The majority of literature around mentoring schemes for women in the criminal justice system suggests that female mentors are generally recruited for working with women and not male mentors (Brown and Ross 2010a; Keating 2012). The ability to engage with people has been viewed as a key requirement of mentors that is sought during the recruitment process and has been argued to be more important than the mentor being a ‘peer’ in the sense that they share experiences to those they mentor (Mulholland et al. 2016). Vacro Women’s Mentoring Programme in Australia used a newspaper advert as a recruitment strategy and this prompted an unexpected high number of responses from potential mentors (Brown and Ross 2010b). The selection of mentors was based on desirable characteristics such as a non-judgemental attitude, patience, reliability and commitment.
The training that mentors receive has not been widely discussed in the literature, however it has been argued that mentors should be trained for at least 20 hours before they start the role (Brown and Ross 2010b). Mentors at Vacro Women’s Mentoring Programme in Australia completed an Orientation Training module before they could be matched with a woman. This included training on: boundaries, mentoring using a strengths-based approach, addiction, mental health and communication skills. Mentors were also offered ongoing training (Brown and Ross 2010a; Brown and Ross 2010b). One of Vacro’s important training objectives for mentors was to ensure that every mentor had knowledge of all services available to women within the prison and the community to ensure that appropriate referrals were made when required. This knowledge was vital in order to address the difficulties many women face when leaving prison. Although the mentor could not directly address all of these issues herself, the ability to sign-post to other agencies and make appointments was valuable. This was argued to promote effective partnership working between agencies.
The evaluation by Mulholland et al. (2016) stated that all new mentors received standard induction training that all members of staff within their organisation received and was not always directed specifically towards mentoring. This suggests that the mentoring role may not be significantly different to other support worker roles within organisations. The training induction also included shadowing of other mentors and those being trained valued the guidance from colleagues to a greater extent than the general induction training. The evaluation also revealed that of 123 mentors who were interviewed, they had received an average of 36 hours training in 12 months and training ranged from a half day to 5 weeks. Mentors also made some suggestions for areas of additional training including: training around disclosure of sexual abuse; mental health; domestic violence; legal highs; drug and alcohol awareness and motivational interviewing. This reflects the extent of the issues of people they were working with. Further exploration of the training that mentors undergo will contribute to an understanding of how the role of mentors is expected to address the issues of women in the criminal justice system.
Summary
were some common components of mentoring such as a one-to-one relationship and working towards goals, the mentoring role appeared to encompass a wide range of activities. There was also disagreement between staff and organisations about the level of support that should be offered as part of mentoring. It may be that as a result of the increasing popularity of mentoring in the criminal justice system, the label ‘mentoring’ has been applied widely by organisations to increase their ability to secure competitive funding. A clearer understanding of mentoring in theory and practice is required to find out how mentoring aims to address the issues of women that were described in Chapter 2.
The relationship between the mentor and mentee was often emphasised in the literature, with relational theory being described as the underlying basis for mentoring services focused on women in the criminal justice system. Some studies argued that mentoring provided women with the opportunity to experience positive relationships for the first time and to ‘practice’ being in positive relationships. Also connected to relationships, social capital and social networks were cited as a basis for mentoring. Social capital was understood as resources that women could gain as a result of their relationship with the mentor. Examples of such resources included: ‘pro-social thinking’, connections to new social networks via their mentor and housing or character references. If ‘bridging social capital’ is a key benefit of mentoring and important in desistance, there is little evidence that this has been achieved to date in mentoring in the long-term and that it has led to significant changes in the lives of women. The current study will prioritise the perspectives of the women who have engaged with the Sacro mentoring service to uncover what the key aspects of mentoring are for women and whether this supports the literature.
Mentoring for women was valued by those who engaged with it consistently, this may have reflected the small number of women who were able to engage with a mentor and may have had less serious issues than many women in the criminal justice system. There was a lack of evidence that mentoring made significant changes to women’s circumstances such as accommodation, family relationships or substance use, which may account for the high attrition rate in mentoring, described across the literature. Reducing reoffending was a key aim for many of the mentoring services, reflecting their location in the criminal justice system. Alternative measures of success, which account for the complex issues women face, may be more applicable
to mentoring and may reflect the impact of mentoring more accurately. The present study aims to uncover what measures of success are prioritised by the Sacro Women’s Mentoring service and whether this is also reflected in the accounts of women who use the service.
Chapter 4 - Methodology
This study aimed to establish what the goals, processes and impact of mentoring are through adopting a largely qualitative approach which involved interviews with women who use the service, mentors and other stakeholders. This chapter provides a detailed description and reflexive account of the methods and analysis that were utilised in this study. Firstly, the chapter puts the research in the context of a feminist approach, followed by a discussion about the rationale for the methods selected. The practical aspects of the research are then described, followed by a discussion of the challenges of the research process. The chapter concludes with an account of the data analysis process that was adopted.