Caring Dads Program
Caring Dads exists to change current practice to better include fathers in efforts to enhance the safety and well-being of their children. Continue reading below to understand our approach to gender-based violence and child maltreatment.
Why the Caring Dads Program?
Since starting in 2001, the Caring Dads intervention program has been firmly situated within the realm of gender-based violence, and, indeed, within the framework of gender equality in general.
In Canada, there are over 100,000 substantiated child maltreatment investigations every year. Police reports further confirm that men are responsible for the majority of severe, injury-causing physical abuse of children and women and commit the majority of family-related homicides.
The Caring Dads program was specifically designed from the premise that violence against women and violence against children are intricately intertwined, and that these two issues both can and should be addressed together. The program was developed by Katreena Scott (Ph.D. Clinical Psychology), Claire Crooks (Ph.D. Clinical Psychology), Tim Kelly (Executive Director of Changing Ways), and Karen Francis (Ph.D. Clinical Psychology), in collaboration with child protective services, batterer intervention programs, children’s mental health agencies, women’s advocates, centres for children and families involved in the justice system, family resource agencies and probation and parole services.
Fear Is Not Love
In partnership with leaders in the field of domestic violence and abuse counselling, FearIsNotLove embraces a “Response-Based approach” to support any person who has experienced neglect, violence and abuse. This approach was developed by Canadian family therapists and researchers Dr. Allan Wade, Dr. Linda Coates, Dr. Catherine Richardson, Dr. Shelly Dean, and Nick Todd.
Their approach honours the many ways people resist domestic violence and abuse, and identifies abuse as a behaviour that can change. FearIsNotLove relies on this best-practice approach in their work with anyone who has experienced violence, including children and youth, and any person who uses abuse.
Much attention is focused on trying to understand the reasons people use violence. It has been suggested that perhaps people are abusive because they themselves were abused as children, or they have mental health challenges. Unfortunately, this sometimes leads to excusing the person from responsibility for their behavior. In most cases, the person is in control of their actions, and that they make deliberate choices about their abusive behavior. Often when people have been abused as children, they have made very different, more positive choices when they raise their own children. FearIsNotLove believes that any person can, at any point in time, choose to change and to behave respectfully towards others.