scholarly journals A multitheoretical perspective for addressing domestic and family violence: Supporting fathers to parent without harm

2021 ◽  
pp. 146801732110285
Author(s):  
Emma Gatfield ◽  
Patrick O’Leary ◽  
Silke Meyer ◽  
Kathleen Baird
Keyword(s):  
Family Violence ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Complex Needs ◽  
Intact Families ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
And Behavior

Summary Domestic and family violence remains a significant challenge to family wellbeing. The risk of serious harm from domestic and family violence is disproportionally carried by women and children, yet often the complex reality of family life means that many families have ongoing contact with their abusers. Responses to this problem are frequently siloed across child protection and specialist domestic violence services, leading to a lack of holistic intervention. More recently, there has been increased attention on addressing the role and behavior of abusive fathers, especially where fathers remain in families or have ongoing contact postseparation through coparenting. This paper offers a systemic approach for understanding and addressing such amilies. Findings An integrated theoretical framework is proposed, which draws together key tenets of feminism, family violence, and intersectional theories within a systems-oriented model. It frames families, inclusive of fathers, within their eco-social contexts, highlighting factors that exacerbate domestic and family violence, and those that increase family safety, which has strong applications for social work practice. Applications An integrated theoretical framework offers an approach for social workers for understanding domestic and family violence in a broad-based and holistic manner, and for developing coordinated family focused interventions while concurrently addressing related child welfare concerns and family safety. A range of considerations for case management of families are explored, which, while relevant to most intact families or those who have continuing contact with perpetrators, holds particular relevance for marginalized families that present with complex needs and experiences of disadvantage.

Building Collaboration with Child Protection and Domestic and Family Violence Sectors: Trialling a Living Lab Approach

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Wendt ◽  
Carmela Bastian ◽  
Michelle Jones
Keyword(s):  
Family Violence ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Mental Health Problems ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Cultural Safety ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Living Lab ◽  
Competing Priorities ◽  
Future Work

Abstract Collaboration across child protection and domestic and family violence (DFV) sectors have long been sought despite the competing priorities found in these practice fields. This article describes a research partnership that aimed to explore the competing priorities by focusing on how workers interact across child protection and DFV specialist agencies. Using a Living Lab Approach, enabled twelve focus groups with child protection and DFV social workers (n = 100). Thematic analysis was conducted, and it was found that diverse understandings of DFV created tensions when trying to form collaborations. These tensions were often amplified when other intersecting issues were present in family lives such as drug and alcohol and mental health problems. Understandings of Aboriginal cultural safety, and religious and culture impacts for cultural and linguistically diverse families were unintentionally sidelined. However, practitioners also formed common understandings of opportunities to progress and sustain collaboration across the sectors. The Living Lab Approach facilitated the development of a policy and practice guide for child protection to support future work. This has implications for social work practice because the Living Lab Approach enabled a call for a consistent approach to DFV that should be gender sensitive, trauma informed and culturally safe, and collaboration at practitioner, team and organisational levels.

scholarly journals Containment: Exploring the concept of agency in children’s statutory encounters with social workers

Childhood ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Morrison ◽  
Viviene Cree ◽  
Gillian Ruch ◽  
Karen Michelle Winter ◽  
Mark Hadfield ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Children’S Agency

This article examines children’s agency in their interactions with social workers during statutory encounters in a child protection context. It draws from a UK-wide ethnographic study. It finds that much of social workers’ responses to children’s agency in this context are best understood as a form of ‘containment’. In doing so, it offers an original and significant contribution to the theoretical understanding of children’s agency, as well as its application in social work practice.

Recruiting and Engaging Men as Fathers in Social Work Practice

2014 ◽  
pp. 235-260
Author(s):  
Joseph Fleming ◽  
Andrew King ◽  
Tara Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Social Work Students ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Engaging Men ◽  
Current Knowledge Base

Evidence in the research literature suggests that men are usually not engaged by social workers, particularly in child welfare and child protection settings. Mothers also tend to become the focus of intervention, even when there is growing evidence that men can take an active and important role in a child's development in addition to providing support to the mother and family. Whilst there have been some promising developments in including men in social work practice internationally, there remains a gap in the research regarding the engagement of men as fathers in Australia. Given the growing relevance of the topic of fathers, the purpose of this chapter is to add to the current knowledge base, to support social work students and practitioners to engage with men in their role as fathers, and to offer an evidence-based practice model that may assist social workers in their work with men as fathers.

Social Work Practice Outcomes

2014 ◽  
pp. 166-185
Author(s):  
Colin Pritchard ◽  
Richard Williams
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Psychosocial Development ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Mixed Methods Research ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Child Homicide ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Beneficial Impact

The key issue in all human services is outcome. The authors report on a series of four mixed methods research studies to conclude that good social work can bring about positive measurable differences to inform policy and practice. The first focuses on how effective Western nations have been in reducing Child Abuse Related Deaths (CARD); the second explores a three-year controlled study of a school-based social work service to reduce truancy, delinquency, and school exclusion; the third examines outcomes of “Looked After Children” (LAC); the forth re-evaluates a decade of child homicide assailants to provide evidence of the importance of the child protection-psychiatric interface in benefiting mentally ill parents and improving the psychosocial development and protection of their children. These studies show that social work has a measurable beneficial impact upon the lives of those who had been served and that social work can be cost-effective, that is, self-funding, over time.

scholarly journals Child Protection With Muslim Communities: Considerations For Non-Muslim-Based Orthodoxies/Paradigms in Child Welfare and Social Work

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 1201-1218
Author(s):  
Patrick O’Leary ◽  
Mohamad Abdalla ◽  
Aisha Hutchinson ◽  
Jason Squire ◽  
Amy Young
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Social Work Practitioners ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Legal Contexts ◽  
Muslim Communities

Abstract The care and protection of children are a concern that crosses ethnic, religious and national boundaries. How communities act on these concerns are informed by cultural and religious understandings of childhood and protection. Islam has specific teachings that relate to the care and guardianship of children and are interpreted in diverse ways across the Muslim world. Islamic teachings on child-care mostly overlap with Western understandings of child protection, but there can be some contested positions. This creates complexities for social workers intervening in Muslim communities where the basis of their intervention is primarily informed by a non-Muslim paradigm or occurs in secular legal contexts. The purpose of this article is to address at a broad level the issue of how overarching concepts of child protection and Islam influence social work practice with Muslim communities. It addresses a gap in practical applications of the synergy of Islamic thinking with core social work practice in the field of child protection. For effective practice, it is argued that social work practitioners need to consider common ground in Islamic thinking on child protection rather than rely on Western frameworks. This requires further research to build evidence-based practice with Muslim families.

scholarly journals Embodied Social Work Practice Within Risk Society

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 673-691 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Smeeton ◽  
Patrick O’Connor
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Risk Society ◽  
Service Users ◽  
Extreme Risk

This paper critically discusses the limitations of theorising social work from psychological and sociological perspectives and argues that phenomenology offers more opportunity to understand the embodied experiences of service users and social workers themselves. The paper argues that psychology and sociology have a limited analysis of being-in-the-world, which ought to be social work’s primary consideration. The paper offers an overview of the sociology of risk before embarking on an extensive description and discussion of Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology applied to the lived experience of child protection social workers working within risk society. The argument is put that phenomenology is a useful tool for understanding the lived experience of social work practitioners. Findings: The authors conclude that embodied social work practice containing fear and anxiety can be thought of as akin to taking part in extreme risk sports and that this is an unhealthy experience that is likely to skew decision-making and adversely affect the lives of social workers and service users. Applications: The authors argue that phenomenology can enhance understanding of practice and decision-making and offers insights into the lived experience of social workers. Phenomenology is useful for helping social workers negotiate risk-saturated environments, through a focus on meaning.

scholarly journals Measuring parenting capacity for disabled children using a child protection assessment

2020 ◽  
pp. 146801732095749
Author(s):  
Susan Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Assessment Tools ◽  
Social Model ◽  
Capacity Assessment ◽  
Childhood Disability ◽  
Disabled Children ◽  
Social Model Of Disability

Summary Childhood disability can heighten risk of neglect and abuse and may also impinge upon the parenting task. Even so, a gross deficiency of published literature on social work parenting capacity assessment for disabled children is evident. This paper provides a critical commentary on approaches to assessments of the capacity of parents of disabled children. International review of literature on this subject matter is enacted across three themes. Findings Themes refer to limitations to the uptake of disability-specific parenting assessment tools, use of existing generic frameworks and supplementation of generic frameworks, respectively. Throughout, a composite conceptual frame is taken up, entailing the conventions of a seminal social model of disability, extended through an affirmative non-tragedy lens. The intention is to contest articulations of disability grounded in tragedy and melancholia, otherwise instantiated by links between disability with child maltreatment in this paper. Applications Application of insights from this paper within professional social work practice can enhance evidence-informed parenting capacity assessment.

scholarly journals From Aristotle to Arendt: A phenomenological exploration of forms of knowledge and practice in the context of child protection social work in the UK

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Smeeton
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Work Activity ◽  
The People ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

This paper attempts to explore the relationship between different forms of knowledge and the kinds of activity that arise from them within child protection social work practice. The argument that social work is more than either ‘science’ or ‘art’ but distinctly ‘practice’ is put through a historical description of the development of Aristotle’s views of the forms of knowledge and Hannah Arendt’s later conceptualisations as detailed in The Human Condition (1958). The paper supports Arendt’s privileging of Praxis over Theoria within social work and further draws upon Arendt’s distinctions between Labour, Work and Action to delineate between different forms of social work activity. The author highlights dangers in social work relying too heavily on technical knowledge and the use of theory as a tool in seeking to understand and engage with the people it serves and stresses the importance of a phenomenological approach to research and practice as a valid, embodied form of knowledge. The argument further explores the constructions of service users that potentially arise from different forms of social work activity and cautions against over-prescriptive use of ‘outcomes’ based practice that may reduce the people who use services to products or consumables. The author concludes that social work action inevitably involves trying to understand humans in a complex and dynamic way that requires engagement and to seek new meanings for individual humans.

scholarly journals A Peace Paradigm in Social Work.

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adenike Yesufu
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Social

Social work is usually seen as a profession with a localized focus but it is eclectic as it borrows from various disciplines for its theoretical framework, which makes it at times disjointed with no cohesion in the various dimensions of its practice. There have been several calls for a change of paradigm in Social Work. This paper takes a critical look at the profession and joins the myriad of calls for the expansion of the Social Work focus. In particular, this article introduces a peace paradigm, which would essentially integrate peace issues and peace perspectives into Social Work practice.

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