Mothers’ Narratives of Their Involvement With Child Welfare Services

Abstract

Centering on practice within child welfare systems, this article focuses on four representative narratives derived from 32 in-depth qualitative interviews with women who experienced intimate partner violence and involvement with the child welfare system in Manitoba and British Columbia, Canada. Narrative analysis was used to explore the content of mothers’ stories to understand how they position themselves against their child welfare workers’ understanding of them as “failed” mothers. This article concludes with recommendations to enhance practice with mothers who are involved with child welfare systems

Through this article, we draw on narrative theories to take an in-depth exploration of the stories of 32 women who were abused by intimate partners and experienced involvement with the Canadian child welfare system. Simply because of their involvement with child welfare services, the women can easily be viewed as “bad” mothers (Virokannas, 2011). Their personal stories not only reflect their attempts to resist this generalization, but also express how they wanted their child welfare workers to understand the messy complexities and difficulties in their lives. The purpose of this article is to provide detailed descriptions of how women involved with child welfare services construct stories and narratives of their identities as mothers and what they perceive as their workers’ understandings of their lived realities and needs as mothers. This article concludes with recommendations to improve relationships between child welfare workers and mothers.

Mothers’ Stories

Narrative scholars are united in the belief that story and narrative are foundational to understanding human experience (Plummer, 1995). Narrative theorists believe that individuals use stories to explain otherwise random events to themselves and others. In crafting these stories, individuals choose some experiences to highlight, place these in a temporal order, and narrate the causal connections among them (Spector-Mersel, 2010). In crafting such narratives, individuals actively create social meaning from their experiences and perform preferred social identities (Riessman, 2002). Rappaport (2000, 4–5) makes a distinction between personal stories, which are idiosyncratic stories from community narratives that are shared among a group in a specific setting, and dominant culture narratives that circulate as social stereotypes through mass media and cultural institutions. Others identify these dominant narratives as both “stock stories,” which are presuppositions and received wisdoms that “justify the world as it is” (Delgado, 1989, 2421) and “formula stories,” which are widely circulating stories that contain stereotypical assumptions familiar to most people within the same cultural and social context (Loseke, 2012, 253). Although the resulting stories are idiosyncratic to each storyteller, these are not understood to be solely private inventions, but as stories built on other stories reflecting broader community and dominant cultural narratives available in particular community and social contexts and shaped by the audiences to which they are told (Rappaport, 2000).

Research about mothering in marginalized contexts—amidst violence, substance misuse, poverty, young age, and mental health difficulties—overwhelmingly reports that women actively construct stories through which they self-identify as good mothers and they fit themselves into the socially constructed stock or formula story of ideal motherhood (Medina & Magnuson, 2009). Against an imagined audience that might view them as bad mothers, women in these research studies emphasize how they put the needs of their children first, despite the difficult circumstances in which they live (Peled & Gil, 2011; Radcliffe, 2011; Savvidou, Bozikas, Hatzigeleki, & Karavatos, 2003; Semaan, Jasinski, & Bubriski-McKenzie, 2013; Virokannas, 2011). Similarly, mothers involved with child welfare systems describe how they put forward an ideal parenting identity, against their workers’ label of them as neglectful or abusive (Sykes, 2011). Through qualitative interviews, researchers have found that these mothers describe how they struggle against predetermined identities of them as unsuitable parents because of mental health and substance misuse difficulties (Radcliffe, 2011; Savvidou et al., 2003; Virokannas, 2011) and how blame is inappropriately laid on them for the impact of their partners’ abuse on their children and themselves (Alaggia, Jenney, Mazzuca, & Redmond, 2007; Hughes, Chau, & Poff, 2011; Strega et al., 2008).

Child Welfare Workers’ Responses to Mothers’ Stories

Child welfare settings are particularly challenging practice contexts, as workers must find ways to demonstrate empathy and be responsive to parents’ needs and then balance this response with their protection mandate, as they continuously assess whether children are at risk and make decisions about whether children are to remain or be removed from their parent’s care (Chapman, Gibbons, Barth, & McCrae, 2002). Research with child welfare workers describes the difficulties of balancing this dual mandate and some research suggests that workers resolve this conflict by highlighting their role in keeping children safe. Through qualitative interviews with 14 child welfare workers in Canada, Collings and Davies (2008) demonstrate that social workers drew on the images of vulnerable children to alleviate the guilt and anxiety that they experienced when apprehending children. Through their quotations, the social workers depicted images of vulnerable children who needed to be rescued from being severely harmed by their parents. The researchers concluded that these images and discourses operated to obscure an understanding of parents as persons in need of help. White (2002) observed a comparable pattern in case conferences in a child health setting in the United Kingdom. She noted that communication about cases wherein it is assumed that children have been placed at risk because of parental abuse or neglect, workers selectively describe parental behaviors in order to present parents as culpable: they characterize the parents by presenting what a “normal” parent would do alongside descriptions of what parents in these cases “failed” to do, as evidence of bad or neglectful parenting. Similarly, Urek (2005, 459) describes how a characterization of an unfit mother is constructed in case notes and meetings as child welfare workers selectively attend to and present one version of the mother as uncaring through presenting information that she was “sitting in bars” and had relationships with multiple male partners.

Other research, however, reports that child welfare workers struggle to balance their understanding of the often difficult life experiences of parents with evaluations of how well they are also performing their roles as parents. Peled and Levin-Rotberg (2013) demonstrate how 13 child protection officers in Israel shift between understanding the parenting of mothers who work in prostitution as not harmful and questioning whether or not these women become too preoccupied or distracted with the difficulties that could occur through prostitution to be available to fulfill their responsibilities as mothers. A similar struggle was documented by Lapierre and Côté (2011), who describe how a group of Canadian social workers alternated between blaming abused women for failing to protect their children and attempting to avoid this blaming by suggesting that these mothers are also victims.

Collectively, the research outlined above points to a gap between the ways in which mothers view the circumstances of their lives and how these same situations are understood differently by their child welfare workers (Sykes, 2011). Based on narrative analysis of 32 women’s stories, the purpose of this research is to understand (1) how women construct their stories by examining the emphasis they place on the events and understandings that they highlight in their stories and (2) how these stories reveal what they wanted their child welfare worker to “hear” and know about their life experiences as women. Below, we describe the narrative method we used to analyze the women’s stories, followed by a detailed account of their narratives that highlights four of the women’s individual stories, and last we present recommendations to improve child welfare practices with mothers.

Method

As a method, narrative inquiry or analysis contains many approaches reflecting the variety of theoretical orientations and disciplinary backgrounds of researchers (Riessman, 2002). The approach is concerned with understanding why particular stories are told (Riessman, 2002) focusing on their function in shaping the meaning of personal experience and forging social identities and the ways in which they resist or accommodate dominant social orders (Plummer, 1995; Riessman, 2002). In undertaking this narrative inquiry, we used the concept of positionality and the two-pronged approach suggested by Bamberg (2012) to analyze how the women positioned themselves in their stories. Bamberg states that positionality is a means by which storytellers or narrators reveal their identities or preferred selves. The two-pronged approach involves focusing first on the content or plot of the story and the rhetorical devices and themes used to describe the life events and experiences narrated within the story and second, examining how the devices used in the story resist and accommodate dominant narratives. Ethical reviews for the procedures described earlier are obtained from the research ethic boards at the University of [Manitoba] and the University of [British Columbia Okanagan].

As part of a larger project, we invited women who had experienced intimate partner violence and child welfare involvement to participate in our study by distributing research posters delivered to a variety of front-line community organizations (i.e., shelter and second-stage housing services to agencies focusing on child and family wellness) in two smaller cities in northern and southern British Columbia, as well as a larger community in Manitoba. Following an approved ethics protocol, all women participants were provided an honorarium. After gaining the verbal consent of each participant, we digitally recorded the interviews and later transcribed them. From the overall 64 interviews collected for the larger project, we chose 32 interviews for this analysis. We began each interview by asking the women to describe their experiences with child welfare workers and agencies. Although interviewers were provided with a list of questions and probes to ensure that the mothers’ experiences were fully described, these 32 women approached the interview situations with stories to tell and it was not necessary for the interviewers to use the additional questions and probes. As a result, these interviews contained full stories with a beginning, middle, and end with story segments that constructed understanding and connection among the described actions and events (Riessman, 2002). The remaining interviews were not chosen for this analysis because although the women described their experiences, these descriptions were largely responses to the interviewers’ questions and probes. Through these interviews, they described the reason for their involvement with child welfare (i.e., intimate partner violence, substance misuse, and mental health difficulties), how contact was made (i.e., self or referral by others), and then what interventions occurred as a result.

All of the 32 women share common experiences of being involved in one or multiple abusive relationships with men and involvement with child welfare services as well as being marginalized by gender and/or socioeconomic class (24 women reported incomes under US$20,000 and only one woman reported an income over US$50,000), race (19 identified as Aboriginal women and 10 identified as white), age (4 were young mothers and many had their first child under the age of 20), and/or mental health disability (4 women reported depression and anxiety as concerns). All of the interviewed women experienced intimate partner violence and this then is a shared experience; however, this was highlighted differently with some women emphasizing this experience and others focusing more on their experiences of mental health, substance misuse difficulties, or as young mothers who grew up in foster care. None of the 32 women suggested that they were helped by the interventions provided by their workers. The women whose children remained living with them or were returned to their care suggest that this outcome occurred not because the interventions offered to them by their workers, but through their own efforts in leaving abusive partners or seeking help for addictions. The women whose children were removed from their custody provided different reasons for this outcome: (1) some placed blame their workers for failing to provide to provide meaningful supports, (2) others expressed regret that they were unable to take advantage of the interventions offered to them, because at the time they were too young or too caught up with abusive partners or misusing substances, and (3) a final group stated that they were satisfied with the decision because their children were placed with relatives or others families that they knew and they were able to retain relationships with them.

For the analysis, we first examined the content of each of the stories through focusing on the events that were highlighted by the women as the narrators, particularly the reason for each woman’s involvement with child welfare and how each participant described her interactions with child welfare workers. Next, we analyzed the devices (i.e., metaphors and themes) used by the women to position themselves as “good enough” mothers against what they believed were their child welfare workers’ understanding of them as failed mothers. Based on these analyses, the 32 stories were placed into four groups where there was overlap in these highlighted experiences (growing up in foster care and then becoming young mothers, intimate partner violence, substance misuse, and mental health difficulties) and among the common metaphors or themes used to express the gap between their understanding of the impact of these experiences on them and their children and that of their various child welfare workers. For each group of stories, we chose one narrative that is compelling and representative of the other stories in the same grouping. Each story is given a title that describes this theme or metaphor and uses words that came directly from each woman. Each woman is provided a pseudonym to protect her anonymity. Two women are from Manitoba, Christine is a 47-year-old white woman and Mary is an Indigenous woman who is 28 years old. The other two women are from British Columbia, Jane is a young, 20-year-old, black woman and Kaitlyn is a 43-year-old white woman. Quotes from the individual interviews are used to provide a link between the raw data interviews and the condensed stories provided below (Guba, 1994) as well as demonstrate the overlap between the individual representative stories and the other women’s stories that were placed into the same narrative group.

Findings

Christine: “I Was Robbed of a Relationship.”

The four women’s stories in this group begin with statements that they voluntarily contact the system asking for help. They describe how they continue to call and struggle to get the help they need, but they emphasize the exhaustion they experience from being abused by their partners, seeking help for this, and also dealing with their own difficulties with mental health. The stories continue with descriptions of how their personal situations worsen after this initial contact and then end when their children are permanently placed into foster care. Within these stories, emphasis is placed on how the lack of attention to them and their concerns by their workers leads to the eventual placement of their children into the foster care system.

Christine’s story begins with her first interaction with child welfare workers when her eldest son is a baby and is structured around years of on and off again contact with various workers ending when her daughter (third and last child) is removed from her care. She connects these events together to demonstrate how she gradually lost custody of her three children because of her partner’s abusive actions toward her and the inactions of child welfare workers, who do not provide her family with needed support and help. Although Christine makes the first call to child welfare about her partner, she is careful to state that she does not want to betray him: “I owe it to my son. I figure, I love my husband but you know, I’m going to protect my children and so I thought I would phone them with something that I thought was really serious.” Throughout her personal story, she makes many statements similar to the quote above wherein she attempts to balance loyalty to her partner with protection of her children. This is a salient pattern and theme throughout her story as it is her attempt—as a Christian women—to demonstrate that she is both a good wife and a good mother. She recounts one story in which two workers came to her home. During this visit, she tells the workers that her partner is disciplining her son by using a belt. She says that the workers told her to “put the belt in the garbage:”

“And you know, they told me to do this and I’m going to do that because you know belts can leave welts. That’s abuse. And I say, ‘I’m not having, anything, I am not allowing abuse.’ And then he says, ‘Well I’m the man of the house’ and I say, ‘Yeah, you are, in my opinion until you start violating children.’ It was very much like that and actually I had a lady from church tell me, ‘How could you treat your husband like that?’ and I say, ‘Well how can I allow my child to be abused?’”

Through her story, she describes how her life becomes increasingly difficult, as her son is moved in and out of foster care and she continues to attempt to keep her family together while also dealing with her partner’s abuse of her and the birth of two additional children. She describes how her attempts to remain in her marriage and keep her partner happy and also ensure that her children are protected lead her to become run down and tired to the point that: “I went into a depression and ended up being hospitalized.” During this hospitalization, Christine’s eldest son is first placed into foster care, which then leads to the later removals of this one and her other two children. Through her story, Christine describes instances of psychological abuse by her partner and how this leads to her feeling “tired,” “powerless,” and unable to protect her children:

I thought I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to get my kids out of here. In fact, that’s why my self-esteem was so low, I couldn’t, I had no energy. I couldn’t even pick up a phone to make business phone calls because my self-esteem had gone downhill so bad. I couldn’t even have rescued myself and if I couldn’t rescue myself, how could I rescue my children. I wanted to—not be abusive to myself—but just figuratively wanting to kick myself for not being strong enough for my children.

In Christine’s individual narrative, it is the ongoing set of circumstances of abuse from her partner and resulting mental health difficulties combined with a lack of help and support from child welfare workers that leads her to conclude that she has been “robbed” of having a relationship with her children. From the first point in her story and throughout, she consistently states that her multiple attempts to call child welfare services for help are an attempt to make the situation better for her family. This is another prominent pattern in Christine’s story: The gap between what she thinks should be attended to by child welfare workers and the issues that these workers focus on. She wants someone to talk to her partner about his discipline methods (use of the belt buckle) and help her children. The focus of the child welfare workers is on her children’s behaviors and how to keep them safe. Instead of help for her family—her partner’s and children’s behavior, which for her are fixable—her children are removed, the workers take over and control her children, and then provide her no respect and place as a mother. This theme is poignantly described through each of the four individual stories and their collective words below (the first quote is Christine’s):

I’ve been robbed of a relationship with my daughter and son because I feel child welfare has taken them into care, but my worker tells me nothing.

I’ve lost my child’s childhood and my son has lost his mom being with him throughout much of his childhood. Sure I had issues, they did not revolve around my son. He was safe and cared for.

I just never got to raise them and I never got to be a real mother.

And I fell apart, I just gave up. I didn’t have anybody. I had me, myself, and I and that was it and I had two baby boys that I had to fend for and I was really, really weak. I lost my boys forever.

Jane: “They Jumped into My Life.”

All seven of the women’s stories in this grouping employed the metaphor of having CPS workers “jump into their lives.” This is the dominant theme expressed through these stories. Involvement with child welfare is described as lifelong, as their stories begin in childhood when they are either temporarily or permanently placed in foster care as children and then continue into adulthood after they have their own children. Within each of their stories, the women express a feeling of being under constant child welfare surveillance and the feeling that they are judged by the past actions of their parents, their experiences as children in foster care, and others in their lives, such as abusive partners. Rather than their present abilities as parents or the efforts they have made to improve their lives.

Jane’s individual story begins when she is placed in foster care at 7 years old because of her parents’ problematic substance misuse, returned to her parents’ care at 13 years old, and then continues when she becomes pregnant at 17 years old and workers again “jump” into her life with accusations that she is doing drugs while pregnant: “they just jumped into my life three days after I had him and came oh, I heard you were doing drugs.” Jane states that she was not “doing drugs” when she is pregnant, but that this accusation from someone is enough to bring child welfare workers back into her life and it is through this contact with her as a mother that the workers come to know that she is being abused by her partner.

Because she grew up in foster care as a result of her parents’ past drug use, she states that the workers seemed to easily believe that she would also be a bad parent: “they tried taking my son away from me because of my past with my parents and social workers right and I just …I’m … yeah I know I’m young but at least I’m stepping up to the plate.” Ironically, Jane herself states that she is involved with an abusive partner because of her past experience in her family: “I guess I thought it was okay for him to hit me and stuff because I watched my dad do it right. I didn’t know right from wrong. I knew I could tell you if my dad never hit my mom and he hit me I’d go, “what are you doing like?” The difference for Jane is that the workers did not recognize that she is different from her parents, but based their assessments solely on her family history without acknowledging that she is parenting her son and that she is capable of change. Earlier in the relationship and when she is pregnant, Jane states that she wanted to stay with her partner: “maybe we can live happily ever after with baby.” Later, she does leave this partner and her child welfare file is closed when he is sent to jail. As a young, black mother, Jane describes the feeling of being under constant surveillance:

I’d be walking out the door and be like oh am I doing something wrong walking down the … the … you know what I mean. It was always what am I doing wrong, what am I doing right because they were just on my case but now that I signed the paper and they’re like removed out of my life. They were closing the file and I was like okay yes. It doesn’t even matter where I go, I know I have to protect my kid, I know that and I know they were there to help, they just never gave me a chance. They just jumped in looking at my past you know what I mean.

In Jane’ story, it is not the presence of child welfare workers that is difficult, but the workers’ assumption that she will be exactly like her parents: “there’s like a little box and you guys aren’t letting me out.” The perception that child welfare workers can come jump into parents’ lives at any point is stated throughout Jane’s and the other seven stories. These women state that the information collected about them is not used to better understand them, but rather to investigate them, question their abilities as mothers, and a justification to remain in their lives. The following quote from another women’s story demonstrates this theme:

Basically they just jumped in right away just because I was a young parent. I was like 16 when I got pregnant, so they learned that right away and they don’t listen or anything. They were there when he was born basically right away just because my boyfriend’s parents were involved a lot with the ministry and he’s got like five brothers and they just knew him as kind of a bad boy.

Kaitlyn: “I’m Tired of the Fighting.”

This group of 12 stories focus on the women’s experiences of abuse from male partners, as each woman describes how this violence has always been a part of either her relationship (multiple abusive and violent episodes with one partner) or her life (multiple experiences of abuse often beginning in childhood and throughout many adult relationships). In these narratives, the women participants positioned themselves as victims, as they describe how violence and abuse are directed at them by others and state that they do not have control over the occurrence of these actions. Yet within these stories, they also narrated themselves as having agency in asking abusive partners to leave (even if this is unsuccessful), leaving relationships, and attempting to seek help from others, especially the police. In the construction of these events, they emphasize first that they could not have known that their partners were going to be abusive when they first met them and then second how difficult it is to leave these partners. They described how their partners follow them after they left and attempt to convince them to live again as a family or how they moved from relationship to relationship in the hope that the next partner would not be abusive.

Kaitlyn begins her story by stating emphatically that she wanted to leave her partner because of his physical and emotional abuse. When her children are young, she goes to her children’s school asking for help and it is someone there who calls child welfare. After this, she leaves her partner and this first child welfare file is closed. From this point, Kaitlyn recounts a long history of involvement with both her partner and various child welfare workers. Repeated calls are made to child welfare, as her partner moves in and out of her life. Over time, her two oldest children are removed from her care and then a social worker arrives to remove her two younger daughters. Her story is punctuated with these emotional moments, as she describes the times when her children are placed into care:

when it was time to go, I gave [daughter’s name] a hug and a kiss, and then I went to [daughter’s name] and I told her, I just told her, ‘Mommy is so sorry. I never meant for any of this for you guys.’ She knew. I started to cry and my hair was down and she pushed my hair like away from my face and then she wiped my tears and she said, ‘Don’t worry mommy,’ she said, ‘when I’m older, I’ll come and find you.’

Later, she is pregnant with a fifth child. Although child welfare workers go to the hospital to apprehend the baby, she manages to retain custody and live in her own apartment. Her partner, however, begins coming to visit her and the baby. Kaitlyn states that she knows that these visits are wrong and that she is risking having her children apprehended. Early in the relationship, she let him return home in attempts to try and be a family: “My ex-husband and I, we were in and out of our relationship. I’d kick him out. Then he’d move back in—broken promises that he could never keep. So when I did finally kick him out, I found out I was pregnant. We decided to work things out because I was pregnant and my three other kids, they basically wanted their dad.”

Although Kaitlyn states that her child welfare workers did give her multiple chances to leave her partner, she also emphasizes that they failed to understand how difficult it is to do what they require of her—not because she is lonely, but because her partner repeatedly and repeatedly reenters her life and will not listen to her pleas or demands to stay away: “She [child welfare worker] says, “well, don’t let him in.” I says, I can’t do that. I told him, I says, I’m tired of the fighting. I said, don’t you people understand? I’m tired of it.” The dominant theme in Kaitlyn’s story is that her workers believe that she is a harmful parent, because she cannot seem to leave and remain separated from her partner and that she simply allows him to continue to abuse her:

But with the restraining order I didn’t, cause like I said, I’m nice. I don’t like fighting. I should have played by the rules but I didn’t, I broke them. He came over and I was nice about it. I didn’t phone the police or nothing. I told him, you know what? Just go. I don’t want you here. I don’t want to cause problems. I don’t want to lose [daughter’s name] cause if I do, it’s gonna be on your head. I’m gonna be pissed off. And he still called. Sometimes he’ll leave it for a week or two. Same thing with visits, and I always tell him, you know what? Don’t come around.

The other women in this group similarly infuse their stories with examples of events in which they sought help from community resources and services providers, they also state that these efforts were not recognized by their CPS workers, because their workers believed that they allowed their male partners to abuse them. The following are quotes that express this same theme from the other women whose stories were placed into this group:

They just assumed that I allowed it. I said oh so I allowed somebody to come in, be in my life, kick the shit out of me, throw me around a couple times, and then just leave me. Did I allow that? Well, that’s pretty much how it isn’t it. And I just looked at her; I said you’re not listening.

They told me that I had to get rid of the guy, but it was hard for me to get away from him cause his abuse and I tried to run and he just found me and he dragged me out by my hair.

I was trying desperately to get away from him but he just wouldn’t stay away. He would come and try and break into the house and the kids were witnessing all this terrible stuff and the screaming and fighting … I was terrified they were going to take those children from me. If I didn’t make him stop bothering me but the thing is I couldn’t make him, no matter what I did he wouldn’t leave us alone and looking back on that you know I was not stable, I was a wreck, I was weakened, I was tired.

Looking back now I feel I could have made different choices healthier ones for me and my children but at the same time I don’t know that I could have done anything to prevent him from getting mad at me?

Collectively, these women stated that they needed time to understand that their partners are harmful to them and their children. In the end, some of the stated that they choose their children and left their partners, while others stated that they were not provided enough time to make these choices.

Mary: “Please See that I Need Help.”

The nine women’s stories that we placed into this group center largely on the connections they make between their problematic misuse of substances and the abuse and violence they experience from male partners. Through their stories, these women describe how their workers are involved with them at various points of time in their lives, but that the workers do not offer help to leave abusive partners or deal with the substance misuse and more importantly the underlying reasons that they are experiencing these difficulties. Mary’s story begins and centers primarily on events that occur in her relationship with the father of her two children. The abuse that she experiences from this partner and the illegal drugs that he introduces to her are given a central role and described as the primary reason for her involvement with child welfare services. The relationship with this partner begins when she is 14 years old. Her story chronicles a cycle of physical and sexual violence followed by her attempts to leave, which trigger more physical abuse and frighten her into staying in the relationship. This partner introduces her to illegal drugs and then uses this addiction to keep her in the relationship.

Child welfare workers are involved at various times. Initially, when her son is a baby and she is still young (under 18 years old), she is told that because her partner is a known drug dealer and gang member that she must stay away from him. When she is 19 years old, her protection file is closed, because she is not living with him. Mary then describes how she became lonely and overwhelmed as a young, single mother and she begins to drink alcohol excessively: “He kept coming around to visit his son and he would tell me all the time, I really want to be with you, I’m really sorry, I really love you. If we get back together you can do what you want, whatever you want.” Then, she is pregnant again and this second child is born with fetal alcohol syndrome. She also experiences more physical and sexual abuse from her partner.

After her partner dies, Mary takes her children to live with her sister-in-law, so that she can attend detox treatment. At this point, she states that her sister-in-law calls child welfare stating that she is a “crazy drug addict.” Mary describes her relationships with child welfare workers as increasingly difficult: “I know I need help. It was no, you are just a drug addict; we are taking your kids. And I had a really hard time with my first social worker, she treated me as though I was absolutely nothing, she had little regard for the fact that I tried to explain what my relationship with my husband was like, what my relationship with his family was like, and the fact that I did try to do what was best for my kids to try to get into treatment.” Mary actively resists the labeling of her as a “drug addict” through emphasizing how she was introduced to drugs and alcohol by family members and how this taught her to also use drugs and alcohol as a means to cope and numb the pain of past and current abuse:

What was left out was the life that led me to where I was. There was no recognition of that at all, “well you had a choice.” Frankly, I may have had a choice when I was 18 to stop using drugs and alcohol, but nobody had ever shown me that was an option. My family used drugs and alcohol heavily. Anybody that I ever encountered in my life used drugs and alcohol. That’s how you coped that’s how you got through life, nobody showed me different. The agency never took that into account that I came from an alcoholic additive family and that my family was violent. So it was always being put on me well, “you have a choice you have a mind of your own you could have thought for yourself.” Well, how can you think for yourself and think that there are more positive ways of dealing with situations if you have never been taught that.

Together, these experiences lead her to state, “please see that I need help.” Early in her story, Mary emphasizes that her workers failed to recognize the difficult and dangerous relationship she was living in with her partner and therefore they did not provide the support she needed to leave him. Later, she states that the child welfare workers do recognize her situation as serious, but then they only seem to regard her as an “alcoholic” and “junkie,” and they continue to deny her the support she says she needs to reunite with her children:

They gave me a reunification worker who was supposed to bring my kids home and make the situation better, but she spent more time over at my sister-in-law’s place working with her and my kids than working with me and my kids. Anything that I had to say, I’ve asked for counseling numerous times, I’ve asked for counseling with my children, for counseling with my sister-in-law to build relationships in my family, and they just completely disregarded this.

This is the dominant theme in her and the other women’s stories that were placed into this group; the interconnections between problematic substance misuse and the abuse in their lives are not made by their workers and they are not provided with needed help. The following three quotes are from other women in this group:

I became a drug user. Well yeah, if you had your jaw broken twice you would get addicted to pills. I’m not using it as an excuse, but I was a pill junkie and then my husband, he worked but he was an alcoholic and there was always booze in the house because his father was an alcoholic, I never drank, I didn’t start drinking till after I got married at nineteen, divorced at 22, and I was already pregnant with the second one. I just couldn’t handle it my little one was still in diapers, they just took him.

Well through the years, my kids were picked up. I turned into an alcoholic, because years ago when my dad used to abuse me, I would leave on weekends and drink and be partying. I’d be away from the house, I wouldn’t go home … so I have trouble with alcohol, doesn’t mean I should lose them forever.

They’re no support at all. They say they are, but if you ask them for help, they always say the child comes first which I agree with. I totally, totally agree with that one hundred percent. But if you have a parent that’s saying, I’ve got two kids, I need some help, I mean why wouldn’t you jump on that right away. Instead they leave you in the back burner and they wait until your child is in danger and then they’ll come.

These stories together powerfully express that they wanted their workers to recognize them as people, in need of help—not just failing or as failed parents. Among this group were some women who recognized that because of their substance misuse, they could not adequately care for their children and some gave up their children to prevent them from being harmed. They stated that they were content with this decision, because they knew where their children were placed and they continued to have ongoing contact and relationships with them. Unlike Mary and others who lost contact with their children, these women did not feel that they were removed from their children’s lives.

Limitations

Although the four stories contain similar experiences (their content) and reflect the same main themes as the other individual stories with which these were grouped, these narrative descriptions cannot fully reflect the experiences of all of the 32 mothers or all mothers involved with child welfare agencies. Another limitation of the described stories is that these may better exemplify the experiences of women who had difficult experiences or complaints about their child welfare workers and their interventions and not those of women who were satisfied with their workers and the services they received.

Discussion

Communicated clearly across the 32 narratives of these women is the collective belief that their personal experiences and circumstances as women are not considered by their child welfare workers either in the assessment/investigation of their family situations or as explanations for why their children are at risk. Through their stories, these women describe how their workers misunderstand the choices that they make either in staying with abusive partners out of fear or attempts to try to keep their families together, the underlying reasons that they do and at times continue to use drugs and alcohol, the isolation of being young, single mothers, and mothers who are overwhelmed by depression and anxiety. This is presented in the I’m tired of the fighting and they jumped into my life narratives and represented in both Jane’s and Kaitlyn’s stories, as they describe how they overcame their workers’ negative judgments about their mothering. Jane’s story details how she resists her child welfare workers’ conclusion that she is just another young mother who grew up in care and will not be able to adequately parent. Kaitlyn describes years and years of judgments and misunderstandings in which her workers believe that she places her own needs to continue to be connected to an abusive partner above her children’s need to be safe. Because of this, Kaitlyn states that she is unable to convince her workers that she is sincere in wanting to leave her partner and the continued contact occurred because he would not leave her alone and he wanted to have visits with his children that she did not want to deny.

The mothers’ dissatisfaction with the practices of their child welfare workers does not occur because these workers are insensitive and uncaring, but because of the organization of Canadian child welfare services. Similar to child welfare systems in other national jurisdictions, the child-focused policies and practices of the Canadian system stipulate that services are only provided to families when risks to children have been identified. Because the focus is children’s safety, issues such as intimate partner violence, poverty, mental health diagnosis, and problematic substance misuse that are the life experiences of women in this study and many others involved with child welfare systems are treated largely as individual parenting problems. The underlying reasons within women’s lives for these difficulties and the harmful effects on them are considered secondary to their children’s needs for safety (Collings & Davies, 2008; Urek, 2005; White, 2002). Interventions provided to parents are not necessarily intended to improve the issues and problems affecting them directly as women, but rather to address identified deficiencies in their functioning as parents.

In child welfare practice, workers’ investigations requires that women provide accounts of themselves as mothers and accept responsibility for the identified risks to which their children have been exposed (Waterhouse & McGhee, 2013). This process is likely to provoke fear and anxiety, as it places their identities as “good mothers” in jeopardy (Sykes, 2011). Research with parents suggests that how workers engage parents is vital to whether parents defend or resist accusation that they have placed their children at risk or whether they responsibility (Waterhouse & McGhee, 2013). Survey research with parents involved with child welfare services reports that some parents are satisfied with their relationships with their workers and services received, particularly when workers are seen to be responsive to parents’/caregivers’ needs and quickly provide relevant services (Chapman et al., 2002) From qualitative interviews with 18 parents, Dumbrill (2006) reports that when workers use “power with” strategies of offering encouragement, advocating for needed resources, and providing practical assistance, the parents engaged with workers in collaborative relationships. In contrast, when workers use “power over” practices in which they held judgmental ideas about the problems the parents were experiencing or imposed interventions that parent did not think were useful, parents reacted by actively fighting against their workers in court or feigning cooperation.

Complementing these findings, the mothers’ narratives collected for this research demonstrate that these women want their workers to first understand them as women, who are struggling with difficult circumstances and, second mothers who have tried to keep their children safe. The mothers’ narratives outlined previously are consistent with mothers’ stories gathered through other research on mothering in difficult circumstances (Holland, Forrester, Williams, & Copello, 2013; Peled & Gil, 2011; Radcliffe, 2011; Savvidou et al., 2003; Semaan et al., 2013; Virokannas, 2011). These narratives follow the form described by Peled and Gil (2011, p. 471) as “split narratives,” wherein each woman unflinchingly describes the messiness of her life, including experiences of physical, sexual, emotional abuse (sometimes beginning in early childhood and continuing into adulthood), discrimination, poverty, problematic substance misuse, depression and anxiety. Yet, also express the social ideal of mothering, as they emphasize the efforts they makes to keep their children safe, as a means to demonstrate that they are devoted to the care of their children and places their needs ahead of their own (Medina & Magnuson, 2009).

In practice, workers need time to listen closely to how mothers construct their stories and acknowledge that they have fully heard these split narratives. First, by conveying empathy for the harm and trauma that they have experienced as women, from abusive family members and partners and recognizing the interconnections between these experiences and subsequent life conditions, such as mental health and substance misuse difficulties. Second, by acknowledging and respecting their strengths as mothers through recognizing the positive images they construct of their mothering in their narratives and the actions taken by them to keep their children safe (Davies, 2008; Holland et al., 2013; Virokannas, 2011; Waterhouse & McGhee, 2013). Validating the mothers’ stories opens the possibility that mothers may then feel safe enough to enter into discussions about the risk to which they have exposed their children and begin to work collaboratively with their child welfare workers to mitigate these risks (Howe, 2010; Peled & Gil, 2011).

Because both Jane and Kaitlyn believe that their workers hold judgmental attitudes about the presence of their abusive partners, they lied to their workers about their ongoing relationships with these men and the visits that occur between them and their children. Concealing these reunions places children at risk, not only because workers are unaware that the partner has returned to the home but also decreases the likelihood that women will seek help if their partners become abusive. Greater empathy from child welfare workers for the difficult position in which mothers are put by demands to remove fathers from their children’s lives would not only allow mothers to discuss these difficulties but also opens the possibility of collaborating on developing a means for these men to continue to safely visit their children (with the support of their workers and the resources of the child welfare system).

Through their narratives, these women also clearly demonstrate that the interventions provided to them were fundamentally missing what they needed, which is recognition of their strengths as mothers and the time and concrete support they needed to make the changes in their lives required by their workers. This is a clear theme and pattern in the women whose stories are described through the “I have been robbed of a relationship with my children” and “please see that I need help” narratives. Christine’s story is the example of this, as she describes how years of trying to raise her children, keep her family together, and deal with her partner’s abuse leads her to become so overwhelmed, tired, and depressed that she is unable to keep her children safe. Another example is Mary’s story, in which she describes how her workers first fail to provide her support to leave her much older and abusive boyfriend when she is young and then later when she attended addiction treatment, she again states that they fail to support her in her efforts to be reunified with her children.

Given the effects of intimate partner violence and attending mental health concerns such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (Blakey & Hatcher, 2013; Helfrich, Fujiura, & Rutkowski-Kmitta, 2008) and problematic substance misuse (Holland et al., 2013), it is unlikely that the women caught in these interlocking difficulties will be able to make the changes required by their workers without significant support. Further, these mothers may also require time to receive individualized counseling services to deal with the effects of the long-term trauma before they can productively attend other programs intended to address their needs as mothers, such as parenting programs. Through their stories, some of mothers did admit that their children were placed at risk because of their behavior (being tired and overwhelmed or impacts of substance abuse and mental health difficulties or exposed to repeated abuse and violence by their partners) and their inability to deal with these issues on their own. For some of the women in this and other studies, being a good mother means willingly giving up custody of their children when they believed that they could no longer cope and their children were impacted by what was occurring in their lives (Holland et al., 2013; Radcliffe, 2011; Savvidou et al., 2003; Virokannas, 2011). For other women in this study, admitting that their children were not safe was threatening because they feared losing custody of them. For women who are overwhelmed and struggling, interventions are needed that allow them to temporarily or even permanently place their children into care for safety, but also allows them to retain their relationships and mothering role.

Conclusion

The women’s experiences documented in this study demonstrate the limitations of the child-centered policies employed within the Canadian and other national child welfare systems. These systems prioritize children’s safety and well-being over the needs and interests of parents. A detailed examination of women’s narratives of their involvement with child welfare services demonstrates that workers need to focus on how mothers’ construct their stories of their experiences, as a means to be empathetic toward their struggles with difficult life circumstances, provide respect for their roles as mothers, and be supportive of their attempts to keep their children safe.