Most social workers don’t feel adequately prepared to engage with fathers, a Community Care poll has found.
In a recent interview with Community Care, Brid Featherstone, who has a long research career in child protection and domestic abuse, noted that practitioners’ reluctance to engage with fathers often resulted in mothers being held solely responsible for adhering to safety plans for children.
She attributed this to the profession having a primarily female workforce and a lack of training and resources.
Respondents to a Community Care poll, which received 561 votes, echoed Featherstone’s concerns, with the majority (77%) reporting that they did not receive the right support and training to work with fathers.
‘It’s easier to engage a woman’
“It is easier to engage a woman,” Featherstone said.
“She’s usually the person in front of you. It’s more likely that she will both see herself and be seen as responsible for the children.”
Research by Featherstone and fellow academic Kate Morris on knowledge around domestic abuse in child protection also highlighted that “the confines of a narrow, risk-focused child protection system” limit the use of holistic approaches, especially when working with men.
According to Featherstone, better engagement with boys and men is critical to improving safety for women and girls. She said this required a “whole-system approach”, underpinned by robust training and supervision.
“You need a space to talk about your fears and then appropriate places to direct men to. There need to be support groups and resources handy.”
Improving practice with fathers
To help improve your practice with fathers, Community Care Inform Children has produced a webinar on the topic.
Kevin Makwikila and Jourdelle Bennett, two fathers with lived experience of the child protection system, discuss how practice can be more inclusive towards fathers and the practical support and information that makes a difference to families. Inform Children subscribers can access the webinar here.
What support does your employer have in place for working with fathers?
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None. Focus is on completing paperwork
Training and specialist training always to be welcomed but there is a peculiar conundrum in this assertion. I’m a 46 year old white male heterosexual social worker. My only distinctive characteristics from that norm is my physical disability. If social workers are anything they are resourceful professionals able to surmount their lack of expertise in some areas. Does not being confident to work with men as a female social worker have it’s roots in the sexism and misogyny experienced by women routinely or failures in social work training? Clearly both but to deskill female colleagues by claiming they are not equipped to work with men is patronising. Not receiving support and supervision is the key really. Reducing social work to constantly changing narrow definitions is at the very least unhelpful. Can I not work with lesbian parents because of my gender? We can’t just claim it’s easier to work with women because they are “seen” as responsible for children. That lets off male responsibility for parenting and perpetuates sexism. As social workers we work in difficult circumstances and with difficult and at times aggressive service users. We do it if we are lucky because we get good supervision and we have good management support. In absence of that we do it with the encouragement, empathy and critical reflections from our colleagues. Every client group benefits from more resources but we don’t not work with those if resources don’t exist.