00:06
For those of you who have experience of working in childcare social work, you might recognise
00:14
this in terms of if you're meeting people socially and they say "what do you do for
00:21
a living?" and you say "oh I work in child protection", you get a certain look, where
00:24
they go "oh that's a difficult job, how do you sleep at night, you must be carrying those
00:31
worries at home with you, you must see some horrible sights" etc. If you tell them that
00:37
you work in childcare they think you work in a creche and you get a different kind of
00:43
image, and a different kind of perception of the work that you do. We all know that
00:50
sometimes we work with very challenging situations, particularly those people that are known to MARAC,
00:56
the domestic abuse and stuff like that, and there are challenges for Social Workers. For
01:01
that reason because I live in Neath Port Talbot and my daughter went to school in Neath Port
01:06
Talbot, we sort of made it a point that if she was to be asked about what I did for a
01:14
living, she would say "My dad works for the council". She was also told that if I turned
01:23
up at school, she was to blank me out. Now being a teenage daughter she was quite good
01:28
at doing that in any case. There was this one occasion where she brought a new friend home
01:33
to the house, me and my partner were out at work at the time, and the friend looks at
01:39
the photo and sees a photo of myself and she goes "I know him, I know him. Now where do
01:50
I know him from? What does he do for a job?" and my daughter on cue said "He works for
01:54
the council", "Ah that's where I know him from, he's our bin man".
02:01
Given the choice
02:06
of being seen as the bin man or the child protection Social Worker when I visit a family
02:12
for the first time, I'd rather be seen as the bin man. And the reason for that is this,
02:20
a triangle. Not any old triangle, but the Kaufman Drama Triangle. This has been around
02:26
for about 50 odd years now, and it talks about kind of the dynamics that most of us will
02:32
be familiar with. In terms of team dynamics, sometimes you'll have somebody who'll go into
02:36
the victim role and other members of the team will then go to rescue them. Or sometimes
02:40
you might be in a situation where you're challenging somebody about their bahavior and they go
02:47
into the victim role, then suddenly you want to rescue them and pull them out of that situation.
02:53
I think it's a useful model to actually think of when we actually start calling ourselves
02:57
child protection workers, and whether that's actually a good thing to do. So if we use
03:02
this model, I'm a child protection worker, so that must mean I am the child protector
03:08
and the person I'm protecting is the child. So who's the child being a victim of? Already
03:17
we've created a dynamic there where we're actually accusing the parents. Back to the
03:25
triangle, I suppose if we were to ask the parents, they would have a different kind
03:31
of view. They would see themselves as the protective parent, they might have their issues,
03:36
they might have their difficulties, they'd have to recognise that,
03:40
but 'I love my child, I want to care for my child'.
03:43
So they're there to protect the child. And again if we think
03:46
back to Tina's case this morning with the mum and the video that you saw
03:51
"I was mortified when I was first contacted", "I'm going to lose my kids"
03:58
So already we're working with fear.
04:02
And I think Geraint the headmaster really put that quite succinctly this morning, about
04:08
when we're having challenges and under pressure quite often we resort to strategies that may
04:13
not be helpful, we might be less than honest about things. Like when you go to the doctor
04:19
and they ask you how much do you drink? or how much do you smoke? or how much do you eat?
04:24
you probably would give a different answer to what the truth is.
04:29
Neath Port Talbot,
04:32
from the director, heads of service, principal officers, managers always want us to know
04:36
what the view of the child is. So if we were to go back to the triangle, and think about
04:41
the child, I would argue that for many of the children the drama triangle would mean
04:48
that they would see themselves as having to protect their parent. And quite often when
04:54
we're working with families, we have to work through that kind of challenge because they're
04:58
quite frightened about what could be happening. They may want the Social Worker to be supportive
05:04
and help stop certain things that happen, but they don't want to be taken off their parents.
05:08
They don't want their parents upset and distressed. They may love and have a very
05:11
strong bond with their parents, but they may also want certain things to change. I qualified
05:20
just as the Children's Act was coming in and one of the criticisms that was about at that
05:26
time, was that while it was important that things needed to happen in a more timely manner,
05:31
there was a real risk that we'd end up being process-driven, so it was more about the processes
05:36
and more about the evidence, so that we lose sight of things. In 1993 there was a fascinating
05:42
study that was done where they took Social Workers from all across Europe and they got
05:46
them to visit each of the different countries. So the English Social Worker says "they didn't
05:55
discuss evidence at all, I wondered what that says about their system. We spoke about it
06:00
most of the time, I wonder what it says about our system". The French Social Worker says
06:05
"All this talk of proof and evidence, the child is suffering, can't they see that".
06:12
They also went on to make another important point, one of the principles of the Children's
06:18
Act is the best interests of the child is paramount and they said "In France we say
06:25
something similar but we say the best interests of the child is paramount in the context of
06:29
the family". So you've been hearing a lot about the outcome focused approach all day
06:36
and I think quite importantly, as we heard from Andrew Jarrett earlier, is it's not a
06:43
process, it's not a tool that we just deploy, it's actually conceptual thinking, it's important
06:50
that we think about our value systems, we think about our language, and we think about
06:54
how we work with people. So if we go back to the drama triangle, I would suggest that
07:02
the outcome focused model actually gets us to think of us as being the support to a family
07:08
and the perpetrators are maybe the issues about how the parents maybe manage their frustrations.
07:14
So that could be anger management, it could be the domestic abuse, it could be a whole
07:17
range of other things. How do they get support around their substance misuse? How do they
07:22
get support around their mental health? And also increasingly, because one of the things
07:27
that also happens is we quite often have big issues within our societies that we try
07:33
to deal with on a casework basis, and I think more and more we're seeing and the
07:37
evidence is coming forward all the time about how much poverty is starting to impact on
07:43
our families. 68,000 kids in Wales are likely to go to bed hungry during the school holidays
07:48
because they can't get free school meals. Is that a child protection thing or is that
07:55
a community development thing? Is that something about how we approach the work that we do?
08:01
So for me, outcome focus is a good tool. Signs of safety I think is actually a very good
08:06
tool, but unless you actually have that conceptual thinking about how we work, we are really
08:12
going to struggle in terms of bringing about change. So three points that I'd like to finish
08:18
on, we need to learn that the vast majority of our parents want to do the best for their
08:27
kids and we have to trust in that, and I think you've heard that time and time again across today.
08:33
While, and again this is the whole enquiritis thing, it makes us think about
08:39
things always from a severe child protection point of view, the Maria Colwells, the Peter
08:44
Donaldsons etc. And there is this thing about the rule of optimism that its almost as soon as
08:51
you start actually advocating that these parents have strengths, or maybe you're getting caught
08:57
up too much in the parents' abilities and stuff like that. But for me that's something
09:04
about professional cynicism that has come into child protection over the last 20 odd
09:10
years, and that doesn't really help us. And finally I think it's important that we think
09:16
about how we work to build engaging relationships. And that gets us past that issue of disguised
09:22
compliance.