Engaging fathers in child welfare services: a narrative review of recent research evidence

It is widely recognized as problematic that there are generally low levels of engagement with child welfare services from biological and social fathers. The result can be limited resources for children's care and potentially poor risk assessment and management. This paper reviews the published research from 2000 to 2010 about the barriers to and facilitators of better father engagement, as well as the very limited evidence on the effectiveness of work with maltreating fathers. There is relatively little known about what works in engaging men, but there are some promising indicators from family support and child protection practice contexts. These include early identification and early involvement of fathers; a proactive approach, including an insistence on men's involvement with services; and the use of practical activities. In the light of what is known about the characteristics of maltreating fathers, there is a logical fit with cognitive‐behavioural approaches. Although there is no direct evidence of the effectiveness of motivational interviewing in this context, its effectiveness in allied fields of practice would suggest that it may hold some promise for the initial engagement of fathers who pose a risk to children.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90556/1/j.1365-2206.2012.00827.x.pd

The Lives of Young Fathers: A Review of Selected Evidence

While young fathers have been neglected in social research in the UK, over the past fifteen years a small but growing body of empirical evidence has emerged across a range of studies. This review article draws selectively on this literature to document the characteristics of young fathers in the UK and their lived experiences. It presents compelling evidence for the desire of young fathers to be engaged as parents, despite the sometimes multiple challenges that they face. The article begins with a demographic profile of young fathers and documents what is known of young fathers’ relationships with their children, the child's mother and wider kin. It goes on to consider a range of practical issues facing young fathers. The article concludes with a consideration of young fathers’ support needs and experiences of professional support, drawing out the implications for policy and professional practice

Workplace Networks and the Dynamics of Worker Organizing

A rich literature has established the importance of social networks for explaining participation in contentious politics but has typically treated networks as existing outside the awareness or influence of movement actors themselves. A separate literature has long recognized the importance of “organizing” for successful collective action but has not conceived of organizing in relation to network structure. Bridging these literatures, we develop the concept of “network-driven organizing” (NDO), where organizers allocate relational activity based on perceived social network structure. Using the case of labor organizers in a campaign at Walmart, we analyze more than 80,000 unstructured organizer field notes from almost 120 store-level campaigns between 2010 and 2015 and find that our measure of NDO is positively and robustly correlated with campaign success; going from 0 to 1 on the measure of NDO more than doubles the number of cards signed. We discuss the implications of our results in light of sociological theories of action and the practice of movement organizing

The Archaeology of First World War U-boat Losses in the English Channel and its Impact on the Historical Record

This paper examines how the archaeological record of 35 known U-boat wrecks sunk in WW1 in the English Channel compares with the assessment of U-boat destructions made by the Admiralty’s Antisubmarine Division (ASD) in 1919. Comparison of the two shows that only 48% of the 37 assessments was correct. This divergence between the extant archaeology and the 1919 assessment was partly caused by over optimism at ASD regarding reported attacks. However, it is also observed that ASD’s own processes were on occasion overridden by a need to overstate Allied successes, and should be seen in the broader context of a wider range of inefficiencies that confronted the Naval Staff during WW1. The same mistakes seem entirely absent from the WW2 records in the same geographical area. The research reveals that the radio silence observed by the Flanders Flotilla proved a challenge to combating its U-boats at sea, making the tracking of the U-boats and the rerouting of Allied ships practically impossible. This was a factor in the early adoption of “controlled sailings” in the Channel. It may have also been the driving factor behind the Navy’s pressure to attack the Flanders bases by land in 1917, a key component often overlooked by historians

‘Stop-go’ policy and the restriction of post-war British house-building

From the mid-1950s to the early 1980s the Treasury and Bank of England successfully advocated a policy of restricting both private and public sector house-building, as a key but covert instrument of their wider ‘stop-go’ macroeconomic policy framework. While the intensity of restrictions varied over the economic cycle, private house-building was restricted (through limiting mortgage availability) for almost all this period. This was achieved by keeping building society interest rates low relative to other interest rates and thus starving the building society movement of mortgage funds. Mortgage restriction was never publicly discussed and sometimes operated alongside ambitious housing targets and well-publicised policy initiatives to boost housing demand. This paper outlines the evolution of house-building restriction, together with its impacts on the housing sector and the wider economy. We review the evolution of the policy framework and its consequences, compare the level and stability of British house-building during this period - historically and relative to other countries, and undertake time-series econometric analysis of its impacts on both house-building and house prices. Finally, implications for debates regarding stop-go policy, Britain’s housing problem, and the distributional consequences of government macroeconomic policy are discussed