This week I looked at the article titled, “Life Changing: The Experience of Rape-Crisis Work,” which researched the experiences social workers have when working with clients who are victims of sexual violence. The feminist movement is a main reason why rape crisis centers exist today. It produced a wide range of organizations that emerged in response to the growing awareness of women’s concerns, including rape, domestic violence and women’s health care. According to research, rape-crisis programs are considered a part of feminist organizations because they came about during the second wave of feminism. The history of women’s crisis programs began in the 1970’s when they were first created.  There mission was to challenge social attitudes and beliefs that contribute to sexual violence. There core functions are crisis intervention, short-term counseling, and community education.

The goal of this research was to see how the workers were affected by working with these clients day to day. Research explains how it can be very “jarring for a researcher to hear a rape survivor’s story and realize that, given different circumstances, you could be on the other side of the interview.” This rings true as rape is so prevalent today. Statistics shows that one in four to one in five women are raped in their adult lifetimes. Many of the researchers experiences hearing rape mirrored the victims experiences. The experienced fear, pain, anger, hope, and the loss of freedom, of a feeling of the basic goodness of society, of one’s identity, and of one’s well-being. Vicarious traumatization, is a new term that describes the transformative effect upon the trauma of working with survivors of traumatic life events. According to research, “one’s view of the world can change as a result of the work.” This is especially true with female trauma therapists as they experience lasting changes in their perceptions of overall safety.

The purpose of the research study was to gain an understanding of the experiences of women who work in rape-crisis programs. There were a core set of questions that basically asked how the experience affected their personal lives as well as there feelings about sexual violence, and how the workers changed through the process of their jobs. The workers of the study were all female employees of the rape-crisis programs who had master’s degrees in social work and other related fields. The researcher defined rape-crisis programs in saying that they are feminist social service organizations that prove one or all of the following services: crisis intervention in emergency rooms of hospitals with victims of sexual assault; short-term therapy with survivors of rape, incest, or sexual assault; long-term therapy with survivors of rape, incest, or sexual assault; long-term therapy with survivors of rape, incest, or sexual assault; and group therapy for survivors of rape, incest, or sexual assault.

The data was collected through semistructured, open-ended qualitative interviews that were conducted by a researcher with personal experience in the rape-crisis field. The interviews lasted 90 minutes and feminist standpoint and grounded theories were the guiding frameworks for the study’s research design and data analysis. The participants were 21 female employees of 8 rape-crisis centers in an urban area. There ages ranged from 26 to 58 with the mean age being 36. The majority 86% were white and 2 others were African American and Latino. 91% of the women stated they were heterosexual and more than two thirds were married or living with partners, while 8 were mothers. The results indicated that the participants were personally changed and influenced by their work. The research categorized the ways they were changed in influenced by listing 3 primary levels, individual, personal relationships, and view of the world. Changes in behavior were a part of individual changes where worker’s expressed their fears of being outside at night as well as fear when taking cabs and the subway. For personal relationships, the mothers of the research said that their normal parental worries intensified. There views of the world were now a constant distrust. There visions of the world as a safe place changed.

In conclusion, this research showed that these social workers duties at the rape-crisis centers were more than just a job. It was a part of their life that they took home with them day and night. I think that being a social worker is a very intimate and personal type of job that needs adjusting to no matter what. I think it is interesting to see that even with master’s degrees, one can still have trouble adjusting to their job and that no textbook knowledge can make you ready for real life experiences such as these.

This weeks article I chose to focus on was called “Mothers in Trouble: Coping With Actual or Pending Separation From Children due to Incarceration.” As female offenders have become the fastest growing population in prison today, this study aims to focus on the unique experiences mothers have before trial and during incarceration, as they are separated from their children.

Female offenders constitute 7.5% of inmates, but have become the fastest growing population in America’s prisons today. The Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that most incarcerated women are mothers and, unlike fathers in prison, were the main caregivers for their children before imprisonment. Also, the number of children with a mother in prison more than doubled since 1991. These statistics indicated a growing social problem and there are few studies in the fields of criminal justice and corrections that focus on women offenders’ experiences as mothers. This study uses 74 semistructured interviews conducted with mothers before trial and during incarceration, to document coping strategies that they employed to deal with potential or actual separation from their children. Prior research suggests that female prisoners tend to share certain characteristics and many have problems that predate incarceration. They are most likely to be poor, single, and disproportionately racial minorities and on average the mothers have two children. Most incarcerated women experience triple traumas in their lives, and many were sexually abused as children and victimized in their adolescence and adulthood. As a result of this, many women were incarcerated for drug-related offenses and were abusing drugs or alcohol before incarcerations, as a way to cope to earlier life abuse and violence. The research found that imprisoned mothers often attempt to maintain their relationship with children by presenting themselves as “good mothers” and disassociating from other imprisoned but “unfit” mothers. Children continue to play central role in women’s lives even during imprisonment. Mothers in prison often see children as motivation for change and their primary purpose in life.

The data from this study came from a bigger study examining the impact of parental incarceration on children and it included semistructured interviews by the second author between 2002 and 2004. The researcher interviewed 37 incarcerated mothers, 20 whom of which were in pretrial detention and 17 were inmates in a state prison, the other 37 were awaiting rial at home. The adult participants signed forms for their own participation as well as for their children’s participation. The interviews provided women an opportunity to share their life stories and discuss their parenting in depth. Women that were chosen for the study all had at least one child aged between 8 and 18 years. Being imprisoned poses many challenges to a woman’s ability to sustain her maternal role, given that she isn’t able to do a mothering job on a daily basis. Incarceration is not an event that occurs unexpectedly. It takes place after an extended period involving the adjudicatory process and sentencing. The coping process is one that can be defined as “constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of the person.” This definition of the coping process is a phenomenon that is viewed as a way to manage stressful circumstances and events regardless of what the outcomes are. The research of this article attempted to uncover the ways mothers cope with the pressures and strains associated with their roles as mothers.

There was a central theme that emerged in the interviews and it was motherhood. Incarcerated mothers were aware of their inability to perform most of their maternal duties, while mothers who were awaiting trial were dealing with the possibility of losing those maternal duties if they were to become incarcerated. This caused stressed among the mothers and they discussed how they tried to cope with them. There were seven techniques that incarcerated mothers used to cope with problems from actual or pending separation from their children. These seven techniques were being a good mother, mothering from prison, role definition, disassociation from prisoner identity, self-transformation, planning and preparation, and self-blame. For many jailed and incarcerated women, establishing their credentials as good mothers also meant having to defend their parenting skills against their criminal and drug abusing past, the very behavior that had separated them from their children. Another characteristic of mothers in prison was disassociation from prison identity. Some women claimed that though there are people who belong in jail or prison, they do not fit in there. Other mothers tended to minimize the behavior that resulted in their incarceration, thereby distinguishing themselves from other prisoners.

In conclusion, I can only imagine how hard it is to adjust to incarceration in general and the external stress of being a mother away from your children. A lot of mothers in this study came from disadvantaged, lower social and economic strata. They often struggled with physical and mental problems and suffered from a lack of social support. This research shows how beneficial services and treatment, both inside and outside of the criminal justice system, can assist mothers in effective coping with actual and pending separation from their families and children.

Celinska, K., & Siegel, J. (2010). Mothers in Trouble: Coping With Actual or Pending Separation From Children due to Incarceration. SAGE Journals, 90(4), 447-474. doi:10.1177/0032885510382218

The current problems in the first decade of the twenty-first century are poverty, unemployment, foreclosures, and homelessness, as well as a severe economic depression. Cities are not unique in having acute social problems, but the spatial nature of big cities and the densely populated suburbs makes the uneven development particular severe. According to the socialspatial approach there are four significant factors that cause social problems. The first is the principle effect of the city as a built environment  is that it concentrates people and resources. This means that drugs and poverty, for instance, have a higher chance of creating a greater impact in large central cities and densely populates suburbs versus less dense ones. The second factor that causes social problems is the internalization of the capitalist economies. Large metropolitan regions such as LA and New York attract a lot of immigrants from poorer nations who have left their countries in search of abetter life. This leads to problems such as bilingual education, that affect these areas more than other places. The third factor is the changes in the global cycles of economic investment which affects metropolitan regions because of the scale of activities in the largest places. This refers to the recession in 2007 that left many people jobless. the American economy shed 8.8 million jobs through February 2010 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011). The staggering job losses occurred mostly in manufacturing and construction, as US companies sought to increase their profits and earnings. The final factor social problems are caused by is the allocation of resources, which can be accentuated by dense, built environments. For example, large cities are major centers of the global economy. Extreme wealth is created within the city and the signs of the money are highly visible, such as expensive restaurants, upscale department stores, luxury housing, and limousines. There are a number of problems associated with urban life, including racism and poverty, crime and drugs, and housing inequities and homelessness.

The most extreme and continuing effects of racism have been felt by Africans Americans, who have been systematically discriminated against in employment and in the housing market. The most powerful indicator of continuing institutional racism in the United States is population segregation.  A study was done in 1965 that compiled statistics on American cities with regard to the relative locations of whites and blacks. The study replicated itself in 1970 and found that some of the most segregated cities during this time were Detroit, Chicago, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Birmingham.  Involuntary segregation is the spatial cluster of population groups. In the case of African Americans, the urban ghettos were created by a from of racism and violence designed to prevent blacks from moving into “white” settlement spaces, federal housing policies that concentrated public housing in the inner city while subsidizing “white flight” to the suburbs through construction of the interstate highway system and home mortgage loans, and other factors. Hypersegregation is the extreme segregation that exists in our nation’s cities today. Hispanics are considerable more integrated in American society than blacks. While African Americans confront the highest levles of segregation, Asian Americans have the lowest levels. Puerto Ricans are more segregated than Mexicans. Cultural factors such as language and religion are associated with the level of segregation for particular ethnic groups.

Exclusionary zoning is a kind of racism where government regulations and real estate agents prevent African Americans from moving outside the large city even if they can afford to do so. As a result, there is a scarcity of affordable housing within many communities, and region-wide racial segregation is compounded by poverty. In 2012, the federal government issued guidelines that defined poverty for a family of four as $23, 492 in yearly income for the United States. Another indicator of poverty besides money is whether or not people possess health insurance. In 2007, before the economic crisis hit, almost 16 percent of americans had none. Income inequality is at an all time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression. As our economic crisis persists, unemployment remains high. Each year an inmate spends in prison costs some taxpayers $30,600. In this chapter we have seen that while many social problems are not typically “urban” anymore, our metro regions play a role specific to their spatial attributes. Cities concentrate people, so as a from of space, they also concentrate their problems. When dealing with many social issues, cities remain important as places that need special consideration from policy makers and municipal governments need resources from higher levels of administration.

The article I read this week examined the issues of in-prison sexual victimization. Several studies have examined consensual activity in female correctional institutions, but have not examined the in-prison sexual assault among incarcerated women. The study I read about examined 436 females inmates in a large Southern prison system and explored the demographic characteristics as predictors of sexual victimization.

According to the research, female inmate presence in prison has doubled itself during the past decade, which leads to increased issues in correctional facilities. One of the main issues that correctional administrators have to deal with is the impact of past sexual victimization among female inmates. Past victimization has shown to created an increase of prevalence behaviors among the women, such as substance use and abuse, unprotected promiscuity, and other involvement in criminal activity. With the formation of The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, has come increased attention to sexual victimization among incarcerated males and females. Self reports such as the NCVS and UCR show how frequently sexual victimization occurs nationwide. Research has found that sexual victimization is a problem faced by women of all ages and that it is important to understand the prevalence among children as well. In this particular study, the researchers found that women reporting lifetime sexual abuse, had been abused as children, as half were younger than 18 at the time of the victimization. The prevalence of sexual victimization has been found to be high among the outside-prison population but even higher amongst incarcerated female populations.

In this specific research, the researchers used self-report data to examine lifetime and in-prison sexual victimization among a sample of incarcerated prisoners in a large Southern prison system. Specifically, they examined the background characteristics of female prisoners who reported experiencing sexual victimization as well as the type of victimization and place of occurrence. The response rate from the 436 participants was 61%, which was a much higher response rate than those of previous studies that examined sexual assault in female correctional facilities.

The data was collected by face-to-face interviews with female inmates inmates. During the interviews the inmates were asked to speak about the issues they faced while incarcerated. These issues, specifically, were based off of perceptions of and experiences with in-prison sexual victimization. The data was collected over a year period from March of 2005 to June of 2006.  Most respondents completed the survey within about 45 minutes. Part of the researchers goal of the sample was to explore the characteristics compared to the characteristics of national and state incarcerated female populations. The second thing they examined was different variables such as age, marital status, high school completion, sexual orientation, and whether the respondent was a first time inmate, to ascertain whether or not there were significant differences between the abused and nonabused groups. Their definition of sexual victimization includes penetration, attempted penetration, touching, and harassment. The results showed that the present group of females prisoners did in fact reflect national and state-level data regarding demographic characteristics of female prison inmates.The range age of women in the sample was 20 to 73, with the average age of the women being 38.  The sample revealed that 68.4% of the participants reported life-time sexual victimization, and 17.2% reported in-prison sexual victimization. A majority of the lifetime victims reported a completed penetration without consent and overall, 43.1% reported being the victim of a completed sexual assault at some point during their lifetime. Of the in-prison victims, 17.3% reported a completed sexual assault which is similar to those of other studies examining sexual victimization among female inmates. One fifth of the lifetime victims reported that they were touched inappropriately without their consent, and 3.7% of the lifetime victims reported sexual abuse not involving touching. A majority of the in-prison victims reported inappropriate touching or groping without their consent, which the researchers attributed to the nature of pat-down and strip searches by prison employes as well as quick victimizations perpetrated by other inmates who are attempting to victimize without being noticed by correctional authorities. The rates of victimization both in-prison and outside of prison settings is higher than rates found in previous studies.

The findings of this study aim to bring awareness to the types of victimization that can occur in prison or correctional settings, among females. While the research did not specify on who the perpetrators were (whether other inmates or administrators) it shows how prison programs and policy can be improved to better meet the needs of female offenders. Prior knowledge of victimization of inmates, will allow programs to be more gender responsive and more successful in treating the issues that female victims and offenders bring with them into the correctional facility.

Blackburn, A., Mullings, J., & Marquart, J. (2008). Sexual Assault in Prison and Beyond. The Prison Journal, Volume 88 Number 3, 351-377. doi:10.1177/0032885508322443

The article I chose to focus on for this module focused on “partners in crime,” the relationship between female offenders and their co-dependants. Women’s involvement in crime is highly likely to capture media attention as women aren’t seen to be nearly as violent as men. Our societal views of women conform them to traditional roles of wives and mothers and any stray from that norm gains immediate attention. The article focuses on how criminologists have devoted little time to routine criminality between women and men and research into female offending has concentrated more on abuse, or women’s experience of imprisonment. Instead of focusing on juveniles in general and boys in particular, this article focused on the phenomenon of adult co-offending. The importance of the research is the role women played in the male-female criminal collaborations. The research was done over a year period in an English prison from December of 2004 to December of 2005. All sentenced women that were of the age of 21 were given a letter inviting them to be interviewed about their criminal experiences. 50 women with co-defendants agreed to be interviewed and these interviews were conducted in private and tape recorded. The women of the research were generally young stemming from ages 21-9 and 21-35. The male offenders were a little older than their counterparts with ages stemming from 21-40. Drug use was prominent and more than three-quarters of the women were serving their sentence for offenses that were drug-related while others committed offenses more related to robbery and theft. Description (A) showed a woman in a coercive relationship with a male co-defendant who committed a crime as a result of a direct threat or use of physical violence from him, which was very common among the females interviewed. This specific example described the male using a knife on the female in order to force her to go into a property and take a persons money. She later explains how she wasn’t all to surprised because he used to beat her up. Another example of a girl named Rachel who the researcher described as “bright and intelligent,” suffered severe abuse physically and mentally. She was forced to do things she didn’t want to and she was often left in fear of her male counterpart. She was often left at fault for his wrong doings after he would force her to admit to things she didn’t do. She was stuck in a relationship with him and he would go to the extremes of locking her in the house for a week at a time and even tying her up. She described her fear calling it “unbelievable,” and explained how he used to threaten not only but her family as well. He would threaten to rape her little sister as well as to do things with her parents so she stated that she stayed with him for “everyone else’s sake.” One-third of the women in the research had claimed that they had been in violent relationships with their co-defendants and more than one-third voluntarily mentioned to the interviewed that they had been abused in childhood, even though they weren’t asked this. The researcher specifically noted, “In England, Morris et al. (1995) discovered that almost half of a sample of 200 women prisoners reported a history of physical abuse and nearly a third had experienced sexual abuse” (p. 155).  Description (B) described women who committed a crime as a result of men’s expectation or association. The researcher stated that that this was the largest category with forty percent of the interviewees indicating that they had felt at the time that they should “stand by their man.” Usually this was due to abuse or manipulation. A common form of manipulation by the males was through drug use. Tonia was one example and she explains how her relationship with her co-defendant started out by going and getting drinks then that later turned into him asking her if she wanted to try drugs. She thought it was a kind gesture at the time but later realized how he would use it against her. Another form of manipulation used by the males was to persuade the woman to take all the blame for the crimes. The final descriptions used were women who committed crimes through “love” as well as the co-defendants being equal partners in the crime and finally whose co-defendants were women.

In conclusion, not all of the women inside the prison were “bad.” There circumstances that had led them to that point were often because of bad choices involving men, which had made their situations worse. While this research doesn’t represent female offenders in general, it shows how women who became emotionally involved with men were often dragged into their criminal lifestyles, even if it was against the women’s better judgement. Many of the women had prior addictions which only made things worse when the men would manipulate existing addiction to ensure submission and compliance. This research shows the depth of women offending with male counterparts and how although not all are because of their counterparts, they do tend to have a big influence over the female.