Being hesitant in challenging family members may not be just because of the fear of what the consequences might be but in some cases due to the complexity of the relationship. The worker unnerved by the family above felt an empathy with a teenage mother she was working with who lived in extremely difficult circumstances and both she and her supervisor felt this could get in the way of focusing on the child’s needs:
So I think the emotional link that I’ve got is just basically empathising...understanding that actually S’s 16 years old, she’s still a child. Being a young mum with a good family background would be hard enough in itself but the fact that she’s got all these implications of domestic violence and disability involved....she’s got issues with her own partner that she’s now resumed her relationship with ....she’s now got back with him...so there’s lots of issues going on in S’s life and I think that’s the thing.... I think that’s something I think about really, just the fact of how young she is and the things that she’s got to cope with in the house. (SW9)
There are certain phrases that recur frequently in the social workers’ talk – phrases which, to paraphrase Atkinson (1995) might be seen as the liturgy of the profession. One of these is about “the child’s best interests” – interests which, legally, the social workers should prioritise. But in complex situations such as the one above where young and vulnerable adults are struggling to bring up children it may not be easy to isolate such “interests” from the need to support the carers and indeed a good deal of the work discussed here did involve major elements of such adult support.
One worker, talking about a case where she was working with a mother with learning difficulties and a partner who was seen by the social worker as obstructive and domineering tried to persuade the woman to access a service by telling her it was for her as an individual not as a mother:
it could mean that you would get more money because you could get DLA (Disability Living Allowance) – they might be able to come and help you with things. It’s not about your kids it’s about you and you know, you as an adult, you as a person and you know she’d already told me she struggles...she can’t read and write very well....and so what they arranged was that the person doing the assessment would go do it at the Children’s Centre so kids could be in the crèche so we got rid of that barrier in terms of you know you don’t want to trail over there with the kids....(SW4)
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What is notable here is the many different ways the mother is seen by the worker: an abusive parent, a possible victim of domestic abuse, someone with learning difficulties, someone who has had a terrible childhood, someone who can be told – this is for you: as an adult, an autonomous individual. So it is not straightforward who she is or how she should be treated. This worker describes the way she is drawn into a complex relationship with the woman’s partner - a hostile father who, for all his hostility, relies on the worker for support:
visits to that house are very mixed when he’s there because on the one hand he’ll be shouting and refusing to listen and telling you all the time I want proof, you get me proof, you get me proof and then next thing he’s saying thank you 500 times because I’ve got the man from the Council to go round and look at the damp and sort the toilet out that wasn’t working properly. And so he’s very grateful for that kind of thing and can acknowledge that yeah you’ve done something for me (SW4)
Questions arise as to how these complex relationships that involve both caring for and monitoring hostile or difficult clients affect decision making and fit with the more forensic, investigatory element of child protection work.
As well as hostility workers faced family members who were in distress after a child was injured or had died. One worker describes interviewing parents who had brought their child to hospital with a skull fracture:
...mum was almost rigid with fear...she couldn’t give us eye contact, she was very very angry, she felt her baby was going to be taken away, she was really under severe stress.(TM2)
Or in another case where a baby had died and the workers were interviewing the parents:
I mean at this point mum runs out into the garden screaming, you know, we give her a while, we ask him to go out and comfort her and try to talk to her...(SW3)
In both of these cases grandparents were also present and making their distress and antagonism towards the workers plain.
This worker graphically describes feeling some of the parents’ pain and distress at the death of a child whilst knowing that the actions she must take may well make them feel worse:
And I went to the hospital, I went with (TM1) actually, and we had to interview the parents, and at this stage the baby was very critically ill, dying probably, and the police had to be there as well and we interviewed...the police interviewed and I interviewed, (TM1) took notes, the parents and you get an idea when you’re dealing with people all the time you just get an idea of who they are and what sort of people they are and both myself and (TM1) came out of
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there and said how awful, you know, they came across as caring, loving parents and how awful and, yeah, but you have to go through the process obviously.(SSW2)
Another worker hauntingly describes visiting a mother whose baby died at birth:
yesterday I visited a family who...she experienced a death...she went into labour early at 26 weeks with twins and one of those twins died so yesterday she got the memory box out, of the twin, and showed me his little tiny dummy and his little tiny nappy and photos of him....(SW9)
7.2.4 Summary
The home visit is a central aspect of social work practice and presents both unique challenges and unique opportunities. The emotional context of decision making in these situations, compounded by fear, distress and anxiety about contamination (Ferguson, 2011) may be a significant factor in the way decisions are made. Studies of child death inquiries have shown how workers become emotionally enmeshed with the families they work with and this can have serious consequences for decision making (Reder et al, 1993) . It has been observed that the focus on orderly decision making and procedures in such inquiries simply fails to recognise the importance of such factors and limits how useful they could be for practice (Cooper, 2005). Brandon et al. (2008) have described the state of helplessness workers are reduced to by some families with particularly complex and intractable problems.
There are cognitive challenges too as social workers have to form judgements and make decisions in chaotic, fast-moving situations which do not allow for more orderly forms of decision making (van de Luitgaarden, 2009; Helm, 2011).
Yet the home visit provides opportunities to see families functioning in their normal day-to-day surroundings, sometimes in poor conditions, which would not be provided by encounters in more professional or clinical surroundings.
The workers I interviewed acknowledged such issues, especially the stress of some aspects of this work, but felt that their decision making was not affected by it. Learning to cope, learning to demonstrate competence in a crisis, is, as suggested above, an important part of a social worker’s “moral career”. Yet many child abuse inquiries and reviews reveal examples of workers being refused entry to homes or to rooms within those homes and of acting in such a constrained manner when in peoples’ homes that vital evidence of child abuse has been missed.
150 7.3 “Building a picture”: doing assessments
Assessment was an essential element of the social workers’ practice. At the time of my study the government guidelines called for workers to provide an Initial Assessment and then, if deemed necessary, a more in-depth Core Assessment. Both of these assessments had strict timescales attached to them and keeping to these timescales was a major preoccupation of the participants. Initial Assessments, which had to be done within 10 days, a period of time that included contacting the family, arranging to see them, forming some kind of working relationship with sometimes very reluctant clients, trying to communicate with the children, gathering information and then completing the necessary forms, were often rushed and several participants told me that these were sometimes done in a day with just a single contact with the family. The poor quality of the work done under such conditions has been the subject of much debate and research (eg Broadhurst et al., 2010b). More detailed Core Assessments had to be done within 35 days.
Since the change in government, the publication of the Munro Review (Munro, 2011) and the redrafted Working Together to Safeguard Children guidelines (Dept for Education, 2013), local authorities have been given permission to vary these timescales. A single, continuous assessment is now recommended with a 45 day timescale. These changes were just beginning to be made at the time of my study but had not yet filtered into practice.
These assessment were usually carried out in peoples’ homes. Family members might be reluctant, distressed or hostile and other family members might well be present and keen to contribute their own views. The views and actions of other professionals could have an important influence on the nature of the assessment. In addition these were often assessments of highly complex, ambiguous and uncertain situations where “truth” might never be established and workers were aware that optimal solutions to problems might not be available.
One worker describes trying to undertake an assessment of a teenage parent and her baby in a chaotic household. The worker has noted the young woman’s “low mood”:
She’s saying it’s because the sessions are taking place in the house where people are there and people are butting in on the session which is understandable so the way to get round that is we’ve organised sessions at the Children’s Centre so that S is alone with me and her baby so it’s free from interruptions. (SW9)
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They are able to do some of the assessment sessions at the local Children’s Centre where the worker is able to make some observations of domestic routines that she sees as important in assessing the parent-child relationship.
so obviously I’m observing what’s happening all the time and at the Children’s Centre this week S brought BJ with her so she was in the room with us when the session was taking place. So it’s obviously observing...opportunities that I’ve got like when BJ needs changing so I’m observing that, observing S feeding BJ, how she responds to her when she’s crying, if she’s trying to comfort her, if she’s talking to her, if she’s trying to stimulate her...so I’m observing that all the time really. (SW9)
The same worker, visiting another family, goes at tea times in order to observe the mother managing both her children during a domestic routine. On this occasion the eldest child is refused a packet of crisps before tea and becomes very angry, leading the worker to suppose that such a refusal is not the usual practice but has been made because of her presence. She actually decides to leave to prevent the situation escalating. But this is an example of a phenomenon several participants mentioned – that families put on a show for them and tell them what they think the worker wants to hear. While a popular image of social workers is that they are gullible and naive the workers in my study were well aware of this factor.
This worker isn’t taking the family member’s story for granted even though she’s upset and wanting to talk:
...and when I went down you can imagine that day she were very upset and telling me all the things, you know, that I suppose I wanted to hear (SW5)
While there is evidence that social workers may assess parents according to their level of cooperation which can blind them to serious failings in their child care (for example Reder et al., 1993) there were instances when cooperation was viewed more suspiciously than the non-cooperation the workers expect. An example of this was given in the previous chapter where the cooperation of the mother of a child with a small bruise was seen as possibly motivated by a desire to put the blame onto the father with whom she was in dispute.
But despite all this workers need to gather relevant information and analyse it carefully. This worker describes a forensic process of information gathering which she is aware may need to be used as legal evidence:
I like things being very clear about the events leading...being very clear about dates and events so the events leading up to the actual investigation because potentially any situation
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we're dealing with is going to have some police involvement so we're very aware of our ability to collate information which may actually be used by the police and we may actually have to give a statement to, so particularly when there are... er..., when there's a child with an injury you need to be very clear about what the account is there at that time, because in a number of cases it can change as time passes, parents either change their story completely or remember the details and whatnot so it's very important to be very clear and consistent from the start about who's saying what and when and where, and so that, that actually is quite a difficult thing to do at times because in a way you have to interrupt parents, you have to stop them doing what they're doing, re-focus kind of a conversation. (SW1)
At the same time this worker is also wanting to find out about the family’s day to day functioning
Well we'd be talking about the other children as well...kind of the way the family operates on a day to day basis really....(SW1)
As a number of the assessments took place following injuries or even deaths of children this combination of forensic, investigatory work and the more traditional social work focus on family dynamics was seen in several cases. This meant trying to undertake an assessment with distressed and angry families:
That (mother’s anxiety) was in many ways made worse by maternal grandparents who kind of whipped up a bit of a frenzy against us. They were particularly antagonistic. They were very nasty, very personal and very abusive towards (SSW1: the co-assessor) and eventually made a formal complaint and dad himself, he was just beside himself, didn’t know how to handle the situation. He was equally stressed and that came out in...you know he ran out of the room, he refused to talk to us, was crying...they really thought they were going to lose their baby. ...eventually they calmed down enough, they cooperated with assessment sessions...they never stopped being distressed but they were happy to talk to...or happy enough. (TM2)
Again, as well as trying to find out what happened leading up the child’s injury which had happened at the end of a family holiday the assessment looked at wider family functioning:
well, (we) did a Core Assessment which was following the Framework (see below) but in particular (we were) looking at the dynamics between the parents, you know, what was their relationship like....history of any violence....relationship with the grandparents – why was there such antagonism and anger and we looked at the specifics of what went on each day on the holiday, you know, you can walk somebody through a holiday you can get a feel as to whether there was any conflict, whether the children were left with anyone else, whether there were any other issues...It was just going into the nuts and bolts of their relationships, their day- to-day things, their background, looking for any possible indicators of risk and vulnerability.
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Because we know that sometimes, well, often, in families where children are injured there are constellations of vulnerabilities that come together that, you know, erupt in this kind of incident...or possible incident...(TM2)
This worker is referring to the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and Their Families (Dept of Health, 2000) which social workers are required to use when undertaking assessments. They have to consider 20 “dimensions” grouped into 3 “domains” – Children’s Developmental Needs, Parenting Capacity and Family & Environmental Factors – which together are intended to provide a holistic or ecological assessment. This participant, who spoke of trying to take a “systems” view of family situations, uses the image of “constellations” to suggest the putting together of these dimensions into patterns or themes.
Extended family members could be asked to participate in social work plans to support and monitor families although they might be deeply ambivalent about social workers being involved. In one case the mother of a woman undergoing a pre-birth assessment because she had abused a previous child agreed to have her daughter live with her so she could keep an eye on her parenting. This might be the kind of support many families might offer but in this case it was part of a social work plan and the woman was not necessarily in full agreement with it.
granny had come on board...granny was initially saying yes I understand that she could be a risk ....but then was saying well then I think you’re being very harsh with this (SW7)
Enlisting the help of other family members may be very important in keeping children safe but it may not be clear how fully, or for how long, these family members will work cooperatively with the social workers.
More in depth Core Assessments were often seen as creating a wider, more holistic view. The phrases “building a picture”, “building a bigger picture” recurred in several interviews and seemed to be a useful metaphor for several of the participants, perhaps similar to the framing process described in naturalistic decision making (Klein, 1999; O'Sullivan, 2011). Munro (1996), using a similar metaphor which has been widely taken up, suggests assessment is a jigsaw puzzle in which pieces of information, which by themselves are of uncertain meaning, have to be assembled without any guidance as to what the picture on the box might turn out to be. It has been argued that the assumption that a complete picture will ever be assembled is questionable and that the “full” picture will, in any case, mean different things to different people (K. Thompson, 2012). The participant cited above who spoke of “constellations of