The power social workers have to intervene into peoples lives must be understood in terms of the lack of social power and status service users typically have. Directly confronting racism at the individual, agency, and institutional levels is the antiracist mandate we all must embrace. Seven minutes into the visit Roberta moves forward and picks the baby up. To do this is to engage critically in the pursuit of just and empowering relationships. The research on which this paper is based was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council [Grant Number ES/N012453/2]. In summary then a critical social work operates within the contingent fields of subjectivity and power. This can also be seen in the case of the Lewis family. We use cookies to improve your website experience. The following discussion applies to adults in therapeutic relationships with qualified therapists. As Cook (Citation2020) argues, it is crucial that the risks arising from the complex emotions experienced on home visits and elsewhere are brought to awareness and made into a resource for insight and thoughtful practice. It simply means they have a few more choices available to them that you can't afford. Power is often used synonymously with terms such as violence, domination or control. In particular, power is found in the person of the social worker himself. At this juncture we might show some caution towards analyses of critical theorists, such as Habermas and Marcuse, who would equate the value of an object with concealment of injustice and deceitful ideologies. These include categories such as child, mother, father, deviant, co-operative and worthy. Seven minutes into the visit Roberta taps the pen in her hand against her pad of paper irritably while she talks; it feels like she is very angry. Powerlessness always means the absence of one's own power. The social worker does not interrupt simply because s/he wants to do all the talking, as people sometimes do. You only need to say one sentence . Social care then began to worry about an apparent downturn in Robertas mental health and other agencies also expressed concerns about her well-being and capacity to care well enough for Amy. Social work is based on a recognition that to be active is a normative social requirement, e.g. Power and social work (not) a contradiction The effect of this is to try and curb violent behavior and graffiti. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Rebecca in particular seems really angry with Angela and Ron, she doesnt hold back as she notes Rons presence and the complete lack of engagement with the Child Protection Plan. Given the inherent power imbalance between social workers and their clients, social workers maintain Pairing the social worker to an individual client in tandem with their legal representative would help resolve the widely observed relationship problems between service users and governmental agency social workers that include the power imbalance created by the agency's authority to determine placement of children, the conflicts of Rebecca tries to bring it back to Angela and Rons relationship, but they dont understand what she means Ron paces around, in and out of the kitchen and living room. The research was funded the Economic and Social Research Council and ethically approved by the participating social work agencies and universities. And of course they can be used in the exercise of power over others. Connect with your NASW Chapter to find local action groups leading the way on achieving equity. Verbal aggression and threats have been found to be commonplace and have detrimental consequences (Robson et al., Citation2014), while significant numbers of workers have felt that the impact of the violence and parental hostility on them was minimised and mismanaged by their managers and this adversely affected their practice and the quality of protection that children received (Hunt et al., Citation2016). Exploring communication between social workers, children and young people. We can work to liberate the clients and communities we serve from the very structures that may be holding them back. In the case of a relationship that constantly feels like it needs fixing,true satisfaction will always feel just out of reach. "Thus, 'power' is immediately equated with 'abuse of power', with a condition that must be overcome as quickly as possible" (Stiels - Glenn 1996, p. 16). Jealousy feels so unpleasant. This splitting into love and hate was also evident in Robertas narratives when interviewed for the research as she expressed her complete admiration for the independent social worker and her intense dislike of the statutory social workers, Olivia in particular. The majority (60 percent) of U.S. social workers are white; thus, issues of white privilege and the empathy gap between white social workers and clients of color must be addressed. The policing of conventions is in the hands of institutional power holders such as social workers, lawyers and teachers. A senior probation officer recently told me that he had put into interviewing rooms (which had suffered badly from vandalism) quality furniture and decorations and that in six months there had been no damage done. Information about yourself and your personal life should not be disclosed to clients. getting someone to do an action or fulfil a task they would not otherwise have done; or mental change, i.e. social workers negotiating with other workers or professionals, the use of disciplinary strategies is not so evident. Equally, if a social worker meeting with other professionals says "I've been a professional for 15 years and I know I am right"; while colleagues may reluctantly give way to the speaker, making it appear that the exercise of power has been successful, they will probably be offended by the confrontational style and be unwilling to accede to further demands by that social worker. changing someone's opinions or what they were going to say, is power being exercised. Social work also has a major role to play in creating an antiracist society. Professionals need much more training to help them learn strategies that defuse these potentially explosive relationships, recognise their role in co-constructing the hostility, and how to work through resistance and engage with children and parents in respectful, reciprocal ways (Smith et al., Citation2012; Turnell & Essex, Citation2006; Turney, Citation2012). Social workers told us they were aware of this dynamic and the need to, as they put it, get down to the service users level, which (it was assumed) would create a greater sense of equality in the relating and enable conversation to flow, which was why they crouched for as long as they could physically bear it. They had been on child protection plans due to concerns about physical abuse. Many adults in therapy bestow great power onto their therapists. The power social workers have to intervene into peoples lives must be understood in terms of the lack of social power and status service users typically have. This left no space for thinking that could help them become aware of the transference and counter-transference, the pathological nature of the relationship and communication and how they could negotiate things like having a place to sit on home visits and having meaningful relationships with children, where they were held as well as seen. Nevertheless, this can be thought of as similar to a physician having a greater understanding of a patient's medical issues than the patient has about the physician's, or an attorney knowing intimate details about a client's life circumstances that the client doesn't know about the attorney. If this summed up my view of power, I could be accused of 'atomism' - the idea that persons are at all moments asocial independent beings unshaped by forces of the collective, historical/evolutionary entity we call society. Sadly, however, as mentioned above, people often relinquish their power to others, including their therapists, which is often a productive focus of therapy, but not in a psychoanalytic sense. Selectively withholding information, then, is essential to therapy and is What I learned from my rabbit about intimate relationships. Prior to the birth, two case conferences took place, at the first of which Roberta expressed huge anger towards all the professionals and her unborn child was placed on a child protection plan. Roberta Dixon had two children, who were not in her care but resident with their relatives for the past two years, and she saw them occasionally. Due to this, nine social care visits occurred in the first half of Month 10 alone, mostly by Susan. Yvonne Roberts argues that if joint working is. Professionals towering over Roberta merely emphasised their dominance and power precisely that which she most feared. WebPower is an inescapable aspect of all social relationships, and inherently is neither good nor evil. Therefore, therapists should acknowledge and explore the power dynamics within each client-therapist relationship. But this is not my view, I believe that the myriad of human relationships, many of them being shaped by a host of other relationships and social practices, form a structural network, the most important totalising forces of which are the ever changing power relationships. Clients as "subjects" of such power relations are produced and reproduced at specific sites of social work practice. Reviewed by Ekua Hagan. It has sought to convey the lived experience of being involved in such casework, the struggles over space and the rights service users have, or dont have, to refuse professionals access to their lives, the tactics of resistance that get played out and the deep emotional effects of such work. Power imbalance may affect joint work. The flow of power has less opportunity to be one way. Much more needs to be done to help social workers recognise and tolerate hostility and hate, to not retaliate and to enact compassion and care towards service users. This paper has presented what the research shows about the nature of hostile relationships in social work and how enormously difficult it is for all concerned to begin, develop and sustain them over time. I have therefore sifted through the abundance of literature on the problem of power in the context of social work, edited it and thus narrowed it down. But research published in the BMJ Quality & Safety indicates that these power imbalances arent going away. It is important to note, however, that the nature of therapeutic relationships does often involve an imbalance of intimate sharing. Unfortunately, because some people suffer from issues related to excessive dependency and have deep-seated rejection and abandonment anxiety, they are ripe for exploitation if they end up under the care of unethical (if not criminal) clinicians. Racism and white supremacy are ingrained within American institutions and systems and have therefore affected social work ideology and practice for generations. By month 11 of the fieldwork the cumulative concerns about Roberta and her parenting resulted in the local authority trying to remove Amy from her. It is service users who typically are characterised as hard to reach, resistant, difficult, but the social care staff were also often emotionally detached and unwilling or unable to tolerate and reach the parents and children. This finding is supported by OSullivans (Citation2019) research, where she used psycho-dynamically informed work discussion groups to reach the deep emotional experience of child protection workers. Trying to sustain these torturous hostile relationships is incredibly emotionally demanding. Audit requirements and the pressure for performance data over-rode the need for attention to what was occurring emotionally and viscerally for the workers, mother and baby, alongside analysis of what was going on in the relationship, especially below the surface. This was on top of their many other duties. Depressed people are thought to have a negative cognitive bias that prevents them from seeing the world accurately. Washington, DC 20002. It should be emphasized here that Weber understands power as a chance, i.e. On closer inspection, according to Fiedler, it must quickly become clear that power does exist in social work. Whats in a name: Client, Patient, Customer, Consumer, Expert by Experience, Service UserWhats Next? 3.2 Facing powerlessness, 4. People with narcissistic personalities may behave differently than non-narcissists, such as shunning introspection and denying mistakes. In a closer examination of the literature, however, power in the context of social work turned out to be a controversial, even problematic topic: There is a lot of talk about power in general - but more silence about power in social work. It is possible that Roberta was showing a capacity to respond to the empathetic approach of the independent social worker, whose report did indeed give limited attention to the risks represented by her. These are the suspended feelings social workers were not getting help to deal with, which because they remain repressed can easily be unconsciously acted out against service users in retaliatory ways and that ultimately traumatise workers and burn them out. Mensch, J.R. (1996) After Modernity, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. With this in mind, towards the end of the paper some suggestions are made about what a critical social work might look like, if it does not merely wish to contain what people say and route them towards a definite end point, but instead, energetically open up a new space of subjectivity which more closely conveys an appreciation of life as a whole, whilst making our habitual relations of power vibrate until they disjoin. Accounting to and for oneself across time is regarded as a morally authenticating activity for both clients and social workers alike. She did not want colleagues to see her crying and this avoidance of showing the impact of traumatic experience was compounded by her senior manager not enabling her to express her emotions, so that the managerial goals of improving staff performance in compliance with targets and audits could be achieved. While the case examples used here reflect actual events and findings, details have been changed to protect the anonymity of the families, professionals and research sites. Power is rarely discussed; it is pushed away. As has been shown, on most occasions interactions between social care and families went on in the home. Mood, for instance, without being the object of any intended act of consciousness, can underlie and guide specific forms of client experience. the Government, teachers, one's parents, to do or not do in this or that way, certain kinds of things. Power in discourse is concerned how power is actually exercised and enacted, that is face-to-face spoken discourse. Sudland (Citation2020) shows how working with high-conflict parents and families is enormously emotionally and practically challenging. The child welfare system has often more rigorously regulated and castigated Black, Brown, and Indigenous families. The reality is, however, that while a therapist might have more specific training, particular knowledge, and certain skills, the client has most of the actual power. A bad object is created into whom unbearable feelings are projected and a good object becomes the recipient of positive evaluations, respectful loving feelings and is idealised. Some families reconciled themselves to the inevitability of statutory involvement, were not overtly aggressive towards social workers and tried to make the best of circumstances to promptly get workers out of their lives. Creating supervisory practices and cultures where these deep feelings, unconscious processes and states of mind can be accessed is very difficult. WebAdditionally, power differentials between the counselor and their client can influence the therapeutic relationship. Acknowledging this and the presence of difficult emotions in the dynamics of hostile and avoidant relationships is a very important way to begin to overcome them. When a dominant culture member disregards the clients own beliefs and perspectives, the power imbalance can become exploitative. Therefore, therapists should acknowledge and explore the power dynamics within each client-therapist relationship. For example, therapists need to learn about the peoples cultures they will be counselling. On the other hand, power behind discourse focuses on the orders of discourse, as dimensions of social institutions, structures or societies, and the way these are shaped and constructed by power relations. To this end psychotherapists are being consulted about the decoration of prison cells for violent prisoners. It seemed like their anxious state of mind was such that unconsciously they colluded in their own distancing, because they did not want to be there. But yeah its a hard balance between, and then youre just avoiding it and lets move on and thats not intelligent, thats just kind of colluding with shutting that sort of discussion down and that emotion down. In dealing with power, we must also consider its counterpart, powerlessness. A better way to explain this might be to characterize power in relation to discourse. After defining and explaining the terms, the second chapter deals with possible causes, reasons, their consequences and the problem of the abuse of power. The home visit in child protection social work: Emotion as resource and risk for professional judgement and practice, Isnt it funny the children that are further away we dont think about as much?: Using GPS to explore the mobilities and geographies of social work and child protection practice, Researching social work practice close up: Using ethnographic and mobile methods to understand encounters between social workers, children and families, How children become invisible in child protection work: Evidence from day-to-day social work practice, How social workers reflect in action and when and why they dont: The possibilities and limits to reflective practice in social work, From snapshots of practice to a movie: Researching long-term social work and Child protection by getting as close as possible to practice and organisational life, The nature and culture of social work with children and families in long-term casework: Findings from a qualitative longitudinal study, Difficult conversations on the frontline: Observations of home visits to talk about neglect, If I feel like this, how does the child feel? The social worker and manager both used this supervision to offload anxiety and fears about Roberta, which served to cement her identity as dangerous. When I started working on the topic of power and powerlessness in social work, I did not have many questions. This leads to another point which is that the recording process acts as a 'structural' repository of power. As a However, some relationships in social work are not like that but are transacted through mistrust, fear, hostility and even hate. It is striking how these two colleagues wound themselves up into a kind of frenzy about Robertas dangerousness, including imagining and enacting the whack! of her assaulting the baby. Social workers have an ethical duty to dismantle racism, both personally and professionally, and to demonstrate what it means to be antiracist. 29 0 obj <> endobj All the parents we interviewed who were involuntary clients felt social workers crossed the professional line and were punitive and persecuting. Postmodern feminist social work theories reject the notion of egalitarian power relations as a fantasy that does not engage with the power dynamics that always exist between social workers and clients, a point also made in earlier work ( Wise, 1990 ). This can be explained, in part, by how uncomfortable workers felt in the home having to face such anger and aggression (see also, Henderson, Citation2018; Sudland, Citation2020). The research on the other hand did gain some access to the deeper emotional life of individuals and the organisation. The manager is aware of the importance of providing emotional support to staff in Olivias situation and in order to protect her had ensured the case was now transferred to a new team. The statutory social workers recognised that Roberta seemed different as Susan put it, shes a changed woman but their narrative remained negative, that she was manipulative, hadnt really changed and that it was disguised compliance. Evenings and weekends: One reason social work places such an emphasis on achieving empowering reciprocal relationships is because it is assumed that service users are voluntary and want a service (Barber, Citation1991). But we also know that a particular setting will constrain one's words or actions, e.g. Ron barely acknowledges the conversation initially, although its largely aimed at him. The latter two powers are drawn on by the social worker in interactions dependent upon whether the other person is prepared to show (3) or (4). I help hold open the box so she can grab the photos as she is also holding Amy There is a much warmer and comfortable atmosphere suddenly. The Dreadful Physical Symptoms of Dementia, 2 Ways Empathy Determines the Type of Partner We Choose, To Be Happy for the Rest of Your Life, Seek These Goals, Why Men Often Feel Insecure in Their Intimate Relationships, Why Getting Along with a Mother-in-Law Is So Difficult, 7 Signs That You'd Be Better Off Ending a Relationship. She tries to gain control of the meeting. They seem very aggressive, and very argumentative and sometimes patronizing From our point of view it seems like they are trying to pull the whole family apart. The use of power to discipline clients is made legitimate precisely because of the unity of 'professionalism' and training of the social worker. The Family Support worker based in the team also made eight home visits, while the intensive family support service (external to the local authority) made 21 visits in a short period at the end of the year of casework we shadowed. It is in this sense that social work as a practice pre-figures the recognition of mood and activity in social life and thus incorporates what might be called a phenomenology of affect. The opportunity for reflective, emotionally supportive supervision was sacrificed to the organisational imperative to comply with government-imposed performance indicators that are inspected by the regulatory body, Ofsted. Power operates as a dynamic force that leaves no area of life untouched, influencing individuals, families, communities, and institutions. Foucault develops a model of subjectivity based on "the Nietzschean idea of the nonfinalized problematization of the forms through which the experience of the subject is constituted" (Rajchman, p.124). Such assessments can legitimately only take place in "social work space", they cannot take place in a bar or restaurant. There is nothing surprising about families who do not want social work involvement using such tactics to keep them at a distance or drive them out. 2023 National Association of Social Workers. Even when parents perceive workers using this power with them as a form of support, they remained mindful and cautious of the potential for this power to be To give a fairly obvious example, Hitler and the Nazi Party portrayed the Jewish people as vermin who were destroying German life and culture. Child protection interventions Power thus pre-figures our relationships with clients, at both an inter-personal and structural level. Starting from the observation that power can firstly be exchanged with each other, secondly instrumentalized and thirdly structuralized, he leads over to the consideration that social work is thus constantly confronted with the questions of superior power, of power distribution and power control (cf. It promotes, develops, and protects the practice of social work and social workers. The threat by Rebecca the social worker to do spot checks in the middle of the night expressed her commitment to checking on the childrens safety, but because it was so unrealistic it can be construed as retaliatory. Taken together they help us understand how "power is situated" in relation to certain people and in relation to particular contexts. 2.3.3 Abuse of power in social work, 3. Luhmann 1988, p. 12). Register to receive personalised research and resources by email. My knowledge of the laws, mastery of diagnostics and methodology, how I conduct and steer consultations or conversational processes, put me in a position of power. By demanding help that is due to him, a client also possesses and exercises power. By using the NASW Code of Ethics as a guidepost, social workers can help dismantle systems of oppression, take action against white supremacy culture, and be leaders in the movement for racial justice. With regard to the notions of human and physical environments mentioned here; by 'human' I mean: others affected by a client's words or actions, e.g. Roberta does sound quite different she gives off the impression that she understands she did harm her other children. She practiced what Ferguson (Citation2018) has called suspended self-preservation, where social workers consciously suppress reflection on and acknowledgement of the depths of their feelings to help them get through the work they have to do and protect themselves and colleagues from their suffering. I am not. Over time, social work theorists have developed sophisticated processes to address the power imbalances and instances of exploitation and discrimination that may arise in relationships with clients. There are numerous contested terms (client, service user, consumer) used to describe the people with whom social workers work. The findings show how hostile relationships were enacted through conflict and resistance especially on home visits and how anxiety and other intense feelings were often avoided by individuals and organisations. Sign up for this free e-newsletter for a daily round-up of the top media stories affecting the social work profession.
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