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.

Social Work In the news! Week 3: Re-branding Social Work

I recently wrote a somewhat rambling and verbose post about, among other things, what I saw as the difference between social work in the U.S. and in Great Britain, at least as seen in the media. Here's an interesting follow-up to that - a story in the Guardian about new advertisements in the U.K. to boost the the public image of social work, and to get new recruits:

The aim is to push the idea that social workers are often the "voice" of people in vulnerable situations.

"We hope to attract a new wave of talent to work in the profession and change public perceptions," said Karen Smalley, head of the department's marketing division. "Social workers help give a voice to many people across all ages and situations and we want to position social work as a career of choice."

The ad (click here to see it) starts a bunch of apparently famous people (I don't recognize them) acting as "clients," with other voices dubbed over. The campaign theme is "Help give them a voice." You can see the video at the link above.

It seems like a good enough campaign - the snippets of people's lives were pretty intense. I was a bit confused about the voices and the images - was the audio actual recordings actual clients recorded? Or other actors? What is the meaning of having them dubbed over video of the stars? Who is giving them a voice? The celebrities are there, but they are giving them a face, not a voice...

Am I over-thinking this? It would probably have made more sense to me if it included stars that I was actually familiar with. Is the unconscious message that as a social worker you get to work with movie stars?

It is hard to imagine a campaign to boost the perception of social workers in the U.S. - who has money and the motivation to do it? The closest thing I can think of is the ACS-recruitment campaign that ran a while back on New York City subways (no stars there though).

What do readers think? Is this an effective campaign? Do we give voice to vulnerable populations? And is that something that would attract you to the field?

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.

Social Work IN THE NEWS!

(The first installment of an ongoing series on how social work is portrayed in the media)

A recent NYT article (August 15, 2009 - okay, not that recent) on Obama's town hall on health care, describes how, in an introductory speech designed to show how bad our system is:

Mr. Wilkes told of how he “searched frantically” for a new policy when his son neared the $1 million cap, and how a social worker suggested that he and his wife divorce, so their son might qualify for Medicaid. Eventually they found coverage, with a $6 million cap.

I am not actually sure what message this anecdote conveys about social work: do we tend to the ones to give practical, last resort advice in times of need? Or are we so callous that we will suggest without batting an eye that someone get a divorce to get benefits? Or are we simply the type of person you hope to god you won't even have to talk to, because that means you're really screwed?

I'll let you decide in the comments section...