David Mandel and Associates

Overview

The Responsible Fatherhood Initiative (RFI) offers training and technical assistance on the intersection of fatherhood, domestic violence and family safety. Promoting responsible fatherhood is fundamental to our commitment to the safety and well-being of children and families. The RFI supports community systems to better understand and respond to the role of all fathers, but particularly abusive fathers, within their families.

The Responsible Fatherhood Initiative builds on DMA’s current efforts, making them accessible to people working in broader variety of settings. The RFI will continue to offer training and technical assistance to child protection systems but will also be available to fatherhood programs, supervised visitation programs, home visiting programs and other organizations interested in strengthening their work with fathers, particularly abusive fathers. We will also offer opportunities to batterer intervention programs interested in improving their work with men by addressing fatherhood and parenting issues. Our goal is to support good practice anywhere issues of fatherhood, domestic violence, and family safety intersect.

Philosophy

Efforts to end domestic violence must address the source of the danger to women and children.

We believe there is a direct connection between the safety and well being of families and the capacity of communities and organizations to implement effective interventions with abusive fathers. Conceptually, when it comes to children and safety, systems often continue to view survivors as somehow responsible for the coercive behaviors perpetrated against them and to make them responsible for ending the risk perpetrators pose to children. In practice, these systems often lack the commitment, expertise and experience around engaging fathers, particularly those with histories of domestic violence. Developing these interventions requires an increase in the capacity to work with all fathers, not just fathers who have been violent. It means having strategies to realistically assess a father’s strengths and weakness as it relates to children in the home, particularly the level of support and respect he offers his partner as a person and parent. It means understanding the impact his presence or absence has on family functioning. And it means understanding what it looks like to support a father in a healthy relationship with his children without increasing danger for the children’s mother. The Responsible Fatherhood Initiative aims to help organizations and communities shift this paradigm and build skills for effective work with fathers.

Addressing fathers is central to our efforts to to work with families.

Our capacity to help a family be safe is improved when we include fathers in our efforts to work with the whole family. Cultural norms lead to terribly low expectations of fathers and unattainable expectations of mothers. These expectations have paradoxically led to some fathers who can contribute to their children’s well-being being overlooked. Simultaneously other fathers who have been abusive or neglectful have been provided access to children when they demonstrate only the barest of interest in their children. We cannot truly understand the physical and emotional landscape of families without understanding fathers, their behavior and their impact on their families, whether they remain physically involved or not. Without this understanding, our ability to partner with survivors of domestic violence, to build on their existing protective effort and to support their healing and the healing of their children is limited.

While men who batter are highly resistant to change, fewer are likely to be motivated to make positive changes if we don’t actively engage them, expect them to be responsible parents and co-parents, and assess their efforts at change. When we actively engage fathers who batter, we also provide valuable information to both survivors and decision makers in our intervention systems about those fathers who choose not to change their behaviors.

Responsible fatherhood is an extension of our commitment to the safety and well-being of women and children.

The Responsible Fatherhood Initiative will remain grounded in the core values of the Safe and Together model. In fact, we see the RFI as a strategy to bring our commitment to these values to a new level. Our priority will continue to be the safety and well-being of women and children and our efforts will continue to be informed by their experiences, voices and concerns. While we believe that improving our work with fathers will help improve their lives, we cannot view this outcome outside of the context of outcomes for their families, particularly where human rights and safety are involved.

Responsible fatherhood work is a complex balancing act. Any responsible fatherhood work must be anchored in the realities, experiences and wishes of women and children, especially battered women and their children. We want to talk about the importance of fathers in children’s lives while remaining unwavering in our expectation that safety is core responsibility of parenting. We are also committed to integrating an analysis of socio-economic factors including culture, racism, and economic injustice into our work with fathering and families. Supporting the role of fathers in children’s lives cannot result in unfettered access to children regardless of children’s safety and well-being. The fullest possible positive involvement of fathers in children’s lives cannot be achieved without setting high standards for fathers as co-parent and partners.