All you need is love?
Our latest issue of Child Abuse Review, now available online, explores some of the dilemmas in working with violent fathers and their families. Positive affirmation and support is a central part of such work, but is it really all that is needed? Can violent men really change?
In our first paper for this issue Timothy Broady and colleagues report on an evaluation of a men’s domestic violence intervention programme, using a qualitative analysis of interviews with 21 participants (Broady et al., 2017). Perhaps the most striking finding of this research was the universal expression, by these fathers, of love for their children, and how that was ‘motivating them to stop using violence and to develop positive relationships with all family members’. Broady and his colleagues suggest that ‘the frustrations reported at not having contact with their children emerged as a particularly powerful experience that could be harnessed to encourage men to acknowledge the severity of their behaviour and to find alternative ways of relating to family members.’
It is not sufficient to put all the responsibility for keeping their children safe on mothers who themselves are victims of the violence and controlling behaviour perpetrated by their partners. If we are going to bring about any meaningful change in families affected by domestic violence, the perpetrators of that violence need to take responsibility for their attitudes and behaviours, and to take genuine steps towards changing not just the violent behaviours themselves, but also the deeper attitudes of power and control which underlie those behaviours.
Picking up on these findings, it seems imperative that intervention programmes seek to understand and work with what motivates violent perpetrators to change. If their love for their children can help motivate change, that must surely be a good thing. However, it is essential that practitioners, while showing compassion and a supportive attitude to their clients, are not naïve about the challenges involved. Change does not happen overnight, and the manipulative, controlling attitudes of many perpetrators of domestic violence mean that a degree of scepticism is important, along with patience and perseverance in working with these men.
As with so much of our safeguarding practice, we need to hold on to the hope that children’s lives can be better. We need to maintain high expectations of parents in their care of their children; provide them with the support that will enable them to meet those high expectations; and keep our focus on the child, so that we are prepared to challenge and act when those expectations are not met.
Balancing support and scrutiny
The difficulties in achieving a balance between support and scrutiny are brought into a different perspective in a paper by Louise Caffrey (2017), specifically in the context of volunteers working in supported child contact centres. Caffrey’s research is an excellent example of how systems methodology can help get beneath the surface of individual behaviours to understand the context, values, and organisational systems which may underlie those behaviours. Pertinently, she found that while the volunteers were aware that child safety and protection were everyone’s business, and were knowledgeable about their responsibilities to refer child protection concerns and how to do so, there were other emphases that could ‘stand in tension with their safeguarding commitments’. In particular, she found that workers emphasised a need to provide a welcoming service, to be non-judgemental, and to be neutral. Indeed, practices such as listening in on conversations, recording observations, or finding out about the background case histories, which were felt to jeopardise the aim of creating a welcoming environment, or that could be perceived as biased or judgemental, were actively avoided or viewed negatively by these workers.
‘You have to dance, not wrestle’
That was how one midwife described how she approached addressing child protection concerns with vulnerable pregnant women in a study from New South Wales by Louise Everitt, Caroline Homer and Jennifer Fenwick (Everitt et al., 2016). In a qualitative interview study, the authors identified four core themes that reflected some of the complexities of working with women and their unborn babies. Central to all of these was the dilemma caused by a partnership model of care, when potential child protection concerns are identified. The statutory power carried by community services could be seen as daunting by these midwives, and a potential threat to their relationship with their clients. Indeed, what comes across strongly in reading this report, is the emphasis these midwives place on maintaining a relationship with the mothers with whom they are working, and to do everything possible to support these mothers and enable them to take their babies home and care for them safely. One key aspect of this was the emphasis on being open and honest with these mothers, not going behind their backs, but providing them with support to try and change. Once again, this study highlights just how challenging such work can be, requiring perseverance, time and energy to achieve a good outcome.
Along with these studies of working with parents, other papers in this issue explore the impact of neglect and abuse on young people’s resilience and psychosocial adaptation, including a paper from Extremadura in Spain reporting on young people placed in residential care because of neglect (Moreno-Manso et al., 2017), and one from Jeff Moore, Christine Thornton and Mary Hughes (2017) reporting on a study with 22 Irish emigrant survivors of institutional abuse. In contrast, Duncan Helm (2017) reports on a thought-provoking ethnographic study of a social work team in Scotland. Helm identified high levels of case knowledge, along with exploration, curiosity and hypothesis generation, without the need to necessarily identify solutions. Practitioners were able to share knowledge and resources that supported critical thinking. However, He also identified an absence of challenging dialogue and dialectic debate. Helm’s findings emphasise the importance of both physical and emotional ‘secure space’ for practitioners, but highlights the need to promote ‘working team cultures which facilitate challenging yet supportive dialogue as an aid to sense-making’.
Love, challenge, patience and perseverance
Despite John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s assertion, in 1967, that ‘all you need is love’, the research reported in this issue of Child Abuse Review suggest that this is not the whole picture. ‘Love’, expressed in these papers as affection, empathy, compassion and support, for parents, children and young people, and colleagues, is a crucial component of safeguarding practice. Love of their children may indeed be a strong motivator for violent fathers, or vulnerable mothers, but expressions of love, by themselves, do not guarantee a child’s safety, and need to be accompanied by genuine and sustained changes in attitudes and behaviours that clearly promote the child’s needs. For practitioners, empathy and support towards the parents with whom they are working need to be balanced with professional curiosity and challenge, and attitudes of patience and perseverance in working with these families.
For those affected by abuse or neglect, compassion and understanding is clearly needed from those to whom they turn for support; that compassion and understanding needs to be grounded in empowering approaches of sharing control and helping the individual to build resilience.
Child Abuse Review Issue 26:5
Table of Contents
Peter Sidebotham
Timothy R. Broady, Rebecca Gray, Irene Gaffney and Pamela Lewis
Louise Caffrey
Louise Everitt, Caroline Homer and Jennifer Fenwick
Psychosocial Adaptation of Young Victims of Physical Neglect (pages 364–374)
Juan Manuel Moreno-Manso, Mª Elena García-Baamonde, Eloísa Guerrero-Barona, Macarena Blázquez-Alonso, José Manuel Pozueco-Romero and Mª José Godoy-Merin
Jeff Moore, Christine Thornton and Mary Hughes
Can I Have A Word? Social Worker Interaction and Sense-Making (pages 388–398)
Duncan Helm