Social Work Awards 2016 - Jean O'Neill PBNI
Jean O’Neill has been a social worker since 1984 and throughout her career has worked to enhance social work practice, particularly in the area of improving the social work services delivered to female offenders in NI. She has made an outstanding contribution to changing and developing social work practice and policy in this area. Jean radically overhauled the social work services provided to women offenders, establishing the Inspire Women’s Project in 2008. Until recently, the approach to managing women offenders in Northern Ireland was identical to that delivered to men, there was no evidence that the risk factors resulting in criminal behaviour differed between the sexes. However, new research evidenced that gender matters significantly, in both the factors that contribute to criminal behaviour and the types of offence committed. Under Jean’s leadership the Inspire Women’s Project was established and develops and delivers a range of women-specific services which directly contribute to reducing women’s offending through targeted community based interventions. This project was the first of its kind in Ireland and has been acknowledged internationally as best practice. Dame Anne Owers commenting on the project said: “The Inspire model should be adopted as the norm for dealing with women who offend’. Jean’s philosophy is to treat people as ‘women first, citizens second and offenders third’ and that philosophy underpins the Inspire Project. The project provides a women-only space for attending probation appointments, completing offence-focused programmes and anger management, alcohol management and drug counselling programmes. The Inspire project has been independently evaluated and found 78% of the women interviewed reported that they had not committed any further offences since becoming involved with it. Olwyn Lyner of NIACRO: “Jean’s leadership enabled NIACRO and community based Women’s Centres to play a vital role in supporting women back into their own communities. Jeans professional social work approach teamed up with her ability to engage openly with colleagues and service users provided the context for an exceptional initiative for which she bears the credit”. Jean was instrumental in the drafting of the DOJNI Strategy for the Management of Women Offenders and those vulnerable to Offending 2010-13. In 2015 she was awarded a Griffins Society Research Fellowship to carry out further research on women who have offended. She completed her study - Time After Time - A Study of Women’s Experiences of Transitions from Custody - this year. Nicola Carr, lecturer from the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work at QUB:
