Living On The Patch

Ruth Stark, Professional Officer at BASW Scotland, examines the challenges of living and working in small rural and island communities…

The Report into the recent Western Isles case gives an opportunity to be reminded of the difficulties in providing services in sparsely populated rural areas or small islands; where people work with their neighbours who may be carers or service users. This contrasts with the central belt of Scotland where social workers tend to have physical space between themselves and their work, rarely living on the patch – except if, like Bob Holman, you are heavily involved in community social work.

I was also reminded of some research by Brian Littlechild, Professor at Hertfordshire University into the fears of Child Protection Social Workers stressed-out by adult family members of the children they were trying to protect who said “I know where you live” – the title of the research.

Further comparative research in Finland revealed similar stresses experienced by the Social Workers. Stalking in itself is now considered a very serious crime – when it happens as a result of your work it has an added dimension that none of us want or seek to experience. Hence the reason why many of us choose to put some distance between our work and our home to enable us to create that work-life balance.

However, in small rural communities and islands this is not so easy to achieve and gives rise to some of the issues raised in the report, with some suggested recommendations.

These need to be considered and whilst in the early summer we (BASW) ran a conference on this – providing services in rural areas – I fear we stuck to very ‘safe’ areas, addressing issues like creating opportunities, multi-tasking and crossing boundaries to provide positive services. We talked of the declining population and the influx of incoming migrant workers with their different languages and different cultures adding to the complexity of meeting needs in the community – often where poverty is well hidden but very prevalent.

What we did not focus on was the difficulty of doing child protection, criminal justice or mental health work with your neighbour and in the context of small community communication networks.
The report suggests three important issues that require very little money but a culture change in the way we support each other in the difficult work we do. {mospagebreak}

Workers can be much closer to the people they serve. Sustaining professional distance, and taking unpopular decisions with intimidating adults, can be challenging. The pool of expertise and consultation is smaller than in larger authorities and the opportunities for training more limited.

Despite these, we consider that the range of issues demonstrated by the abuse of the children in family A would have presented a major professional challenge to health, education, social work and police staff in any part of Scotland.

There is plenty of evidence from previous child abuse inquiries that front line staff who are in daily contact with parents often find it hard to sustain their suspicions about them. There is a vital role for managers of all professionals involved in protecting children to hold this awareness and to challenge and support staff to constantly review and update their opinion of the children’s safety in the home.

The responsibilities of the supervisor should include exploring any issues which may affect the social worker’s objectivity. The supervisor should be satisfied that the social worker’s judgements are based on an analysis of the evidence. Current events should be examined in the light of previous patterns in the family history. Decisions made in supervision should be recorded in the case file and cross-referenced to discussion noted on supervision records.

All agencies should make sure that staff engaged in work protecting children have access to confidential counselling which is separate from their line management. Staff working in very distressing circumstances should be expected to have an initial meeting with an independent person outwith their organisation to discuss available options for support.

Keeping staff safe and supporting them in their assessments, making sure that they are always objective is hard at any time in busy social service offices – but this report highlights how important it is to achieve this in order to help protect vulnerable people.

The challenge to which social services workers and managers need to respond in order to achieve a change in culture was spelt out at the SSSC annual conference on 9th November – creating an open learning culture that will lead to a confident, competent workforce.