Diagrama Gantt de las metas propuestas

Notions of brotherhood or sisterhood run through the literature on peer mentoring, from concepts of ‘Big brothers, Big sisters’ and Buddies in early studies in the US (Grossman and Tierney, 1998; O’Donnell, Lydgate and Fo, 1979) to more recent conceptions of female mentors who fashion entire communities outside of prison walls to offer emotional support (Collica, 2010). This section will make sense of peer mentoring as a process of fraternity or sorority. In doing so it will not only acknowledge these foundational, familial ideals, but also propose that another element of fraternity or sorority can also be traced in this work, that is: people finding community or solidarity with ‘folks like themselves’ (hooks, 1993: 77). These are often folks of the same gender, as for example in mentoring projects specifically for women offenders (see Rumgay, 2004). However there is more to such identifications than gender alone. They can be more accurately described as myriad forms of ‘resistance building – the notion that peers can form solidaristic groups to protect themselves’ (Pawson, 2004: 52).

Chapter four will introduce a research field which identifies peer-hood in various and diverse ways. Peers will be conceived of as ex-offenders, community members, female

offenders, gang-leavers, and care leavers, amongst others. In all of the settings, however,

the act of mentoring as a peer appears to involve much more than just offering special insight, gaining trust or being an inspiration. It also appears to involve bonding with others who share a common experience, and using this bond to allow space for marginalised perspectives. This aim can also be traced in the literature to date, particularly in the work

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of User Voice, a charity led by ex-offenders whose mission is to ‘engage those who have experience of the criminal justice system in bringing about its reform’ (User Voice Mission Statement, 2012). The Princes Trust (2012: 1) also recognises the importance of ex- offenders’ ‘personal insight’, which makes it easier for mentors and mentees to bond. Members of a user-led fraternity or sorority are able to assert a particular perspective on crime and desistance because they have lived through particular experiences. In this way the precept shares something with feminist standpoint epistemology, which: ‘identifies women’s status as that of victim and then privileges that status by claiming that is gives access to understanding about oppression that others cannot have’ (Stanley and Wise, 1993: 91). Standpoint epistemology supposedly ‘makes possible a view of the world that is more reliable and less distorted than that available to capitalist or to working class men’ (Stanley and Wise, 1993: 91). Whilst peer mentors and mentees are not (always) clearly identified in terms of a victim status, peer mentoring does privilege the offender’s, female offender’s, care leaver’s, or gang leaver’s status, claiming it gives access to an understanding that others cannot have. To quote a respondent in Boyce et al., (2009: 29): ‘I’m able to understand and be empathic towards my client group, because a lot of their situations I’ve been in myself (Sharon)’. The practice therefore offers up forms of what one might term offender standpoint epistemology. It positions peer mentors and mentees as members of a collective. Their role is also to create a space for voices and truths, which may not be recognised or evident outside of direct, first-hand experience. The common voice of the mentoring fraternity or sorority need not just be a ‘female’ or ‘male’ voice or even an ‘ex-offender’ voice, but a voice from any marginalised standpoint. The power of shared standpoint, for otherwise unacknowledged perspectives, has been highlighted by Stanley and Wise (1993), who argued, in the context of obscene phone calls they received on a lesbian group contact number:

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The only people who immediately accepted our reactions as valid-for-us were other women who had similarly experienced such reactions from men; and these were mainly other lesbians. If other women have shared similar experiences then they’re willing to accept ours as valid; and if they haven’t then they are much less willing to do so (Stanley and Wise, 1993: 129).

Whilst this context is different to that of peer mentoring, the underpinning assumption is the same: that people who have not shared similar experiences do not afford the lived experience validity. Hence ‘prisoners’ version of “the truth” is located at the bottom of the hierarchy of knowledge’ (Ballinger, 2011: 110) and recovering inmates are seen as ‘more capable of establishing credibility and demonstrating understanding compared to hired treatment staff’ (Cook et al., 2008, cited in Fletcher and Batty, 2012: 6).

Experience and validity are seen as intricately linked therefore. If experiences are expressed to an audience who cannot relate to such a position, they may not achieve validity or understanding. The achievement of validity is not claimed to be solely dependent upon shared or recognised experiences, however, but also upon power relations: ‘Those people with less power, those people without power – the oppressed – are more likely than those with power to find their accounts of reality discredited by others’ (Stanley and Wise, 1993: 147). Given the power of criminal stigma the ‘ex/offender’ may feel that s/he faces a social field where ‘valid-for-us’ truths are highly restricted. Peer mentoring by contrast, not only makes valid-for-us truths possible, but central.

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The problem with employing standpoint in this way however, is that it ‘can slip into essentialist arguments’ (Henry and Milovanovic, 1996: 85). Essentialism is ‘most commonly understood as a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the ‘whatness’ of a given entity’ (Fuss, 1989: xi). To create an ex-offender standpoint is therefore to suggest there is a true and unified essence of the criminal experience, when this is evidently not the case. Above the more general ‘anti- essentialist poststructuralist feminist’ concern with ‘resisting any attempt to naturalise human nature’ (Fuss, 1989: xi), a problem with reformed offenders employing essentialist arguments is that: ‘“Experience” emerges as the essential truth of the individual subject, and personal “identity” metamorphoses into knowledge… Exclusions of this sort often breed exclusivity’ (Fuss, 1989: 113-115). This is a concern shared by Spalek (2008: 13) specifically in relation to essentialist groupings: ‘it would be a mistake to view the collectivisation of identities in a solely positive way, since group identities are formed and reinvigorated through the “threat and practice of exclusion”’. To draw upon experience as a claim to knowledge can therefore be to exclude those who do not share that particular experience:

The politics of experience sometimes takes the form of a tendency amongst both individuals and groups to ‘one down’ each other on the oppression scale. Identities are itemised, appreciated and ranked on the basis of which identity holds the greatest currency at a particular historical moment and in a particular institutional setting. Thus, in an Afro-American Studies classroom, race and ethnicity are likely to emerge as the privileged items of intellectual exchange, or, in a Gay Studies classroom, sexual ‘preference’ may hold the top notch on the scale of oppressions (Fuss, 1989: 116).

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In the context of peer mentoring, professionals or helpers who are not ex-offenders often find their claims to knowledge relegated beneath those with a history of offending. Returning to the user-led charity User Voice, for example, their view is that: ‘Only offenders can stop re-offending’ (User Voice, 2014, emphasis added). Such hierarchising excludes other perspectives. bell hooks encourages that we consider these criticisms more closely however. Her counter-argument is that charges of essentialism tend to be directed at already marginalised groups who have already had to struggle for a voice of recognition, thus such criticisms can compound their invisibility:

I am suspicious when theories call this practice harmful as a way of suggesting that it is a strategy only marginalized groups employ… [This] leaves unquestioned the critical practices of other groups who employ the same strategies in different ways and whose exclusionary behavior may be firmly buttressed by institutionalized structures of domination that do not critique or check it. At the same time I am concerned that critiques of identity politics not serve as the new, chic way to silence students from marginal groups (hooks, 1994: 82-83).

For hooks, essentialism becomes a valid strategy to try and counter such negation:

Looked at from a sympathetic standpoint, the assertion of an excluding essentialism on the part of [people] from marginalized groups can be a strategic response to domination and colonization, a survival strategy that may indeed inhibit discussion even as it rescues those students from negation (hooks, 1994: 83).

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Thus, whilst ex-offenders may employ essentialism in ways which appear to exclude others, they are not alone in employing such a strategy. The essentialising of offenders is commonplace outside of peer mentoring narratives. Maruna for example argues that ‘academic criminology has at times acted as an active coproducer of the discourse of criminal essentialism’ (Maruna, 2001: 6). To be too critical of adopted essentialism within emerging ex-offender voices may, therefore, serve to silence a group with a marginal voice; a group whose truth is already written for them in essentialist terms by others. Viewed from a sympathetic standpoint, the essentialism employed by ex-offender peer mentors emerges as a strategic response to the professional, risk culture dominated, colonisation of their lived offending experiences to this point. However, whilst making essentialist claims to knowledge may serve the purpose of reclaiming voice and may establish a valid position from which to speak, the problem, as hooks highlights, is that as a strategic response it is as ‘inhibiting’ as it is ‘rescuing’. Essentialism creates a fiction of unified experience, which can be as restrictive to the emergence of diverse voices as externally imposed exclusions.

It may be argued, then, that essentialism is part of the complex reality of peer mentoring. This thesis will pay close attention to the manifold ways and contexts in which subject- position is deployed. Chapters six, seven and nine, for example, will explore how essentialism materialises via expressions of personal worth, self-validation and personal dignity alongside forms of alterity, claims of distinction from and criticisms of others.