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.

中文翻译：

---

当社会工作者被赋予双重任务时：加纳儿童保护系统中的儿童抚养和家庭情况的复杂性

有监护权的父母（通常是单亲母亲）在抚养孩子方面面临挑战，包括非监护父母缺乏对孩子福利的经济承诺。有证据表明，抚养子女与贫困以及其他家庭暴力问题之间存在密切联系。除了主要的儿童和家庭保护职责外，加纳的儿童保护从业人员还有权评估儿童抚养问题。这种双重责任可能有利于促进全面的儿童和家庭实践，但当实践者过度关注一项责任而牺牲另一项责任时，它也可能对家庭产生负面影响。我们试图了解并表明向加纳社会福利和社区发展部报告儿童抚养问题的家庭是否遇到了儿童抚养之外的挑战，以及从业者是否在评估中识别了这些主要的保护问题。对十七名家长进行定性深入访谈的结果表明，这些家庭经历了家庭暴力、婚姻冲突以及儿童虐待和忽视，超出了标准儿童抚养案件的范围。研究结果强调了儿童保护工作者在制定儿童抚养安排时进行全面家庭评估以解决“隐藏”家庭困难的重要性。