"There would have to be an amazing amount of trust": Community service providers on working with criminalized mothers, pregnancy, and substance use.


Katharine Dunbar Winsor, Mount Allison University

In this paper, I provide an overview of common experiences by community service providers supporting criminalized women in Atlantic Canada. The experiences they often provide support on include trauma, victimization, substance use, and motherhood. Due to their experiences and intersecting identities, criminalized women commonly face multiple forms of stigma and structural barriers in their daily lives. Community service providers commonly work to provide support and system navigation for criminalized women within community-based organizations. In an emotionally laden area of work, service providers support criminalized women as they navigate criminal legal, child protection, and social assistance systems. Further exploration of service providers’ experiences within their work and their understanding of their clients’ substance use, motherhood, and criminalization is warranted. Service providers commonly maintain ongoing professional relationships with clients and, therefore, have the potential to support criminalized women’s health and pregnancy through trauma-informed supports and approaches. Using a theoretical framework for the sociology of emotions, these experiences of community service provision are explored to illustrate their navigation of emotional predicaments within their field (Davis, 2016; Hochschild, 1983). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 women community service providers working with criminalized women in Atlantic Canada. Transcripts were subjected to open and focused coding. Themes illustrate that service providers are an important source of information for criminalized women and that trust built with clients is critical to de-stigmatizing conversations about substance use and pregnancy for criminalized women. Community service providers as prolonged and often trusted individuals in the lives of criminalized women highlight additional pathways for trauma-informed approaches around substance use. Relationship-building and trust are paramount in these relationships. At the same time, trauma-informed education and resources can further support both community service providers and the work they are engaged in.

This paper will be presented at the following session: