“Fathers Are Very Important,but They Aren’t Our Contact Persons”: The Primary Contact Person Assumption and the Absence of Fathers in Social Work Interventions

Abstract

Research on the engagement of fathers in family- and child-oriented social work interventions has focused on individual factors relating to the father, to the mother, or the social worker. Much less attention has been paid to the impact of organizational aspects of the social services themselves. This article uses the methodology of institutional ethnography to examine this impact on the engagement of fathers in those services provided by municipal Departments of Social Services in Israel. We found that service delivery was structured by the primary contact person assumption—that one person should be designated as the primary contact in the routine course of an intervention. Together with gendered, political, and cultural factors that support preference for the mother, this structuring assumption results in a full or partial exclusion of fathers from family- and child-oriented interventions.

Keywords

fathers families intervention ethnography

Given the recognized importance of paternal involvement to the well-being of the family unit and to children, the low participation rates of fathers in child- and family-oriented social work interventions are of concern to both scholars and practitioners. Despite efforts by social service programs to specifically engage fathers, their participation in these interventions remains low.

Existing research has pointed to three central causes for this low level of engagement: fathers’ reluctance to access the services, mothers’ role as gatekeepers that hinders fathers’ access to the services, and the structure and organization of the services themselves. Research on this last factor has mainly focused on social workers’ attitudes and perceptions as the cause of father absence.

In this article, we focus on an aspect that has hitherto received scant attention, if any: the impact of social services’ organizational aspects on fathers’ levels of engagement. We seek to answer this research question:

Research Question 1: What role do organizational culture, norms, and structure in the social services play in the low levels of engagement of fathers in family- and child-oriented social work interventions?

To answer this question, we have conducted an institutional ethnography in six Departments of Social Services (DSSs). The ethnography included 46 interviews with social workers in a variety of roles, observations in the DSSs and in fieldwork, and analysis of written forms and reports.

Following this project, we present a new theoretical concept: the primary contact person (PCP) assumption. It holds that routine interactions within family social work interventions are based on the implicit assumption that only one of the parents is the PCP. Although both written policies and program mandates require that, wherever possible, contact be made with both parents, in practice, these contact persons are almost exclusively mothers. The PCP assumption and the cultural preference for mothers are central elements of the mother-based intervention, which focuses on the mother as the center of child- and family-related interventions and is previously described by the authors (Perez-Vaisvidovsky et al., 2021, 2022).

In the first part of the article, we review existing research on father engagement in social services and point to the gap in the literature on the impact of the services’ organizational structure and culture. After describing our methodological approach, we present our findings, documenting the PCP assumption and how it is manifested in the routine work of social workers. In the “Discussion” section, we connect this assumption to existing research on father engagement and show how together they create the mother-based intervention. In the concluding section, we discuss the answer to our research question, both its impact and its limitations.

Literature Review

Fathers’ participation in social work and social services interventions aimed at improving the welfare of their family and children is very low. Indeed, many scholars refer to fathers as “absent” from the arena of social services. Quantitative data on fathers’ participation are hard to come by, but existing studies show that levels of father involvement tend to be less than 50% than those of mothers and are sometimes much lower (Haworth, 2019; Strega et al., 2008; Strug & Wilmore-Schaeffer, 2003). Many qualitative studies have described the clientele of the social services as being predominantly mothers. Some scholars focus on the fathers as a cause to this absence, characterizing them as “hard to reach” (Clapton, 2009; Davies, 2016; Maxwell et al., 2012). Others focus on the role of the services, portraying them as “neglected” or “excluded” (Baum, 2015b; Gupta & Featherstone, 2015).

These low levels of involvement are of such concern because evidence shows that father engagement, both in child care and in the intervention, increases the effectiveness of family-oriented social work interventions (Brewsaugh et al., 2018; Brewsaugh & Strozier, 2016). Systems-level efforts to include fathers have been found to reduce the time a child spends in the welfare system and foster care and provide better results of such care (Burrus et al., 2012; Malm et al., 2006; Velázquez et al., 2009).

Given that existing low levels of paternal engagement in social work interventions are detrimental to their outcomes, it is important to first determine the causes of that low engagement and then explore how to increase it. Existing research identifies factors relating to three primary causes: fathers, mothers, and the services themselves.

Fathers tend to refrain from accessing the services for various reasons. In general, men tend to avoid seeking help and psychological assistance (Addis & Mahalik, 2003). As Baum (2015a) notes, this tendency does not originate in a decreased need for services, but rather in common perceptions of masculinity that require men to be strong and independent.

Societal perceptions of the role of fathers in the family, in which they are seen as not as central as the mother, further discourage their use of social services. Family-oriented services are often perceived as targeted at children and mothers and as irrelevant to fathers (Baum, 2015b; Brown et al., 2009; Ewart-Boyle et al., 2015). Other reasons for fathers’ absence include negative past experiences with social services (Malm et al., 2006) or, in situations of family breakup, the reluctance of the father’s current spouse who is not the child’s mother (Maxwell et al., 2012).

A second cause of father absence is maternal gatekeeping. In some situations, mothers position themselves as gatekeepers between fathers and the services. They may refrain from bringing fathers into the picture and sometimes resist the services’ attempts to engage them (O’Donnell et al., 2005). Mothers may be afraid of involving a father who has been violent in the past, may be worried about losing custody to the father, and/or may desire to keep full responsibility for the children. Another possible reason is their fear of losing benefits attached to single-parent status if welfare services identify a father in the household (Maxwell et al., 2012).

The third cause of this absence is the services themselves, as elements in the services deter fathers from participating in interventions.

Existing research has focused on those organizational elements related to the individual social workers who deliver service: their knowledge, training, perceptions, and attitudes that influence how they work with fathers. Therapeutic knowledge on working with men in general and specifically with fathers is lacking. Men express distress and pain differently than women, and professionals’ lack of knowledge regarding this difference often leads to the misinterpretation of men’s feelings and needs (Baum, 2015b; Brown et al., 2009). Regarding fathers specifically, research on families and parenting tends to focus primarily on mothers and neglect fathers (Shapiro & Krysik, 2010; Strug & Wilmore-Schaeffer, 2003). This focus is reflected in social work textbooks that emphasize the role of mothers and the mother–child connection (Brewsaugh & Strozier, 2016).

A major cause of difficulty for social workers in working with fathers—and therefore, a major cause of father absence—is the gender differences between social workers, who are predominantly women, and fathers. Female workers and male clients face a contradictory power relation, in which the worker holds power originating in her professional status, while the father holds power stemming from the privileged status of men in society (Bundy-Fazioli et al., 2009). Gender gaps may give rise to a fear of violence when social workers have to work with fathers who have been violent in the past, are suspected to be violent, or are subject to stereotypes of being violent (Baum, 2015a). Baum (2015b) points to the social worker’s unresolved Freudian conflicts as a source of difficulty.

Few studies have addressed the impact of the structural and organizational elements of social services on engagement of fathers. Brown and colleagues (2009) list several reasons on this level. The use of the gender-neutral term “parent,” rather than “mother” and “father,” may lead workers to choose to contact only one parent—the mother—sparing them the time and effort of contacting the father. Furthermore, the global spread of managerialism, emphasizing standardization and efficiency, in social services may constrain efforts to engage fathers; overworked professionals may be discouraged from the attempt. In addition, negative and uninvolving acts of social workers toward fathers were found to be influenced by norms and work routines in the organization, which tend to supervise the parental functioning of the father more harshly than that of the mother (Perez-Vaisvidovsky et al., 2022).

These organizational and structural sources of father absence, as outlined by Brown et al. (2009), have received little consideration. In this article, we introduce the mother-based intervention and the PCP assumption as key concepts providing a framework for understanding the structural exclusion of fathers from social services.

Theoretical Framework: The Mother-Based Intervention

This article is part of a larger project that is mapping fathers’ structural and organizational exclusion from social services. The hypothesis guiding this project is that such exclusion exists and at least partly originates from the services themselves, for organizational reasons that go beyond the level of the individual social worker.

Previous research has mapped the structural exclusion of fathers on the policy-making level, identifying three types of conflicts—the professional, the ethical, and the political—that act as barriers to strengthening fathers’ engagement in family-related policy and dissuade policy makers from creating father-oriented policies (Halpern et al., 2022; Perez-Vaisvidovsky et al., 2021).

In the absence of explicit policies, regulations, and guidelines targeted at the inclusion of fathers, we have identified what we call the mother-based intervention. While social workers may identify the importance of fathers and may interact with them as part of family-oriented interventions, these interventions are built on the assumption that mothers stand at the center of the family and, therefore, should stand at the center of the intervention (Perez-Vaisvidovsky et al., 2021). To date, research has focused on the policy-making level and has been limited to identifying how this assumption has been explicitly addressed in policies and regulations; it has not tracked its mechanisms and expressions in social work interventions. In this article, we examine the manifestations of the mother-based intervention in the day-to-day routine work of social workers in the field.

Method

To explore this research question, we chose the methodology of organizational ethnography. It explores organizational life on a day-to-day basis, providing a look into the inner workings of an organizational structure (Neyland, 2008).

We conducted an organizational ethnography of six DSSs in Israel, focusing on the practices of family social workers—the frontline workers delivering family-oriented interventions. In Israel, DSSs are found in every municipality; they operate under the municipal authority’s jurisdiction and professionally answer to the national Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (MOLSA). They are considered to be the mainstay of the Israeli welfare system. Family social workers are defined as primary professionals in charge of family-oriented interventions (Weisberg-Nakash, 2017). They are required to undergo specialized training for the position and serve as the key professional in the regional team entrusted with family interventions; they are responsible for managing the intervention with the individual client or with the family, including all its members. Their role is to create, implement, and monitor an intervention plan that will improve the family situation, with the aim of achieving goals determined in partnership with the family (Winter, Morley-Sagiv, 2011). The designated clients and the target of the family social worker’s intervention are, by definition, the entire family, including the interaction between its members, between the parents, between parents and their children, between siblings, and between the family and its surroundings. Collaborative working relationships are the essence of the intervention (Weisberg-Nakash, 2017).

Although there are few studies of fathers’ engagement with social services in Israel, existing research shows a pattern similar to that documented in other systems (and described earlier). It has documented patterns of workers’ reluctance to engage with fathers (Baum, 2015a), the expression of gendered perceptions of social workers (Davidson-Arad et al., 2008), difficulty in identifying feelings expressed by fathers (Baum & Negbi, 2013), and more. Thus, the working assumption of this article is that findings from the Israeli system are, to a high degree, relevant to other contexts and systems.

The six DSSs chosen for study represent various settings and cultures: a low-income rural town, which served as a pilot study, a high-income rural town, a low-income urban neighborhood, and a high-income urban neighborhood. In addition, a department serving mainly Jewish ultra-Orthodox clients and one serving Palestinian clients were selected to provide representation of these two groups’ cultures, who comprise a significant proportion of the Israeli population.

The ethnography included interviews with relevant workers and the collection of relevant documents, both physical and digital. When deemed necessary, we also participated in staff meetings. For ethical reasons, personal data on clients were not collected and were omitted when research participants accidentally reported them.

Interviews focused on the day-to-day routine work with families. Participants were asked to describe their daily work, focusing on the role that fathers take in it. When needed, the participants were asked to provide examples of typical and atypical families.

In the first stage, we interviewed three family social workers in each DSS (except in one DSS, where the entire team consisted of two workers). We then interviewed other workers who were deemed relevant to the project, based either on participants’ recommendations or on our analysis of the initial interviews. This study reports on interviews with 43 workers; most were family social workers, but we also interviewed intake workers, child protection officers, custody officers, team heads, department managers, and deputy managers.

DSS 1 was located in a low-income, small-town Jewish municipality (Development Town—Ayeret Pituach). This DSS served as a pilot study. Three researchers visited the DSS 10 times over a period of 3 months. The first visit of each researcher included a written report of their impression from the department. These visits included nine frontal and one phone interviews, one participation in staff meeting, one participation in field visit, reviews of administrative data and of anonymized case records.

Following this pilot study, a research strategy was developed and applied to DSSs 2–5: managers of several DSSs matching each demographic criterion were accessed, until consent for participation was achieved. One researcher was assigned to each DSS, conducting several visits that included observations, interviews, and collection of written data (work procedures and anonymized case records). The point of origin of each ethnography was the work of frontline Family Social Workers; the research was then expanded to other workers that appeared to be relevant based on the findings, until saturation was met. The number of research participants ranged from two (on DSS 4, a rural high-income community—all social workers in the DSSs) to eight on DSS 5. The length of each ethnography ranged from 8 to 14 weeks.

Each interview began with a description of the research and its aims and signing of an informed consent form. All interviews were held face-to-face in the department. Most interviews were conducted in Hebrew and transcribed. Those in the Palestinian DSSs were conducted in Arabic, transcribed, and then translated. The entire data collected in the ethnographies—interviews, field notes, observations, and written collected data—were analyzed using Atlas.ti qualitative analysis software. Data from the pilot study were included in the research, as changes in data collection strategies between the pilot and the full study were minimal.

The analysis phase included a two-phase inductive thematic analysis (Boyatzis, 1998; Creswell, 2013; Fereday et al., 2016). Each text was analyzed by two members of the research team, independent of each other, identifying common themes in the text. Themes from all texts included in the project were then united into one conclusive list of themes. As a last phase, each text was analyzed again to identify occurrences of themes from the conclusive list that was missed in the previous round (making this a deductive analysis).

The research was reviewed and approved by the Ashkelon Academic College institutional review board (IRB). The research team was comprised of four members—two Jewish women, one Palestinian woman, and one Jewish man. All researchers have advanced academic degrees in social work, and three are certified and practicing social workers, who have worked in the past or are currently working in DSSs (not those included in the sample). This position had a substantial positive effect of facilitating our knowledge of the field and enabled us to create familiarity with the participants. However, it may cause the researchers to adopt a positive view toward the workers.

Findings

As described earlier, this article’s main argument is that the work routine of family social workers in the DSSs prioritizes engaging with one person in each family, in contrast with the policies and guidelines for family social work. This section presents the empirical support for this claim. We begin by describing the implicit nature of the primary contact assumption and then provide an account of three of its manifestations: the preference for mother-focused programs on the organizational level, the focus on father engagement in complex situations, and the engagement of fathers in the absence of mothers. We then explore the reasons for and causes of the PCP assumption.

The Implicit Nature of the PCP Assumption

Formal work routines, policies, and practice guidelines in MOLSA and the DSS do not document a preference for working with one parent. Indeed, one of the primary documents of the MOLSA defining the work of family social workers, titled “An Outline for Family Social Worker Intervention in the Departments of Social Services,” stresses the importance of connecting with all family members:

One must note that reality points to the fact that most clients of the department’s services in practice are women, and an essential role of the family social worker is to provide accessibility to the department’s services to all family members, that is also to men and children. (Weisberg-Nakash, 2017, p. 17)

In emphasizing that the expectation is for the social worker to be in contact with all family members, this document, however, acknowledges that “reality points to the fact” that this is the exception and not the rule. Similarly, most research participants claimed, on one hand, that they attempt to work with all family members equally; on the other hand, they acknowledged that most clients are women. Tamar, a social worker in a department in a high-income urban community, describes her work this way:

Interviewer:

Can you tell me about your meetings with fathers? On the job?

Interviewee:

OK. There is will and thinking that it’s right to see all parts of the family, though again, most patients are women, like most of them are women, mostly single parent, so there’s this dilemma here . . .

Tamar makes claims similar to those made in Outline for Family Social Worker Intervention: The services welcome both fathers and mothers, but fathers tend not to accept this welcome.

However, looking into social workers’ work routines leads one to question what they mean when they use the phrase “father engagement.” In most cases, even when social workers claim they are “engaging” fathers, this does not result in an equal role for fathers and mothers: fathers often play a secondary role in interventions.

As shown later in this section, workers tend to build the intervention around a PCP, with whom they have the most contact. Although this PCP can theoretically be of any gender, it is a role reserved almost exclusively for mothers.

The assumption that the PCP is the mother is typically left implicit, because the professional ethos is that of equal treatment of both parents. However, workers sometimes make it explicit, as Moshe, a child protection worker in a department in a middle-class urban community, states:

In each family under our care, so, they tell you who’s the significant contact person. So, the significant contact person [in the described case] is the mother, with the father there was this introductory meeting to know who he is.

In most cases, the PCP assumption surfaces through several mechanisms: the organizational preference for mother-oriented programs; the nature of father engagement, in which fathers are involved only in situations the worker perceives as “complicated” or “fundamental”; and the focus on fathers only in the absence or dysfunction of mothers.

Organizational Preference for Mothers: “We’re in Contact With Whoever Is in Contact With Us”

Although family social work necessarily involves working with multiple clients in each case—parents, children, other relatives, and sometimes educational professionals—most family social workers find it important to have one person they can work with primarily in each family. Tamar, a worker in a department in a high-income urban community, describes how she decides who that primary contact will be:

Like, all our contact, most of the contact, is with the woman. [. . .] she’s also the one that contacts us more, she’s the one that. . . Once there’s a figure that’s more in contact with us it’s something that’s reciprocal! I mean, it’s not that I can’t address him and make a phone call, but I have less of a talk with him, like . . . I don’t have, he doesn’t see fit to . . . And many times he might say “ask my wife” or something like that.

Michal, a department manager and family worker in a DSS in a rural, high-income community, describes how the starting point of interventions dictates this work pattern:

In most of the cases, unless there’s some info on risk for children, most applications are the family’s initiative. So we’re in touch with whoever contacts us, actually. Usually the ones contacting us are the mothers, not the fathers. We aspire more and more for contact with the fathers but it doesn’t really happen, I’ll call it an excuse. In the excuse that the father works, [it is] that he couldn’t come, I [the mother] am more available, I’m more, I can come more.

Both Tamar and Michal describe their focus on mothers in their work as a result of the preference of the families themselves and of mothers’ greater availability. Implicit in this reasoning is that having primary contact with only one person in a family is necessary to conduct an intervention; contact with other family members is beneficial but not essential. This is the embodiment of the assumption of the single contact person. This basic assumption was shared by almost all participants. The presence of both parents was perceived as essential only in specialized parenting-oriented programs (discussed below).

While all workers share the assumption that reaching out to fathers is beneficial but not essential, their level of commitment to engaging fathers and reaching out to them varies by worker and by department—from minimal commitment, including a single invitation by phone, to repeated attempts, including home visits.

Fathers’ Engagement Necessary in Complex Situations

As discussed, in routine situations, workers work exclusively or primarily with whoever initiates the department’s application, who is usually the mother. Just as indicative of the different roles of mothers and fathers and of the PCP assumption is the pattern of contacting fathers only in complex or problematic situations. Family social workers seem to involve fathers only when interventions reach a critical point. This is how Michal describes the difference between those situations where she approaches fathers and those in which she works only with mothers:

[I approach fathers] if things are more fundamental, like family therapy, and less the economic or monetary parts—like after-school activities, or clothing for the children, or other matters; there it’s less relevant to meet the father. I’m OK with talking only to the mother, and I get a general sense of the family. When it’s actually concerning therapy, and in fundamental issues, like child protection, there the father has, of course, 100%, I say that each parent has 100% influence on the children, so it’s not even a question.

Michal stresses the importance of engaging fathers—but only in situations she sees as critically important. In routine situations, she is content to work with mothers only.

Another pattern of fathers’ differential engagement is beginning the intervention with just the involvement of the mother and then recruiting the father only when deemed necessary. Oshrat, a worker in a DSS in an ultra-Orthodox, low-income community, reveals her perception of father engagement while describing a case she is currently working on:

Say, we have a mother who’s cooperating all the time, and now we want to transfer a child from one institution to another, and he has some difficulties with this [. . .] so a mother is one thing, but I am going to invite the father and tell him—“we’re going to do this together.” It’s very important that [the child] hears both voices.

Oshrat describes her routine work with the mother as satisfying—until the intervention “has some difficulties.” When the situation gets complicated, Oshrat feels the need to involve the father so as to better reach and help the child. Hanna, from the same department as Oshrat, refers to a similar pattern when describing her work procedure with separated parents:

Interviewee:

As a single mother she can tell me—I want to open a case, I won’t start inviting the father. She’s the one managing this unit. But when significant decisions have to be made like sending a child to a boarding school, or Intervention Planning Committees in general, we invite the father even if they’re divorced.

Interviewer:

But until then, up to this point . . .

Interviewee:

Not in the intake [meeting]. If the father really does not live in the house, and the mother comes to open the case, and she’s managing the family unit, then no, we won’t make efforts to locate the father at this stage. Only later, when there are decisions [to be made]. It’s not like we’re making decisions at the intake.

Hanna refers to the Intervention Planning Committee (“Va’adot Tichnun Tipul Ve’haaracha”), the group that makes essential decisions regarding the intervention; when the case is brought to that committee, that is the point where fathers have to be engaged. The Intervention Planning Committees, a central element in the Israeli child protection system, have the authority to recommend an intervention plan, including allocating resources to such plans or initiating a process for a court-mandated out-of-home placement.

These committees are mandated by regulation and comprise the family social worker, the child protection officer, and additional social workers and other professionals relevant to the case. The participation of both parents is mandatory, and the committee cannot meet if one of the parents is missing and has not signed a waiver:

The committee shall not meet without the participation of the parents. The parents are the legal and natural guardians of the children, and they have parental rights and obligations. As a rule, in cases of separated/divorced parents, the meeting will also be held in the presence of both parents. (Article 17A, Regulation 8.9, Social Work Regulations)

Because of these committees’ decision-making powers, social workers are legally mandated to ensure that fathers participate in them. Yet most workers describe this duty not only as a legal obligation but also as a chance to increase fathers’ engagement, thereby enabling better solutions for children (although some participants regarded this obligation as a bureaucratic burden).

The obligation to recruit fathers for the committees demonstrates simultaneously both the potential of promoting father engagement through regulations and its limitations. On the positive side, the mandate for fathers’ participation in the committee leads many workers to create a substantial connection with fathers, usually for the first time. However, this effect is limited to the mandatory requirement and does not seem to spread to aspects of the intervention prior to the committee’s meeting, stressing the limited effectiveness of regulatory action. Again, this example demonstrates the differences in attitude toward fathers between workers and between departments, on one hand, and the limited effect and scope of these differences, on the other.

Father’s Engagement in Cases of the Mother’s Absence or Dysfunction

In some cases, fathers played a central role in the interventions, and we asked each worker to recount examples of cases in which fathers were involved to a high degree. Almost every time, the workers described cases where the mother was absent or incapable. As Israel, a family worker from a DSS in an ultra-Orthodox, low-income urban community, recounts,

Where there’s more contact with the father and not with the mother, it’s because it’s a mother with postpartum depression, or she’s using drugs, or she’s diagnosed with some mental disorder and she’s not in remission, but usually it’s with the mothers, less with the fathers.

Lian, a team leader and family social worker from a DSS in a Palestinian–Israeli low-income rural community, answers the question about engaged fathers this way:

Interviewer:

Have you had a case with father engagement?

Interviewee:

Sure, of course there are. There’s a case where the mother has cancer, and the father is always in contact with us regarding the woman and the children. He even comes here more than the woman. The woman—I think because of her illness she can’t come.

Thus, most of the examples that workers give of engaged fathers are where the mother is not functioning, ill, or missing—which reveals the workers’ reliance on a single contact person. This person is usually the mother, and workers seek to engage fathers only when mothers are not available and the need for an alternative PCP arises.

Origins of the PCP Assumption

This project’s choice of method—an organizational ethnography—is less suited to uncovering the origins of the PCP assumption than to describe it, because of its focus on the current organizational situation and not on past developments. However, one interview trend may reveal the reason for the PCP assumption: the difficulties that workers describe in working with both parents. When asked to discuss cases in which they worked with both parents, workers usually describe the interventions not only as effective but also as consuming their resources, especially their time. This is how Michal, from a DSS in a high-income suburban community, describes such a case:

It was a very, very complex case, and we always insisted on hearing them both. It was draining. Listen, today, in retrospect, I don’t know how I could, for each event, open it to both of them. I don’t know. It took two people [. . .] it took two people and sometimes three and sometimes our secretary was involved in this too. We had to, around the clock, check what was really happening in these cases.

Michal stresses the difficulties of working with two parents and the extensive human resources required. Moshe, from a DSS in a high-income urban community, discusses the needed resources and the problems caused when they are not available. In this case, the father was essential but was hard to reach:

So really, it was quite a feat. It really wasn’t simple. [The father] was a focus, he was very important, it didn’t work, [the intervention] was stuck for so many years, and here, somehow, we made some contact with him. Can I say there’s the availability and the time and the procedures to do it? Not at all. Parents are very . . . fathers are very important, and they are also very destructive many times, they aren’t our contact persons.

Several points arise from Moshe’s account. He sees not only the great importance in working with fathers but also the difficulty in doing so. Moreover, he connects the lack of organizational resources to the inability to work with fathers. In Moshe’s interview, we can see both the difficulty of working with fathers—specifically, their “destructiveness”—and its importance.

Thus, even workers like Michal and Moshe who identify the importance of working with fathers see the complexity of doing so and identify the lack of organizational resources as a barrier. Interestingly enough, in both cases described, the workers describe father engagement both as crucial to promoting a complex intervention and as difficult and challenging.

Discussion: From the PCP Assumption to the Mother-Based Intervention

The previous section outlined the nature of the PCP assumption and its manifestations. It showed how social workers in Israel perceive interventions as focused around a PCP, how this perception manifests in work procedures and routines of the DSSs, and how those lead either to the exclusion of fathers or their marginalization within most interventions.

The PCP assumption draws attention to the structural and organizational characteristics of family social work services. When discussing the causes for the absence of fathers from social work interventions, this article focused not on gendered perceptions of social workers, fathers, and mothers or the general public, but instead on work procedures and routines that are, at least explicitly, gender-neutral: these procedures and routines do not specify a preference for working with mothers rather than with fathers but only for working with a single person, without stating this person’s gender.

Existing research on the role of social workers in exacerbating father absence in interventions has focused on cultural causes, specifically female social workers’ lack of therapeutic knowledge of male clients and their dispositions toward fathers. These explanations use broad cultural perceptions regarding gender roles to explain fathers’ exclusion.

At first glance, the PCP assumption’s focus on the organizational level may seem contradictory to the existing literature’s focus on cultural aspects. Attributing father absence to organizational factors can be seen as limiting the effect of cultural ones. However, a more in-depth look shows that, rather than contradicting each other, the cultural and organizational explanations complement each other. Focusing on the PCP assumption alone does not explain why this PCP is almost exclusively the mother. Nor does focusing on cultural explanations alone account for the high rate of father absence or its persistence in the face of changing cultural norms. Combining these explanations solves these two problems: the PCP assumption receives its gendered character from the cultural causes of father absence.

Based on the PCP assumption, social workers contact a single person per family. When choosing the PCP, workers prefer the mother because they see her as a more competent parent, because they find it easier to identify with her, because they are concerned about the father being violent or for any other cultural explanation. Thus, the workers’ cultural tendencies lead them to choose the mother as the PCP, thereby giving this assumption its gendered character.

Conversely, the focus on a single contact person per family reinforces cultural perceptions and biases. Theoretically, the decision to work with either parent should not be colored by bias or cultural norms; workers should be as likely to work with fathers as with mothers. But in the real world, the PCP assumption reveals that the choice to work with one parent limits working with the other parent. Therefore, choosing to work with the father means the worker cannot interact with the mother: It is a choice to prefer him over the mother. Father engagement seems to come at the expense of mothers, creating a zero-sum game (Featherstone, 2010, discussed a similar issue).

By encouraging workers to choose between fathers and mothers, the PCP assumption exacerbates existing prejudices and biases. Even a small preference for mothers on the cultural level will translate to a substantial—indeed, as our data show, almost exclusive—preference in field practice. This is a similar pattern to how people’s prejudices translate into workforce gender discrimination (Fang & Moro, 2011).

The interaction of the cultural and the structural creates the mother-based intervention: its organizing principle is that services are structured around the centrality of mothers in family-oriented interventions. This interaction may provide a clue both to the sources of the mother-based intervention and its resistance to change. As discussed earlier, our data do not provide a historical explanation for the emergence of the PCP assumption. However, a plausible explanation is that it originated in earlier periods when mothers’ role as caregivers was more dominant and explicit. When the social work profession developed toward the end of the 19th century, mothers were seen as holding sole responsibility for the care of their children. During this period, designing the services around a primary (if not a single) contact person was a logical consequence of those professional perceptions.

In the late-20th and early 21st centuries, gendered perceptions regarding parents’ caring responsibilities have changed considerably, moving in the direction of a more egalitarian division of care (Lewis, 2001). These changes should serve to un-gender the PCP assumption. However, the mother-based intervention remains entrenched as the preferred intervention method in social work. As shown earlier, the interaction of the PCP with structural elements prevents the un-gendering process in family social work.

That family social work is still guided by this intervention method is supported by its similar high prevalence in the various cultural contexts included in this study. As mentioned earlier, the DSSs included in this project represent a variety of Israeli cultures: Jewish ultra-Orthodox, Palestinian, low-income rural towns (“Ayeret Pituach”), and high-income urban areas. Despite the differences in the way different cultures in Israel perceive fatherhood (Strier, 2015), our research did not find substantial differences in the engagement of fathers between these departments. Therefore, one may assume that the PCP and its preference for mothers prevail despite changes in cultural norms regarding fatherhood and that the relation between cultural norms and father absence from the social services is not that of direct influence, but is rather more complex.

The methodology of choice in this project—institutional ethnography—excels at providing an insight into the work routines and procedures of the DSSs. However, as clients were not included in this study for ethical reasons, the voice of fathers is not represented, as is the voice of other relevant actors—specifically mothers and children.

Although this article provides a novel insight into the impact of organizational factors on fathers’ exclusion from social work interventions, it does so in a preliminary way. As a qualitative case study on family social work in Israel, its scope is limited by its focus on the specific (although central) field of family social work. Other areas of social work may show a different pattern of organizational interaction with fathers, and further research is needed in a more diversified setting. In addition, it is limited by its Israeli focus. Although father engagement in Israeli social services presents patterns similar to those described in other welfare systems, because of the substantial international variation in the organization of welfare services, our conclusions may not be applicable to welfare systems worldwide. Rather, it offers a framework for further study, focusing on different welfare systems and, preferably, on comparative research. Despite these limitation, we believe that the PCP as a framework to be central to our understanding father absence from social services.

Implications for Practice

The main conclusion that may be taken from this study on the level of social work practice is that the engagement and inclusion of fathers should be a continuous, service-wide effort. Current attempts to engage fathers tend to focus on specialized father-oriented programs (see, for example, Sicouri et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2018), but this focus neglects the routine intervention process, which forms the central part of the work.

We believe that an inclusive practice toward fathers on the level of frontline social workers must include a fundamental change in the way family-oriented interventions are perceived. The inclusion of fathers requires moving from a PCP assumption to an intervention including an ongoing meaningful contact with all adults (and children) in the family.

Such a change requires adaptations on a multitude of levels—professional, managerial, and financial (Perez-Vaisvidovsky, Mizrahi & Halpern, 2021). However, it also has a potential to substantially affect intervention effectiveness, intrafamilial relationships, and, in the long term, gender equality in the household and outside.

Conclusion

To answer the question of how the organization of social services affects the inclusion of fathers in family-oriented social work interventions, we introduced the PCP assumption: the tendency of social services to focus on a single person as the contact person in each household. In family social work, that person is almost exclusively the mother. Fathers are considered to be significant only in vital decision points in the intervention process or when mothers are absent or unavailable. Thus, fathers have a secondary place in the intervention process.

The PCP assumption, which operates on the structural level, interacts with factors operating on the cultural level to create the mother-based intervention: social services’ tendency to work primarily with mothers and to sideline fathers. Although policies, guidelines, and best practices stress the gender neutrality of interventions, work in the field engages mothers primarily, as a result of complex exclusion mechanisms that incorporate both structural and cultural elements.

Footnotes

Disposition editor: Cristina Mogro-Wilson.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper is based on a research supported by the Israeli Research Foundation grant number 1269/17.

ORCID iD

Nadav Perez-Vaisvidovsky

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