Abstract
This article examines the place of gendered relationships between parents with regard to child protection work in England, and the effects of this on mothers who are abused by their male partners. These areas are discussed within an emotionally, socially, and politically charged set of issues concerning to what extent the State should intervene, why, and how between parents and their children in terms of parental rights and child protection. In this way, the article examines fault lines in the Western world’s ideology of the family, and concepts and realities of parental, mothers’ and children’s rights. In examining dominant and competing discourses on parental rights in child protection work, the case is made for the need to disaggregate concepts and approaches away from parental rights per se, to viewing the possibility of needing to see fathers and mothers needs and rights as at times being in conflict. This becomes particularly problematic in relation to mothers’ rights to their own protection from abuse, and how this relates to professional interventions when both the mother and the children are being abused. It considers the need to acknowledge and foreground taking account of how the mother and child(ren) are experiencing the abuse, not how society and professionals might like to view the situation by way of an idealized view of families through a particular ideological lens.
Highlights
Introduction and BackgroundThe aims of this article are to examine discourses concerning mothers’ positions within child protection policy discourses and front-line social work practice work in England, within the consideration of how these relate to ideas about privacy of the family and its sanctity to treat its different members without State interference
Whilst one dominant discourse concerns the rights of children, a less feted but deeply socially embedded discourse concerns assumptions and longstanding beliefs in terms of male rights within families which can be argued to be in opposition to mothers’ rights, leading to, it is argued, a need to question the generic term “parental rights”, with its inference of equality of both fathers’ and mothers’ rights and interests. This leads into the discussion of a highly emotionally, socially and politically charged issue concerning to what extent the State should intervene, and how, in what happens between parents in terms of contested views on parental rights within child protection work
Social workers have to be part of recommending that a court makes an order to remove parental responsibility from the parents they have been working with [62]. This can compromise the rights of mothers who are being abused themselves in such situations; Fleckinger [63] sets out from her research how child protection workers can have “blind spots” to the marginalization of female victims of relationship violence, affected by “deep-set attitudes and partially unconscious moral concepts which quite unintentionally, may lead to child protection social workers to blame the survivors of gender-based violence” [63] (p. 5)
Summary
The aims of this article are to examine discourses concerning mothers’ positions within child protection policy discourses and front-line social work practice work in England, within the consideration of how these relate to ideas about privacy of the family and its sanctity to treat its different members without State interference. Whilst one dominant discourse concerns the rights of children, a less feted but deeply socially embedded discourse concerns assumptions and longstanding beliefs in terms of male rights within families which can be argued to be in opposition to mothers’ rights, leading to, it is argued, a need to question the generic term “parental rights”, with its inference of equality of both fathers’ and mothers’ rights and interests This leads into the discussion of a highly emotionally, socially and politically charged issue concerning to what extent the State should intervene, and how, in what happens between parents in terms of contested views on parental rights within child protection work. Possible ways to remedy these in practice, are the focus of this article
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