Social workers blame mothers and ignore fathers when children are mistreated, new research suggests.
They are reluctant to deal with men who are alleged to have abused children, partly out of fear for their own safety, the research implies.
It was carried out by Dr Helen Buckley, a lecturer in social work at Trinity College Dublin.
The results are published in the Irish Social Worker, the quarterly bulletin of the Irish Association of Social Workers.
Dr Buckley co-ordinates the advanced diploma in child protection and welfare at TCD. She studied 72 child-abuse allegations made to a health board over six months.
Most were "filtered out" at an early stage, and the remaining 28 were investigated.
Dr Buckley writes that allegations concerning men who had a history of aggressive or criminal behaviour "appeared to be filtered out of the system fairly readily".
Five complaints concerned lone fathers against whom reports had been made by, respectively, a grandparent, a neighbour, an 18-year-old son and in two cases by gardai.
One man left the country with his child when the report was received, but none of the others was directly approached by social workers.
"The inquiries were instead conducted through third parties (relatives, a public health nurse and a teacher) and, as it happened, closed with no action taken," she writes.
Fears for their own safety are partly to blame for this attitude by social workers, according to Dr Buckley, who complains that health boards have done little to show they take such complaints seriously.
Social workers make mothers responsible for putting matters right in families where children have been mistreated or are at risk, according to her report.
Usually, they make little effort to involve men.
In 14 cases in which there were cohabiting parents, they spoke only to the mothers in eight, failing to speak to four men who were the alleged abusers, her research found.
Social workers ignore situations in which men are beating their wives unless the children are physically or sexually abused, and even then mothers find their involvement unhelpful, according to Dr Buckley.
Discrimination by social workers who believe women should "inevitably" be the carers also disadvantaged men, she suggests.