Professor Brid Featherstone reflects on her three decades of research into domestic abuse and child protection and why she feels social work needs to become more poverty aware
This article is part of a series of profiles of key figures who have shaped social work over the past five decades, to mark Community Care’s 50th anniversary. Previous interviewees include David Howe, June Thoburn, Eileen Munro and Herbert Laming.
Qualified since the 1980s, Brid Featherstone has been pivotal in advancing research that has shaped thinking in social work.
Her work on child protection has spanned three decades, including influential books and articles that have offered advice on working with men, addressed the treatment of mothers by services and challenged child protection practice in domestic abuse.
In 2015, she was a member of the Child Welfare Inequalities Project team, which examined the role of poverty and inequality in child protection, influencing practice in that area as a result.
Beyond her research and advocacy, she has also embodied her social work values outside of work, spending over 20 years fostering children with her partner.
Having retired in March this year, Featherstone spoke to Community Care about persistent issues when working with victims/survivors of domestic abuse, practitioners’ hesitance to work with men and the need for greater poverty awareness.
How was your experience entering the sector in the late 1980s?
I went into child protection in 1987 and it was the most terrifying time to be a social worker because we’d had many inquiries and child deaths. There was so much anxiety and risk aversion.
It’s good to look back because, when I talk to my students and they say to me, ‘social workers are always being blamed’, I actually think we’re not in the same position as then. Politicians are not making the same mistakes and demonising social workers.
If you look at some of the cases in more recent times, we don’t have the same sense of demonisation of social work.
I think for social workers to constantly feel that they are being demonised means we don’t always understand our power. We can be very powerful in people’s lives, but also quite powerless. If we get into a victim position, we will ignore the fact that people are scared of us.
How did your beginnings shape your approach to social work?
One of my first jobs was working in a bail support team, which provided an alternative to getting children remanded into care or custody. I worked with young girls who were seen as ‘troublesome’ or ‘difficult to work with’.
I took away the kind of things that, to some extent, I still believe in. You needed to have a broad understanding of the challenges that young women would have in their lives, whether these were to do with poverty, sexism or racism, and work hard at making relationships with them.
I remember one young woman saying to me, ‘So you want me to become like you?’.”
It kind of brought me up short. Don’t assume that they will automatically share your views or values. You have to engage with their worldview.
Even if you don’t like it, sometimes they’re making choices that are quite rational in their context. They may not be good choices, but they’re rational.
You need to understand the context in which people are living. It doesn’t mean excusing things, but understanding them.
You’ve done extensive research into the child protection system. What is your opinion of it today?
I don’t think the current child protection system is the best way of dealing with the troubles that children and families have.
It is too focused on individual parents and what they do and don’t do. We forget that many of the risks don’t have to do with parents. For example, how do you raise children in an unsafe environment or if you haven’t got enough money?
We need to think of protecting children within a wider social project. How do we ensure that we have set the right context for children and their parents to flourish? What do people need to give their children a good life?
A mistake we’re making is not engaging with families’ neighbourhoods or paying attention to the quality of their relationships.
This article is part of a series of profiles of key figures who have shaped social work over the past five decades, to mark Community Care’s 50th anniversary. Previous interviewees include David Howe, June Thoburn, Eileen Munro and Herbert Laming.
Qualified since the 1980s, Brid Featherstone has been pivotal in advancing research that has shaped thinking in social work.
Her work on child protection has spanned three decades, including influential books and articles that have offered advice on working with men, addressed the treatment of mothers by services and challenged child protection practice in domestic abuse.
In 2015, she was a member of the Child Welfare Inequalities Project team, which examined the role of poverty and inequality in child protection, influencing practice in that area as a result.
Beyond her research and advocacy, she has also embodied her social work values outside of work, spending over 20 years fostering children with her partner.
Having retired in March this year, Featherstone spoke to Community Care about persistent issues when working with victims/survivors of domestic abuse, practitioners’ hesitance to work with men and the need for greater poverty awareness.
How was your experience entering the sector in the late 1980s?
I went into child protection in 1987 and it was the most terrifying time to be a social worker because we’d had many inquiries and child deaths. There was so much anxiety and risk aversion.
It’s good to look back because, when I talk to my students and they say to me, ‘social workers are always being blamed’, I actually think we’re not in the same position as then. Politicians are not making the same mistakes and demonising social workers.
If you look at some of the cases in more recent times, we don’t have the same sense of demonisation of social work.
I think for social workers to constantly feel that they are being demonised means we don’t always understand our power. We can be very powerful in people’s lives, but also quite powerless. If we get into a victim position, we will ignore the fact that people are scared of us.
How did your beginnings shape your approach to social work?
One of my first jobs was working in a bail support team, which provided an alternative to getting children remanded into care or custody. I worked with young girls who were seen as ‘troublesome’ or ‘difficult to work with’.
I took away the kind of things that, to some extent, I still believe in. You needed to have a broad understanding of the challenges that young women would have in their lives, whether these were to do with poverty, sexism or racism, and work hard at making relationships with them.
I remember one young woman saying to me, ‘So you want me to become like you?’.”
It kind of brought me up short. Don’t assume that they will automatically share your views or values. You have to engage with their worldview.
Even if you don’t like it, sometimes they’re making choices that are quite rational in their context. They may not be good choices, but they’re rational.
You need to understand the context in which people are living. It doesn’t mean excusing things, but understanding them.
You’ve done extensive research into the child protection system. What is your opinion of it today?
I don’t think the current child protection system is the best way of dealing with the troubles that children and families have.
It is too focused on individual parents and what they do and don’t do. We forget that many of the risks don’t have to do with parents. For example, how do you raise children in an unsafe environment or if you haven’t got enough money?
We need to think of protecting children within a wider social project. How do we ensure that we have set the right context for children and their parents to flourish? What do people need to give their children a good life?
A mistake we’re making is not engaging with families’ neighbourhoods or paying attention to the quality of their relationships.
When I started, I would walk around getting to know my estate. I would know where my parents went if they were short of clothes for their kids.
We’ve lost that connection with our communities. We’re often in big city centre offices and driving out long distances. We don’t know what good or bad things are taking place within communities.
We need to give parents confidence, courage and support through community networks. Make sure that the mother won’t be on her own on Saturday night, when all the professionals are gone. Make sure there is a network around her, a local vicar or whoever.
The tragic death of Star Hobson highlighted for me that we are not engaging with families and communities as we should. Families had been telling children’s services for quite a while that they were worried about Star. And yet, the official response afterwards focused on improving multi-agency working. And I was going, ‘No, we need to spend more time listening to families and communities’.
Multi-agency approaches are important but they can’t be the default position. What we really need to think about is community engagement.
We need to go out into communities and talk to them about what’s going on, ask them what and who keeps them safe, what they define as safe.
A concern throughout all your research has been domestic abuse in child protection cases, something you’re still researching on. What has been a persistent theme from your body of research?
When I trained as a social worker, we didn’t look at [domestic abuse] in the child protection world. It was seen as an adult issue.
In the 1980s, it became clearer that one of the biggest risks to children’s safety was when the mother was being physically abused and couldn’t care for the child.
And so there was a big campaign that led to domestic abuse being recognised as a child protection issue. This was solidified in the Adoption and Children Act 2002.
What was really sad is that, over time, that turned into us making women responsible for the protection of their children from men whom they might be afraid of. And the double-whammy is that we responsibilise the mothers, but we don’t work with men.
One of the things I really worry about it’s what’s happening to boys and young men with the kind of culture around Andrew Tate and incel culture. If we don’t engage with young boys and men and support them, hear their stories, their fears and troubles, we could be making things a lot worse for women and girls.
We’re also finding that we aren’t geared up to deal with the links between childhood trauma, mental health, substance misuse and domestic abuse. We do not acknowledge the links enough because we are afraid that we might be seen as excusing abusive behaviour and we get confused between what might be a contributory factor and what might be a cause.
Where does that hesitation around working with men in child protection cases stem from?
Social work is a [predominantly] female workforce and practitioners don’t feel that there are any resources to support them, they don’t feel very skilled with it.
I think it’s easier to engage with the woman. She’s usually the person in front of you. It’s more likely that she will both see herself and be seen as responsible for the children.
Social workers will say to me, ‘He’s living somewhere else and I don’t have the time to chase him up’, or, ‘The mother doesn’t want him involved’.”
I think it’s got to be a whole-system approach and be supported in supervision. You need a space to talk about your fears and then appropriate places to direct men to. There need to be support groups and resources handy.
There are some places where practitioners are involving fathers in family group conferences. So it’s not all complete doom and gloom at all. But it is a persistent issue.
In 2015, you took part in a project raising awareness about the impact of poverty. How have you seen that progress?
In 2010, when the coalition government came in, they would say, ‘Oh, poverty has nothing to do with child protection. That’s about people behaving badly’. I think there has been a shift.
From 2015 to 2021, I took part in the child welfare inequalities project, which mapped and explored inequalities in child welfare intervention. I believe it succeeded in raising awareness because we framed our messages in ways that people could engage with.
One of our messages was that there was an inequality for children at the heart of our services. For example, one statistic you’ve probably heard of is that a child in the poorest parts of the UK, such as Blackpool, is more than ten times more likely to be in care or on a child protection plan than a child in the richest areas.
Now, does that mean that all parents in Blackpool don’t love their children or have poor attachment patterns? That set up a certain set of conversations.
We found that social workers would tell us, ‘We will do this or that, but [poverty] isn’t our core business. Our core business is assessing for risk’.
So we did training sessions on attitudes and got them to think about a day in the life of somebody in a less affluent area and the choices they’d have to make every day. Not to excuse them but to try and understand them.
For example, you say, ‘She takes her first child to school and leaves him in the playgroup at eight o’clock but the school doesn’t open until half eight, so that’s neglect’.
But, hang on a minute, what other children has she got? What’s the bus service like? Has she got a job to go to? Has she got childcare handy? We did this day-in-the-life methodology and it was very powerful.
You can’t solve poverty as an individual social worker. Poverty is a big issue for governments to solve. But you can be aware of the impact it has on your families to assess risk better.
Then you can distinguish between the parents who can’t be bothered to get up in the morning and take their kids to school on time and those juggling impossible things. That’s being poverty-aware.
You were a foster parent for around 20 years. How did the experience inform your work?
It was very rewarding, very hard work.
It was also really useful because I would ask the children what a good social worker looks like. One child had this idea of a social worker that was lovely, and very funny.
It was definitely not someone good at paperwork [laughs]. But somebody who was fun, who took them to the cinema, listened to them, sang along in the car with them. Someone who was on their side.”
I saw so many practitioners coming in and out of our house, so many of them brilliant examples. But it made me realise that, as social workers, we’re such brief visitors in children’s lives and we have so much power. We really need to think about that. We need to leave children with as many connections as possible.
It has also made me realise that children never stop trying to make sense of their lives. A very simple thing was, we’d be sitting watching television and it struck me how family-oriented it was. The ads would be mum and dad and children or that family model would be promoted as commonsense.
The children were constantly having to make sense of their situation and the difference. It wasn’t just about going to school and explaining why they didn’t live with their mum and dad. It was even in their leisure time, sitting there watching television.
What are your hopes for the future?
I feel cautiously optimistic. We’ve had a really dreadful, chaotic, irresponsible time.
I hope that ministers will understand how important it is to engage with and hear about what it’s like to live in the towns where services have disappeared, where you have really big issues around accessing food and safe spaces for your children.
I am disappointed that politicians generally are not that interested in child protection.
Over the years, I’ve tried to get mainstream politicians interested and they seemed to see it as something separate from everything else. That it has to do with ‘bad families’.
I would like them to understand that there is a social gradient and that child protection is everybody’s business.
Which influential figures in social work would you like to see Community Care profile?
