Time : Episode 2

*spoilers

‘The world’s not a straightforward place for a woman’

Season 2 , Episode 2 of Time by Jimmy McGovern,  gives us insights into the complexity of women’s lives, the assumptions we make about each other, and the strength and courage it takes to be a mother, albeit a flawed one (and which of us who is a mother can’t put our hand up to that?). Throughout the episode it would be fair to say that nothing was straightforward for any woman. 

The number of issues faced by the women felt a bit overwhelming at times, but that is often the nature of life for women who are criminalised and in prison. One issue leads to another, often in a downward and fast moving spiral, and what began with a small mis-step ultimately takes someone over the cliff edge.  I’m not going to try to pick up on all of them, in this blog I’m just going to focus on Kelsey’s story.

The young, maybe teenage, heroin addict, is in prison on remand (pre-trial) for drug importation, and has discovered that she is pregnant with her first child. We see her being taken to appointments, visiting the Mother and Baby Unit and facing harsh words from other prisoners.

The experience of Kelsey is not atypical of women who are pregnant in prison but we do know that many women in prison are not brought to their ante-natal appointments and their healthcare and wellbeing needs are not adequately met. If you read the work of Dr Laura Abbott and Dr Lucy Baldwin, you’ll come across many accounts of women not getting the care they need whilst pregnant in prison. You’ll read of women who feel that being pregnant in prison increases their vulnerability and is something they need to play down. Deprivations range from not getting folic acid, proper nutrition, or an adequate mattress, to keeping silent about the pregnancy for fear of being a target for the resentment of other women who don’t have their children with them. 

There are only a few prisons which have Mother and Baby Units (MBU), which are often under-utilised.  Not because women don’t want a place on them, but because the conditions for a place are so stringent that many women are automatically excluded from applying. Even when women do apply there is often a bias from local authority social workers (who give a report to the Mother and Baby Board) against women having their child with them in prison. In 2022 the Chief Social Worker Isabelle Trowler undertook a review of MBU applications and made recommendations for improvement including in the consistency of the decision -making process, the experience of women and the input of children’s social care to this process.

I’ve been looking at social work case files from a women’s prison and came across a report to an MBU board for a woman in her late twenties. The local authority social worker advised against the woman being allowed to keep her baby in the MBU. She had not met the mother but was making this recommendation because the woman had a previous pregnancy aged 16, when the baby was removed from her. In most circumstances this inadequate report would have been the determining view, and the child would have been separated from their mother at birth. Fortunately the prison social worker, funded by Pact’s Together a Chance scheme, was able to intervene to ask the board to take a different view based on the prison social worker’s assessment of the mother at that time. The matter was referred to the Governor, who agreed that the woman could have an MBU place. 

Care proceedings, where a child is removed from a parent, are viewed within the family courts as the most serious proceedings the court will hear. It has long bothered me that MBU admission decisions are quasi care proceedings, often concluding with the removal of a child from their mother, and yet they are conducted by lay people whose decisions are not subject to any kind of review process.  It is another area where imprisonment seems to lead to a lack of procedural justice for women. 

The scene of the MBU board gave us the chance to observe just a small glimpse of the dehumanisation which forms part of our punishment systems. I hope that Time’s depiction of it will make viewers question its purpose. Can you imagine sitting in a room with three people you’ve never met before as they discuss reports written about you, perhaps by people who also have never met you. You are in the room but you’re talked about in the third person as if you don’t exist. I know that I would find that frustrating, it would feel rude, and if it was in the context of them making a life changing decision about me I’d struggle to not interject or correct and I’d probably end up angry and showing it. In Time, we see Kelsey in this situation at her MBU board. When she is allowed to speak she’s almost immediately challenged on something she’s said by an older white middle class man on the panel. She responds well and is allowed to continue. She explains to the panel how she’s never before been able to think about her future. But now with a baby coming, she can think about her future and she believes she will be a good mother. 

What Kelsey did took real courage. There are women who find themselves in Kelsey’s position who can’t face making an application to the MBU because they fear they’ll be looked upon as a bad mother and so they choose not to put themselves through that. In the play [Blank] which Clean Break performed at the Donmar Warehouse a few years ago, a pregnant woman worried what her other children would feel if the baby was able to live with her whilst they couldn’t. Applying to an MBU board is an immense challenge for any woman in prison.

And then Kelsey gives birth. In prison. With no staff or medical support. Fortunately for Kelsey she was in a unit where the other women could help her, but what if she’d been locked in a cell? It seems unlikely the story would have ended with a healthy mother and baby. The dramatization of the scene might make us think that the lack of concern ( ‘is there anyone who can go over? No there’s no midwife and healthcare clocked off at 5’ ) wouldn’t be replicated in real life, but we know that it is.

The world’s not a straightforward place for a woman.