Introduction

Working with fathers represents a classic tension in social work practice. On the one hand, social work is predicated on the basis that parents, including fathers, have the capacity for growth and to improve their own and their children's lives. On the other hand, social workers are required to identify when a parent presents a risk to the child and should no longer be caring for them. Given that most social work continues to be with mothers, fathers represent a practical dilemma for social workers in terms of their presence or absence in a child's life, the quality of that involvement, and the potential for them to be positively engaged with change. Although it is now well established that practitioners should ‘engage’ fathers with child welfare services, their continued invisibility to services represents a challenge to researchers interested in improving the situation. This chapter considers how conversation analysis can be used to understand professional practice as it happens and the circumstances in which fathers are made more or less visible in the interaction.

Fathers and family support

Social work has historically had an uneasy relationship with fathers. Tasked with safeguarding the welfare of children, social workers have to make decisions about the capacity of the adults in the house to meet the child's needs. When parents have separated, and because children are more likely to live with their mother, this frequently involves assessing the capacity of, and the risks presented by other men in the child's life, such as step-fathers and mothers’ new partners. The risks of not doing so can lead to tragic consequences and the history of social work is marked by a series of high-profile child deaths, including those of Maria Colwell, Jasmine Beckford and Peter Connelly, all of whom were killed by new male partners in their mothers’ lives. The importance of identifying and understanding the presence of men in the lives of children has continued to resonate in reviews of other child deaths since then (Brandon et al, 2009).

Gathering information about the men in a child's life is therefore important when conducting statutory investigations of risks to children. Even when there is no immediate threat to a child's life, harsh parenting behaviour exacted by fathers has negative consequences for children in their future relationships with peers (Allen et al, 2002) or displaying problematic behaviour (Lamb and Lewis, 2010).