Social support, familial stigma and release

Abstract

This chapter assesses interactions with individuals and agencies external to the caregivers' own social and family networks. Research has shown that families and children experience stigma through their association with a prisoner. Relatedly, the narratives of the caregiving kin bring sharply into focus the lived realities of the discrimination and isolation that accompanied their experience of maternal imprisonment. Anxieties about social acceptance, legal guardianship, and gaining appropriate support underpinned the caregivers' accounts while they negotiated the prison sentence and looked to the mother's future return to the family. The chapter has three main sections, exploring: challenges facing primary kin caregivers without legal guardianship for the children, and their experiences of identifying and securing statutory support; caregivers' experiences, perceptions, and management of familial stigma in media reports, their local community, online, and at the prison; and caregivers' expectations of the mother's release.