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.

Family therapy – why I like it, even when I don’t

Subtitle: once you've tried it you can't go back

The reason I decided to study social work was because I thought it would be nice to be a therapist. Not necessarily a private practice therapist, but a therapist. I'd been interested in psychology since before I knew that I was interested in psychology, and I realized that it was much more interesting to talk to someone that to sit in front of a computer. At that time I envisioned being an individual therapst, because I didn't know a thing about family therapy.

After some investigation and indecision, I decided that social work was the quickest route to becoming a therapist, and indeed it was - I was doing therapy about a week into my first year internship. Now, about 2 years later, here I am, a family therapist. As far as I can recall, nowhere along the line did I actually decide to be a family therapist. However, over time, it just seemed like the best thing to do. Here is why.

First of all, there are the practical reasons: Fresh out of grad school with an MSW, you have to work in an agency. Let's say you want to do clinical social work and you are not focused on working with people with severe mental illness. My unscientific, ballpark estimate is that there are about 10x more opportunities for jobs in the child welfare/family services arena than in individual counseling. For reasons I'll discuss below, I never really tried to find a job at an agency providing only individual counseling, but my impression is that it would have been a lot more difficult, and I'd probably still be searching.

On to why I didn't bother trying in the first place. I am, I should note, personally inclined towards individual therapy. I see an individual therapist and value her greatly. I am generally more interested in the interworkings of the mind, the layers of conscious and unconscious material, symbols and structures, archetypes and object relations, and selfobjects. All that stuff has an inherent allure - the "mysteries of the mind".

However, once I got a taste of (doing and reading about) family therapy, I have had trouble letting it go. It just makes so much sense, practically - especially for someone like me who enjoys working with kids (stay tuned for a future post on "Why working with kids alone is the easiest thing for a family worker to do, and that's why you shouldn't do it"). In my opinion it is hard to exagerate the importance of family on development. Kids spend most of their lives with their families except when they are in their school-prisons and asleep); the family atmosphere and structure have a huge impact on how a child develops.

Of course, an individual therapist can make all the difference with a child in spite of their family difficulties. As Clare Winnicott wrote,

my recent experience with young adults has brought home to me
very vividly how much suffering might have been avoided if there had been someone outside the family to whom the boy or girl could have turned for help and understanding when things began to get difficult. (Winnicott, C. "Communicating with Children")

This is true for adults as well (although perhaps not as easy, since over the years we develop shells and defenses that seem so familiar and safe that change can be quite difficult, however many years of therapy we've been in).

A therapist/social worker can help a child individually, but the question still remains: Given the choice of working with the family or in spite of the family, what is best for the child? Then, the answer seems obvious: family therapy.

When we come to adults, the answer is not so obvious. In many cases, life difficulties can be due to problems with partners or children, and individual therapy can be like an escape from that system, rather than addressing the key problems, e.g. a breakdown in communication.

At the same time, many people want personal growth, self-understanding, and self-actualization; whatever all that means, they want it. That is a big reason that I see a therapist. When it comes to actual growth (as opposed to problem solving), I am of the opinion that everyone who feels that impulse could benefit from seeing a (good) individual therapist. Not that everyone needs to or should see a good individual therapist.

So my the verdict is: Family therapy is better than individual therapy for children, especially because children are often blamed simply for reacting to stressful family and social environments. This should be the standard intervention, long before meds are discussed.

For adults, I think good family (or couples) therapy can help with the communication and interpersonal patterns that keep us arguing, feeling judged, or stuck - all the things that take up time that could be spent meditating or writing our novel. However, this is not a replacement for (good, non-stagnant) individual therapy for people who want to dig down into their souls a bit and see what happens.

All that being said: Will I stick with families? I don't know. How am I supposed to make a decision like that? It kind of looks that way... In my idealized future, I develop two specialties: one, in family work of one kind or another (in NYC, Ackerman and Minuchin are the big theorhetical perspectives); and another with an individual, psychodynamic perspective - I lean more towards the object-relations field. Then I'd have all my bases covered and I could really begin raking in the dough.

Alternately, I could split the difference and go into Internal Family Systems. This is a model, developed by Richard Schwartz, that I know very little about, but it sees to apply systems thinking to inner life. That would kill two birds with one stone, as it were: Schwartz claims it can be applied to familes, groups and societies too. I'm sceptical but interested, and one of his books just came in from Amazon, so I'll probably write more about it soon.

"The Rubber Room" - An example of systemic dysfunction in NYC Schools

I don't want to veer too far from the topic of concern - this is a blog about social work, not schools. But it is about social work in New York City; a lot of social workers work with kids, and if we're working with kids we're going to be involved with NYC school system.

The day after writing my last post on the educational system, I read this article in the New Yorker about what happens to teachers deemed too bad to be in a classroom.

Essentially, teachers who work for the NYC school system get tenure after three years. Once they have tenure, they can't be fired because the United Federation of Teachers, through intensive lobbying, has a stranglehold on the state legislatures ability to reform the system.

What do they do with a really terrible or possibly dangerous teachers who can't get fired? (as well as to innocent teachers who are accused of being terrible or dangerous) They these teachers to a sort of purgatory called the "Rubber Room," where they do nothing, get paid (one person getting $100,000 a year), and wait for arbitration of their case, which can take years. Some will get to retire and collect their pensions (which can be 50% of salary) before their case is ever resolved.

Are these teachers really terrible? Most of the ones interviewed claim to be victims of administrative wrath - written up for speaking their mind. Others point to race as a factor. I'm sure those sitting in the Rubber room are a mix of terrible teachers who screwed up and good-decent oneswho got falsely accused of something.

Frankly, most of the teachers quoted in this article sound like they have some serious personality disorders that they should be dealing with (I know that's not "strength-based," but this is my blog so I can engage in a little armchair diagnosis).

The sympathies of the author, Steven Brill, are clearly with the administrators, and not with the problem teachers and the U.F.T., which comes across quite badly.

Still, even if we accept that in many cases the teachers are the victims, we can agree, can't we, that this is a prime example of how screwed up the educational system is? We are talking about billions of dollars, and a teachers union that has the power to keep people getting paid not to teach. The system of arbitration is endless and byzantine.

This article demonstrates clearly how a system can morph develop a life of its own and become malignant- eventually it exists to perpetuate itself, not to fulfill its original intent.

It doesn't even resemble what it purports to be. And amid that mess, some kids still manage to learn things, and (most) teachers manage to teach them.

Social Work IN THE NEWS (week 2)

Having perused social work-related-news for the last few weeks, I've become aware of a distinct difference between how social work is discussed in the US and how it's discussed across the pond. First of all, social work comes up in the news quite a bit more in Great Britain than in the US, at least according to my Google news alerts. Even more noteworthy, though, is this: over there social workers are almost always associated with being responsible for letting children die. This is in contrast to here in the US, where social workers are generally associated with burn-out and "the welfare office".

Let's take a recent opinion piece from the Scottish Sunday Herald. Granted, it defends social workers against those who lambaste them:

You can estimate the importance of social work by the outcry that ensues when social work fails. The types with firm opinions on the uselessness of "bloody social workers" have their prejudices confirmed, of course, but only after they have demanded to know why the professionals didn't do X, or insist on Y. Suddenly, briefly, social work matters. Inadvertently, yet grudgingly, a truth is recognised: there is no-one else. The social worker is the last line of defence.

Wow: I wonder what the opinion of social workers could be over there, if the public needs to be reminded that they are not just there to screw things up and allow tragedies to occur. (I got a taste of this on a recent trip to the British Isles. Whenever I told people I was a social work student, they tended to look apologetic and say things like, "Hmm. Yes, well it's too bad they get such a bad rap," or "I suppose we need good ones out there." I felt compelled to make clear that I wasn't in that branch of social work at all...)

The perspective about social workers in the media in the UK seems closer to that of ACS workers in New York (ACS is the child protective service of NYC), who are often seen as the bad or neglectful guys or gals when it comes to child safety. They tend to get blamed for tragedies when the news hit the papers, and then ACS quickly shuffles its acronym as though that will solve everything (Social workers in child welfare complain about ACS all the time, for not being clinical enough, for their knee-jerk response of separating families, for not being strength-based, etc.)

Now I wonder: Does "Social worker" over there mean what "CPS worker" means over hear? Or do UK social workers have the training as social workers in the US, but do mostly CPS-type work? Do social workers do therapy, or is this more the the doorbell ringing, "we've come to take your children" type or work? (no disrespect meant to people with that role).

I call on any of my SW brethren and sistren from the homeland (at least my homeland) to chime in.

Meanwhile, back to the article. The author, Ian Bell, makes a few more gestures of respect towards child welfare workers:

Social work is the splint we attach to what David Cameron, another armchair expert, calls our broken society. Without it, dysfunction and disaster would become endemic. In return, its workers are underpaid, insulted and misrepresented.

Nevertheless, he, says, blame must go somewhere. "When a child dies, someone has failed. No other interpretation is available..." "We cannot apportion blame?" he asks, and declares "It would be a betrayal of children if we did not." The implication, it seems clear in context, is that someone involved in the specific case has failed, and should get canned, at the very least. Having a hard job, he makes clear, is no excuse for screwing up.

But I have another interpretation: Yes, individuals can fail at their job; this might have been the case in the recent example he discusses. But the system can also fail, and the system can fail not because someone "on the ground" made a bad decision, but because people were given ridiculous caseloads, or were not provided with enough training or resources to adequately do their jobs. The real "blame" goes all the way to the top - not just to administrators and politicians but the the populace, that says with its votes that the bare minimum should be expended on child welfare.

If you once begin to accept that no-one can cope it becomes all too easy to cease to try.

In other words, it's better to find a face to blame than it is to face reality: that putting social workers or child welfare workers in overburdened, underfunded positions with humungous case loads and asking them to be responsible for childrens' lives is the same thing as saying, "We don't really care, we're just doing the bare minimum."

Mr. Bell makes it sound like the world will descend into chaos and paradox if we don't find a person to pin responsibiliy on. But if he really wanted to prevent more childrens' deaths, he would put more focus on the systemic problems, and pressure his readers to call for reform.

I hate the educational system

I hate our educational system. I have a visceral, emotional reaction when look over a (child) client’s report card, with its check marks and its numbers, or when I read an IEP (Individualized Educational Plan), or when I even think about standardized tests for 4th graders.

I respect those who work in the public school system, but I don’t ever want to be in such an environment. I think my (otherwise somewhat repressed) anarchic, anti-authoritarian impulses emerge in the face of any effort to mess with a child, and for me, schools are the biggest perpetrators of this. (In my personal vocabulary, mess with has a very specific meaning – it is the opposite of supporting the child for who he or she is – it is imposing an idea of what he or she should be, and, through this, denying what he or she really is).

Kids get messed with all the time in school, by school. Part of this stems from the way the institution of school has evolved. Many problems in our society stem from conscious or unconscious hypocrisy: we say we are doing something for one reason, but we are really doing it for another. This process works on an individual (“I think/say I want to help but I really want admiration”) and on a societal level.

A good example is the prison system – in theory prisons are for prevention and punishment, but when we look at how the system works, they are for many other purposes, such as the control of given class of people deemed threatening to the social order; the provision of jobs in the region; even to bump up the census count and ensure federal funding for a given congressional district, without having to deal with the convicts' pesky votes.

Similarly, schools: The general assumption is that the purpose of schools is to educate children, and that educating children is important. But if we look at how the education system is supported, funded, and administered, we cannot really continue to believe this, and it becomes clear that schools exist in order to keep kids off the street, and to socialize. How they are socialized is based on what social class they belong to. Wealthy children in rich areas are socialized to collect degrees and become leaders. Poor children are socialized to become content consumers and workers, and not to become criminals. If we really wanted children to be educated we would pay for it. It is important to clarify that many or most individuals in the educational system (social workers, teachers, administrators) do want to educate children (although many have given up considering how this could best be done). It is the institution as a whole that has other aims – and like many social structures, it has a life and a momentum of its own.

Now you know where I stand, and perhaps you strongly disagree with me. But I need to explain my perspective on schools so that I can move on to discuss some challenges to doing social work with kids. I also want to acknowledge that everything I have written about education could also apply to social work. This is not a new idea; to some extent I agree with it, and I will probably explore this question in the future.

I am not a fundamentalist about this, so I am aware that my perspective is problematic both theoretically and practically. First, I do not have a well thought out idea of what education should look like, especially within our current social order, in large metropolises like New York. Any improvement would have to involve a radical rethinking of what education is – a tweak here and there wouldn’t do it. Since I don’t know specifically what would work better, my critique is not particularly constructive – my “theory of education” is woefully incomplete, and verges on just “bitching and moaning.”

From a practical (or, more appropriately, a practice) perspective, I work with children as a social worker and I am aware that children will probably benefit from going to even a terrible school and graduating from high school. So as a family worker (which I am) I have an obligation to support that process, even when I see it as an assault of the inner essence of the child.

I am currently struggling with the challenge of reconciling all this. It touches on the “big question” of social work, that comes up in so many class discussions, of whether we should work on a macro- or a micro-level. Clearly the system is fucked up. What do we do? (More on this issue, and a parsing of the [possibly misguided question itself] some other day.)

I find that I don’t have a tidy way to wrap up this post. In a nut shell, the best I can do is to consider the child and the family from the most holistic perspective possible, including what is best for the “true self,” and for the person-in-environment. This involves supporting the kid to receive the best education possible, but at the same time not putting so much emphasis on education that the message communicated to the child is: “Your education defines you,” or “Get used to jumping through hoops because that’s what life is about.”

In other words, my goals (until I find some better ones – and suggestions are welcome) is not to add to the damage, to hope they’ll get through high school with some dignity, self-esteem, and support them in other ways so that they can get the benefits of school while avoiding the soul-crushing oppression as much as possible. Sounds pretty easy, right?

Money and Value

I just came across a blog (that I may discuss later) suggesting that social workers not complain so goddam much (to wildly paraphrase). Well, I like to think I'm "exploring" rather than complaining, but it's all grey, now isn't it? So on to this post's topic: my measly salary.

First of all, my current job – the first since getting my MSW this spring – is going great. It's the first full-time, salaried job I have ever held for more than 2 weeks, and I don't dread going to work as I thought I would. But I have been looking forward to getting a steady paycheck after paying to work all the way through social work school.

But then...I received my second paycheck yesterday. I was shocked – shocked! – at how many taxes were taken out. Ok ay, I know everyone says it, but it's different when it's actually your money. Also, in my former jobs I’ve paid my own taxes as a small business. This sucks in its own way – writing a check for thousands of dollars when you don't really have thousands of dollars – but it still came out to about 14% when all was said and done. How much was taken out of this most recent paycheck? 25%! Okay, I'm naive but I was not prepared for that, and now I have to go back and recalculate my whole budget. My annual salary suddenly seems, well, not so good.

(Let me note that I'm in favor of taxes and social services, I just don't want to be the one paying them. I would not complain if social workers were exempt from taxes, and I would be okay with just me being exempt too.)

But let's get to the point: After I accepted reality I started wondering...first, what value is placed on social work, and why? I don't wonder why working with poor people is undervalued, since we all know our society as a whole doesn't care much about the poor as long as they stay out of sight. I do often wonder why poor children are so undervalued when they are actually so important, and when we live in a country where people (particularly politicians) are always going on about the children and families.

This may be why some social workers think their work is "noble" - "If I can't get paid in money, at least maybe I can pay myself in self-admiration and pats on the back".

But let me tell you what I'm really wondering: what is the impact on our morale, just in knowing that our labor is under-valued? Do we work less hard? Take more breaks? Have more stress? Justify it to ourselves? Kick the dog when we get home? Or just bitch and moan and feel special? Or just feel special? Probably some mix of the above, depending on our personality.

Whatever the impact, there must be one, and we might as well talk about in that case. I, personally, have a complicated brew of bitterness, jealosy, and self-riteousness, which is kind of unplesant to have once you notice it.

(Tangent: If a profession can be a a personal arch-nemesis, mine is school psychology. They study for 3 years and get paid about 50% more than social workers. I don't even want to know more about school psychology because I'm afraid I'll learn something I like).

The assumption in all my mental ruminations, of course, is that money is a proxy for the value of my work, and that the value of my work is a proxy for the value of me. Money is a symbol for respect and value of an individual - it is how much we are "worth". Also inherent in all of this is the idea that I need value to be given to me by an outer authority (society) in the form of a salary, and that a low salary is evidence of my lack of value. I believe it too, except when I don't.

When don't I? Basically, when I am with a client. When I am with a client, I don't think about the value of my work because I am present and in contact with the other person. If there is value, it is a value in the relationship and the present moment. I also feel this way when I come home from good day of work - I feel content in my day, not for having filled out all the right paperwork but for having been in contact with people - and in that state, money is not important (as long as I can pay the bills).

It is really only when ideas come in, when I think about the injustice of being paid less than a school psychologist, or a psychiatrist (which is really the injustice of believeing that I am worth less then them) that I loose that sense, and my head gets activated, and suddenly there is something wrong. Before, I knew the value of things; then, I forgot.

Two great social workers

I have been reading, this week, the work of two great social workers – Virgina Satir and Clare Winnicott. Virginia Satir is well known in the field of family therapy; Clare Winnicott is not well known, but she played an important role in the development and publishing of her husband Donald’s theories. It is interesting to me that both women had pivotal roles in the development of therapy, but they are both outshone in academia – Satir to a lesser extent, but she does not seem to have devoted as much energy to promulgation of her method – or, perhaps, her method has been more difficult to promulgate (the Virginia Satir Global Network, form Avanta, seems to come close, but I'd never heard of them before I investigated).

What is the explanation for this? Neither contributed to the “literature” to the extent that others did. C. Winnicott seems to have been more involved in the practical world of child welfare than in academia, and she appears to have been content to support the publication of her husband’s writing.

Satir became well-known for her practice, having been featured as a “Wizard” by Bandler and Grinder’s Neurolinguistic Programming, and her videos circulate in widely among family therapy professionals. For this reason it surprises me that we don’t hear more about “Conjoint family therapy,” as we do about, say, Minuchin’s Structural Therapy (which seems to be the universal practice in child welfare agencies in NYC, based on my limited experience).

Is it right to group these two women, in part because they are women, and in part because they are both social workers? Over the next few weeks I’ll discuss more of their work as I continue to read through Satir’s Conjoint Family Therapy and explore the texts on a website about Clare Winnicott.

Meanwhile, any discussion or comments would be great. I’ll leave with a quote by Winnicott, MSW, from her article “Communicating with Children” (1977), that seems particularly relevant to social work involving children and the delicate balance of roles:

Perhaps the most valuable gift that we bring to work with children is our own capacity to remain vulnerable, while accepting our professional discipline and role. (Communicating with Children, 1977).*

More later of what I learned from her on talking to children, and other similarities I see in the perspectives of these two great social workers.

*Winnicott, Clare. (1996) Communicating with Children. Smith College Studies in Social Work, 66(2).