Did you know that Caring Dads have been running for 20 years and we are now in many locations around the world?
There are Caring Dads groups in the following locations:
CANADA where it all started!
UNITED STATES: including Oregon, Colorado, Illinois, Vermont, Connecticut, NY and Maine!
AUSTRALIA: in most States!
UNITED KINGDOM: England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland!
EUROPE: Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, Holland!
I would like to make a plea for children whose fathers are abusive in their families. In Canada, as in many other places, we have different policies, programs and practices for responding to violence against women and for child maltreatment. This separation of response continues despite the fact that: a) a major form of child victimization is child exposure to domestic violence (perpetrated almost always by their fathers); b) fathers perpetrate about as much physical abuse against children as mothers and predominate as perpetrators of injurious and potentially lethal forms of abuse; c) mothering is a frequent focus of men’s abuse; d) men’s risk of perpetrating domestic homicide applies to their children; e) men’s perpetration of domestic violence and their maltreatment of children frequently co-occur… I could go on. Suffice to say that in our Covid 19 world, I am very worried about children living in families with men who cause harm.
Right now, we may be the only social service providers with expertise in violence talking to men. I am fully in support of the “pivot” recommended by the WWP European Network to a response focused on monitoring and managing immediate risk to potential victims of men’s abuse. For emphasis, I have put the list below of risk factors they this group emphasizes.
· Previous arrests for DV and convictions
· Court mandated clients
· Alcohol and drug use
· Previous severe episodes of physical violence
· Coercive controlling behaviors
· High jealousy and controlling behaviors
· Low motivation to change
· Doesn’t take responsibility for his violence
I would like to add to this list a few key risk factors for children that practitioners doing these critical check-ins can be aware of and listen for.
· Presence of infants, toddlers and young children – younger children are more vulnerable because they are more “breakable” and also because they have fewer strategies to manage their risk and escape from his violence
· Involvement of children as part of IPV episodes (could be a rationale for his abuse of their mother, children could be trying to intervene to stop the abuse)
· Expressions of hostility/rage/extreme frustration over a child not behaving the way he wants especially if escalating
· Support of aggression/corporal punishment as a means to control children
· Threats/fantasies about keeping children (i.e., “maybe I just won’t take them back after this access visit. It would serve her right”)
· Lack of appreciation about how his abuse is impacting his children (i.e., their fear, desire to distance themselves from him, anger/rejection of him) especially when these reactions become further justifications for his abuse (e.g. , “I’ll give him something to be afraid of”, “If she [mom] wasn’t so incompetent, I wouldn’t have to do this”)
I realize that many practitioners have been trained in an adult-focused world and may feel less comfortable talking to men about maltreatment of children. I come back to the fact that you may be the only contact with him in a family where the risk he poses to everyone is very high. Please consider adding these risk factors to you list of things to be aware of, ask about, monitor and respond to.
Katreena Scott, PhD. C. Psych.
University of Toronto
Caring Dads Author
To learn more about what Dr. Katreena Scott’s work outside of Caring Dads please visit this link:
https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/aphd/Home/Faculty_and_Staff/Faculty/1541/Katreena_Scott.html
Western Australia
Caring Dads and Stopping Family Violence joined together in the creation of this Webcast to speak about the importance of perpetrator based work during the COVID19 pandemic. Damian Green is the CEO of Stopping Family Violence in Perth Australia as well, Damian is one of our Caring Dads trainers and valuable partners.
During this webcast, Damian speaks to the need for systems to step up to ensure the safety of women and children during a time of isolation and uncertainty. Both Caring Dads and Stopping Family Violence sends the message that we need to focus on child safety when it comes to the intersection of fatherhood and domestic violence.
MORE ABOUT DAMIAN: Damian Green is the CEO of Stopping Family Violence (SFV), and a passionate advocator and researcher of perpetrator responses in Australia with a key vision of instilling a high standard of excellence across the sector. Through his work at SFV, and as an experienced Research Associate within the Social Work discipline at Curtin University, Damian has been involved in an array of national research projects exploring perpetrator interventions in both an advisory and investigatory capacity. Prior to this, Damian worked for nine years at Communicare as Executive Manager for Accommodation and Therapeutic Services. Here, he was responsible for a directorate that included a Professional Training Institute, Psychological Services, Family and Domestic Violence Services and Justice Services. Prior to commencing employment at Communicare, Damian worked in out of home care with youth and spent 10 years in the management of child care services.
Damian is a Board member of Starick, a not for profit organisation that provides support services to women and children affected by FDV. Damian is a registered psychologist and board approved supervisor with AHPRA and in this role provides clinical supervision and training. He is a registered Safe & Together Trainer, and an experienced group work facilitator and trainer having worked extensively in the areas of violent offending, MBCPs and parenting over the past 15 years.
Damian Green
March 30, 2020
Rationale
In the wake of COVID 19 and necessary social distancing measures, it is almost certain that rates of domestic and family violence and abuse are going; with women and children most likely being harmed and the men and fathers in their families most likely causing this harm. The reasons for this increase in vulnerability and risk for causing harm are numerous and include: the need to be constantly in close space with others; increased stress due to job loss, medical concerns; interruption of access to activities and locations that would regularly offer protection against abuse (e.g., work and school environments); and reduction in social monitoring and control of risk for those who have caused harm through criminal justice, child protection and intervention programs for men who cause harm in their intimate relationships and families.
Should we move our groups online?
We appreciate that there are a range of factors that are going to go into a decision about whether to run groups online or not, including funding provisions, agreements with other agencies and recommendations from your local public health services. Our thinking about this is focused on the safety of women and children who might be victims of men’s abuse. From this standpoint, we believe that there are a number of challenges to simply “continuing as normal” online.
Here are some of our thoughts:
1. Our main goal is to contribute to the safety of women and child victims of men’s abuse. At this time of crisis we need to provide crisis work that is responsive to the specific risks men pose to women and children. In this time of increased risk, it makes most sense to focus on managing crises. Crisis services are designed to manage immediate risk. They are individualized and context specific. Through connecting with, monitoring and managing men’s risk of engaging in abusive and violent behaviour, we have stronger potential to keep women and children safer during this critical period.
2. Change of long term patterns of behaviour is likely not a realistic goal at the current time. In intervention programs like Caring Dads we are aiming to help men change key patterns of thinking and behaviour. Although change process can often be kick-started by crisis, people then need periods of security and stability in which to work towards this kind of long-term change. The current context is not likely conducive to this sort of work. Crisis response is likely a better fit to the safety needs of women and children.
3. Expecting our clients to be able to engage in change “as normal” is also not realistic. Just as it doesn’t make sense for our programs to run “as normal”, it is not realistic for our clients to be focusing on change in the same way as they were before this crisis. Fathers are likely dealing with a range of new stressors and new risk situations. For example, access visits that were formerly non-problematic might now have become a point of conflict between him and his partner. Children’s annoying behaviour may be heightened due to their anxiety and because children are missing their social connections and normal routine. It is these new stressors and situations – and their impact on his abusive behavior – that is likely the most important focus for increasing safety.
4. Risks that women and children are dealing with right now are not necessarily the same as the ones that were present before. The kinds of risks that men pose to their partners and children might be quite different right now due to COVID, social distancing measures and to major changes that have occurred in families (e.g., closed childcare, schools, job loss). For example, there may be families where mothers are at work and fathers are not, meaning that fathers are suddenly having considerably more responsibility for caring for children. Even if mothers are doing the majority of caregiving, it may be the case that fathers who don’t normally spend a lot of time in the home may be around constantly which may elevate risks because it may limit mothers’ privacy and ability to access support and children’s ability to escape from his coercion, hostility, anger and abuse.
5. Survivors have expressed concern about agencies offering online groups. There is an important discussion being held online that is drawing on voices of survivors for their recommendations. These interviews with women partners of abusive men caution against the risks to them and their children of running groups online during this time. Their concerns include worry about him being “triggered” by group material and having no one to manage that, children overhearing men’s group discussions, and the potential stress to survivors of having to overhear men in the program engage in minimization, denial and blame.
6. We don’t normally consider COVID-specific risks. If we were to provide “regular” groups right now, we would really need to look at the content and modify material to account for this specific context. Some change strategies that we may commonly recommend will not work in this context and we don’t typically cover information on stresses associated with being in close and constant quarters or by types of abuse that perpetrators now have access to that they didn’t before. As one example, a father might decide not to return children after an access visit as a control strategy.
If not online groups, what do we need? Some Initial Suggestions
1. Make available a “distress” line for men to call into that is open to current and past Caring Dads fathers.
2. Do check in calls with fathers already in service.
3. When you make contact with fathers, focus on the following:
Making a connection so that he has someone to reach out to and so that his partner is not the only one bearing the load of risk
Ask questions that allow you to assess and monitor men’s risk to their families. This includes thinking about recent and current stressors that men and their families are facing. o Working with men to understand their risk to others and to counter this with prosocial desires such as being a good father, keeping their relationship, avoiding arrest, etc.
Collaborating with men and, as needed, with other social service providers to manage and reduce dynamic risk (e.g., support implementation of harm reduction strategies in substance using men, address immediate housing needs, “talk men down” from revenge and anger)
Providing as much practical support as you can to help manage immediate stress.
Service could include helping fathers complete employment insurance forms, access food banks, etc.
We are pleased to announce our special guest speaker at the Caring Dads Conference in May!
David is a proud Aboriginal man from Tasmania, Australia. He has worked in various research roles over the last decade all of which have been focused on improving the physical, social, emotional and cultural outcomes for people in our communities. David is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne within the Department of Social Work and is a program scholar within the Safer Families Centre of Research Excellence.
David has research interest in a variety of fields including family violence, Indigenous health, custodial environments, and sport for development.
“Domestic and Family violence has a significant impact upon Aboriginal women, children and communities globally. Discussion on how to develop appropriate domestic and family violence interventions within Australian Aboriginal communities is often polarised and framed as a gendered versus a healing approach. However, there is an argument to be made that both approaches are needed. This presentation will explore this notion and present a framework for working with Aboriginal men who have used violence that is underpinned by a healing and gendered approach.” - Dave Gallant
London, UK
Dermot Brady, (Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Kingston and St. George’s University, London, UK & one of our Caring Dads Trainers) shared a little story about the impact of Caring Dads in his community we felt was worth sharing.
”Training is often not enough. When we work with communities implementing Caring Dads, we need to do work around the system that supports the programme. If the programme is to run well it needs to be embedded in children’s services. That can be quite a challenge as systems vary widely in their approach, practice models and culture. Working with fathers can be a real challenge. People know that we should be doing this, but often are not talking to them in any meaningful way and this seems to be a common factor in systems in the UK and in other places I have worked. It would be interesting to hear from other people about this. For change to happen services need support from people delivering the programme and also from senior managers. I came across a great example of this recently.
We (that is me and Elaine) recently delivered an event in Haringey in London. Haringey is a very diverse borough with its share of problems, common to big cities. We really enjoyed the training – a lively, committed group of people, some of whom had been waiting for some time for a model to work with fathers. We had support from senior managers and were working through how to implement the programme, how to generate referrals, what criteria we would use and so on. Part of this was talking to the social workers who would be making referrals into the programme, so an event was arranged, with about 40 or so social workers in attendance. I described the programme and we had an interesting debate. Some of the recently trained staff came along to talk also.
I was in the middle of my usual spiel when I noticed a woman near the front of the room trying to catch my eye. And catch it she did. She came up to the front of the room and said hello. We exchanged pleasantries and to be honest I had no idea who she was – maybe I should have been paying more attention. She introduced herself as Ann Graham, the Chief Executive Office of Haringey Children’s services. https://www.haringey.gov.uk/jobs-and-training/working-children-and-young-people-s-service/welcome-director-childrens-services.
Ann started to talk about her previous experience of Caring Dads and why she was supporting it in Haringey. She had been in Barking and Dagenham (another area in London that has been running the programme successfully for some time) and in particular describing the group of fathers who had been on the programme. She said it was one of the most positive meetings she had ever had with fathers in children’s services and talked about the changes they had made. She gave quite a few examples, including one man who had enrolled in literacy classes because he wanted to read to his child. I know the men make all kinds of changes and some men do not shift at all. I expect them to stop the violence and abusive behaviours, so learning to read and write might not sound that important. But it shows that particular man was thinking about the long term welfare of and relationship with his child. That’s important.
You don’t often see the most senior managers in organizations at this level. Children’s services in Haringey are large and complex. But when I see a senior manager, especially THE senior manager, on the shop floor as it were, I kind of think that service will do well. It says something about what kind of leader they are. I shared this story with colleagues in Barking and Dagenham later that day. Alison Ryan, who has been managing the programme in B+D for some time replied - what a lovely email to get at 5pm on a Tuesday . I asked Ann for permission to share this story and she quickly agreed.
What do I take for this? Senior leaders not only enable things to happen, they also set the tone. The best are able to link their considerable responsibilities with a focus on children and a direct link to practice. And we never know what the impact of the connections we make will be. What we do in one place can have unintended consequences in another. Sometimes that is really positive.” - Dermot Brady
A paper written by Dr. Katreena Scott *please see link to paper at bottom of this post
Dr. Scott’s Research Lab at The University of Toronto aims to reduce violence in family relationships and specifically focuses on violence perpetration in men and fathers. Dr. Scott is recognized internationally for her intervention work with abusive fathers and nationally for her research on effective interventions for intimate partner violence.
Today’s blog will highlights a paper written by Dr. Scott and make key connections to the Caring Dads program. The theory behind the Caring Dads program is important to understand why we need to do this work. Caring Dads is not just a 17 week group process but equally includes a mother contact component and critical case collaboration. In addition to this, the four goals of the Caring Dads program are linked and connected to the safety of women and children.
Have you ever wondered how improving the father-child relationship helps reduce re-occurrence of domestic violence? How is this connected to the child’s mother?
Please review the chart below to understand the benefits of working with fathers and how Caring Dads strives to promote change in fathers’ parenting behaviours.
|
BENEFITS WORKING WITH DADS |
LINK TO CARING DADS |
|
Strong and healthy father/child relationship – minimizes abuse and improves child outcomes |
Goal 2 – Child-centred Fathering Listening, Playing, Praising Child Development, Child’s Identity |
|
Ending Violence Against Women |
Mother Contact Case Collaboration |
|
Support to Children’s Mothers |
Takes the pressure off mom to be responsible for keeping herself safe (and her children) while work is being done to change the abusive behaviour with the father – *above slide shifting towards safer practice Mother Contact – weekly throughout group Case Collaboration – informed by what mom says |
|
Emotional attachment between children and fathers – improves child outcomes |
Goal 2 – Child-centred fathering , developing empathy, developing discrepancies (breaking the cycle of abuse) Goal 3 - Taking Responsibility for Abusive Actions – CBT work to see different perspective |
|
Accountability, contributing to child healing – helps children heal if father takes responsibility |
Goal 3 – Taking Responsibility for Abusive Actions – CBT work to talk about abuse and make changes to parenting behaviour Goal 4 – Rebuilding Trust Fathers rebuild trust with children – how to talk to their kids about what happened |
|
Fathers who leave one family seldom end their involvement with children in general – also move on to new families |
Goal 2 – Child-centred Fathering , includes step-child relationship Goal 4 – Planning for the Future (safety plan) Case Collaboration |
|
Potential to monitor and contain fathers during follow-up from the child protection, justice systems |
Goal 4 – Planning for the Future (safety plan) Stance: “If the child has to deal with him so should we” Case Collaboration |
|
Support fathers in deciding to, or in being ordered to limit their contact with their children |
Goal 4 – Planning for the Future (safety plan) What do we do if we are still worried about the fathers contact with his child? Do something about it. Case Collaboration |
|
Men who have engaged in service or more likely to continue to access services to be pro-social (lowers the risk) |
Goal 1 – Engaging with men – gaining their trust, making a connection, creating hope that things can be better, hope that they can improve their relationship with their child, start to develop insight into cycle of abuse |
In November 2018 Australia hosted a series of Caring Dads Facilitator trainings in several locations including Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Perth!
Caring Dads co-creator and Lead Trainer, Dr. Katreena Scott traveled across the globe from Canada and joined forces with Australian trainers to deliver events in Melbourne and Brisbane connecting with professionals within those cities and further developing partnerships.
In addition to Katreena travelling to Australia, Caring Dads Community Manager, Sarah Webb tackled the long flight and co-trained in Sydney and Perth.
Here are a couple of pictures at the Sydney event which was hosted by Relationships Australia, New South Wales. Sarah co-trained with Monique Yeoman, Caring Dads Statewide Coordinator and Fiona Edwards, Caring Dads Team Leader both from Kids First Australia, Heidelberg Victoria Child and Family Centre.
Thanks to Andrew King and Relationships Australia for hosting this event!
Left to Right: Caring Dads Accredited Trainers Monique Yeoman, Sarah Webb and Fiona Edwards
Quintessential Opera House shot
The Sydney training was a dynamic and enthusiastic group of professionals working across the Domestic Violence Sector and included professionals from Men’s Behaviour Change groups, Women’s Advocate services, Family Mental Health services as well as included Andrew King, Practice Specialist and Community Education Manager at Relationships Australia. Andrew attended the two day training and humbly participated in the role plays and truly enhanced the learning with his expertise. Andrew King is also a respected author of text books and training programs and has devoted a large part of his career to group work, working with men, fathering and domestic violence.
Sarah then traveled across Oz to Perth in Western Australia where she co-trained an event with Damian Green, CEO of Stopping Family Violence. Damian Green is a Specialist in FDV policy and practice, with particular interest in perpetrator interventions and men’s behaviour change. This event was hosted by CentreCare in sunny Perth.
Here are a few pictures of the Perth event:
CentreCare, People Making Time for People, Perth
Damian Green and Sarah Webb
Sarah talking about the Problem Solving for Parents steps
Downtown Perth!
The participants in Perth were a compassionate and eager group of professionals who worked hard over the two days as well as used humour to make the training fun. This event was hosted by the kind people at CentreCare who provided a welcoming venue and allowed us to take over their lunch room! And last but not least, the Perth event would not have been a success without the huge support of Sharon Tanner, Executive Assistant at Stopping Family Violence who did a lot of work behind the scenes and ensured everyone was comfortable as well as managed the enjoyable meals and even took pictures!
