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The attitude of social professions involved in the child
protection sector
by
Marianne Haslev Skånland, Bergen
December 2000
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The ethics involved in carrying out
one's work is an important part of any profession, part and
parcel of professional work itself.
What do people employed in the
social sector understand the ethical goals of their
professions to be? Some examples first:
1.
England
Social workers in the Liverpool
area went on strike for higher wages. When they returned to
work, the population they were supposed to serve had
discovered that they had all told had a better life in the
social workers' absence. People in need of help had helped
each other and had found that such mutual, undemanding
back-up and assistance produced a greater measure of
happiness and content than did suspicion, supervision and
control.
2.
England
A mother of four children was
suddenly widowed while the children were still very young.
The family's finances being humble, she had to ask for
economic assistance from the social services. She was
shocked by the social workers' attitude to herself and her
family. The profession was clearly in need of personnel
with a different way of thinking, and she decided that when
the children were older, she would become a social worker
herself.
She duly did so and was employed in
a district of London. There she was put on the case of a
young couple, the parents of a baby, who had practically no
income, and who were hard put to manage daily tasks such as
cooking food and washing the baby's clothing, since the
power was frequently cut off because they could not pay the
electricity bills.
When our social worker started
sorting out their troubles, she found that both husband and
wife were for practical purposes almost illiterate. (A
number of people in any population are, regardless of
teaching efforts, unable to learn to read and write to the
extent needed in our complex society. This is usually a
dysfunction based on various conditions to do with the
brain. It does not correlate directly with general
intelligence.) The couple had therefore not been able to
cope with the necessary filling out of forms to obtain
social security payments to which they were certainly
entitled. Our social worker helped them through the
procedure and got the system working smoothly for them. She
also helped them claim the more than a thousand pounds they
should already have had coming to them.
With everything in shipshape, our
social worker reported back to her office, giving the
details of what she had done, which had brought the case to
a satisfactory conclusion. But her superiors and her
colleagues were negative. Her way of dealing with problems
was not what social work should be, she was told. She
should have taken the child away on the grounds that the
parents did not care for it properly.
3.
Norway
A middle-aged woman, who had
brought up her own children and in part her grandchildren,
who was a teacher by education, and with valuable
experience from several areas of life and work, applied for
a job in the child care section of a social office. In the
job interview, one particular question was of major
interest to the chief of the social office: Would she be
"loyal to the system"?
The applicant was very surprised
and when she understood that the social office was serious
in considering loyalty to be due to itself and not to the
clients, she withdrew her application.
4.
Norway
A psychologist, whose work lies
partly in the education of social workers, is one of the
very few to try and open her students' eyes to the
realities experienced by people exposed to various kinds of
"help" from our welfare state. She presents documentation
in detail about concrete cases of the ordeals, faulty
assessments and abuses of power perpetrated by Norwegian
authorities against families, and about the results for
children and their parents.
The educational institution
employing this psychologist has told her that since she is
not loyal to their system, they want to get rid of her.
They will probably succeed.
5.
Norway
The political leaders of a
Norwegian county announced an open discussion meeting about
the way the public child care of the county was carried
out. A large number of people attended, several having
cases of their own to relate of how they and their children
had been hounded, lied on, and separated from one another
by social workers.
The administrative leader of the
county's child care then got up. He told the politicians to
keep out of the matter, stating that he himself had taken
more than 60 children away from their parents. That was
what the child care office was for, he said, and he
intended to continue and would tolerate no interference, no
control and no questions.
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Social
work is internationally uniform
The similarity between the English
and the Norwegian incidents described above is not
accidental. The stories are boringly the same in other
countries too (consult e.g. case reports on a number of
web-sites on the "Links" page of NCHR - the
Nordic Commitee for Human
Rights).
Practitioners of social work in most countries have been
taught the same philosophies by the same kinds of
people, whose reading lists include the same books and
articles (some of which I have read and must
characterise as generally dense). These people are
always on the look-out for studies and suggestions from
abroad, and seldom bother to bore beneath the surface of
anything presented by the social services of some other
country and claimed to give entirely new insights and a
solution to all problems. Ordinarily, however, there is
nothing very new about anything social sector operatives
write or quote; they practice great selectivity in
choosing stuff which confirms what they already believe
- or want to believe. They do precisely what one
must not
do,
in other words, if one is to do acceptable research
work. Nevertheless they claim to base their practice on
research, or even to be doing research themselves.
The beliefs of these people in the
social sector are based on loose ideas of various kinds,
some of them a couple of hundred years old, some mediaeval;
some go back two thousand years or more to helpless
speculations which at the time were incapable of sound
investigation because the necessary methods of conducting
studies leading to proof and disproof were lacking, as was
the requisite background knowledge of anatomy, physiology
and disease, and the discipline of statistics.
Occasionally the social sector also
quotes, even claims to follow the lead of, advocates of
some truly different method. An example is the New
Zealander Murray Ryburn, whose writings are fairly critical
of the way social workers make an enemy of the child's
family, and who advocates putting the family back in
authority and supporting them in their care for the child.
Ryburn is hailed as an ideal by the Norwegian social sector
in theory and he figures on students' obligatory reading
lists, but in actual practice social workers always find
Ryburn's ideas inapplicable to the case they are working on
just now.
A recent Norwegian tv programme
showed another variant, also well-known: The social
services in a southern district of Norway praised a "new"
American method of "treating" difficult teenagers. The
programme showed us Norwegian social workers driving around
in pursuit of truants while calling their colleagues in
America on their mobile phones, in order to ask for advice
and be assured that they were proceeding in accordance with
the wonderful method. Needless to say, probably, the method
seemed to consist of talking to all and sundry about how
necessary it was to be aware of ..., to support ...., to do
an intensive study ..., - - - I was unable to discover
anything new, or even any particular content at all of this
method. But next year, we were told, the social service
staff of all Norwegian districts are to go to America to
learn the new method.
What
happens to a social worker who feels a
dilemma?
It is natural that people in the
social sector are rarely alarmed by what they do. Most of
us have a positive view or expectation of a profession when
we enter into it, otherwise we would not have chosen that
profession. We also normally operate on the assumption that
our own actions are good and justified. As we grow into our
work, we acquire a record of past activities, a record
which gets harder to break away from the longer it has
piled up. To start treating cases in an entirely different
way would be to admit that there has been something wrong
all along.
Let us take a social worker who is
truly motivated by idealism and with a sincere wish to do
good to others. To acknowledge, after several years of
taking part in the child deportations, that such
deportations do not save children but sends them into a
desert of danger and unhappiness, is for such a social
worker to accept that the motive of rendering help has not
led to doing good in practice, one has done inexcusable
harm and one's vision of oneself as a ministering angel is
tragically false.
This type of social worker who
really wakes up is almost non-existant in practice. The
truly sensitive and thinking persons react long before they
have saddled themselves with an unbearable burden of
harmful actions committed. Many shy off from that type of
job very quickly. (The turn-over of social workers in the
child care sector is enormous.) Some of them refuse to obey
commands to carry out harmful orders, and are frequently
sacked or made to resign. Or, in order to escape sanctions
from their previous employer the social services, when
trying to find other employment, they get out of the child
care profession quietly. The less alert drown their
consciences, carry on and keep their job, gradually losing
their initial sensitivity on the altar of expediency. The
third kind are the ones who were never attracted by
anything but power and voyeurism. Their souls hardly bear
looking into.
So, social work in practice, as it
is generally carried out in our societies today, is a
quagmire. The "system" is self-perpetuating because
sensible people who could really do what the concept of
"social welfare in the best interest of the child" intends
them to do, flee from professions and occupations which act
like our present social services so regularly do. Those who
are satisfied with the existing state of affairs, stay on
and make themselves deaf, blind and immune to all the
information which exists about the real status of their
beliefs and the real outcome of their actions.
Why
do social workers act as they do?
How the social sector can fail to
see the realities of what they are doing is almost
unbelievable for those of us who have seen at close
quarters how families are destroyed through vicious actions
carried out by people representing their welfare state and
their society, in other words their fellow citizens, in
what claims to be a society under the rule of law and with
freedom of speech. How is it possible?
The
social work literature is full of considerations for the
social workers themselves. Social workers are
systematically taught to consider themselves as pure and
their motives as beyond question. There are endless
discussions and insertions in their textbooks about how
they must learn to cope with their own pain when taking
children away from parents or taking some other brutal
action against people. They emerge from their training
having learned to consider themselves as heroic martyrs who
have taken on the heavy burden of acting in the best
interest of the child.
I rarely go into a consideration of
what really motivates social workers, or what the
mechanisms are which have made the individuals in such
professions paint themselves into a corner. My natural
reaction is that the question of how social service
personnel feel and think is irrelevant to the issues of how
they execute a terrible power and are the major creator of
lasting detrimental effects on their victims. It is their
victims who should be our concern. We should not allow the
situation of the social professions to steal into focus.
I have, however, come to think
somewhat differently about this, for two reasons:
Firstly,
most clients who come up against the social services cannot
understand what they experience at the hands of these
people. One expects help, and receives harm. It seems
unbelievable and many keep thinking that it must be some
kind of a mistake and that all will be put right if one
just explains even more fully the circumstances of one's
life and problems and needs. In order for people to realise
what the social services really are about and protect
themselves better, it may be necessary, though
unfortunately so, for us to study the philosophies and
mechanisms that rule social work organisations and
individual social workers more closely, and disseminate
such information more vigorously.
Secondly, it is only by examining
the whole system of social work as thoroughly as we can,
that we may be able to see points of comparison with other
phenomena in history or contemporary life, and thereby
understand better what we are up against and be prepared
for what may happen in the future.
Among the most seminal reading from
this perspective is Zygmunt Bauman's "Modernity
and the Holocaust" from
1989 (Polity Press). Bauman is a British sociologist of
Jewish descent, originally from Poland. He came to Britain
before the war but is of course very well informed about
the holocaust. His opinion on its causes differs from that
of most people. He holds that it was not caused by actions
of furious, aggressive hatred or by anti-semitism alone,
nor did the holocaust represent a break with modern
civilisation. Instead Bauman maintains that it was a
natural consequence of what modern civilised states are.
Two characteristics of modern civilisation are essential in
this context: One is its developed technical-industrial
sector, which enables the authorities to "expedite" people
on an incredibly large scale. The other is its enormous and
continually growing bureaucracy, which opens the door: to
minimising what each employee does, to a consequent
obscuring of what the total activity amounts to and results
in, to a pulverisation of individual responsibility of each
employee, to distancing away of most employees from their
victims, to a loyalty to their mighty employer who
guarantees their job and their conscience.
If Bauman is right, the holocaust
was not an isolated, incredible mass-madness. On the
contrary, it was the product of forces and motives which
are still present and which are bound up with modern social
life itself. If so, such disasters must be expected to be
recurrent, in somewhat different forms and of varying
extent, and directed against varying groups of people, but
the underlying forces still with us and never without an
object.
About 10 years ago, the Norwegian
psychiatrist Reidar Larsen said to Adele Johansen, whom he
tried to help when her child had been taken away by the
Norwegian social services: "What we see today is only the
beginning. It'll grow and become much, much worse."
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Reference:
Zygmunt
Bauman (1989): Modernity
and the Holocaust. Polity
Press
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