Book Review: Youth Offending and Restorative Justice: Implementing Reform in Youth Justice

Abstract

that is more holistic and problem-solving based. Silvestri shows that despite downplaying their revolutionary role, high-ranking British policewomen are changing the organization they work in by introducing more democratic leadership styles.The book's weakest section is the discussion of leadership style. Drawing on the extensive leadership literature in the field of management and organizational psychology, Silvestri states that women naturally gravitate toward transformational leadership styles in which democratic participation in decision making occurs. This is allegedly at odds with the transactional, autocratic style associated with military-based command structures. However, transformational leadership styles typically refer to the charismatic and visionary nature of the leader and do not necessarily equate to democratic participation.A more nuanced approach to leadership theory would have found that theories around team-based leadership may have been a more appropriate theoretical fit for her empirical findings. Also, empirical work on the "style approach" to leadership has explored the complex continuum between autocratic and democratic leadership. Bringing these leadership theories to the policing context, however, is a rather new approach, best crystallized in the recent book by M. R. Haberfeld titled Police Leadership (Prentice Hall, 2006).Overall, this book represents a turning point in scholarship on policewomen by focusing on those who have negotiated their roles during a long and successful career. By taking a critical stance as to their feminist consciousness, Silvestri provides a deeper understanding of the subtleties of women's presence in policing-as reluctant symbols of Western society's larger gender-liberalizing transformation during the past few decades.I initially consulted this book while working on my dissertation proposal for research on female policewomen in the small Arab, Muslim nation of Bahrain. Silvestri's findings prepared me for the nuances of a focus group I led with the highest ranking female police officers in the country. These women did not frame their work as part of a larger feminist revolution but rather as part of their society's concern for women and juvenile offenders within the aim of promoting healthy Bahraini families. Nonetheless, later at an NGO conference I attended in Bahrain, the policewomen were discussed as examples of secular liberalization, and calls for their full integration with policemen were made. Although Bahrain has a number of structural and cultural variables that make it different from the United Kingdom, the empirical findings in Silvestri's book appear to hold for policewomen in a variety of national contexts.