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RCGP Safeguarding toolkit

Part 2A: Identification of abuse and neglect

Unseen men

Men play a vital role in their children’s development and wellbeing and have a major influence on the children they care for. However, male caregivers and male partners sometimes go ‘unseen’ by services involved with children. Two types of unseen men have been identified in case reviews:

  • Men who posed a risk to a child, which resulted in the child suffering serious harm or death.
  • Men who could have protected and nurtured the child in their life but were overlooked by professionals.

Reasons for this oversight of unseen men include:

  • a lack of professional engagement and curiosity
  • an overly narrow focus on the quality of the care children receive from their mothers
  • inadequate information sharing between services.

A report from The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel in 2021 entitled: ‘“The Myth of Invisible Men”. Safeguarding children under 1 from non-accidental injury caused by male carers’, found that there is an urgent need to improve how the system seems, responds to and intervenes with men who may represent a risk to the babies they are caring for. For this group of men, the role that they play in a child’s life, their history of parenting and their own experiences as children and how this affects them as adults, are too frequently overlooked by the services with responsibilities for safeguarding children and for supporting parents.

The review concluded that there are a number of contextual factors linked to non-accidental injury to infants and that their interaction heightens the risk of abuse. It identified the significance of men who have had a background of abusive, neglectful, or inconsistent parenting themselves, which can lead to poor mental health, often exacerbated by:

  • substance abuse, especially use of drugs, which can encourage increased levels of stress and anxiety, sleeplessness, lowered levels of frustration tolerance, heightened impulsivity, poor emotional and behavioural regulation and poor decision making
  • the co-existence of domestic abuse and the fact that some men mitigate their difficulties with others through a rapid default to violence and controlling behaviour
  • living with the pressures of poverty, mounting debts, deprivation, worklessness, racism and very problematic relationships with the mothers of their children.

The NSPCC briefing: ‘Unseen men: learning from case reviews. Summary of risk factors for improved practice around ‘unseen’ men. 2022.’, highlights the key issues for learning from a sample of case reviews published since 2020 that highlight the issue of professionals not identifying or assessing key men involved in the care of children who died or suffered harm. These are:

  • insufficient information sharing and record keeping
  • lack of professional curiosity and engagement
  • over-focus and reliance on mothers
  • overlooking the ability of male carers to provide safe care.
Good practice points
  • Identify men’s roles in a child’s life. See the ‘adult behind the child’.
  • Seek out the child’s perspective on the men in their lives especially when there is a change in the child’s behaviour.
  • Involve male caregivers – be aware that they may need education and support to help them in this role.
  • When men attend with mental health or substance misuse problems, ask if they have any caring roles for children (including unborn children) and consider the impact these problems may have on their ability to parent safely.
References