Today is World Social Work Day and the theme of the day is relationships…
In this piece of writing, I reflect on ways in which I might have deprived people of their dignity (despite my best intentions) when working as a criminal justice social worker in the East End of Glasgow in the 1990s. I might be exaggerating a little; I’m not sure I was this bad a social worker, but I think it represents some of what was and is problematic about the ways that professionalism and professional services are sometimes constructed — and, more specifically, about the ways I worked. It was written a few years ago, in the context of my then membership of the Poverty Truth Commission (https://www.faithincommunityscotland.org/poverty-truth-commission/), and was prompted by my engagements with the expertise and experience of the other commissioners. The Commission’s motto and mantra is that ‘Nothing About Us Without Us is For Us’.
Without you?
It was all about you
Respect for persons
Human dignity and worth
Self-determination
I was taught to understand you
‘Poverty, Discrimination and Disadvantage’
‘People in Adversity’
That bus to Barrowfield
My mind was trained
To empathise and engage
Building trust and rapport
Assessing and planning
In partnership, of course
My Interventions:
Psychosocial?
Task or person-centred?
Cognitive and behavioural?
Individual, group and community?
Clients, targets, systems
‘Evidence-based’
Evaluating ‘effectiveness’
And when we finally met
I tried hard to be for you
I applied my mind
Applied my skills
Counseled, motivated, advocated
Striving to change for the better
It, them or you
But not us
Not us
Us?
And then I drove home
In my bought-and-paid-for car
To my west end flat
My home improvements
My cookbooks and culture
My double income, no children
Mostly strife-less life
The next day I drove east again
Full of ‘preliminary empathy’
Figuring out how exactly to
Social work you better
In partnership, of course
You were allocated to me
Already a ‘case’; an orange folder
Bulging with your annotated problems
Already a case; pre-reported
Pre-constructed
In a pre-liminary way, of course
All subject to a negotiation
But one in which I wrote your story
Fabricating you
Under headings
Conforming to my structures
My story that rendered you;
Stripping the layers back to a
Hollowed out skeleton
That could fit my small coffin-shaped box of tricks
It was meant to be all about you
But most of you was missing
All the fleshiness
The strong sinews that held you together
And the mind making sense
Of the senselessness
It was meant to be for you
‘Promoting social welfare’
But nothing about you without you was for you.
Except in the rare moments when I saw you and knew you
And you saw me and knew me
And we made some sense together.Without