibility to assess how these images impart the same mythic forces in the ongoing acts of violence and specters of postcolonial imperialism that persist in its new global forms. This article aims, to reveal that legal forms and identities, far from being stable in their construction, are inherently unstable, and remain forever in an ambivalent relationship to the things being constructed and those engaged in the construction.     

Sexual violence against men in countries affected by armed conflict

Sexual violence against men in armed conflict has been documented for thousands of years under the various guises of war, torture and mutilation yet it is often neglected mainly because of overwhelming stigma and shame surrounding it. Based on academic and grey literature on sexual violence against men in conflict, this article discusses the complex reasons for lack of quality data on this important topic. The motivations of sexual violence against men are also explored through applying causal theories that are largely based on female victims of sexual violence. Finally, interventions for the management of sexual violence against men in conflict are discussed. This study concludes that gendered binaries and strict gender roles are primarily responsible in accentuating sexual violence against men in terrorising and humiliating victims, and must be addressed. It also calls for more research and advocacy of male victims of sexual violence in order to fully understand the dynamics of this challenge as well as to offer effective care for male survivors of such violence.     

Imperial Violence: the ‘Ethnic’ as a Component of the ‘Criminal’ Class in Victorian England

This article seeks to identify how, and in what ways, the debate over ethnic identity acquired saliency during the different phases of black settlement in England, especially against the backcloth of the socio-cultural processes and the economics of colonialism. It outlines how the ‘other’ was constituted in different discourses, policies, and practices, and how these constructions were appropriated by the criminal justice agencies. Critically, ethnic identity as subordinate and ‘inferior’ was produced by many of the same mechanisms as was developed with regard to the indigenous ‘criminal’ class in Victorian England. Societal reaction, through criminal and civil statutes, established the identity of the ethnic minorities of early nineteenth century England, not just as subordinate strata, but also by a more complex process, as a variant of the newly emergent ‘criminal’ class. It is argued that, caught in the hub of empire, the ‘ayahs’, the ‘lascars’ and the domestic servants (See R. Visram, The Ayahs, Lascars and The Princes (London: Pluto).) in England’s ports found themselves reconstructed as part of the ‘criminal’ class and subsequently subjected to disciplinary measures of social control and surveillance. The author argues with regard to the indigenous population, conceptions of the threat of the non-Western crystallised around the same popular images of ‘savagery’ and of moral degeneracy, a process reinforced in imperial fiction. A desire to ‘civilise’ and improve the peculiar habits of the non-Western followed directly from indigenous precedent.