Social Work and Child Abuse

Still Walking the Tightrope?

Dave Merrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415354141
• eBook ISBN: 9781134258611
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery
• Index: Social Sciences

While social work practice with child abuse is a well-documented topic, this revised edition of Social Work and Child Abuse actually challenges and changes the focus of existing literature. Instead of concerning itself with the ways in which the task of preventing and detecting child abuse can be more effectively undertaken, it presents a critical analysis of the task itself.

There has been much new guidance and regulation since the first edition of Social Work and Child Abuse was published in 1996, making this a timely new edition. With a brand new introduction and conclusion, this fully revised text discusses:

• the implications of the Victoria Climbié Inquiry, the Laming Report, the Green Paper Every Child Matters and the 2004 Children Act
• the 1989 Children Act and the conflicting duties of the social worker to prevent and intervene in child abuse and also to promote 'the family'
• the emergence of official discourses of prevention, treatment and punishment
• the 1975 Children Act and the role of moral panic.

Concluding with a call for the full implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to strengthen the child protection system by giving children and young people a much stronger voice, this book is essential reading for all professionals in social and probation work, and for students in social work, social policy and criminology.

Chapter 1
Teaching or preaching?

This chapter reviews the social-work literature which claims to base itself on a critical understanding of the political history of contemporary practice in social work. The work reviewed was written from a socialist, or a Marxist, or an explicitly feminist and anti-racist perspective. These are important because, apart from standard social-history texts, they are the only texts which claim to offer any historical analysis of social work. In addition they are important because they were, and are still in many quarters, influential in social work, particularly in social-work education.

A major problem to be confronted in reviewing this literature is concerned with what should be included. Included are texts which have the words ‘radical social work’ in their title. Also included are texts which do not, but which nevertheless are addressed to social workers in the context of a political/historical analysis of their activity; therefore books are included which focus on specific issues and attempt to develop and outline a social-work practice in that context, for example, anti-racist social work, feminist social work, women and social work. The earlier work is reviewed first, except where a later text takes up an issue which I consider to have been neglected by an earlier text.

RADICAL SOCIAL WORK

Bailey and Brake’s (1975) Radical Social Work a collection of essays ranging from an introductory essay by the editors attempting to analyse the historical development of social work in the welfare state, to an article relating to the endeavour to develop a radical social-work practice.

The debt to classical Marxism

The editors’ introduction, while appearing to some extent to distance itself, is in its essentials classically Marxist. It suggests that

Welfare can be allowed to develop with the cooperation of the working class movements, because it does not challenge ideologically the fundamental nature of capitalist democracy. This is not to argue that these benefits should be rejected as reformist, nor that the benefits gained in class struggle through the thrust of trade union power should be belittled but . . . as long as the unions act and others act as pressure groups within the state context, they tend to sustain rather than undermine the established situation.

(Bailey and Brake 1975: 2)

Even though these authors are concerned not to belittle particular gains made by the working class in struggle, an orthodox Marxism is at the root of this work nevertheless. This orthodoxy has been subsequently criticised for its gaps and silences and its apparent assumptions of a unified and singular working class, always having the same material interests, however unconscious of them that they (or even it) may at times be. Of course, as further work in this field emerged there were attempts to criticise and respond to these gaps and silences, and these endeavours will also be considered in this chapter.

This text was an attempt to move towards improvement on the often very apolitical and oppressive social-work practices of the day. To do so it was necessary to convince its audience that there was at least the possibility of such a practice. To do this it was necessary first to deal with the cruder versions of social-control theory. The following illustrates the way in which this was attempted:

To see social workers, in short, as simply the willing henchmen of the ruling class in its exercise of social control is to take an undialectical view. It overestimates the rationality and monolithic nature of the capitalist state in its ability to determine in detail the activities of an occupation.

(Leonard 1975: 49)

The attraction, and point, of such an argument is that it creates a space within which social work can be seen as at least potentially positive. There is the potential at least for a progressive practice. But this then begs the question of the nature of the practice itself; it is here, particularly in this early work, that radical social work is weak. Social work is, in essence, an active and not an analytical profession. Something always has to be done, and therefore theory, if it is to be taken seriously, must be readily applicable in practice.

It is not strictly true to suggest that there is no practice on offer, even in this early text, but it is true to say that it is limited. In the first place any radical social-work practice faces a dilemma that its more conventional competitors do not. Quite simply, at its base there is a desire to develop a social-work practice that itself seeks to be a part of, and even facilitate, a transcending of the macro-social conditions which it believes make a major, if not the major, contribution to the distress that the consumers of social-work services face. At the same time it is concerned to meet the real and immediate needs of those who come to a social-work office in the hope of receiving help for what is often a specific, and to those people, an essentially personal problem. The kernel, therefore, of any practice that makes a claim to be radical, or in later texts socialist, anti-racist, etc., must be its ability to address and utility in addressing both of these seemingly opposite poles.

Two of the articles in Bailey and Brake (1975) explicitly attempt to grapple with this dilemma. Leonard (1975) offers one such attempt. In his conclusion he is disarmingly candid; he admits that ‘it will be clear that radical social work is a long way from being able to formulate a coherent paradigm of theory and practice’ (Leonard 1975: 61).

An orientation to a radical
social-work practice

Leonard offers what he considers to be an orientation to radical practice. In doing so, he offers four aims of radical social work. The first is ‘education’, that is, essentially consciousness raising of one’s service users.

He advises the linking of people to ‘systems’, for example, one should be conscious of the potential isolation of service users and attempt to empower them by, where possible and appropriate, assisting them to link with pressure groups and self-help groups.

He also advises the building of counter systems, either within or outside the existing system. This may involve trade-union work, pressure-group activity, counter-information systems, informal support groups, etc., for social workers and service users or both in combination, and he suggests that radical social workers should work both in and against the welfare structures of the capitalist state (see pp. 55-9).

Leonard also advises group conscientisation, which involves working with clients and others in an ‘action system’ to achieve change (p. 60). In addition he urges radical social workers to develop organisational, planning and administrative skills since, quite apart from anything else, none of the aforementioned aims could be achieved without them.

The project and the practice of
radical social work

In responding critically to the above it is important to separate the questions of the ultimate project (which appears to be to facilitate, if not a revolution, then certainly a process of criticism and contestation, which is thought of as contributing to such an outcome) from the question of a specific method of social work.

In relation to the former, what is clear is that the analysis is explicitly Marxist, although it is not possible to state the precise philosophical basis of the Marxism involved because it is not fully visible. An inspection of the index of the book reveals that there are two references to Lenin, ten to Marx and Engels, and none to Stalin or to Stalinism or theoretical attempts to overcome it. In fairness, Leonard, for instance, points out that, ‘many radical social workers . . . have little taste for theory, and are deeply suspicious of the mystifying and divisive effects of theorizing’ (p. 47). Nevertheless, he insists that if radical activity within social work is to avoid becoming ‘mere unreflective activism’, then it must take seriously Lenin’s proposition that, ‘without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement’ (Lenin 1963 What is to be Done? quoted by Leonard 1975: 47).

In relation to the social-work practice he advocates, it could be argued that his advice could equally well be taken by any social-work practice, and indeed it could be argued that it is currently mainstream, and in some aspects was mainstream at the time. It was often possible therefore for social workers to respond by suggesting that radical social-work practice, in so far as it was elaborated at all, and when stripped of revolutionary rhetoric, simply seemed to amount to good social-work practice.

Marxism, radical social work and the
critique of social democracy

Bolger et al. (1981), Towards Socialist Welfare Work, is more elaborate in its attempt to develop a radical social-work practice, and is also more explicit about the form of Marxism upon which it is predicated. The book, as its title implies, is an endeavour to encourage ‘socialist experiments in welfare practice’ (see Leonard in the editor’s introduction, p. xiii).

The book offers a critique of social democracy and social democratic approaches to welfare. It sees social democracy as an ‘impressively strong ideology’. It is strong because it is, on the one hand, ‘structured into the fabric of institutions through social policy’ and, on the other hand, it is ‘an ideology used to study these institutions’ (p. 9). It is, however, in the view of these authors flawed because

The crucial factor here is the social democratic conception of politics. The Labour Party in Great Britain has failed to construct a democratic relationship between the state welfare apparatus and the working class. Welfare reforms are imposed from ‘above’. They are then run by professionals . . . We can detect a social democratic fear of the working class – a fear that they are not actually capable of being involved in the administration of state services. In fact this probably reflects a more fundamental fear that the working class is racist, sexist, and individualist and does not actually want the state services that are being imposed on it!

(p. 12)

This is thought to be of help in understanding the electoral defeat of the Labour Party in 1979. On this analysis the defeat represented a rejection by a large portion of the working class of these services, which had been imposed in the way outlined earlier, and which, therefore, had no democratic base. The question of the democratic relationship between the welfare state and the working class is the key to the book. Essentially the book is a call to (radical) social workers to attempt to both provide elements of, and to prefigure the missing democratic element. Since this analysis underpins the work, it is not difficult to infer the essential message to practitioners which, when stripped of all rhetoric, involves their attempting wherever possible to facilitate and construct this missing democratic alliance.

A critical analysis of the above would involve a number of issues, for example, the seemingly homogeneous nature of the working class, and the role of class struggle pure and simple in the production and reproduction of particular political outcomes. Even if this is taken as given, there would still be the crucial question of the differential experiences of oppression within the working class, for example, the specific oppression of racism, of gender, etc. There is also a related issue concerning the make-up of the populations who are the subjects/objects of intervention by the welfare state, since there is a distinction to be made between the working class as a whole and those of them who at any given time constitute the overwhelming bulk of the ‘client’ population.

When considering these authors’ analysis of British childcare legislation, it is clear that they take a particular view of social democracy and its relationship to the working class, for instance of the 1969 Children and Young Person’s Act. They suggest that, ‘thus the . . . Act was forced onto the statute book by a Labour government whose respect for “expertise” capable of “serving the nation as a whole” had led it to a dependency on Fabian academics and social work professionals’ (p. 90). The passage continues to complain that the Labour Party did not develop a ‘broadly based political alliance’.

The position outlined earlier in relation to the activities of the Labour Party, Fabian expertness and the presence/absence of the working class in the construction of British child care legislation is criticised in later chapters of this book. Much work in this field offers, in essence, aversion of, or is a development of, the earlier analysis. (See, in addition to Bolger et al. (1981), Parton (1985), Pitts (1988), Frost and Stein (1989), all of which are critically evaluated in subsequent chapters of this book.)

There are two texts which give more attention to the fact that the working class is far from homogeneous. They are London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (1980) and Jones (1983). These texts are too early to take in the debate in relation to the changing nature of the working class: for example, episodic part-time employment, the question of whether there is in existence an underclass of unemployed or underemployed people who are permanently accorded only a ‘client’ status and in which women and black people are more commonly placed than are white men etc. Nevertheless, these texts do offer a different emphasis from that of the texts so far reviewed. Since Jones (1983) is explicitly engaged with the text reviewed earlier, it is appropriate to take his work before that of the London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (1980).

STATE SOCIAL WORK AND THE
WORKING CLASS

Jones (1983) does not endeavour to provide a radical social-work practice. Rather his work is focused on the attempt to come to an understanding of the historical development of state welfare. It is again an essentially Marxist analysis and it is explicitly said in the editor’s introduction to be pursuing the same project as the texts reviewed earlier. The book illustrates the way in which the state has been in large measure successful in fragmenting the poor from the rest of the working class. However, social workers, via their experience of the deprivation of their clients and their own altruism/liberalism, are constantly at risk of ‘contamination’ and therefore become unreliable and difficult employees. The book is concerned with the way a ‘class fraction’ (p. xiii), that is, state employees, have been used to manage the working-class poor. Jones therefore considers the question of how social-work training and social-work management endeavours to control and police its own recruits.

Jones differs from the texts reviewed earlier in a number of respects, for instance their characterisation of the welfare apparatus as essentially social democratic. He points to

The repressive social security, racist nationality laws, the appalling increase in poverty and despair, the manner in which community care policies are reinforcing the subordination of women and the dependants for whom they care to new depths of misery, the accelerating drift to more punitive policies with respect to young offenders, are just some of the issues currently facing social workers and demanding attention.

(p. 7)

The book is richer in historical detail and empirical research than the texts reviewed earlier. Chapters 2 and 3 consider the clients of social work and the way in which the state has attempted to deal with the problems which they pose. Chapter 4 considers the relationship of social-work clients to the whole of the working class. The second half of the book (Chapters 5-8) considers social workers themselves and

Seeks to demonstrate the many difficulties and problems which have confronted the state in employing concerned and often liberal social workers and directing them to intervene deeply into the lives and circumstances of some of the most deprived and impoverished victims of contemporary society.

(p. 8)

Democracy is also central in this text, as in the texts previously reviewed, because this demand arises from the growing recognition that many of the welfare services created under social democracy concentrated power in the hands of unaccountable ‘professional experts’ - which was a key reason ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION TO 2006 EDITION
• CHAPTER 1: TEACHING OR PREACHING?
• CHAPTER 2: QUESTIONS OF THEORY
• CHAPTER 3: STILL WALKING THE TIGHTROPE?
• CHAPTER 4: THE 1989 CHILDREN ACT: A SIGNIFICANT SHIFT?
• CHAPTER 5: A STITCH IN TIME: THE MEN FROM THE MINISTRY
• CHAPTER 6: THE 1960S AND THE SHORT-LIVED ‘TRIUMPH’OF TREATMENT
• CHAPTER 7: MORAL PANIC AND MARIA COLWELL
• CHAPTER 8: BACK TO THE FUTURE
• APPENDIX: A COUNTER-DISCOURSE INVOLVING A NUMBER OF YOUNG PEOPLE WHO HAD EITHER RECENTLY LEFT CARE OR WERE STILL IN CARE AT THE TIME
• BIBLIOGRAPHY