Back to the rough ground

Back to the rough ground Mark Smith Presentation to IASCW/RMA/IASCE Conference February 2010

Where are we in time • High modernity – belief in steady • Postmodern uncertainty/fragmentation • Retreat from welfare • Distancing from traditional authority structures (professional expertise, the Church) • Neoliberalism – belief that market ideologies can be applied to social settings • Shift from collective to the individual

With the result that … • residential care is now 'a commodity . . . there to be traded and exploited for its surplus value like any other commodity' and as a consequence 'the quest for profitability means that business values, reductions in costs and income generation have been prioritised over above the quality of care'. The private sector's role in providing children's homes and related children's services is also, as mentioned earlier, increasing and there has been, for example, something of a 'stampede of private equity firms into the foster-care sector‘ (Garrett) • Positioning of social care workers as glorified life coaches

Residential care has not always been good enough but … • …. the centrality of the private sector serves to reinforce, implicitly and explicitly, the notion that public services (particularly local authorities) have failed 'looked after' children (see also Association of Directors of Social Services et al. 2007). However, this notion – part of the emerging 'common sense' associated with the SWP enterprise – can be contested. • Indeed, the whole notion that the 'care system' is 'failing' can be understood as an intensively ideological project which is required, within the dominant neoliberal frame of reference, to reveal failure in order to provide a foundational rationale for privatization. (Garrett)

Indeed, the whole notion that the 'care system' is 'failing' can be understood as an intensively ideological project which is required, within the dominant neoliberal frame of reference, to reveal failure in order to provide a foundational rationale for privatization. (Garrett)

And into this mix .. • The whiff of scandal • Scandals occur at moments ‘when history is up for grabs’ (Lynch and Bogen, 1996) • Inquiries – instruments of government(ality) • Submerged narratives • Impulse to ‘cleanse’ residential care

The means to ‘cleanse’ • Discourses of rights and protection • Standards • Inspection • Registration • Vetting and barring

A caution • ‘Atrocities take place not in the perverse ceremonies of some evil cult but rather in the course of purging such cults from the world’ (Frankfurter in Webster, 2009 p.30). • ‘When a long abuse of power is corrected, it is generally replaced by an opposite violence’ (McGahern)

A question • Might the clamour to be seen to respond to undoubted abuses in care have unleashed atrocities of its own through the manner in which allegations of abuse have been pursued and prosecuted?And it is not just individuals who are the victims of this process. It is hard to argue that the crusade to purify residential care has served the sector well; its result is regimes characterised by stultifying regulation and indifference.

The problem with rights • …‘(it is no coincidence that the prominence given to rights coincides with the dominance of advanced liberalism and increasing recourse to law as a means of mediating relationships) and premised on particular values and a particular understanding of the subject as a rational, autonomous individual’ (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005: 30). • We become linked to one another through a series of contractual relationships rather than anything deeper • Recourse to abstract, universal principles rather than grounded decision making • freedom only comes in relationship with others, in heteronomy (community) rather than autonomy

The problem with protection • ‘protection involves a very different conception of the relationship between an individual or group, and others than does care. Caring seems to involve taking the concerns and needs of the other as the basis for action. Protection presumes the bad intentions and harm that the other is likely to bring to bear against the self or group and to require a response to that potential harm. Protection can also become self-serving, turning into what Judith Hicks Stein calls “the protection racket” in which the need for protection reinforces itself. (Tronto 1994: 104-05) • A system ‘close to bankrupt,… doing more harm than good, …shattering families and communities with dire consequences for civil society (Lonne et al, 2008)

Where has all this taken us? • ‘Many senior managers in this field are now more interested in reports, statistics and numbers than the individual needs of the child’ ‘..sometimes we get so caught up with procedures, we lose sight of the child’ • Staff are expected to keep three simultaneous daily logs. The first is a handwritten diary noting movements of staff and children in and out o the home; no Tipp-Ex corrections are allowed and all unused parts of pages must be crossed through and initialled. The second is a round-the-clock record of the children’s activities and staff registering, for instance, if a child gets up for a glass of water in the night. The third is an individual log compiled each day for each child, noting their activities and behaviour. All these logs and diaries must be stored for a minimum of 75 years - partly in case a child makes an allegation of abuse against a care worker. So many need to be held onto that thousands are kept at a disused salt mine in Kent. Sunday Times (18th March, 2007)

Looking for a way out • We have positioned care as a technical/rational task rather than a practical/moral one • An ethical turn • ..… the legitimacy of social work rests on exhortations that betray an ethical intent rather than a set of empirical or outcome based possibilities…the return to ethics should be a major theme that characterises social work in the late modern scenario. (Webb, 2006)

Let’s start at the very beginning • Am I my Brother’s Keeper? • …I am a moral person because I recognise my brother’s dependence and accept the responsibility that follows (Bauman, 2000: 1) Being human is an orientation to the other

A conceptual fault line • The nub of the matter • .... when we obscure the essential human and moral aspects of care behind ever more rules and regulations we make ‘the daily practice of social work ever more distant from its original ethical impulse’ (Bauman, 2000 p.9) • ‘Responsibility is silenced once proximity is eroded… the fellow human subject is transformed into an ‘other’ by technical bureaucracy’ (Bauman, 1989:184). • Responsibility needs to be exercised face to face without intermediaries (Levinas) • ‘Pindown’

Care ethics is concerned with… • responsibilities and relationships rather than rules and rights; it is bound to concrete situations, rather than being formal and abstract; and it is a moral activity rather than a set of principles to be followed.’ (Sevenhuisjen 1999)

Alternative ethical frameworks • Care ethics (feminist ethics) • Gilligan - ‘In a Different Voice’ • ‘an ethic of care is a practice, rather than a set of rules or principles…It involves both particular acts of caring and a ‘general habit of mind’ to care that should inform all aspects of a practitioner’s moral life’ (Tronto 1994, pp126/7). • an activity and a disposition

Care ethics involves… • Taking .... professional caring into the personal realm and requires that both parties show up, be present, be engaged at a feeling level for each other. The presence of feeling(s) provides the link which connects the worker and client. Very simply put, without this connection, without the feeling(s) in the relationship, the people do not matter to each other (Ricks, 1992). • Physical care needs to be transformed to caring care (Maier, 1979). This happens when the ‘self’ of the carer becomes central to the experience of care; these occasions are ‘our whispered moments of glory, our Camelots (Maier, 1979)

Back to the rough ground • We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground! • Post Ryan - a desire to remove the rough edges • Yet, residential/social care is messy and ambiguous

The rough ground of relationships • Love • Taking kids home

The rough ground of complaints • Thus I have known a number of children who have complained about and thereby lost the only person who could probably help them. Learning to make trusting relationships is very hard and often distressing for both child and adult and for a child making a complaint about someone is one way of escaping from the unhappiness that is involved. Likewise for the adult in a residential team we get the argument that “this is not the right place for this child “we cannot meet his/her needs”, I believe it is when a relationship reaches this difficult testing stage that a breakthrough in our work with a child is near and if staff hold firm and resist the rejection of the child, then the child will feel emotionally held.

cont • I am still in touch with a woman now in her fifties who I formed a primary relationship with when she was 10 years old. She had been in care from the age of 6 weeks and the way she had learned to cope was to treat life as a game of adults versus children ; adults try to control you and you try to “get away with things”. My job was to try to give her a primary experience, to help her to allow herself to become dependent, to form an identity, and to see me as a person who she could trust and love. She says that if complaints procedures had been around during her time in care she would have made a complaint about me; she also says if she had not had a relationship with me, “I would now probably be in Rampton !”

The rough ground of restraint • ‘It is all very well using minimum force with someone who is considerably weaker than you but it soon becomes maximum force when they are big and strong.’ (p.65) • ‘And the window smashed, and then the window smashed again and by this time I had entered the room and I took hold of him. Now maybe if I’d done that in the first place he wouldn’t, you know, and that’s the bit where your professional judgement, I guess, comes in and maybe I was wrong in that case. Maybe I wasn’t, it’s hard to say.’ (Steckley and Kendrick, 2005).

Rethinking professionalism • We have confused professionalism with professionalisation • Bureaucratic professionalism may well be working itself into a corner. We hope more will have the courage to develop spaces where helping is on a human scale” (Smith and Smith, 2008: 154).

And the place of codes … • Codes are ‘negative rather than positive, products of fear rather than a characteristic of a confident profession or workforce’. Codes give no space for context or good professional sense, and so were generally ‘ignored or became unworkable’, creating ‘guilt at their non-compliance’. The more specific codes become, the more ridiculous they are, and the more they cast teachers under the veil of suspicion.

Changing policy directions…? • a profession lacking in confidence and uncertain about its role. Social work … has lost touch with some of its core purpose and has become unduly process dominated…. Changing Lives • We believe that the greatest gains in reforming our care system are to be made in identifying and removing whatever barriers are obstructing the development of good personal relationships, and putting in place all possible means of supporting such relationships where they occur. (DCSF) • ‘Going the extra mile’

What users and carers want • ‘A friend and an equal…’ • ‘You need a worker with a heart’ • Keeping in touch - going for meals etc (Halvorsen) • Compassion and interest, while essential were clearly not enough. Without investment, action or help to accomplish some stated or implied goal the relationship was not perceived as therapeutic (Shattell et al, 2007) • Care is a self-in-action task

Dare to be human • ‘There is nothing reasonable about taking responsibility, about caring and being moral. Morality has only itself to support it: it is better to care than to wash one’s hands, better to be in solidarity with the unhappiness of the other than indifferent’ (Bauman 2000) • Humanity involves fallibility – need to live with staff mistakes in complex circumstances – qualities of forgiveness, understanding • Joy, spontaneity, complexity, desires, richness, wonder, curiosity, care, vibrant, play, fulfilling, thinking for yourself, love, hospitality, welcome, alterity, emotion, ethics, relationships, responsibility — … are part of a vocabulary which speaks about a different idea of public provision for children, one which addresses questions of the good life…. (Moss and Petrie, 2002, p.79).

So • Back to the rough ground

References • Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern ethics, Oxford: Blackwell • Bauman, Z (1994) Alone Again: Ethics after the age of certainty London: Demos • Bauman, Z. (2000b) Special essay: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’, European Journal of Social Work, vol 3, no 1, pp 5-11. • Cree, V.E. and Davis, A. (2006) Social Work: Voices from the Inside, London: Routledge. • Dahlberg, G and Moss, P. (2005) Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education, London Routledge/Falmer.

Halvorsen, A. (2009) What Counts in Child Protection and Welfare? Qualitative Social Work, Vol. 8 (1) 65 – 82. • Lonne. B, Parton, N., Thomson, J. and Harries, M. (2008) Reforming child protection. London: Sage. • Smith, H. and Smith, M. K. (2008) The Art of Helping Others: Being Around, Being There, Being Wise. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. • Tronto, J. (1994) Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care, New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc.

Webb, S. (2006) Social work in a risk society: Social and political perspectives,Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Back to the rough ground