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Pilgrim: a journey of discovery, part 2

II             Brother Mattheus

At the sound of the great iron knocker, resounding down the stone-paved corridors, Brother Mattheus came scurrying. A rotund figure, slightly breathless as he pulled open the ancient doors, silently swinging on their well-worn hinges.

‘Welcome, welcome, welcome!’ said the monk, his eyes sparkling with warmth and hospitality. The glow in his cheeks could as much have come from the genuine joy of welcoming a stranger as from the willing effort of bustling down the corridors.

‘Come in, my friend, come in. You must be weary from your travels. We have rest and refreshment for all in need. Come, let me take your cloak and staff. Come and sit with me in our fine refectory, and you will find rest for your soul.’

With what seemed an inordinate flurry of chatter and activity, Mattheus led our pilgrim, somewhat bemused, but chuckling inside, down simple, unadorned halls, to a great refectory where he was greeted by wonderful aromas of fresh home baking. The pilgrim warmed to this bumbling monk: sandal-clad and wrapped in his brown habit. He judged him to be an honest and simple man, who almost fell over himself in his eagerness to please – a genuine longing to make the stranger feel at home.

Sitting the pilgrim down, the brother scurried off to the kitchen, returning moments later with two great mugs of frothy coffee and a great piled plate of muffins and biscuits.

Brother Mattheus took up his coffee and invited the pilgrim to tell him about himself and all his travels. Then, hardly pausing for breath, the monk launched straight into his own tale. In a cascade of information and anecdotes, he told the pilgrim of the life of the monastery and all that went on within and without its doors. He told him of the brother healer and how he, Mattheus, loved to help out in the infirmary – tending the sick, sitting by their bedsides, bringing them cups of tea, cleaning their wounds or mopping their brows. How he would often accompany the Brother Healer on his rounds of the nearby villages, visiting poor families with ailing loved ones.

Brother Mattheus spoke of the village school, where he went twice a week to teach the young ones in religious instructions. How he loved to gather them round him and tell them tales of our Lord, and how he reached out to any in need, or of St Francis and his great love for all creatures. Oftentimes he would linger in the classroom, to help some of the less able children while their teacher guided them through the complexities of maths and grammar. Listening to him, the pilgrim wondered how much he actually helped these youngsters, but concluded that the very presence of a caring, affirming soul might do more for some than any amount of carefully constructed pedagogy.

The Brother spoke of the gardens and the fields, how each day he would spend a couple of hours with the Brother Gardener, tending the plants, pulling up weeds, or preparing beds for planting out seedlings. He loved his time in the garden – whatever the weather. Spending time in good, wholesome labour, with God, in God’s good creation, always lifted his soul. He spoke of the immense excitement, at Harvest time each year, as the monastery transformed to a hub of activity, with all the preparations for the great Harvest Festival. For days beforehand they would clean and tidy, inside and out. Having brought in the crops, they would select out the very best of their produce and lay them out in the chapel. And then, on the day of the feast, all the villagers from miles around would join the monks in a celebration of goodness – singing hymns in the chapel, then sitting down, side by side, to enjoy a feast together: old and young, rich and poor, tasting of God’s bountiful goodness.

On those days, more than ever, Brother Mattheus loved to help in the kitchens: carrying and fetching; chopping vegetables; kneading and baking bread and cakes. Surely, he mused, there was no better place on earth than a kitchen, where you could not only roll up your sleeves and serve others in good, hard work, but at the same time enjoy all the little titbits and morsels as you went along.

And he told the pilgrim of the regular prayers of the monastery, the daily rhythm of the hours: Vigils; Lauds; Terce; Sext; None; Vespers; and Compline.

The pilgrim wondered how this brother ever kept quiet during those times. And yet, for all his chatter and effusiveness, he seemed, too, to love these hours: times when he could sit, quiet, in the presence of his Lord. And as he spoke, it was as though this enthusiastic, eager monk seemed to drift into another place. He spoke quietly now, with a slower pace, and with a reverence that had somehow previously been hidden.

Mattheus told him of the chapel, of the chanting of the monks and the reading of the Psalms. He told of the silence of the cloister in the cool of the day. And he told of Brother Reginald, tucked away in his reading room, day after day, deep in his studies and oh, so very clever.

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Pilgrim: a journey of discovery in six parts

I               The Monastery

In the heart of rural England, where winding roads weave their way through silent coppices and gentle meadows, and industrious farmers nurture their fields through the annual cycle of ploughing, tilling, sowing and reaping, an adventurous pilgrim, lately set out from a certain bustling town, might chance to find himself rounding a bend and pausing in wonder at the scene of goodness and beauty laid out before him.

An ancient monastery was there – solid as the hills themselves, and as much a part of the landscape to lead our pilgrim to question whether God himself had not planted it there, crafting its rough-hewn stones, and laying out its cloisters, gardens and fields so that they truly became the very landscape in which they sat.

The monastery had stood there for generations: a bastion of the traditions of faith and culture. Within her cloistered walls, the monks went about their daily rhythms of rest and work, celebration and prayer, as they had done – day in and day out – for centuries untold. And yet, though her hours might be as dependable as the stones with which she was built, this monastery was far from being a silent relic, consigned forever to dwell in the past. She was, rather, a flourishing community of life and joy – an integral part, not just of the landscape, but of the social fabric of that region.

Her monks were known and loved throughout the area. Every Saturday their produce sat, along with others’, on the market stalls: fruit from their orchards; fine herbs and vegetables from their walled garden; sweet honey from their bees. Each May, when youngsters wove their ribbons round the Maypole in the village, the Abbott himself would be there, serving wines and ales to boost the celebrations. At harvest time, when the farmers went out to gather their crops, the monks would be there, alongside them, bending their backs in fulsome labour. If any in the neighbourhood were ill, the Brother Healer would go out – day or night – to work his charms. Throughout the seasons of life – birth and marriage, sickness and death – the community would look to the monastery for both mystery and meaning, comfort and celebration.

 

Our solitary pilgrim, knowing nothing of this, but weary from the road, wandered down to the monastery gate. He was not a religious man, but something about the place seemed to draw him in – a welcoming presence, silent and hidden within those walls. The great oak door, iron-studded and darkened with the years did not seem cold or unwelcoming. Its rustic beams seemed rather to be inviting him in – to knock and enter, to enjoy the hospitality of heart and hearth.

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My father was no ordinary man

Another poem by Clare Shaw, poet in residence for the BASPCAN 2018 International Child Protection Congress

My father was no ordinary man

 

My father could fly. He needed no father –

he had mother, the hunger of four older brothers –

my father was one of an army of brothers

and he learnt all the ways of men.

 

My father was handsome and worshipped by women.

His loins were a river: they flowed with his children

and he was the fountain of truth we all drank from

and when he held forth we would not interrupt him.

My father named every flower in the garden,

each star in the night by the right constellation.

He knew all the birds by their song

 

and they sang it. My father could never be wrong.

His hands were a gun and they brought down the rabbit.

He fed us on flesh that was studded with bullets.

There was fire in his fist, there was gold in his pocket.

My father turned water to wine and he drank it –

he needed no prayer and no God

 

for he was the word and he rang like a hammer.

Oh, my father was victor; he rode on our shoulders,

he rode deep inside us. We carried my father

through hell and high water,

we proved ourselves worthy of love

 

and his love was a river in flood.

The sun made him happy.

The truth was soft mud in his hands, oh truly

he was the truth and he was the glory.

He filled all the rooms with his song and his story,

his whisper could silence a house

 

for my father bore pain that you could not imagine.

His forearms were scarred and his fingers were broken.

His lungs were a pit and his heart was a puncture.

Oh, my father was hard and my father was tender

and his hand was a mark

we will all wear forever.

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An Arabic version of the Child Abuse Potential Inventory: supporting child protection globally

One of my PhD students, Jumana Al Abudwani, has recently completed and tested an Arabic version of the Child Abuse Potential Inventory. This is now published and the paper freely available for download until the 3rd November.

This has been a major undertaking, and is a really significant first step in providing a tool which could help child and family welfare workers in Arabic speaking countries in their efforts to promote children’s rights and support families in caring for their children.

To download the paper, please click on the link below:

Jumana Al Abduwani, Peter Sidebotham, Muna Al Saadoon, Mohammed Al Lawati, Jane Barlow. The Child Abuse Potential Inventory: Development of an Arabic version. Child Abuse & Neglect 72 (2017) 283–290.

If you would like a copy (in Arabic) of the Arabic version of the Child Abuse Potential Inventory, please email Dr Al Abudwani: j.alabduwani@gmail.com

 

Abstract

The Child Abuse Potential Inventory (CAPI) is a well-validated screening tool for assessing potential for child physical abuse, and has been translated into many different languages. To date the CAPI has not been translated into Arabic or used in any studies in Arabic-speaking populations. This study reports on the process of adapting the CAPI into Arabic Language which was undertaken following the International Society of Pharma-economics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) guidelines. The translation/adaptation process was multi-stage, and involved the use of a Delphi process, cognitive debriefing, back translation, and a pilot testing of the Arabic CAPI at two primary health care centers with a population of pregnant women (n = 60). Following “literal translation” 73 out of the 160 items needed re-phrasing to adapt the items to the Oman context. No differences were found when comparing results of the translated or back-translated versions to source; however, eight items needed further amendment following translated to back-translated comparison and feedback from the pilot. Iterations were resolved following in-depth interviews. Discrepancies were due to differences in culture, parenting practices, and religion. Piloting of the tool indicated mean score value of 155.8 (SD = 59.4) and eleven women (18%) scored above the cut off value of 215. This Arabic translation of the CAPI was undertaken using rigorous methodology and sets the scene for further research on the Arabic CAPI within Arabic-speaking populations.

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The health costs of energy inefficient housing: once again, it is the poorest who pay the highest price

The process of moving house has enlightened me about the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC): a measurement of the energy efficiency of a building, and a legal requirement for all properties being sold or rented (yet another advantage of our EU membership, apparently).

Energy Performance Certificates

The EPC gives a grade, from A to G, on how efficient the building is, how much it costs to heat and light, and what its carbon dioxide emissions are likely to be. It also gives suggestions on how the energy efficiency could be improved.

epc
Our current home has an EPC grade of D (about average for the UK), uses about 36,000 kWh of energy for heating each year, and produces about 9.1 tonnes of CO2. The house we are buying is somewhat worse, being in band E. It uses about 23,000 kWh (being a smaller property), but produces about 11 tonnes of CO2.

However, for an investment of around £20,000 we could improve that to band C, cut our CO2 emissions by a third, live more comfortably in a warmer home, and cut our energy costs substantially.

We can afford to do that.

 

Energy Vulnerability

Not so those on low incomes or state benefits, who suffer a triple whammy. People living in either private rented or public housing are more likely to be living in energy-inefficient properties; they are more likely to experience energy vulnerability and be unable to pay their electricity or heating bills; and they have no control over improving the energy efficiency of their homes, while the private landlords have no incentive to fork out the capital to do so, and the austerity-driven local councils are unlikely to prioritise this over other more pressing demands.
Frustratingly, though, this isn’t just about feeling good about doing our bit to help tackle climate change, nor even about feeling a bit more warm and comfortable during the winter months. Living with energy vulnerability has a direct impact on our health. Last week I attended a seminar exploring the health costs of energy inefficient housing in the UK and France. The authors pointed out that people living in homes in bands F and G have an overall higher mortality, as well as substantial risks of ill-health, not to mention the impact on lost days at work, and for children, poorer educational outcomes.

Conversely, a relatively small investment now in improving the energy efficiency of our public and private rented housing could have huge impacts on the NHS budget, not to mention the very real impact on the lives of those who can’t afford to stay warm.

 

End Fuel Poverty

According to the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, 2.35 million households in England are living in fuel poverty. Surely it doesn’t need to be that way?

 

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BASPCAN Congress call for abstracts extended

It has been very encouraging over the past few weeks to see some excellent abstracts coming in for the BASPCAN 2018 child protection congress. We have seen synopses of some truly engaging research, personal stories, workshops and discussion forums, all of which promise to bring something inspiring to the congress.

Several people, however, have indicated that they would like to submit, but need more time to complete their abstracts.

In view of this, we have decided to extend our deadline for abstract submission to the 10th October.

So hurry and get your abstract submitted now: go to www.baspcan.org.uk/baspcan-congress-2018/baspcan-congress-abstract-submission/

 

If you have a good idea, some original research or innovative practice that you can present, or if you are able to draw on your own experience as a survivor of abuse or someone who has been involved with family support services, we invite you to submit an outline of your presentation.

 

Please log on to the congress website to submit your abstract. If you are having any difficulties, please contact our administrator, Hazel Cann at: congress@baspcan.org.uk

 

 

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All you need is love (plus a good evidence base, a healthy dose of scepticism, and patience and perseverance in working with families!)

All you need is love?

Our latest issue of Child Abuse Review, now available online, explores some of the dilemmas in working with violent fathers and their families. Positive affirmation and support is a central part of such work, but is it really all that is needed? Can violent men really change?

In our first paper for this issue Timothy Broady and colleagues report on an evaluation of a men’s domestic violence intervention programme, using a qualitative analysis of interviews with 21 participants (Broady et al., 2017). Perhaps the most striking finding of this research was the universal expression, by these fathers, of love for their children, and how that was ‘motivating them to stop using violence and to develop positive relationships with all family members’. Broady and his colleagues suggest that ‘the frustrations reported at not having contact with their children emerged as a particularly powerful experience that could be harnessed to encourage men to acknowledge the severity of their behaviour and to find alternative ways of relating to family members.’

 

It is not sufficient to put all the responsibility for keeping their children safe on mothers who themselves are victims of the violence and controlling behaviour perpetrated by their partners. If we are going to bring about any meaningful change in families affected by domestic violence, the perpetrators of that violence need to take responsibility for their attitudes and behaviours, and to take genuine steps towards changing not just the violent behaviours themselves, but also the deeper attitudes of power and control which underlie those behaviours.

 

Picking up on these findings, it seems imperative that intervention programmes seek to understand and work with what motivates violent perpetrators to change. If their love for their children can help motivate change, that must surely be a good thing. However, it is essential that practitioners, while showing compassion and a supportive attitude to their clients, are not naïve about the challenges involved. Change does not happen overnight, and the manipulative, controlling attitudes of many perpetrators of domestic violence mean that a degree of scepticism is important, along with patience and perseverance in working with these men.

As with so much of our safeguarding practice, we need to hold on to the hope that children’s lives can be better.  We need to maintain high expectations of parents in their care of their children; provide them with the support that will enable them to meet those high expectations; and keep our focus on the child, so that we are prepared to challenge and act when those expectations are not met.

 

Balancing support and scrutiny

The difficulties in achieving a balance between support and scrutiny are brought into a different perspective in a paper by Louise Caffrey (2017), specifically in the context of volunteers working in supported child contact centres. Caffrey’s research is an excellent example of how systems methodology can help get beneath the surface of individual behaviours to understand the context, values, and organisational systems which may underlie those behaviours. Pertinently, she found that while the volunteers were aware that child safety and protection were everyone’s business, and were knowledgeable about their responsibilities to refer child protection concerns and how to do so, there were other emphases that could ‘stand in tension with their safeguarding commitments’. In particular, she found that workers emphasised a need to provide a welcoming service, to be non-judgemental, and to be neutral. Indeed, practices such as listening in on conversations, recording observations, or finding out about the background case histories, which were felt to jeopardise the aim of creating a welcoming environment, or that could be perceived as biased or judgemental, were actively avoided or viewed negatively by these workers.

 

‘You have to dance, not wrestle’

That was how one midwife described how she approached addressing child protection concerns with vulnerable pregnant women in a study from New South Wales by Louise Everitt, Caroline Homer and Jennifer Fenwick (Everitt et al., 2016). In a qualitative interview study, the authors identified four core themes that reflected some of the complexities of working with women and their unborn babies. Central to all of these was the dilemma caused by a partnership model of care, when potential child protection concerns are identified. The statutory power carried by community services could be seen as daunting by these midwives, and a potential threat to their relationship with their clients. Indeed, what comes across strongly in reading this report, is the emphasis these midwives place on maintaining a relationship with the mothers with whom they are working, and to do everything possible to support these mothers and enable them to take their babies home and care for them safely. One key aspect of this was the emphasis on being open and honest with these mothers, not going behind their backs, but providing them with support to try and change. Once again, this study highlights just how challenging such work can be, requiring perseverance, time and energy to achieve a good outcome.

 

Along with these studies of working with parents, other papers in this issue explore the impact of neglect and abuse on young people’s resilience and psychosocial adaptation, including a paper from Extremadura in Spain reporting on young people placed in residential care because of neglect (Moreno-Manso et al., 2017), and one from Jeff Moore, Christine Thornton and Mary Hughes (2017) reporting on a study with 22 Irish emigrant survivors of institutional abuse. In contrast, Duncan Helm (2017) reports on a thought-provoking ethnographic study of a social work team in Scotland. Helm identified high levels of case knowledge, along with exploration, curiosity and hypothesis generation, without the need to necessarily identify solutions. Practitioners were able to share knowledge and resources that supported critical thinking. However, He also identified an absence of challenging dialogue and dialectic debate. Helm’s findings emphasise the importance of both physical and emotional ‘secure space’ for practitioners, but highlights the need to promote ‘working team cultures which facilitate challenging yet supportive dialogue as an aid to sense-making’.

 

Love, challenge, patience and perseverance

Despite John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s assertion, in 1967, that ‘all you need is love’, the research reported in this issue of Child Abuse Review suggest that this is not the whole picture. ‘Love’, expressed in these papers as affection, empathy, compassion and support, for parents, children and young people, and colleagues, is a crucial component of safeguarding practice. Love of their children may indeed be a strong motivator for violent fathers, or vulnerable mothers, but expressions of love, by themselves, do not guarantee a child’s safety, and need to be accompanied by genuine and sustained changes in attitudes and behaviours that clearly promote the child’s needs. For practitioners, empathy and support towards the parents with whom they are working need to be balanced with professional curiosity and challenge, and attitudes of patience and perseverance in working with these families.

For those affected by abuse or neglect, compassion and understanding is clearly needed from those to whom they turn for support; that compassion and understanding needs to be grounded in empowering approaches of sharing control and helping the individual to build resilience.

 

 

Child Abuse Review Issue 26:5

Table of Contents

All You Need is Love (Plus a Good Evidence Base, a Healthy Dose of Scepticism, and Patience and Perseverance in Working with Families!) (pages 323–327)

Peter Sidebotham

 
‘I Miss My Little One A Lot’: How Father Love Motivates Change in Men Who Have Used Violence (pages 328–338)

Timothy R. Broady, Rebecca Gray, Irene Gaffney and Pamela Lewis

 
The Importance of Perceived Organisational Goals: A Systems Thinking Approach to Understanding Child Safeguarding in the Context of Domestic Abuse (pages 339–350)

Louise Caffrey

 
Working with Vulnerable Pregnant Women Who Are At Risk of Having their Babies Removed by the Child Protection Agency in New South Wales, Australia (pages 351–363)

Louise Everitt, Caroline Homer and Jennifer Fenwick

 

Psychosocial Adaptation of Young Victims of Physical Neglect (pages 364–374)

Juan Manuel Moreno-Manso, Mª Elena García-Baamonde, Eloísa Guerrero-Barona, Macarena Blázquez-Alonso, José Manuel Pozueco-Romero and Mª José Godoy-Merin

 

On the Road to Resilience: The Help-Seeking Experiences of Irish Emigrant Survivors of Institutional Abuse (pages 375–387)

Jeff Moore, Christine Thornton and Mary Hughes

 
Can I Have A Word? Social Worker Interaction and Sense-Making (pages 388–398)

Duncan Helm