Social workers’ visits to the family home were frequently necessitated by a concern around something that might be described as “taboo” involving the worker in what would normally remain a hidden, or unspoken aspect of family life. These concerns included issues that might be considered as ‘unthinkable’ or deeply disturbing, such as parents causing harm to their children through sexual abuse or extreme neglect. Social workers investigating such concerns therefore needed to find ways to manage their own emotional responses, particularly distress, sadness and disgust, towards these issues.
Managing feelings of distress, disgust and encounters with the taboo
One social worker described undertaking a home visit to a young person who had been accused of sexual assaults against children in the local area. The social worker’s role was to support the young person who had been threatened with retaliation by members of the community. When undertaking the visit, the reality of the abusive acts were quite literally close to home for the social worker:
I walked back … past the victim’s house … And obviously I looked at the place where the alleged offence happened … What I was starting to piece together was – did the information in the police report match? Which it did. … in this case … [it] was clear, what was described could have happened. So, what I’m thinking is what am I going to say to the young man when I go to meet him?
Thus the social worker needed to find a way which would allow her/him to manage their own feelings, and build a supportive relationship with the young person, who was accused of these disturbing crimes. When asked whether he had any “personal thoughts about that?” the social worker responded clearly that he did not, and spoke in a matter-of-fact, unemotional tone when describing the situation. However, he did identify that:
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…One of the victims in this case is the same age as my older daughter. I’m aware of that.
The worker went on to state that, in putting his feelings aside (particularly those which were close to his personal life) for the purposes of the home visit, he was aware that the emotional fall-out “may well come out later” as he had experienced in the past, perhaps during the night when the feeling would need to be expelled and perhaps “written down.” In another research interview, a social worker described a similar strategy of deliberately setting aside her own emotions for the duration of the visit:
It’s more about, okay, so this is the situation we need to deal with, rather than get too involved in, if that makes sense? Trying to keep my own emotions fairly separate. I think it’s more after, like once I’ve left, I’ve got time to think about - reflect on it then… the emotions come a bit stronger, but at the time… you kind of lock it away in a box I think, you don’t really think about it.
The strategy of deliberately attempting to set aside, or put into a “box”, one’s feelings parallels what Richards and Gross (2000) describe as ‘expressive suppression’ or Hochschild’s (1983) notion of ‘surface level acting’ (see literature review, chapter three.) Interestingly, as stated in the literature review, the conscious attempt to suppress one’s distressing emotion in order to produce an outward display appropriate for the situation (such as to show support and warmth towards the young person accused of sexual abuse) has been demonstrated to have a ‘cognitive cost’ (Richards and Gross, 2000) in terms of memory recall. It may be that during home visits in which they are actively striving to not display their emotions, workers may find it more difficult to accurately recall observations made in the home that were significant to the assessment of risk.
In order to overcome feelings of aversion or disgust, social workers also consciously sought to suspend their moral judgement. This was evident in a social worker’s description of a home visit to a known sexual offender – a visit which she was extremely reluctant to undertake. When asked about why she was reluctant to undertake the visit, the social worker appeared to be censoring her sense of aversion and moral judgement from her narrative:
The fact that he (one second pause) (Large intake of breath) was because (three second pause) he’s, he’s, he’s (three second pause) he’s, he – You kind of don’t want to be judge - in this job, you kind of don’t want to be judgemental of people, and you want to give people a chance, and you don’t want to see that happen in the world, but also… the flipside to that is protecting children and ultimately that’s my job. That’s what I do.
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So with him, it was a case of, you know, you’re not necessarily a bad person, I’m not saying you’re a bad person. But this is a bad situation.
Differentiating the ‘person’ from the ‘situation’ appeared to enable the worker to engage with an individual about whom she appeared to experience an unvoiced sense of anger or disgust. In the previous example (where the social worker needed to offer support to a young person accused of sexual offences) the worker described a similar strategy – reframing the young person as a vulnerable child, rather than a potential abuser:
And this time reinforcing well, he’s a young person too and he needs support as well…. Yeah, that’s kind of how I deal with it now, processing that.
In these examples, social workers appeared to be reappraising their experiences as an at least partially conscious strategy to manage their emotions. On other occasions, social workers’ censorship of disgust or aversion seemed to be less conscious. For instance, one social worker described a home visit to a family where there were “sexual offenders everywhere” within the extended family network. The social worker alluded, throughout the interview, to her suspicion that the young person in question was being sexually abused by someone outside of the family (with who she was staying) and discussed the surprising lack of boundaries in the family home the young person had recently fled. The worker commented on the fact that the young person and her sister had a tendency to form sexual relationships with older males, and wondered if they had perhaps experienced abuse growing up. However, on more than one occasion, the social worker lost her thread at the point where she seemed to be about to make the connection to the possibility of the young person’s father as an abuser – perhaps as an unconscious defence against the unthinkable fact of incest/sexual abuse. Another possible interpretation is that the social worker may not have felt comfortable mentioning a suspicion that she felt, but for which she did not have a rational justification.
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