Scroll, Click, Blame: Mother-Blaming and Father-Ignoring in Social Media Surveillance in Child Protection
By David Mandel, CEO and Founder, Safe & Together Institute
In an era where digital footprints are increasingly scrutinized, one critical dimension remains underexamined: the intersection of gender bias, social media use, and child protection surveillance. For years, we’ve explored how systems blame mothers and ignore fathers. Now, it’s time to ask how these dynamics are amplified—indeed, codified—through the informal and often unregulated use of social media in child protection assessments.
Visibility Is Not the Same as Risk
Research consistently shows that women are more active on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. They tend to post emotionally expressive, relational content—family photos, parenting reflections, moments of vulnerability or joy. Men, by contrast, are more likely to post task-oriented or opinion-based content on platforms like Reddit or Twitter.
When child protection workers scour social media for risk indicators, whose posts are they most likely to find? Whose lives are more easily inspected, dissected, and judged? Mothers. And what do we make of these observations?
Too often, mothers’ digital expressions of survival, joy, or resilience are misinterpreted as signs of irresponsibility or minimization. A selfie with a cocktail becomes a red flag. A post about reconnecting with a partner—who may also be the perpetrator—reads as “choosing him over her children.” A smiling family photo is taken as denial of trauma rather than a hard-won moment of stability in the midst of chaos, and speaking openly and publicly about the abuse they experienced on social media is used against them, not seen as sharing for healing and restoring autonomy.
This is not a risk assessment. It’s digital mother-blaming and victim-blaming.
The Invisible Father, the Unexamined Risk
Fathers, especially those using violence, often escape this kind of scrutiny. Their online presence—if it exists—is rarely mined for patterns of misogyny, threats, admissions of violence, or coercive behavior. A father’s absence from his child’s digital life is rarely questioned. His aggressive posts on fringe forums go unnoticed and undocumented. His refusal to engage online is not seen as evasive but as neutral or even more “stable,” especially by those with cultural or generational bias’ about technology and social media use. Even if they are engaging in threatening online behaviors or actively advocating for men’s use of violence and the removal of the rights of women and children.
This digital invisibility of fathers reflects long-standing professional patterns we’ve extensively and globally documented: a systemic failure to assess men as parents, a neglect of their role in child safety and family stability, and a persistent disregard for their violence, coercive control—all while disproportionately scrutinizing the protective strategies of survivors, most of whom are women.
When surveillance systems focus almost exclusively on maternal visibility, they perpetuate two dangerous myths: that mothers alone are responsible for children’s safety, and that silence or invisibility equals safety when it comes to fathers.
The Digital Abuse Effect
Gender bias shaping whose posts are examined, what posts are considered relevant, and how those posts are interpreted by social workers and then used in child protection judgements doesn’t even capture the entire problem. Surveillance of survivors by social workers also intersects with technology-related abuse by perpetrators. This is where the issues become insidious and is a continued system-driven breach of the survivor’s privacy and rights.
A portion of social media accounts are false. Some of those fake accounts are impersonators. How many perpetrators are setting up false social media accounts for their ex-partner and that is what is being surveilled? Or how many are hacking their actual accounts and creating fake posts or illegally gathering information? A recent survey showed that post-breakup unauthorized social media account access is very common.
Just like we need to understand that perpetrators make false accusations of child abuse and neglect and in general manipulate systems to harm the survivor, they can also leverage the biased scrutiny of mothers to manipulate professionals and wreak havoc on the survivor from the digital shadows. The perpetrator pattern of creating false social media accounts, stalking, or hacking a partner’s social media and digital accounts should be considered and documented as part of the perpetrator’s pattern of coercive control.
When Surveillance Feels Like Coercive Control
There’s another layer of harm. For many domestic violence survivors, being monitored—especially covertly—is a form of trauma. Especially when the information is decontextualized, false, gender- or otherwise biased, and used to harm survivors by taking away their rights, helping the perpetrator avoid accountability and removing their children.
Perpetrators use surveillance to control, isolate, and punish. When child protection agencies replicate this pattern by trawling social media without consent, it not only undermines trust—it replicates the abuse. The Safe & Together Model calls for a pivot to perpetrator patterns. This means naming the source of harm, understanding survivor strategies as protective acts, and resisting simplistic judgments based on digital fragments of someone’s life.
What Can Be Done?
1. Develop ethical social media policies for practice.
Social media checks must not be informal or arbitrary. Agencies need clear, trauma-informed policies that set boundaries, define consent protocols, and emphasize contextual interpretation over assumption. Types of social media examined (e.g., Reddit v. Instagram, Discord v. Facebook) and the types of posts (e.g., violent misogynistic online comments toward strangers) must be considered, as they can help workers to understand the pattern of a domestic violence perpetrator. Considering that the majority of shared posts on platforms like Facebook and Instagram are posted by women and the majority of posts on Reddit and Discord are believed to be by men, there is a heavy gender bias in which social media sites and profiles are being viewed and judged by child protection.
2. Train workers to recognize and resist gender bias.
Without training, social workers are likely to default to societal norms—holding mothers to unattainable parenting standards while minimizing or excusing fathers’ absence or harmful behaviors. Like fathers’ parenting impacts may be invisible or unexamined, social workers need to consider the relationship between a father’s social media posts and any assessment of parenting capacity.
3. Shift the lens from visibility to behavior.
Professionals must assess behavior, not just digital presence. A survivor’s Instagram does not reveal her safety planning, but her partner’s YouTube or Reddit comments might expose a pattern of physical violence, sexual violence, or coercive control.
4. Recenter risk on the perpetrator.
Social media content should only be used in child protection when it helps clarify patterns of harm caused by the person choosing violence—not as a shortcut to scrutinize the adult survivor.
5. Ask, don’t assume.
Engage survivors directly: “Is there anything online you’re concerned might be misinterpreted by services?” This simple question directed at survivors respects their autonomy and builds trust. “Are there any sites that your perpetrator frequents which might show us patterns of coercive control, violence or sexual violence?” Engage with perpetrators directly: “Is there anything online you’re concerned might be misinterpreted by services?”
6. Consider digital abuse.
Consider digital safety and digital abuse as part of any assessment process. Is the perpetrator engaging in digital or online abuse? Do they have a history of surveilling or stalking or hacking the survivor online? Are they using children’s social media to surveil the other parent? These are just some of the questions that need to be considered when examining ethical social media–related assessment.
Moving Toward Digital Accuracy in Risk Assessment
Digital lives are real lives. But which platforms and posts we consider and how we interpret them matters. A domestic abuse–informed, trauma-informed, Safe & Together–aligned approach to social media means understanding that the real digital risk isn’t a mother’s selfie or a public disclosure of the harm someone perpetrated on her—it’s a system that uses that information to obscure the behavior and the ultimate responsibility of the person harming her and the family.
Let’s stop blaming mothers online just as we work to stop blaming them offline. Let’s get all the relevant behavioral information online and offline and hold the right people accountable—in every space they show up, including digital ones.
Additional Resources
David Mandel’s book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence
Safe & Together Institute’s domestic abuse–informed trainings
Safe & Together Institute’s upcoming events
