The case of the missing perpetrator : a cross-national investigation of child welfare policy, practice and discourse in cases where men beat mothers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines in detail the introduction, development and reification of the concepts of ‘children witnessing’ and mothers ‘failing to protect’ as powerful and currently dominant concepts in child welfare in the UK (with particular attention to Southampton) and in Canada (with particular attention to British Columbia). Drawing on literature and research within child welfare and feminism, and my own data analysis, this thesis explored the construction, deployment and enactment of these concepts. A feminist discourse analysis was employed to examine legislation, policy and practice in both jurisdictions. Relevant documents were analysed in both jurisdictions. Conversational, introspective interviews were undertaken with social workers and mothers in both jurisdictions. Discourse analysis methods from a number of sources were drawn on to reveal and interpret how the discourse of ‘failure to protect’ has emerged, and how it shapes and informs child protection practice and policy. This thesis argues that the concepts of ‘children witnessing’ and mothers ‘failing to protect’ are constructed, enacted and deployed in ways that maintain and may even increase the nature and extent of violence against women. Further, I demonstrate that the rhetoric and actions engendered by this discourse are in themselves injurious to women, both individually in cases where mothers lose or are threatened with the loss of their children, and collectively in contributing to a continuing failure to hold responsible or even notice men who perpetrate violence against mothers.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".