Purpose This paper foregrounds the experiences of mothers involved with England’s children’s social care system when experiencing domestic abuse. It reports on data from a survivor-led study on domestic violence and/or abuse (DVA), involving women victim-survivors and domestic abuse practitioners. It aimed to understand how dominant discourses governing child protection work with families in which there is a perpetrator of DVA, might be revised to shift a tendency to hold mothers (solely) responsible for the protection of children as well as for their partners’ abuse. Methods The study advances a discourse analysis of interview and focus group data, substantiating how children’s social care practices produce the routine responsibilisation of the non-abusing parent, usually the mother, with limited focus on the abusing parent, usually the father. Results The paper exposes the gendered discourses of mother-victim-blame and responsibility patterning children’s social care responses to domestic abuse, which together intensify adult and child victim-survivor material harm and hamper child protection work. Also in evidence are the enduring traumatic consequences of the court-ordered removal of children. Conclusion The paper has implications for policy and practice, asserting that shifting responsibility away from mothers requires the ongoing interrogation of normative understandings of gender relations and gender-role stereotypes as they manifest in families. Fathers’ accountability should be constructed on a structural as well as individual level, which in the case of DVA and the family, incorporates efforts to enable perpetrators of DVA to cultivate an individual sense of responsibility and accountability, as standard practice.

A borehole flowmeter has been developed to measure low flow rates in NX (76 mm) boreholes. The instrument can be used to determine the standing water level and permeability of a test section of the borehole.The borehole flowmeter is a short, lightweight wireline packer which is inflated pneumatically and contains a turbine flowmeter transmitter unil. The useful flow range of the standard instrument is approximately 0.7 cm3/s to 70 cm3/s. The unit was originally designed to measure small axial flow rates in an array of boreholes which was thought to intersect a series of perched aquifers.Experimentation showed that an increased rate of flow could be induced through the unit by piping water into the top of the borehole, the flow rate being proportional to the excess head of water above the unit. Using this principle, a form of in situ falling head permeability test was devised. The corrected head of water at a zero flow rate was found to correspond to the standing water level in a borehole, and the linear relationship between applied head and flow rate was used to calculate the permeability of the section of borehole below the unit. The results are compared with those of packer tests carried out in the same test sections.The method has several advantages over packer testing in many conditions. The wireline equipment is light and can be operated by one man. The permeability test results are repeatable and are completed on average within one hour, though a satisfactory relationship between flow and head is usually established within ten minutes in a moderately permeable formation.

A second programme of tests has been completed under commercial conditions using significantly deeper arrays of 76 mm drillholes in two rock masses, one in the Old Red Sandstone, and the other a set of basalt flows. Single packer tests were carried out as drilling proceeded using a standard mechanically-expanded packer with continuous autographic recording of flows and of input pressures. Some of the holes were also tested after drilling with a prototype double packer system instrumented with transducers to measure pressure within, above and below the test section. Results of the two methods are compared and individual test behaviour has been examined and it has been found that results were affected by changes in groundwater level produced by drilling. In any test it is unwise to assume that the effective piezometric level in the rock mass at the time and position of a test is necessarily the same as that observed in a completed drillhole.The tests have produced further practical evidence of the need to consider the scale of tests and observations in relation to the inhomogeneity of the rock mass under investigation. At these test sites there were marked variations in standing water levels, and in measured permeabilities in adjacent closely spaced drillholes.