Dominelli, L., Strega, S., Walmsley, C., Callahan, M., & Brown, L. (2011). ‘Here’s my story’: Fathers of ‘Looked After’ children recount their experiences in the Canadian child welfare system. British Journal of Social Work, 41, 351-367.
Fathers of children living in out-of-home care occupy problematic terrain in the child welfare system. Child welfare literature suggests practitioners construct fathers’ around the ‘good dad’ – ‘bad dad’ binary. The authors of the current study previously investigated how fathers of children in out-of-home care described their experiences with the child welfare system. The primary themes emphasized the strategies that fathers used to convince practitioners they were ‘good enough’ fathers who could be trusted to care for their children. The current study scrutinizes the previous studies’ categories fathers used when discussing their parenting capacity and relationship with their child welfare workers. The original storylines that emerged from the study were reconfigured into typologies of the father involved with the child welfare system. The identities that were developed are the ‘misrepresented dad’, ‘survivor dad’, ‘mothering dad’, ‘denied identity dad’, and ‘citizen dad’. Authors suggest that each father’s story has the capacity to encompass every identity and is contradictory in some ways. Nonetheless, the fathers’ claims indicate that being a father is a life-changing event and that caring for children should be a more equally shared responsibility between men and women.
Forde, D., Baron, S., Scher, C., & Stein, M. (2012). Factor Structure and Reliability of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and Prevalence Estimates of Trauma for Male and Female Street Youth. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 27(2), 364-379.
Within the past three decades there has been sizeable growth in research examining various aspects of childhood maltreatment. The Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) and Childhood Trauma Questionnaire Short-Form (CTQ-SF) are widely used in clinical settings, community surveys and program evaluation, and provide a retrospective identification of the prevalence of child abuse and neglect. The CTQ-SF tool is a 28-item form that takes approximately five minutes to administer. The current study tests the psychometric properties of the CTQ-SF (n=397) using a sample of street youth, comparing male and female respondents. Almost all (98%) respondents met the criteria for at least one form of maltreatment; 34.5% met criteria for all five forms (i.e., emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect). The CTQ-SF was found to have a weak factorial invariance, suggesting that it may be used to make a valid comparison of scores of child abuse and neglect as a five-factor model. However, the lack of strong factorial invariance indicates that it may not be equitable to compare scores between males and females, possibly indicating that the two groups do in fact interpret items differently.
Tanaka, M., Wekerle, C., Schmuck, M., & Paglia-Boak, A. (2011). The linkages among childhood maltreatment, adolescent mental health, and self-compassion in child welfare adolescents. Child Abuse & Neglect, 35, 887-898.
Childhood maltreatment is a risk factor for poor physical and mental health. This study explored the relationship between child maltreatment and self-compassion. Self-compassion was defined as a concept of positive acceptance of the self. The present sample was taken from the Maltreatment and Adolescent Pathways (MAP) Longitudinal Study. A total of 117 youths completed the self-compassion scale within the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. Results suggest youth who had experienced higher childhood emotional abuse, emotional neglect, and physical abuse had lower self-compassion than those who experienced lower levels of these types of maltreatment. Youth with low self-compassion were found to have higher levels of psychological distress, problematic alcohol use, and report a serious suicide attempt. Authors suggest exploring self-compassion further in order to better understand the impact of childhood emotional abuse.