S/he interrupts in order to control the contributions of the client, to stop the client repeating information or giving obvious and irrelevant information, to ensure the client gives the information the social worker wishes to hear. Questions from social workers must relate strictly to the social problem at issue, whether or not the child is at risk from sexual abuse, preventing, for instance, the sort of topical development we would find elsewhere in discussions about people's sexual activities and preferences. Already Power Still in some states of America there are laws which prohibit certain types of sexual acts. The capacity to effect changes, bar nature's capacity, e.g. The difficult, tense, conflict laden dynamics of these visits replicated those above. All of the experiences so far have been very bad and they keep coming round and saying, well, we are here to help. 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. She was also trying to contain her emotions to undertake the several phone calls and other tasks now required to ensure this child is safe. Powerlessness in social work active for change. I am going to argue that politics is about a network of forces that create a varying distribution of power and examine the effects this has on subjectivity and social relationships. We also extracted data from social work case files about the total work that was done over the year (Leigh et al., Citation2020). Social workers are given the capacity to act, as well as actually acting as social workers due to several legitimating powers: (1) Social work knowledge bases, e.g. You are not required to obtain permission to reuse this article in part or whole. Of course there are clients who are skilled in dealing with social workers and are very good at 'working the system'. 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. 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. They also partly reflect the tenor of the literature reviewed. a possibility, and leaves open whether this becomes action. Some 30 of these were done by social workers and their managers. ibid.). As Fairclough explains, this kind of power is the "policing of conventions, they way they are enforced, both in the negative sense of what sanctions are taken against those who infringe them and in the positive sense of what affirmations there are for those who abide by them" (1989, p.61). She sort of laughs dismissively when she looks at things. Social Graces: A practical tool to address inequality Many, perhaps most, uses of power in social work are intended to produce good ends, but this should not obscure the most important point that they are nevertheless uses of power, and as such, as a matter of good practice and not mere theoretical whim, should be critically evaluated. Powerlessness as the counterpart of power and as a feeling that can be professionally countered by social workers, be it their own powerlessness or that of the client, is addressed in chapter 3. A client can "fire" a therapist at any time for any reason no ifs, ands, or buts whereas a therapist can't ethically abandon a client without making an effort to transition the therapy to another provider. 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. Furthermore, forms of power are differentiated in the literature; this leads, for example, to distinctions between power to act, power to define, or power to limit. a victim of abuse, her family. Hostile relationships in social work practice 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. In the 12months there were 68 face to face encounters between social care and the family. Much more needs to be learned about how relationships based on mutual suspicion are sustained over time, or break down, and how the feelings generated by tense, often conflictual and sometimes frightening encounters are dealt with and the implications for keeping children safe. 750 First Street, NE Suite 800 However, they were not really aware of the primitively anxious nature of their surveillance, the splitting and framing of the mother as a dangerous bad object and the effect of this on the mother and baby. Power Issues And Case Analysis Imbalances Social This involves the researcher staying close to participants experience and writing in ways that intertwine events and emotions as they were experienced in real time, ensuring accounts of practice maintain their aliveness (Holway, Citation2015, p. 123). In the above discussion it was indicated that there are two basic notions of power: power as capacity - one's ability to produce change; and power as exercised - one's doing or saying something, and changing or trying to change a situation. Some parents were opposed to child protection involvement and this type of relationship was often hostile and remained that way. Despite its great influence Get the help you need from a therapist near youa FREE service from Psychology Today. During such assessments social workers often feel contradictory pressures. In dealing with power, we must also consider its counterpart, powerlessness. 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. There are also constraints on the people who can take part; there is a restricted set of legitimate actors who can take part. Exploring the use of the cognitive and affective supervisory approach with childrens social work managers. by poverty, by living in an unfurnished house and so forth. The use of power to discipline clients is made legitimate precisely because of the unity of 'professionalism' and training of the social worker. 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. Ron, who was so placid and uncommunicative earlier, begins to seethe. Most of this work was done in the second half of the year. Foucault's conception of power' in Economy and Society, Vol.9, No.1. Social Work This was discussed with the senior manager in a research interview straight after the supervision: Researcher: Olivia said she didnt want to talk any more about what happened in that situation with Roberta because shed only get upset again. It may frighten a parent into adequate parenting and thus the social worker may feel s/he has been successful in this use of power. Power imbalance may affect joint work. WebWhat is a power imbalance? 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. But the fact is therapists are not endowed with any special powers and abilities that make them better or "more" than other ordinary people with specific educations and (let's hope!) Mobile research methods were used so we could travel with practitioners, interviewing them on the way to and from home visits and other places where children and families were seen (Disney et al., Citation2019). 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. Social workers at times raised their voices, argued with and talked over the parents. WebA social workers ethical responsibilities to clients is addressed in value 1: Respect for the Inherent Dignity and Worth of Persons, value 3: Service to Humanity and value 4: Four home visits were made by social workers in the first few days after Roberta and Amy went home from hospital, after which in Months 7 and 8 the pattern settled into weekly home visits, which were either announced, ie Roberta knew when they were happening, or unannounced, when she didnt. They constitute some of the most important forms of regulatory power and means by which society maintains itself. It is Foucault who teaches us that "power is co-extensive with the social body" and that "relations of power are interwoven with other kinds of relations" (1980, p.142). The Relational social work method supports the practical development of participation, collaboration, and reciprocity. The first home visit was done by the team manager, Olivia, due to the social worker Susans unavailability. Given the inherent power imbalance between social workers and their clients, social workers maintain The counselors choice to withhold or share information can have ethical implications for the client and potentially cause the client harm (Barnett, 2011). 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. Can clients in court-mandated practice grant There is nowhere to sit and after 2 minutes the social worker gets down on her hunkers. membership organization of professional social workers in the world. Roberta tries to get more information from the social worker about Susan but is given a vague reply that this new social worker will be coming to visit for a while. What is striking is that social workers did so little to try and work through these barriers and defences. 3.1 The powerlessness of helping Meanwhile the independent social worker who completed the pre-birth parenting assessment related to the mother as a good object and could see nothing of the danger others were preoccupied with. Then, in Month 11, at a meeting Roberta aggressively challenged everything Olivia said and as Olivia put it exploded with rage and threatened her. 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. 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. The ways we eat our meals, what clothes we wear for certain occasions, how we talk to people, how we queue, that we talk in whispers in churches and libraries and so forth. In child protection work with involuntary clients what constitutes fair, proportionate and respectful practice is inevitably contested. - It only takes five minutes A visit that Susan and Olivia made together later in Month 6 was more typical of the pattern of relating that became established: Susan took the lead, knocked on the door and Roberta led us into the kitchen. Some uses of power in social work not only demonstrate bad practice, but also are regarded as immoral and illegal. So, bringing it full circle, don't believe for a minute that your therapist has more power in the relationship than you. The practitioners tried to relate to the children in the home and saw them at school, but the parents soon blocked that too. Registered in England & Wales No. Understanding Power: An Imperative for Human The fact that members of the helping professions, but first and foremost clients, can feel powerless, helpless, is a recognized and accepted feeling. 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. | On the one hand they feel obliged to treat clients in a disengaged and technical way, in order to establish that their interest is purely professional when discussing personal and sensitive issues such as sexuality. 2. 202.336.8324 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. Psychology Today 2023 Sussex Publishers, LLC. 3.2 Facing powerlessness, 4. If shes not working with us and we cant get into the home its not safe enough for her to take that baby home, end of story. Within the literature on relationship-based practice (Ruch et al., Citation2018) there is recognition of the complexity of working with strong feelings and dealing with aggression and hostility (Cook, Citation2020; Smith, Citation2018). the Government, teachers, one's parents, to do or not do in this or that way, certain kinds of things. Service users in child protection cases have increasingly been framed through such discourses as disgusting others (Warner, Citation2015). 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. NASW also seeks to enhance the well-being of individuals, families, and communities through its advocacy. For instance, one can forcefully, "I'm a social worker and my training tells me that this child is not developing sufficient motor skills commensurate with her age." 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. To the worker she seemed to be merely an appendage to her mother. Schlter goes even further by formulating that social work "at least in its professional form owes its very existence to a publicly recognized power imbalance of many kinds " (ibid.). DQ v{ ;P This example points to power that is expressed by knowledge bases, techniques and education which is an important condition of professional identity, authority and practice. Due to this, nine social care visits occurred in the first half of Month 10 alone, mostly by Susan. When Is It OK to 'Fake It Till You Make It'? Foucault, M. (1980) 'Power and Strategies' in Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge, edited by Colin Gordon, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Brighton. 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. The social worker and manager both used this supervision to offload anxiety and fears about Roberta, which served to cement her identity as dangerous. The social workers meanwhile, regarded the parents as being responsible for the lack of cooperation and saw this as further evidence of their problematic parenting. The power of imbalance - CNO The challenges involved were all the greater because typically social workers had several such cases at the same time and team managers had to provide support for their entire teams caseload of involuntary clients. Men have long been silent and stoic about their inner lives, but theres every reason for them to open up emotionallyand their partners are helping. A 'situated model of power' for social work is developed which draws on the writings of Michel Foucault. Whilst Robertas behaviour was frightening, if one function of supervision is for managers to support workers emotionally and in being critically reflective about parent-child relationships (Davys & Beddoe, Citation2010) it didnt happen. WebPower and the ways in which social workers manage it are critical elements of the relationships between parents and social workers in child protection systems (Mandell, The latter, drawn from many sources, is given a refined professional expression through the trained persona of the social worker. But even in this case we make changes. Patients need power to formulate their values, articulate and Power issues in the doctor-patient relationship Roberta is much louder and really dominates the room. The mission of social work is to enhance human well-being and help meet the basic needs of all people, with particular attention to those who are vulnerable, oppressed, and living in poverty. The pattern was for social care workers to ask Roberta questions about baby care and other practical things like housing, but there was little attention to her feelings about and relationship with the baby. As has been shown, on most occasions interactions between social care and families went on in the home. The constraints on the settings of risk assessment are particularly significant in attempting to guarantee that the encounter is a professional one. Parental allies can provide a person who has lived experience of the child protection system, who can offer emotional containment, genuine understanding and enable parents to feel valued, not just bad objects (Tobias, Citation2013). Some research suggests that in such high-risk cases intimidation and physical violence towards social workers by family members are quite common (Littlechild, Citation2005; Stanley & Goddard, Citation2002). Social and professional status confers power, but it is primarily the knowledge, experience, and tools with which a social worker acts that empower him or her. She gives a minimal explanation as to why she is getting involved and where Susan is. Whats in a name: Client, Patient, Customer, Consumer, Expert by Experience, Service UserWhats Next? 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. In both cases, of professional and client relationships, the interaction between humans and their physical environment is of crucial importance in effecting change for good or for ill. For instance, in the UK it has become abundantly evident that high rise blocks or flats are damaging to one's well-being. The successful exercise of the capacity-giving factors (1) to (4) turns on how the social worker handles any or all of them as well as (in meetings with other professionals) the role (e.g. So, yeah, its hard and theres, you know, a limit to how much you can get involved in the in-depth of one case when you know youve got another 60 to, to make sure get covered and so on too, really. 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. But in the vast majority of therapeutic relationships, which should rest on a solid foundation of mutual trust and respect, a level playing field of shared power exists. The social worker, who had known them for over two years, was so used to the family pretending not to be in that she no longer waited for them to answer but would knock and immediately walk into the house. Hypervigilant people constantly monitor for threats and brace for worst-case scenarios. Social workers have had roles in perpetuating these harmful social systems, and this history cannot be ignored. The impact of power dynamics when counselling clients with While social work literature and policy stress the importance of user engagement and working in partnership, the reality is that most social work relationships are involuntary (Smith et al., Citation2012, p. 1462) because the person receiving the service does not freely enter into it. Ultimately however, the emotional support provided was compromised by the managers regulatory role and their need to address issues such as staff performance, timescales and targets for completing work. To care about someone and be helpful requires a capacity to become emotionally attuned to their experience, to think about why they present in the ways that they do and to not retaliate when they are angry and upset. Professionals towering over Roberta merely emphasised their dominance and power precisely that which she most feared. The training and the reproduction of disciplining in our everyday lives can be called following Foucault (1979) "disciplinary practices". Much greater awareness of spatial dynamics is required and the value of seeing service users in places beyond the home, at least some of the time (Jeyasingham, Citation2013). 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 For example, if I as a social worker am charged with determining a client's need, I have power in doing so through my existing discretionary powers. If because social worker A has written down in official files that Mr Jones is unpleasant, and B, C and D read it, (and because it is an official report it has authority and thus likely to be believed), then B, C and D social workers will be suspicious of Mr Jones and prone to exercise their professional powers in a tougher way than they might have done if he had been described as friendly. Many of the social workers in the team had worked closely together for several years and the researcher established that it was extremely rare for one of them to openly cry in the office. Concluding theses on possibilities and limits for a responsible use of professional power conclude my remarks in the last chapter. In less formally unequal situations, e.g. Do Therapists Really Have More "Power" Than Their Clients From the outset the child protection social workers internalised a view of this mother as a bad object, which was the lens though which they made sense of her. However, some relationships in social work are not like that but are transacted through mistrust, fear, hostility and even hate. An analysis of the rational technologies deployed under the Holocaust regime indicates a twisted Kantian logic whereby good means do not show up as good ends. This lack of attention to the emotional dynamics and effects of the casework contributed to social workers relationship with the child remaining detached. Olivia is good at asking Roberta to help her fill it in it is an attempt to involve her in the process and address power imbalances. 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. During Month 7 another social worker co-worked with the family with Olivia because Susan was unavailable, and this is a scene from their first/introductory visit: Roberta leads the social worker into the sitting-room. We have been lied to actually from social services, blatant lies to our face so there is definitely no trust or anything there. Here the social worker starts out from a position of power over the client because s/he has prior 'knowledge' of what the client is like. Another example of power behind discourse might be the assessment procedures of children who are considered at risk of sexual abuse. Roberta was now pregnant and described in the referral as having a history of violent and abusive relationships where she was at times suspected to be the perpetrator. On the one hand, in order to transform the dependence of the other person into independence in a goal-oriented way and with the right means, but also in order not to let the relationship become a one-sided relationship of domination, which no longer corresponds to a basic partnership intention (cf. Schlter 1995, p. 115). Ron begins to raise his voice, he waves his hand around in a gesture of frustration, raising his voice louder still. Realistically, you are just two people with different skill sets working collaboratively to achieve therapeutic goals. I mean, you know, there I am talking about that emotion at the beginning of the supervision, half way through Im talking about, right, how are you going to a get a grip with this member of staff? Its quite tough to balance. Power differences based on unequal professional status are an example of the latter. What were you thinking when she said that? Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine. April 26, 2002 in Child safeguarding, Workforce. Ethical dilemmas in power and authority: a social work student Selectively withholding information, then, is essential to therapy and is 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. Olivia remains largely still, except for nodding to her occasionally. Anxious surveillance infused with persecutory anxiety is clearly not an effective way to deal with the primitive fears such work and relationships bring up. Interestingly, some people take comfort in the perception that their therapists have some special mental might or psychological power like a benevolent parent has over a child. The central aspect of this work will be the handling of professional power in social work. In Being and Time,Heidegger explained that human existence constitutes the open-ness where beings can be revealed. Information about yourself and your personal life should not be disclosed to clients. The persistent stigmatising of the poor and of black and minority ethnic communities make them into marginalised others who provoke fear and contempt (Tyler, 2020 ). The Cleveland Inquiry (1987) showed a child abuse scandal in the UK in which one of the professionals involved, the pediatrician, had failed to make a sufficiently comprehensive assessment because she was so committed to one method of diagnosis of child sexual abuse, i.e. Following the work of Klein (Citation1946) there is evidence of psychological splitting occurring here, which is a defence mechanism for dealing with intense anxiety and other unbearable feelings. They were often helpful to children and parents and many families confirmed this in research interviews. While social workers are trained to understand marginality and how fear of the other is socially constructed and to counter it through anti-oppressive practice, at a psychological level direct contact with people from such social groups can still provoke anxiety and be experienced as a threat to the integrity of the self. 2023 National Association of Social Workers. We regularly observed a culture of attentiveness and mutual support amongst staff and relationships were collegial. The longest home visit to Roberta Dixon lasted 45minutes and was the very first, as Roberta angrily sought explanations for why social care needed to be involved. Communications Director 3099067 This paper seeks to contribute to filling this gap in knowledge by drawing on an ethnographic study that used participant observation to explore how social workers establish, develop and sustain long term relationships with children and parents in child protection cases and how this is influenced by organisational life, staff support and supervision.
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