YESTERDAY was World Social Work Day – a celebration of the people who should be our most prized asset, but they lag behind other professions when it comes to respect. So often, social workers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Either they blunder in over-zealously and remove children for no apparent reason or they fail to act soon enough and a child is battered to death.
In short, who in their right mind would do this job?
When people think of social workers, they immediately think of children – cynics might say of dead children.
The truth is that social workers practise in a wide range of settings. They work in hospitals, in community centres, in courts and criminal justice. They help find foster homes for neglected, abandoned or abused children as well as taking kids into care. They help people with benefits. They counsel addicts. In the workplace, they counsel people with personal, family, professional or financial problems which can affect their jobs.
Is that enough? They deserve so much more than we give them.
It is the same all over the world. In the US, thousands of firefighters, paramedics and construction workers have just won a legal settlement for the emergency work they did after the terror attacks in 2001.
The amounts are $1million for cancer, $2million for a death, but nothing at all for emotional distress. And you can bet that for all those social workers who were traumatised by 9/11, there will be nothing at all. After all, we heard about the firefighters. We heard about the cops. Yet, as usual, social workers were the unsung heroes of 9/11.
When the dust settled, it was they who counselled the bereaved, who helped trace the missing, who treated firefighters and the police traumatised by days of digging for their comrades-in-arms, not knowing whether they would find them dead or alive.
Social workers helped children who saw things no one should ever see; they counselled men and women who lost jobs, businesses and livelihoods. They helped people in hospital lobbies and on street corners.
Don’t get me wrong, in the US, the practice of social work before 9/11 was never easy, but with a highly diverse population, including many immigrants, the need for the profession was always great. In fact, after 9/11, many New York social workers felt as traumatised as their clients.
Social workers around the World Trade Centre saw the planes crashing into the buildings. They saw people jumping from the upper floors to escape the smoke and flames. They saw bodies hitting the ground. Yet, despite all that, they continued to provide services to families and help plan for the 15,000 children who lost parents that day.
They suffered the same headache as their clients for weeks, caused by the pungent odour from Ground Zero.
That day, when the social workers went out to help the community, there was debris and dust flying everywhere. They did everything they could to help desperate New Yorkers adapt to the horror around them; everything they could to help them resettle once all the damage had been done.
World Social Work Day was about the way in which social workers help people make changes in their lives.
Yet all over the world, the value we place on these professionals is never high enough.
Not for nothing has social work been referred to as a “Cinderella service”. Cinderella is a great metaphor for the way the profession is under-resourced and sidelined.
There are serious problems within social work in Scotland. Real progress is so often hampered by the need to spend too much time on paperwork and records and too little time on building up relationships with family members, which is, without doubt, the key to detecting child abuse.
We all know that people who abuse children devote all their time and energy to lying and concealing the truth about what they do. Some are very astute. The children they abuse know better than to spill the beans.
For doctors, the police and social workers, it can be extremely difficult to confidently identify child abuse. When they do, an unpleasant confrontation follows.
Can you imagine accusing someone of abusing their child, knowing the response is going to be aggressive, if not downright violent?
It is easy for us to sit back and complain, when a child dies of neglect, that people are not doing their jobs correctly, but could any one of us, hand on heart, do better?
I dare you to try it as a career. I bet you wouldn’t last one week.
As for the poor image of social work, it is difficult to say who is at fault – whether or not it is us in the media, although coverage is better, more positive than it used to be.
The job of a social worker must be infinitely harder than that of a journalist, especially when a child they are supervising dies. The ensuing publicity must make them feel like one of the accused at Nuremberg; judged guilty even before their case has been presented.
Nine times out of 10, other professionals such as health workers are equally to blame for a child’s death. But health workers are, literally, allowed to bury their mistakes.
Controversy invariably follows the death of a child in care. After such deaths, there is usually enough blood in the water to satisfy even the hungriest of predators.
Unfortunately, many in the media fail to recognise the excellence in most social-work practice, every day, unseen and unsung.
It really doesn’t matter whether social workers practise in post-9/11 Manhattan or rural Aberdeenshire, the pressures on them are the same all over the world. Do your job, be a success and do not allow any life to slip through your fingers. Most of us can manage the first two, but the third, well, that is a different ball game altogether.
Bear that in mind next time you open your mouth to damn social workers, whose shoe laces most of us are not fit to tie.