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It is widely recognized that women who are at risk of harming themselves and those around them (particularly their children) are under-served by the social and judicial systems that represent them, and that they experience more severe judgement for their failures than their male counterparts. This deficit is exacerbated by the fact that relatively little attention is given to them in the academic and clinical literatures. This edited book by Angela Foster starts to redress this imbalance by presenting accounts of women's experiences, drawing on reports of service provision, clinical vignettes, and commentaries on the flawed systems that exist, as well as referring to accounts of audit and research.
In bringing these matters to light, Foster and her co-contributors regularly reference the landmark work of Estela Welldon, Mother, Madonna, Whore, originally published in 1988 and which threw down a challenge to clinicians and policy makers to take seriously the capacity of women to be perverse and destructive (in order that they could be understood and worked with) without falling into the trap of pigeon-holing them into the very limited range of roles that social assumptions have often allowed them.
The most compelling parts of the book are the women's stories (some composite) which are found throughout and which bring to life the lived experience of women struggling in systems that consistently fail them. Here we find moving testimonies of the terror of facing the enormous task of rehabilitation and of reversing generational neglect and trauma; but also offering hope for change through descriptions of grounded, boundaried, respectful services that recognize the humanity in the women's failed attempts to cope; for example, the accounts of women who have repeatedly had babies and children removed from their care, only to start a new pregnancy to cover up the pain of their previous loss. Helena Kennedy reminds us how the term ‘victim’ is used in the media as well as the co