[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Failure to Protect
Consistent with the concept of violence as a family systems or relationship problem are the concepts of "engaging in domestic violence" and "failure to protect," which presume that women participate in their own victimization or fail to stop it (Failure to Protect Working Group, 1999). This idea ignores all the feminist literature since the 1970s that reconceptualizes rape from "she asked for it" and "she wouldn't have been raped if she wasn't dressed that way, if she wasn't walking alone at night, etc." (e.g., she engaged in her own rape) and reapplies these old victim-blaming concepts again in the area of domestic violence.
Moreover, it is in direct contrast to the research on the process and outcomes of domestic violence. There is no general collective resistance to addressing this issue; to the contrary, social workers have been criticized for intervening in domestic violence, with major implications, through the child welfare system and individual, couple, and family counseling.
If educators and practitioners are to effectively collaborate with community leaders to end violence against women, we must increase open and respectful dialogues with grassroots workers, and learn from their experience and well-developed practices over the past 30 years. Furthermore, it must be acknowledged that major improvements in services and policy changes were lead by feminists.
A major chasm is created when social workers apply authority-based positions that promote ideologies and practices that are counter to the research and carefully developed standards of practice. Some of the contested practices include couples counseling, promotion of batterer treatment over legal accountability, recent positions against mandatory arrest policies, promotion of the concepts of family violence, family conflict, and bi-directional/mutual violence, and, of course, "failure to protect" child welfare practices. The latter is perhaps the most telling about the current state of the profession as turning away from social justice and toward individual pathology models......
