Gender and child protection work : voices from the front-lines

Child protection work largely relies on mothers in fulfilling its aim to protect children and support families. Mothers are expected to shield children from abuse and neglect regardless of circumstance. Fathers evade such expectations, and are rather treated as unimportant or as aggressors. In either case, they are distanced from the child protection process. These divergent expectations of mothers and fathers often go unnoticed in child protection practice, as social workers are consumed with the urgent need of assessing risk to children. Workers' reliance on mothers becomes a habit that is not easily countered because there is neither the time nor the tools to engage in such a battle. The present study seeks to illuminate gender constructions and their reproduction in front-line child protection work through the voices of social workers. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight former and current front-line workers for this study