Retired social worker Colin Turbett, who has 40 years of experience under his belt, outlines the radical case in favour of the controversial Named Person scheme
A NUMBER of years ago I was fortunate enough to visit some remote areas of eastern Canada to see how social work services were delivered. One particular isolated community in Newfoundland stands out in memory – stunning in its beauty but chilling in what went on all too commonly behind closed doors.
Far from any 'Waltons' idyll of rural family life, here was the ugly reality behind Annie Proulx’s novel Shipping News. Sexual abuse within families was relatively commonplace and had been going on for generations – accentuated in recent times by poverty and the breakdown of family life caused by the collapse of the cod fishery.
It had been recognised and was being targeted systematically through planned and well-resourced state interventions which were making a difference and ultimately improving the quality of lives of children and changing social patterns within these communities.
The role of frontline staff in schools and health settings in looking for the signs of abuse and then discussing concerns with specialists was fundamental. At the time of my visit, referrals were reducing and there was optimism that the problem had peaked and was reducing in scale.
This is certainly a class issue and one where state intrusion into family life should take place in order to look after the most vulnerable.
Back home, as a children and family social work team manager in a West of Scotland local authority, another fairly recent poignant memory affects my view on the Named Person (NP) controversy: Paula was 17 and had been referred to our team by the health midwife service through concerns about her vulnerability and potential as a parent for her unborn child.
Our assessment confirmed risk to any child she might be responsible for. Unlike most of the mothers referred to us she was not affected by substance misuse, but her capacity to parent had been damaged by awful family experiences as she grew up. Her father, who had only been around in her early years, had, she told us, pushed her down a stairway when she four years old and the hospital she attended had accepted her parent’s account that she had fallen accidentally.
This had left her with permanent facial disfigurement and poor confidence. At school she had attended well, sitting at the back of the class and drawing as little attention to herself as possible. This had got her through to 16 when she left and joined numerous others in her community in joblessness.
She had soon left home to move into a chaotic household tenanted by an older man, and there she was sexually exploited by those who came and went – in return for a bed. Pregnancy soon occurred and she struck up a relationship with a young man with special needs of his own whom she soon moved in with.
To cut to the chase, it was clear to all concerned that Paula could not offer a safe environment to her baby and had none of the basic skills required to care for herself let alone a new and vulnerable child. We offered her as much support as we could – this even involved taking her out and purchasing underwear – something her mum had never done as she grew up and she had never experienced herself, and trying hard to improve her sense of self worth.
Ideally most of us would like to see a reduction in the need for such intrusive interventions but that can only come with a massive increase in resources that support parents with everyday burdens like childcare.
But it was too little too late. The baby was removed at birth and a process started that will have led to adoption – a family split apart through corrosive non-intervention at the stage it should have happened.
Paula’s story is a sad and scandalous indictment on helping services for children in the 1990s and 2000s: despite her poor hygiene, shy presentation and the lack of interest in her education or health by her parents, no one involved with her as a child realised how poor her home life was and how much in need of help she and her mother were.
Capitalism and its inequalities create such circumstances and state interventions are needed all too often in Scotland’s poorer communities. This is certainly a class issue and one where state intrusion into family life should take place in order to look after the most vulnerable. Those who call for more resources for such interventions are absolutely correct and introducing a broadening of support at a time of austerity and cuts is problematic if not two-faced.
Ideally most of us would like to see a reduction in the need for such intrusive interventions but that can only come with a massive increase in resources that support parents with everyday burdens like childcare.
The Russian Bolshevik and feminist Alexandra Kollontai argued in the 1920s for the socialisation of parenting in order to release women from the burden of caring (and work) that capitalist society places upon them. She assumed that end would come through the development of communism.
Such an argument might be controversial in the light of Russian history and the development of the psychology of childhood, but there is no doubt that a Marxist view that sees the family as a means to reproduce labour at the cheapest cost to the state is proven by austerity’s basic premise of cuts to supportive services to families in order to preserve neoliberal capitalism.
NP, of course, is no lasting solution to problems of class, poverty and inequality. That will require a serious challenge to neoliberalism – something unlikely to come from the SNP.
I well recall the syndrome in social work offices of conscious stricken teachers phoning us on the eve of a holiday to offload their concerns about a particular child – often admitting that they could now take a break happily having passed their worries onto someone else.
Some might argue that NP could increase this unreasonable practice as teachers and health staff up the ante in order to avoid the repercussions of the failures apparent in recent publicised tragedies. This is unnecessary if people talk to one another (as argued by Catriona Grant in her recent CommonSpace piece) and social work is seen as the type of community-orientated and well-resourced service called for by social work academic Iain Ferguson in his recent Herald letter.
I long ago reconciled my role as a minor state functionary, whose work contained oppressive aspects, with my radical aspirations as a socialist, and argued for much of my career for a practice that was friendly, honest and accommodating to those whose problems, largely, were created by a society run in the interests of the rich and powerful.
That is the rejoinder to Iain Macwhirter’s recent Herald article on NP warning of the SNP’s bolstering of a "surveillance state". Maggie Mellon’s CommonSpace piece, which also argued against NP, issued similar warnings and discussed the mayhem social work interventions can cause to families.
True, but in my experience those who sometimes shout the loudest as victims about such issues are articulate middle class men deflecting attention from their own abusive behaviour. NP will no doubt focus on working class people for obvious reasons but it should also pick up on the less visible middle class child victims who are largely absent from social work caseloads.
NP, of course, is no lasting solution to problems of class, poverty and inequality. That will require a serious challenge to neoliberalism – something unlikely to come from the SNP. It has the potential, though, to ensure in a better way than we have had to date, that responsibility is shared within government-funded services for targeting resources properly and keeping children safe.
It has the potential, though, to ensure in a better way than we have had to date, that responsibility is shared within government-funded services for targeting resources properly and keeping children safe.
Let’s not, though, use it to set staff up with impossible burdens: in a jokingly competitive attempt to make their local authority the 'best place to grow up in', North Ayrshire Health and Social Care Partnership has recently published its children’s services plan based on expensively commissioned 'research' undertaken by a Devon-based consultancy.
This goes beyond the philosophy of the Getting it Right for Every Child scheme (and by extension, NP) by effectively setting the state as an entity between the child and parent. It sets out numerous 'promises' to children that will be impossible to deliver upon given existing resources.
That is not helpful to staff in education, health or social services if the document is to be viewed seriously and not just as some kind of showcase. The authority is committed to some means of support to frontline social work staff such as workload management (though doubtful how many senior managers understand it) and a commitment to the 'Pareto principle' to social work practice – social workers doing 20 per cent paperwork and 80 per cent face-to-face work (almost the reverse of what actually happens).
It seems like a lot of circles have to be squared when resources are frozen and child protection staff paid considerably less than their Glasgow counterparts.
NP is now to become a reality and it is up to all of us to argue for the resources required to make it work as a practical and helpful tool rather than an oppressive force for staff and service users alike.
Colin Turbett is author of Doing Radical Social Work.
Picture courtesy of Jonathan Cohen
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