Don’t blame social workers for child abuse

Gaynor Arnold is an author and a social worker. As government plans to boost social services recruitment are dismissed as inadequate, she defends a job that has been openly scorned and reviled.

Since my long-listing for the Orange Prize, a number of colleagues have remarked how nice it is to see a social worker who is famous for something other than involvement in a high-profile child abuse inquiry. Certainly you will have had to look hard to find good publicity around social work, particularly in the past 12 months, when it seems as though the term “social worker” has become synonymous with “social pariah”. It is not a comfortable time to be in the profession, and in defending ourselves by suggesting that it is perhaps impossible always to get things right, it is easy to sound complacent.

Of course, unless we eradicate evil from the face of the Earth, child abuse and child murder will continue to happen. But no one is more horrified, shocked and saddened than social workers when we fail to prevent such tragedies. We are, believe it or not, good people. We have chosen a job that is stressful, underpaid and sometimes downright dangerous, to engage with those sections of society that most people like to put out of their minds.

I can’t tell you the number of times people have said to me “I wouldn’t do your job”. No, you probably wouldn’t, I think. You wouldn’t want to be faced with the life-and-death decisions, the verbal abuse or the continual exhaustion of juggling several extreme situations at the same time. Most people are happy to pay their taxes for someone else to do the job. They don’t want to know. Except, of course, when things go wrong. Then press and public unite in an outbreak of national hysteria: what did they think they were doing? How could they have made such blunders? Why does it go on happening — and in the same way?

They are good questions, of course. And they absolutely should be asked. In fact, I ask them myself when I, along with everyone else, first see the horrific headlines over breakfast. My first thought is that I wouldn’t have made such disastrous mistakes as social worker A or manager B. But the truth is I might have; I know how complex these situations can be and how difficult it is to make such an important decision as separating a child and a parent. But once matters are in the public domain, everyone is an expert and we do our own version of back-seat driving.

So why is “the obvious” not so obvious at the time? How can social workers go into a house where abuse is suspected, time and again, and not see what is under their noses? How can meetings involving highly trained professionals from various agencies get the answers so wrong? I cannot comment on any particular case but I think there are several reasons why these tragedies occur. One is to do with the high levels of crisis intervention that social workers and managers have to engage with these days. I don’t think the public has any idea of this, or how it affects people’s health, judgment and ability to do the job.

Social workers don’t just have one case to deal with; they have perhaps 20 or 30 most of which are highly demanding. And because of the shortage of staff, caseloads can inflate even more. Children’s teams across the country now have a vacancy rate of between 20 and 30 per cent. As well as that, many people are off sick with stress-related illness, so inexperienced social workers are asked to take on serious and complex cases — and managers (often with relatively little experience themselves) are sitting with their metaphorical fingers in the dyke as the amount of work coming in grows and grows.

In an attempt to regulate the system and make all social workers accountable (not a bad thing in itself), the amount of paperwork has also gone through the roof. Is it any wonder that something has to give? Tired, stressed people don’t make the best decisions and tired, stressed managers can’t give social workers the support they need. This is a nationwide problem that will get worse unless the status of social workers rises and more people come into the profession — and stay there. Baying for blood really won’t help.

Another contributing factor is the nature of the cases with which social services departments deal. When I started in 1969, the emphasis was on preventive work: I dealt with families whose difficulties arose from basic poverty. I used to visit them frequently and knew them well. The department I worked for was small, there was almost no staff turnover and you kept the same cases for years. It was not all roses, though. Sometimes it was hard to see improvement when I processed yet another boy through the approved school system, collected another runaway or tried to regulate another debt acquired by a family with 32 outstanding court orders. But when I went back to “children and families” work five years later, I found a more structured world of priorities and time limits. There was far less preventive work, far more court work; far more young people with extreme behaviour and an explosion in the number of sexual abuse cases.

As time went on, I spent a larger proportion of my week with police officers investigating cases of abuse, and it was difficult not to feel like a police officer myself. Verbal abuse was common, and several colleagues were physically assaulted. One, in Birmingham, was murdered.

I wonder how I coped. I think it was because I had good managers and good colleagues, and we were a well-staffed team. We also knew the importance of having a sense of humour, and at lunchtimes there would often be hysterical (and very un-PC) laughter ringing around the office.

I no longer work directly with families but I know that, nationwide, social workers are dealing with even more extreme situations, often due to drug misuse. In some areas there are reports of them being threatened with dogs and knives. One social worker in the North reported to Unison [the public sector trade union] that she and her family had been threatened, and that she was locked in a house and threatened with needles.

It is hard for a social worker to go into unpredictable situations day after day and challenge parents on the care of their children. Yet we do. And one reason why social workers fail some children may be this very ability to establish a rapport with difficult and abusive parents.

Many of the parents we deal with have been abused and neglected themselves, so they are in some ways just as needy as the two-year-old we have gone in to protect. It is hard to focus on “the child” in situations where everyone exhibits childlike behaviour and the social worker is the only caring figure around. The neediness of the adults is obvious. And many of the parents we deal with are very young — it may be only a week since they were officially children themselves yet, if they have a child of their own, that child must be the focus of our intervention.

This is a continual challenge in social work: trying to meet the needs of both parties through intervention with the ones who can talk. If hostages can learn to empathise with their captors, how much more likely is it that social workers will empathise with the needy parents they see every week, even to the extent of taking on their anxieties and priorities? This is why good supervision from experienced managers is so vital, because managers are not caught up in the dynamics of need and can keep the social worker focused on what is most important.

But what about those cases in which shedloads of experts have been involved, yet the child has still slipped through the net? Each time there is an investigation into such failures, it produces pages of recommendations about improving the service, improving communications between agencies, setting up new systems to safeguard children. I wouldn’t argue with these in principle — the faults are patently there and need addressing. But sometimes the result is that the bureaucracy around child protection becomes even more unwieldy and time-consuming. Co-operation between agencies is vital but decisions made by groups can still go wrong. And it can’t be right that social workers should spend half their time sitting at computers, setting up and servicing these elaborate systems. I don’t think that systems or paperwork safeguard children. In the end, it’s down to the social worker observing the child and asking the right questions. And there are many competent social workers around who, if properly supported and supervised, with manageable caseloads and working in pairs, can do the job efficiently and well. Indeed, they already do so every day with all the cases that we don’t hear about — cases in which children have been protected, removed from danger and given a better life with loving carers. But those cases don’t make headlines. We are judged only by our failures; the situations in which decisions are hard to make, or where parents deceive or bully. And this negative publicity has meant a great increase in the number of applications to court for care proceedings.

Social workers now err on the side of caution, and parents who might have made it with help and supervision are separated from their children and taken to court. And undoubtedly some MP or parents’ rights group will now accuse us of being “over-zealous”; newspapers will ask why a child was “brutally removed” from decent parents. When it comes to removing children from their homes, we really are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

If I were graduating from university today, I can’t imagine that I would choose social work as my career — not because I have changed my mind about helping people, or because salaries are relatively low (we don’t get bonuses), but because I don’t think I could cope with the stress of working on the front line of child protection any more.

I take my hat off to young social workers starting now. They are wonderfully dedicated. But they are fewer in number, and most are not destined to last as long as I have. Most people don’t want to risk public trial and retribution, so those who remain in the profession are harder-pressed. If you survive as a social worker you are likely to be promoted to management before you are ready and have built up the knowledge that you need to supervise others. This is dangerous for social workers and dangerous for children.

I was very glad to see this week that the Government has made more money available for the training and support of social workers. Let’s hope that it goes where it’s needed — on the front line. I also welcome the proposed inclusion of more ordinary people in safeguarding panels. They can offer professionals a valuable “outside” perspective.

I don’t know how far these new measures will solve the problem. What I do know is that universal vilification won’t help recruitment. And unless we accept that social workers cannot prevent human wickedness — that sometimes they will fail or make mistakes — nobody will want to do the job. And all children will be considerably less safe.