Music and communication for mothers and young children in prison

Abstract

The inspiration for this research began with a surprise; a lack of information on the musical communication between mothers and their young children, albeit in a unique environment, the prison. Musical interactions between mothers and infants, for example, the use of music to establish routines in young children’s lives, play a role in establishing positive bonds between mothers and their babies around the world (Martin, 2014). This paper follows initial research on this topic undertaken in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Early Learning and Development in Music; we found only one academic paper (Rodrigues et al., 2010) that examines how music is used by women and their children who reside in custody with them to communicate with each other and form positive attachment bonds. Based on both of our professional experiences, as music teachers and practitioners working in prisons in Scotland and Portugal, we saw that this practice is not reflected in published academic literature. There is an established field on the impact of parental imprisonment between parents and children that are separated by imprisonment, and research on music in prisons has often focused on the benefits for adults who engage with music while incarcerated (Henley et al., 2012). However, there is a much smaller discourse on women who are incarcerated and raising their young children with them inside prison, and the musical interactions between mother and child. This paper is timely as the number of women in custody around the world has increased substantially, and on every continent, by over 100,000 in the last decade (Prison Reform Trust, 2021). In this paper, we discuss our research project designed to bring together practitioners and researchers that work across the many areas of this practice including music education, health and penology, in a series of online workshops using Heikkinen et al.’s (2012) ‘Five Principles of Action Research and Narrative’ to connect and develop this practice. We discuss music programmes designed for delivery to participants in formal educational settings, as well as the everyday musicing that takes place between mothers and their children, for example, in cells, and how this may mitigate the negative impact of imprisonment for women. This research will expand knowledge and understanding of a hidden area of practice, music as a form of communication between mothers and their young children who reside in custody with them, and discuss implications for music education in the prison environment.