La enseñanza del filosofar

Mentors had, on average, a caseload of approximately 15-20 women at one time. Paid mentors were allocated women based on their caseload, rather than matching based on characteristics such as interests, background or age. This differs from the matching process documented in previous research where volunteer mentors were matched with women based on their interests and age (Brown and Ross 2010a; Salgado et al. 2010).

Many of the women in the present study accessed mentoring through recommendation from their social worker and were not clear about the type of support that the mentoring service offered. When women were asked what support they needed from their mentor in the initial stages of the mentoring relationship, 16 women stated that they were seeking practical support. Specifically, this type of support included: transport/support to appointments; help organising bills and support needed on day of release from prison:

Fiona: just day to day things and if I had any problems she would be like ‘get your bills together and we'll sort them out’ because (I’ve not been doing it lately) but usually I just put them to the side...(bills) that's no helping.

Nine of these women stated that they were also seeking emotional support and only four women stated that they were only looking for emotional support only from their mentor in the early stages of the relationship:

Louise: To be honest I needed a bit of support and someone to talk to because obviously my history and what I was going through. I've not got any friends or anything. My partner was in jail so I had no one really to talk to. So it was just basically for someone to talk to.

Mentors perceived practical support to be essential for early engagement in mentoring. A number of mentors believed that women would not view the service as having any value for them if it could not do something ‘for’ them at least in the early stages of the relationship.

First meetings between the mentor and mentee varied in structure. The mentoring service based in Glasgow, for example, would normally involve a 3-way meeting between the woman, criminal justice social worker and mentor, to introduce the woman to the service, and present her with the opportunity to decide whether she would like to participate in mentoring. However, if a woman showed interest in participating in the service at this stage, it did not always lead to a second meeting with the mentor. According to some mentors, many of the women who showed interest at this stage did not attend a further appointment with the mentor. The proportion of women who showed interest and did not attend was not included in the KPI data and therefore is unknown. Mentors stated that sometimes women already had support in place and did not need the further support of a mentor, however they attended the appointment because they did not want to appear uncooperative with their social worker. Views of women who did not take up the service would have been more informative about the reasons for not attending further appointments. However as noted in the Chapter 4 there were access difficulties. This suggests that the statutory involvement may have impacted on whether women showed an interest in mentoring, which may undermine the ‘voluntary aspect’ of engagement with mentoring.

Although it was intended that an action plan would be developed in the first meeting, mentors stated that this did not always happen and it could be unhelpful to present a high volume of paperwork at an initial meeting. Here a mentor describes how she usually approached first meetings with new women:

M7: I'm hoping that I can establish a relationship, an atmosphere where she feels willing to talk. If she never does, then I have to respect that too but just trying to find out ‘who are you? What do you need?’ I haven't done the first assessment yet. What I normally do is go on a first visit and just talk. Usually you find on a first visit, they want to talk to you. So it's listening. But it's just talking about the service. Next time I come, we'll do an assessment, we've got the paperwork out the way, we'll maybe build an action plan.

This again demonstrates the flexibility around the components of the service. This quote shows how important communication is in the early stages for establishing a relationship and the importance of informality. It also highlights the power imbalance between the mentor and woman, as the mentor already has prior knowledge about the women’s personal relationships. This is because the service user in this example was referred from another Sacro service. Although mentors stressed that they attempted to keep the relationship as equal as possible, the mentor will also have more power than the woman due to their professional role and their collecting and reporting of data in relation to meetings, suggesting that this ‘equal’ relationship may be another imaginary penality (Carlen 2008).