My friend and former work colleague Eileen McLeod, who has died aged 77, was a probation officer who moved into social work lecturing at Warwick University, where her research mainly focused on the argument that tackling inequalities in healthcare should be a central issue for social work.
Eileen was a co-founder, in 2004, of the Social Work and Health Inequalities Network, which now has almost 400 members in 25 countries, and she also wrote, with me, a book on the subject, Social Work, Health and Equality (2000).
In the 1970s and 80s, Eileen had also been a founding member of the Programme for the Reform of the Law on Soliciting, an alliance of professionals and sex workers. Its work was a key factor leading to the Sexual Offences Act 1985, which for the first time in the UK made men liable to prosecution for kerb crawling and persistent soliciting, and helped to change public perceptions of sex work. Her book Women Working: Prostitution Now was published in 1982.
Eileen was born in Kingston upon Thames in Surrey to Irene Powell (nee Clutterbuck), a housewife, and Ernest, a sales manager. She attended Tiffin school for girls before studying history at New Hall College, Cambridge (now Murray Edwards College), from where she graduated in 1967. She then gained a diploma in applied social studies at Oxford University – with a distinction and a university criminology prize – before starting work as a probation officer with the Inner London Probation and Aftercare Service (1969-70) and then moving on to the West Midlands Probation and Aftercare Service (1970-75).
Eileen’s interest in the complex intersection of socioeconomic disadvantage and institutional discrimination in the lives of her clients led to her appointment as a social work lecturer at Warwick University in 1975. While at Warwick her book Feminist Social Work (1989, written with Lena Dominelli) was published, and she also wrote Women’s Experience of Feminist Therapy and Counselling (1994). Remaining at the university for the rest of her career, she was awarded a doctorate by published work in 2003, retired as a reader in 2006, and was made emeritus professor in 2009.
At Warwick, Eileen was a highly respected lecturer and research supervisor who generously gave students her experience, knowledge, time and constructive support. She had a special mix of warmth, kindness, integrity and intellectual rigour.
Outside work she loved modern art, cinema, walks by the sea on the Cornish coast and meals with friends and family.
She is survived by a daughter, Anna, grandson Rory and her siblings Geoff and Julia.
