I am really very grateful to everyone who took part in my survey for practitioners working with families back in October. I've just randomly selected the winner of the prize draw (£100 worth of books on working with fathers). I can't reveal their identity as the survey is anonymous but they know who they are. I was very glad of people giving up their precious time to fill in the on-line questionnaire. There were 223 responses from just over 50% of local authorities in the UK. The results look very interesting but I'm not ready to share them yet - need to do a load of work on analysing the data first. It will be a couple of months...... (sorry).
I thought I would share some brief thoughts on the politics of work with fathers. I had a couple of direct approaches from people who felt the questionnaire didn't reflect their approach and was 'biased' against 'non-feminist' approaches to work with men. I did pilot the questionnaire with people who have sound knowledge of this field of practice. It seems as though I should have piloted it a bit more widely to try not to alienate anyone, as I did want to capture a wide range of different ideologies and models of working. I knew there would be competing approaches.
What this experience tells me, though, is that it is not possible to be neutral in this field. I tried to give people room to express a range of views, so I included a statement about fathers' rights that respondents had to rank in order, so if you disagreed you could rank it bottom. I also included a statement about doing the work in order to prevent men's abuse of women and children - again the response could be to rank it bottom if you disagreed. But two people who emailed me implied that in only mentioning men's abuse of women and not also women's abuse of men I was effectively skewing the questionnaire towards a pro-feminist perspective. I guess they may be right and you cannot sit on the fence here. People who are firmly in either a men's rights or a pro-feminist camp are not likely to see eye to eye. And it may ultimately be difficult in a politically contested field to construct a questionnaire which doesn't put someone's nose out of joint.
I know this is not the same issue, but when I did a survey of programmes working with violent men a few years back I came across very strong feelings between proponents of different approaches (see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2311.00122/abstract). One agency told me they would be seen by certain other projects as 'men bashers'. Another said they would seen by rivals as 'letting men off the hook'. It may be that these same tensions around in work with fathers. If so, maybe that's a shame, as I'd like to think there is a lot of common ground. When I analyse the survey data I will find out if there is common ground and if so what characterises it.
I thought I would share some brief thoughts on the politics of work with fathers. I had a couple of direct approaches from people who felt the questionnaire didn't reflect their approach and was 'biased' against 'non-feminist' approaches to work with men. I did pilot the questionnaire with people who have sound knowledge of this field of practice. It seems as though I should have piloted it a bit more widely to try not to alienate anyone, as I did want to capture a wide range of different ideologies and models of working. I knew there would be competing approaches.
What this experience tells me, though, is that it is not possible to be neutral in this field. I tried to give people room to express a range of views, so I included a statement about fathers' rights that respondents had to rank in order, so if you disagreed you could rank it bottom. I also included a statement about doing the work in order to prevent men's abuse of women and children - again the response could be to rank it bottom if you disagreed. But two people who emailed me implied that in only mentioning men's abuse of women and not also women's abuse of men I was effectively skewing the questionnaire towards a pro-feminist perspective. I guess they may be right and you cannot sit on the fence here. People who are firmly in either a men's rights or a pro-feminist camp are not likely to see eye to eye. And it may ultimately be difficult in a politically contested field to construct a questionnaire which doesn't put someone's nose out of joint.
I know this is not the same issue, but when I did a survey of programmes working with violent men a few years back I came across very strong feelings between proponents of different approaches (see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2311.00122/abstract). One agency told me they would be seen by certain other projects as 'men bashers'. Another said they would seen by rivals as 'letting men off the hook'. It may be that these same tensions around in work with fathers. If so, maybe that's a shame, as I'd like to think there is a lot of common ground. When I analyse the survey data I will find out if there is common ground and if so what characterises it.