ESRC Festival Event: Relationships Matter Putting Children at the Centre of Professional Practice

Dr Karen Winter: Relationships Matter Putting Children at the Centre of Professional Practice

An ESRC funded ethnographic research project underway in the South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust (SEHSCT) that seeks to:

Identify how social workers communicate with children in practice;

Enable practitioners to reflect on specific practice encounters, helping to identify the barriers and enablers to attuned communication;

Identify how practice in this domain could be improved and develop paper-based and video/digital resources to enable these improvements to be realised.

The event represents an opportunity for practitioners and policy makers to engage with the findings of research in which they have been involved and consider their practical applicability.

Learn more about this project at:

Lisburn Civic Centre

12.30 – 4.30

5 November 2014

Further details available from: k.winter@qub.ac.uk

Inside Probation and the Possibilities for Penal Reform

Irish Criminology Research Network

When viewed alongside international comparators the use of supervised community sanctions (such as Probation and Community Service Orders) in Ireland is relatively low. The marked increase in the prison population in Ireland in recent years has focused attention once again on the under-utilisation of community sanctions. The recent report of the Strategic Review on Penal Policy echoes calls made in numerous policy documents over the past 30 years, to reduce the use of imprisonment, particularly for short prison sentences, and to strengthen the range of community sanctions available to the courts. Alongside cost imperatives – prison is an expensive sanction – the detrimental effects of prison have been noted. Temporary incapacitation, particularly in the form of short prison sentences does not help to reduce offending in the long-term. In fact a wide range of evidence suggests the opposite effect.

However, lessons from other countries suggest that caution should be…

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