Oxford studies bullying in prisons

A new study aimed at investigating the causes of conflicts and violence within Britain's prisons is being carried out by the University's Centre for Criminological Research. The study, by Research Officers Dr Kimmett Edgar and Ms Carol Martin, is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its new Violence Research Programme, and follows an earlier study by the centre on bullying in prisons. In the earlier study for the Prison Service, Dr Edgar and Dr Ian Donnell, now Director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust and Adjunct Fellow of Linacre College, found that 46 per cent of young offenders and 30 per cent of adult prisoners were assaulted, threatened with violence, or robbed in one month. This, they argued, could but did not always lead to bullying—defined in the study as a relationship based on dominance, established and maintained through intimidation or violence, exploited for material gain, status, or pleasure and persisted over time. Dr Edgar said: `We found that prisoners routinely victimise other prisoners with insults, petty physical confrontations, threats, and social exclusion, although actual bullying as we defined it was comparatively rare.' The report, which has just been published (University of Oxford Centre for Criminological Research, Occasional Paper number 18) was based on a two-year study, conducted in four prisons, shortly after the introduction of a new Prison Service anti-bullying policy in 1983. Dr Donnell and Dr Edgar carried out a survey of 1,566 prisoners and interviewed 200 inmates and staff as part of the study. The authors recommended prisons should adopt a `whole-prison' approach, rather like that adopted in schools, so that everyone comes to feel some responsibility for preventing bullying. The new study, by Dr Edgar and Ms Martin, will pursue the subject in more detail, examining background circumstances and the interactions between prisoners which lead to assaults. It will involve interviews with inmates in four different types of prison: a young offender institution, a local prison, a women's prison, and a dispersal (high security) prison and will again involve in-depth interviews with inmates. The researchers hope that interviewing all sides involved in conflicts in prison will help explain why violence occurs and contribute to the development of policies to tackle the problem.