erm… Not word for word obviously. No I mean it is like erm I am trying to think now…….. A description would do. Yes, I am just, well it is like oh, you know, the God squad and things like that and erm you know, “Are you allowed to have sex being a vicar?” type of thing. You know and those kind of things as a woman and unfortunately we had a female chaplain here who had a relationship with one of the inmates and that comes up as well. You know….. I…… and one thing that is very different as well, I will not go into an inmate’s pad, I won’t go into a cell unless I really know them and obviously I do, double lock the door and that, whereas the guys are more happy to go into somebody’s pad and you know sit on their on the bed and have a conversation whereas I don’t feel comfortable and I will take them out and go into another room. A, for my own safety obviously, but also I am very aware of prison officers and obviously because one chaplain has already been done for…. Erm… you know…. abusing her authority. I wouldn’t want anybody putting any SIRs in about me. And that can be difficult
because especially….. like I had one young guy who was on the SORI course and he had been abused as a child and he had also been a rent boy and he erm divulged this to me and there was issues that he had been abused by his step father, or his mum’s boyfriend, and he wanted to tell his mum this. So I had spent quite a number of times talking to him and I felt quite vulnerable because obviously I couldn’t share with the staff what I was talking about; however they kept saying, “Are you going to see him again?” And I didn’t like that, you know; I used to log it and I used to tell our guys, “Look I am talking to him about this but he only wanted to talk to me,” so of course he would ask for Imogen, he wouldn’t ask for the other chaplains. So in that way it worked negatively because I thought the officers were thinking hmm, whereas they wouldn’t probably bother quite so much if one of the guys spent a lot of time with one person. But I can understand why, you know at the end of the day it is all security and, you know, I made sure that I was sat in an office with a window so they could see me at all times and I would tell them that I was going in. So I met all the criteria but I over compensated because I am a woman. Yes, there are instances
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in other places…… where women staff and not necessarily chaplains find that the male staff have left sort of page 3 of the paper open deliberately or comments are made, so you have experienced that sort of thing as well? Yes, yes. OK. But I will make
not a joke out of it, but I will just say, “It is a shame that you need to read that, I would have thought you would have been more intelligent than that,” you know rather than reading The Sun or is that The Sport, you know kind of tongue in cheek but get my point over. And I do have a good rapport with most of the officers…. although I have got a few officers that have turned round and said, “What is the point of flipping chaplaincy?” But I did the Faith Awareness training yesterday for the first time. First time it has been run and it was excellent, really, really positive and all the officers that came on it said that they really enjoyed it and so that was good.
Imogen ends this section of the dialogue emphasising the effectiveness of her working relationship with “most of the officers” and that only “a few have turned round and said, what is the point of flipping chaplaincy?” This is a qualified assertion and it may well be that her use of “flipping” is a
euphemistic substitution for “fucking”. The same reservations are evident earlier in this section, the pause in the first line of the extract suggesting a “but”, leading her into a more hesitant narrative. “if I was very PC….. I suppose I could get upset…but I just let it….” In this reflective mode Imogen appears to rationalize her technique of responding to verbal harassment and its substratum of contempt and violence. When I ask for verbatim examples she becomes uncomfortable and seems uncertain about whether or how to frame the comments which had been made to her (“it’s like erm…I’m trying to think now..) and seems to make an appeal to shared knowledge and culture (“Well, you know, it is like erm…..”) Because of her unease I invite her to generalize but this initially invokes a response which has more to do with contesting the status of chaplains and mention of, after a hesitation,
comments around whether she has sex or not. She is the more vulnerable to comment because “unfortunately we had a female chaplain here who had a relationship with one of the inmates”. Tait (2008,80) acknowledges the extra scrutiny of female staff by male officers which such occurrences cause, rare though they are. The implied assault is upon Imogen both as woman and as chaplain; she is vulnerable both in her personal and professional
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relationships. Her narrative becomes story when she recounts her work with “one young guy” who had, in strict confidence, disclosed childhood abuse. Here Imogen seems to be the “young guy’s” surrogate mother, (“he wanted to tell his mother this”), a role similar to that experienced by both Esther and Claudia in response to the disclosure of abuse. Since Imogen could not share what the “young guy” had told her, staff speculated openly about her
relationship with him to the extent that “I didn’t like that… I used to log it.” Despite her understanding of officers’ suspicions “it worked negatively” because the suspicions were gender based and determined the level of her response to the prisoner’s needs; she ends by reflecting that her actions were essentially gendered by cultural context: “I met all the criteria but I
overcompensated because I am a woman.”
Having talked through these issues Imogen is now able to offer, only partly prompted, her reaction to the implicit insult caused by the display of tabloid page 3 photographs apparently left open for her to see. The seriousness she perceives in it lies behind her principled assertion, “But I will not make a joke out of it.” She ends, however, with a strong affirmation of her relationship, as chaplain, with staff, even some who had previously been sceptical, through the delivery of a Prison Service staff training course. Even so, the beginning of the extract suggests that relations with staff can be more problematic than with prisoners, an observation made also by Heather.
Inevitably, perhaps, the attitude of female chaplains to the language of what is perceived to be predominantly a male culture varies. In contrast to
Heather’s passionate objections to sexual innuendo is Jeannette’s amusement about swearing and the (possibly ironic) reluctance of some staff to swear in front of the chaplain:
I don’t embarrass very easily. I’ve sold condom machines, you know? Actually I never sold one; I had them on my list but I never managed to shift one, not for want of trying. Actually what I find is that staff tell some story or they’ll be effing and blinding and they’ll go “Oops, sorry, sorry.” And I say, “What are you saying sorry for?” And they say, “I wouldn’t have said that if I’d known you were there.” And I always say the same thing: “Ah, I live in hope of hearing something I’ve never heard before.” Yesterday, one of the governors, he was going to tell
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this story, joke “But I can’t tell it with you here in the room.” “Oh, why ever not?” “No,” he said, “I wouldn’t be comfortable because it’s got swearing in it.” I said, “You should go and spend some time in a vestry,” (laughter) but I find that quite charming in its nod towards respect.
It is not clear from this whether the embarrassment of officers and governor arose from Jeannette’s status as chaplain, her gender or both. She herself is apparently possessed of a broad sense of humour and is not in the least embarrassed by the language or the prospect of a risqué story; she was, though, moved to tears when telling me about prisoners’ prayers. Like Martin’s respondents (1996,518) and others of mine, Jeannette accepts the nature of the culture in male prisons. Nevertheless, the assumed, possibly affected, propriety of “one of the governors”, who makes it clear that there is a joke which he will not tell in front of her, has the effect of excluding her from the group and stressing its essential maleness.
Penny relates a similar situation to Imogen’s where the scrutiny implied by staff comments is communicated through apparent humour:
I’ve just been working in a team where I was the only woman and all the men [officers] kept saying, “Mr X is asking for you, Penny. Mr X, he’s your favourite; Mr X will only talk to you.” And it got quite, quite tricky and I just felt that…um… it was either like having their older sister or their granny there so there was quite a lot of that in the confidentiality but it was like sensible practical advice and the male chaplains – some of them – were quite frightened to go on to the wings….
In this case, however, Penny, who is chaplain in a high security prison, recognises that the officers’ comments can be perceived as cautionary, that the constraints upon her contact with male prisoners arise from the
dynamics, actual and potential, of a lone woman working one to one with category A prisoners, rather than from what Imogen perceives more as tale bearing. This contrasts with Imogen’s experience in a lower category prison where the perceived physical risk is lower and staff are readier to engage with prisoners on the wing. Penny here presents herself as consciously outperforming her male colleagues, (7.2) projecting a version of what she
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thinks male behaviour should be, in the context of a high risk of assault or abduction, but isn’t because they were, “quite frightened to go on the wings”). These three responses could be seen as differing perceptions and awareness of boundaries in which the sharpest contrast is between Heather and
Jeannette.
As it is for female officers (Tait 2008, 75), so gender sensitivity is problematic in differing degrees for female chaplains who work alongside male staff in male prisons. For some, it is a source of serious offence whilst for others it can be, if not an area of indulgence, at least a source of amusement and gentle admonition. It is possible to see this as both a formative and resultant
feature of relations between female chaplains and male staff in male prisons; while there is no suggestion that a majority or even a large minority of male prison officers offer gender based challenges to them, nevertheless it is an issue of which a number of the chaplains are aware and around which they are consciously strategic. No such issues were mentioned by chaplains, male or female, working in female prisons. The extent to which women chaplains can exercise a ministry in male prisons seems to be determined, at least in part, by the relations they are able to establish with male staff. I encountered no misgivings of the kind found by Hicks (2012, 659).
In at least one instance a female chaplain, Pauline, began at a disadvantage and associates staff scepticism about her ability and inexperience with her own denigrated female embodiment:
I absolutely take on board that people saw me as a short and dumpy female who didn’t have a clue as to how the system worked…. and who could be taken very easily for a ride. People just thought that, “She won’t last more than six months.”
Pauline thinks that “They were judging me not as a priest but as someone who would be incapable in this environment” and that “it was much more to do with femaleness than ‘female in the church-ness’.” Pauline asserts that this stage has been passed but her words are a reminder that ordained female chaplains can be the objects of gender prejudice in both the Prison Service (informally) as well as in the Church, where women are ineligible to
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serve as bishops and their ministry can be legitimately rejected on grounds of “conscience and with deeply held beliefs based in scripture and tradition.” (Bagilhole 2003, 373) I refer elsewhere to Pauline’s dysfunctional
relationship with a previous line manager (5.4) but I should note here her comment that, “I have never had a female line manager.” Heather’s
experience seems to be that the gender of the manager does not necessarily make a difference.
A similar point is made in relation to the Church by Juliet:
As an NSM (non stipendiary minister) I was attached to a parish which opposed the ordination of women. Neither NSMs nor chaplains are owned by the Church. I thought when I came into this job from being an NSM that the Church would take more notice, but they didn’t. It’s easy for chaplains to develop a chip on their shoulder. I cannot celebrate in my home parish because they don’t approve of women priests so when we had a party to celebrate the 10th anniversary of
women’s ordination it was sort of under cover of darkness. Juliet’s comments suggest a degree of ghettoization among some women clergy where both a mode of ministry and the person exercising it are rejected and ignored. A sense of distance from mainstream church
structures, however, was acknowledged by male and female chaplains alike. (9.2; 10.2)
7.4 Gendered cross-postings and ministry to prisoners.
The previous section examined working relations between female chaplains and male staff. Chaplains’ principal ministry, however, is to prisoners and some of the tensions revealed in the previous section arise from that
relationship, the way it is perceived by male staff and the way in which those perceptions are acted upon. Some women chaplains (Heather and Imogen), however, expressed greater ease working with prisoners than with staff. Nevertheless, there are real constraints for chaplains working in an
establishment of the other gender, as Penny and Imogen recognise; one or two women chaplains, however, hint at a ministry which is available to women but not to men in both male and female prisons. Esther’s story is explicit:
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I mean the thing that you do get occasionally is people fall on your neck and burst into tears because I had a bloke who did that, and he was on reception and he was unusually, I think that he was probably principal carer for his little boy of 2 or 2½, and the previous night had been the first night that he had spent apart from him. And he was a big tough looking bloke with the vest and muscles you know, close
cropped hair and all the rest of it, and I was in his cell with, obviously, the door open, but I was in his cell and so I suppose in a way it’s a little moment of sort of private space and he started telling me and he just fell on my neck. And he cried on my shoulder because I was a woman and he could do that; there was nobody else he could have done it to. He wasn’t going to go and tell any of the male officers, I mean what do you do, you can’t say, “Oh, get off.”
Esther seems to echo Penny’s reference to substitute older sister or granny status,(7.3) a ministry of controlled intimacy involving physical contact and unavailable to men. In another account, which is narrative rather than complete story, she demonstrates the co-operation between her and a senior officer:
I remember the last evening I was at Seaport before I went to
Whitchurch, one of the S[enior] O[fficer]s wanted me to go and see a bloke, tidy bloke with neat short hair, clean shaven and all the rest of it, and as he started talking to me he burst into tears but fortunately the SO had parked us in his own office as he sensed there was something wrong and the guy started talking about being abused when he was a child.
In both vignettes Esther stresses the prisoners’ gender with reference to their physical characteristics (“big tough looking bloke …. vest and muscles… close cropped hair”, “short hair, clean shaven”). The SO in the second account seems to have responded both to the prisoner’s need and the female
chaplain’s situation, possibly recognising that the prisoner needed a safe space in which he could temporarily suspend his conformity to the hegemonic masculine stereotype in which men are in control and
invulnerable, and reveal his distress (Newburn & Stanko 1994, 161). The unmistakably gendered self-presentation of both men can be temporarily abandoned in the privacy of a cell and in the company of a woman whose presence as chaplain, may be perceived both as an extension of chapel space and as female familial surrogate. Toch (1992, 189) draws attention to the risks of being perceived as a potential victim. Both of Esther’s accounts might
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also be used in considering the location and nature of safe and sacred places in prisons as well staff’s perceptions of a chaplain’s function.
Esther also recounts an analogous experience concerning a male chaplain in a women’s prison:
Theo had to go and tell someone that their mother had died. He was upstairs on E wing and obviously he did the usual thing; he stopped off at the wing office and one of the women staff came up with him and he went in and he told the woman, broke the news. And she went straight out of the cell, outside on the landing. There was the officer and she went straight into her arms.
This is not to suggest undue constraint upon chaplains operating across the gender divide so much as to recognize gender based boundaries and the circumstances in which those boundaries may be crossed rather than transgressed. In this instance the function of prison officer was overlaid by gender identity and the officer supplied physical response which the male chaplain could not.
For Ronald same sex relationships were a source of acute embarrassment when he accidentally encountered women sharing a bed during the day, although he learnt to recognize the reality of it and had been prepared for it during training. He identified it as a major difference between ministry in a parish and a women’s prison:
It certainly challenged my theological view of things because having come from a parish where, certainly the parish I worked in, I didn’t get that sort of thing at all, not up front anyway, and suddenly being confronted with it up front and having to deal with all this, it was quite