Caring Dads — Canada's Child-Protection-Linked Programme for Fathers Who Have Used Violence

Caring Dads is a 17-session group intervention for fathers who have used violence against their children's mother, maltreated their children, or are at high risk of doing so, developed in London, Ontario by psychologists Katreena Scott and Claire Crooks together with Tim Kelly of the men's service agency Changing Ways, and piloted over five years before its manual was published.
A quasi-experimental evaluation tracked two-year child-protection outcomes for 85 fathers who completed the programme against 100 fathers who remained on a waitlist. Verified re-referrals to child protection for further paternal maltreatment fell to 20.5% among programme completers, compared with 36.0% among the waitlisted comparison group (a statistically significant difference), and completers had substantially more contact with caseworkers (30.3 vs 16.7 contacts on average), suggesting greater engagement rather than avoidance.
The design is quasi-experimental rather than randomised, so causal claims should be read with some caution, but it remains one of the few fatherhood-focused interventions in the domestic-violence field with a published comparison-group outcome study. The programme has since been adopted at sites across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Wales, Germany, Australia and Sweden.

Read the full analysis: https://caringdads.org/about-caring-dads-1