Abdullah, Alhassan, Frimpong-Manso, Kwabena, Cudjoe, Ebenezer, and Agbadi, Pascal (2024) When Social Workers Are Given Dual Mandates: Child Maintenance and the Complexities of Family Situations in the Ghanaian Child Protection System. The British Journal of Social Work, 54. pp. 2415-2434.

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Abstract

Custodial parents, often single mothers, face challenges regarding child maintenance, including a lack of financial commitments from non-custodial parents for their children’s welfare. The evidence suggests that there is a strong link between child maintenance and poverty as well as other family violence issues. In addition to their primary child and family protection duties, child protection practitioners in Ghana have a mandate to assess child maintenance concerns. This dual responsibility may have the advantage of promoting holistic child and family practices, but it could also negatively impact families when practitioners overly focus on one responsibility at the expense of the other. We sought to understand and show whether families who reported child maintenance concerns to the Department of Social Welfare and Community Development in Ghana experienced challenges beyond child maintenance and whether practitioners identified these primary protection concerns in their assessments. Findings from qualitative in-depth interviews with seventeen parents show that these families experienced domestic violence, marital conflict and child abuse and neglect beyond the scope of a standard child maintenance case. The findings highlight the importance of child protection workers conducting comprehensive family assessments to resolve ‘hidden’ family difficulties when establishing child maintenance arrangements.

Item ID:	85120
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1468-263X
Copyright Information:	© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Association of Social Workers. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Date Deposited:	06 Jan 2026 01:46
FoR Codes:	44 HUMAN SOCIETY > 4409 Social work > 440901 Clinical social work practice @ 0%
SEO Codes:	23 LAW, POLITICS AND COMMUNITY SERVICES > 2301 Community services > 230104 Children's services and childcare @ 100%
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