Social Work in the News! Week 4: More about the Brits

For a New York oriented Social Work Blog, NY SWOG has been heavy on British news of late...

But here is an interesting article from the Guardian detailing the debate about child welfare among our former colonizers. The recent discussion revolves around two brothers in Dorcaster, aged 10 and 11 and both abused by their parents, who were placed in foster care and who proceded to abuse two other boys physically and sexually.

The Guardian gives a good account of the various issues being debated, with a focus on "damaged children" (the term used in the article) and what to do with them.

In the view of some experts, the two boys in the Edlington case were already "neurally wired" to behave in a violent manner by the age they reached their foster parents.

I am curious why how one determines if a child is neurally wired to behave violently, and what that implies - lost causes?

Some are suggesting more aggressive intervention -Martin Narey, the head of Barnardo's (which sounds like some sort of drug store or tuxedo shop but is in fact a big child welfare charity in Britain) came out saying that more infants should be taken from "broken families at birth. Here a longer quote, from another article in the Telegraph:

“We just need to take more children into care if we really want to put the interests of the child first,” he said.

“We can't keep trying to fix families that are completely broken.

“It sounds terrible, but I think we try too hard with birth parents... If we really cared about the interests of the child, we would take children away as babies and put them into permanent adoptive families, where we know they will have the best possible outcome.”

What are these broken families? What does broken even mean when we talk of families as though they existed outside of the social and environmental context? Who decides what qualifies as broken and how? If they are broken, why not go straight for forced sterilization?

Fortunately, the Guardian quotes other voices:

Philippa Stroud of the think-tank the Centre for Social Justice refuses to accept that there is an "unreachable" underclass in society.

"I don't think we should go there," she said. "These children were clearly brutalised themselves. There should have been intervention from the time their mother was pregnant – the health visitor, social workers. She should have been seen again and again and if she had not been able to change her behaviour then the kids should have been taken into care in the first year.

"Early intervention is key. The mother could have been salvageable and retrained. Social workers come into their profession with noble aims, but before long they are carrying enormous case loads and are stuck in such box-ticking roles instead of being out there where they should be."

So perhaps there is actually something we as a society can do to help families? If only there were enough resources in the world to help Dorcaster social workers actually do their job. Oh, actually, there are enough resources, it' s just that we have other priorities.

"Delusions" of Identity

After reading an NYT article earlier this month about identity disorders,I've become interested in explanations for how the "self" comes to be a self, and amazed at how that sense of self can be disrupted. I recommend a new book by Todd E. Feinberg called From Axons to Identity about the different type of identity problems, and explores what these teach us about normal identity.

The more I think about these things, the more I am fascinated by what the brain and the mind do. But also, I confront the basic awareness that identity cannot really be explained or even defined. What we think of as ourselves is it is really just an idea based on familiarity, habit, and what we learn from those around us. The fact that my "identity" can think about this is even stranger. (This is why I put "delusion" in quotes in the title - since healthy identity is itself a delusion, as we can say about these disorders are that they stray from common wisdom, and probably cause challenges in interacting with the world around us.

A good example is a recent news story (discussed, in brief, here and here) about a man with body integrity identity disorder - he believed that his foot was a foreign object. No one would amputate it for him, so he stuck it in dry ice until it was so damaged that they had to cut it off. Now, he reports to be very pleased. His wife reports that their relationship has improved.

This story makes us consider what it would be like to believe that a limb attached to us is not ours. In what essential way is this different from believing that our hair can be cut, or that an artificial limb that performs the same functions as a leg is not a part of our body? Thinking broadly, this raises the question of what it mean to think that we are our bodies, and we end where our bodies end.

Thinking clinically (this is supposed to be about social work, after all), I could not help wondering what I would do if I was working with this family or individual as a therapist, pre- or post-operation, besides refer him to a neurologist. Could it have helped to explore his psychic history, or is this simply an issue of neuronal malfunction?

He is very happy that his alien limb is gone, and appears to have no psychiatric symptoms. Is there any reason to discuss the leg or to challenge him about it? What does his wife think about all of this? How do we explain it to their children?

I don't know, but my simple, basic conclusion (which summarizes a lot of what I see in the world) is: People are strange and amazing.

How to visit NY SWOG while at work

***UPDATE***
This blog has been updated since I first posted it! See below.

Ever since the internet hit offices, I've wondered why exactly people are allowed to surf the web and get paid for it. If I dragged a TV into my office and flipped it on, it wouldn't go over too well, even if I were just watching the news. Yet the internet is in a strange liminal zone between utility and, well, un-utility: one could use it for work, so it would be difficult to ban completely, even though it is often used not to work (see the Onion artcle "48-Hour Internet Outage Plunges Nation Into Productivity")

I will add that as a social worker I use the internet all the time to find very valuable resources and services for clients, so if I were to look the WWW my productivity would surely decrease.

All of this is to say that I don't exactly want to endorse surfing the net at work, but if you do, why not read a stimulating, entertaining, and informative blog about social work issues?

HOWEVER - guess what: it turns out that all blogs are blocked from my work computer - because blogs are inherently unnecessary for social work, I suppose. Several readers have told me the same thing about their work servers, so I want to let you know that you can (probably) still access NY SWOG at work. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to a blog feed site like Google Reader
   
2. Get a ID and password, or use your Gmail account if you have one
3. When you get to the main Google Reader page, click the button that says "Add a subscription" and type in or paste: nyswog.blogspot.com
4. Click "add", and you are now a subscriber! You can go there any time and see if NY SWOG has new posts.
   

(Obviously this only works if your work lets you log on to things like Google Reader/Gmail. I can, so hopefully you can too.)

Enjoy...but not too much. Now get back to work!


UPDATE - I posted this last night, went to sleep, woke up, and went to work. I decided to see if I could see this post on Google Reader, and found that between yesterday and today, Google Reader has been blocked at my workplace!

I can see only 3 possible explanations:

1. Some higher up is reading NY SWOG and responding accordingly
2. By checking if I could use Google Reader at work yesterday, I somehow got it flagged and then blocked
3. It is just a strange coincidence

I will let readers decide. Of course, this only applies to my agency, so maybe you can still get on... for now...