Who is responsible? Mothering and protecting children in service provider responses to intimate partner violence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last few decades, there has been a significant shift in how the Canadian state has constructed and responded to the issue of intimate partner violence in legislation and policy discourse. Although initial changes arose out of Violence Against Women Movement’s critique of the state’s inadequate response to men’s violence against women, recent reforms in family violence and child protection legislation have involved framing intimate partner violence and subsequent child exposure as a gender-neutral problem. Feminist scholars argue that this de-gendering of domestic abuse in family violence and child protection legislation and policies has shifted the focus away from men’s violence and onto women’s failures as mothers. Embedded within dominant discourses surrounding mothering (“good mothers” versus “bad mothers”) and notions of managing risks, feminists assert that these policies hold mothers responsible for maintaining a safe home environment for children through controlling, managing, and fleeing men’s violence. While these policies aim to protect children from harm, existing research finds that, in practice, these policies responsibilize mothers who are victims of intimate partner violence. Building on the feminist literature, this thesis examines how mothers and children are constructed by service providers in their responses to intimate partner violence in Manitoba. A sample of 19 interviews with service providers collected as part of the Canadian Domestic Homicide Prevention Initiative with Vulnerable Populations was analyzed. The sectors represented include: social services workers, Crown Attorneys, police, probation workers, shelter staff, and victim services workers. Carol Bacchi’s “What is the Problem Represented to Be?” framework and Critical Discourse Analysis were the two main methodological approaches employed to investigate how dominant understandings of intimate partner violence, managing risks discourse, and constructions of mothering in the context of abuse factor into service providers’ responses towards women and children who experience violence. The findings of this study suggest that despite gender-neutral legislation and policies, service providers tended to construct the matter in gendered terms: as abused mothers failing to protect their children in cases of intimate partner violence. Rather than intervening with violent fathers and challenging their abusive behaviours, service providers placed the responsibility on mothers to protect their children from harm.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".