Power also exists in the form of the client. We are grateful to Marta Bolognani, Linda Cooper, Simon Haworth, Claire Mackinnon and Liz Salter for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper and for the feedback of the two anonymous reviewers. 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). This yet again demonstrates what Francis Bacon, the 16th century English statesman and philosopher meant when he observed that 'knowledge is power'. Dual relationships. What this tells us is that if we change human environments, we can adjust behavior and mood. Challenging perspectives: Reflexivity as a critical approach to Somewhat paradoxically these were not workplaces where sadness, fear, anger, guilt and other painful feelings were easily or openly expressed. That is, it resides and is exercised through our relationship to other social workers and officials, to institutions, e.g. Why Traditional Psychotherapy Led to CBT, Which Spawned DBT, How to Have a Balanced and Stress-Resistant Life, How to Stop Overreacting to the Small Stuff, 13 Common Behaviors and Values of Narcissistic People, The Danger of Self-Protection in Relationships. 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. The research on which this paper is based was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council [Grant Number ES/N012453/2]. Such power to repress is not merely negative in content but positive in that prohibitions leave open to one the 'right and good' methods of performance. The practitioners tried to relate to the children in the home and saw them at school, but the parents soon blocked that too. We even lack an agreed language to refer to people who dont want a service (McLaughlin, Citation2009). 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. Olivia has responded so well to the photos, smiling and saying how lovely they are, how nice the children look. The policing of conventions is in the hands of institutional power holders such as social workers, lawyers and teachers. Therefore, it is necessary to establish what the term power means, what associations it evokes. This is what Winnicott (Citation1949) called hate in the counter-transference. Self-disclosure. the Government, teachers, one's parents, to do or not do in this or that way, certain kinds of things. This post is for informational purposes only. Racism and white supremacy are ingrained within American institutions and systems and have therefore affected social work ideology and practice for generations. 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. The impact of power dynamics when counselling clients with He recognizes the importance of Heidegger's view of the constitution of the subject in a temporal frame and of the development of a new philosophy purged of humanism. The chosen cases are what Wengraff (Citation2001) calls the focal or gold-star cases within qualitative research samples that deserve attention because they not only tell their own story but illustrate the general research findings particularly well. Research in psychology is now showing that the colors of walls, carpets and furniture and the layout of a room can affect our mood, feelings and how we behave. Principal social worker) or recognition in terms of respect, expertise, experience and so forth that s/he commands. While transferential processes might be considered crucial in traditional psychotherapy, in CBT they are usually seen as interesting quasi-phenomena rather than material to be "analyzed" as if doing so would advance the therapy. This can create a great sense of transparency and even vulnerability on the client's part that doesn't necessarily have to do with an imbalance of power, per se, but rather a personal information disparity. However, some relationships in social work are not like that but are transacted through mistrust, fear, hostility and even hate. a possibility, and leaves open whether this becomes action. Power Faking it till you make it can be very powerful in behavioral health treatment. Some things, like wanting to be liked by everyone, are near guarantees of stress and unhappiness. - Publication as eBook and book It is vital to understand the mutuality of this dislike. Her inflexibility and maintenance of a rather singular approach may have reinforced her feelings of professional authority and power but produced distress for herself because of official criticism of her and acute distress for the parents accused of perpetrating child abuse. Sex differences in marriage and single life: Still debating after 50 years. April 26, 2002 in Child safeguarding, Workforce. Psychology Today 2023 Sussex Publishers, LLC. The research found that different kinds of relationships became established between social workers and families in long-term casework. They have a regular form which has been inherited from the past, and the latter constrains us from doing the action differently. How Blame and Shame Can Fuel Depression in Rape Victims, Getting More Hugs Is Linked to Fewer Symptoms of Depression, Interacting With Outgroup Members Reduces Prejudice, Practice Improves the Potential for Future Plasticity, How Financial Infidelity Can Affect Your Gray Divorce. Power tempts to abuse power in the everyday work of social workers. This mother internalised the anxious surveillance by social care, experiencing it as persecutory anxiety, which in turn made her even more defensive and anxious about their involvement and her capabilities as a mother. WebPower is an inescapable aspect of all social relationships, and inherently is neither good nor evil. It is very possible that the nature and style of the social work surveillance contributed to the worsening of Robertas well-being and it certainly contributed to her reactions to professionals. 1. Greg Wright Social workers have an ethical duty to dismantle racism, both personally and professionally, and to demonstrate what it means to be antiracist. What is striking is that social workers did so little to try and work through these barriers and defences. In forcefully challenging the parents, the social worker did not disguise her annoyance with the lack of progress and ongoing risk to the children and she just about maintains her composure in the face of the fathers behaviour. A total of 271 practice encounters between social care staff and service users were observed, 146 of which were home visits. 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. Hostile relationships in social work pra . Researching long-term practice and relationships, Sustaining hostile relationships over time, https://doi.org/10.1080/09687590500086666, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2019.02.029, https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2017.1413083, https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2020.1837105, https://doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2015.1073145, https://doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2019.1597693, https://doi.org/10.1332/204674319X15536730156921, https://doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2018.1460589, https://doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2011.626642, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2206.2012.00830.x, https://doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2018.1439460, https://doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2011.626654. Service users in child protection cases have increasingly been framed through such discourses as disgusting others (Warner, Citation2015). power 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. Angela continues to have her feet up, snuggling into the sofa. The production of the 'normal', normalization, is, as we can now see, a complex social and historical meeting of exercises of power, via commands, orders, warnings, recommendations, approvals, and exemplary actions especially from those to whom one is expected to defer, e.g. And it never was. The latter, drawn from many sources, is given a refined professional expression through the trained persona of the social worker. endstream endobj startxref Providing parents with advocates who can support them and processes like family group conferences (Mason et al., Citation2017) can help to re-balance the power dynamics of vulnerable parents, often lone mothers, coping with constant visits by two social care workers. Such pressures made giving children and families the full attention they needed and maintaining a capacity to think clearly about them and the dynamics of the relationship enormously difficult. Susan tells Roberta how gorgeous the baby is. As a Already 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. %%EOF In the 12months there were 68 face to face encounters between social care and the family. It is the place where influencing judgements are held. It is the latter kind of work and hostile relationship that is the focus of this paper, which has two aims: to draw on case-studies of long-term casework with involuntary clients to show what it looks like, feels like and involves for both social workers and service users; and secondly, to add to the literature on relationship-based practice by developing the concept of a hostile relationship. 750 First Street, NE Suite 800 It is argued that, in most 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, Power has been described according to: (a) who has formal authority to make decisions and who controls the resources; and (b) who has less tangible aspects of symbolic power or the ability to control ideas and meaning [ 17 ]. As Winnicott (Citation1949) showed, feelings like hate are experienced and acted out unconsciously by professionals and not just service users. active for change. Power Imbalance The approach to participant observation that was adopted enabled attention to be given to the senses, emotions and lived experience of face to face practice and organisational life over time (Ferguson, Citation2016; Pink, Citation2015). It is vital that A phenomenology of power and subjectivity as informed by writers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer in contemporary social and cultural theory, may influence critical social work in a constructive way. But in the 12months of casework we observed where hostile relationships persisted professionals and parents remained deeply mutually suspicious of one another. Developing Winnicotts work, Kahr (Citation2020) uses the metaphor of hostile clients throwing bombs into encounters with professionals, causing psychological shrapnel that workers and clients have to find ways to survive. Its absence arose from how fear and anxiety cause the self to become defended, which stops reflection in action and how this is compounded by the absence of help with critical reflection afterwards in supervision (Ferguson, Citation2018). 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. To the worker she seemed to be merely an appendage to her mother. For example, therapists need to learn about the peoples cultures they will be counselling. And straight away ((makes hitting noise)). 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. All of the experiences so far have been very bad and they keep coming round and saying, well, we are here to help. Being squared off with was in a variety of ways at the heart of how parents saw their experience of hostile relationships. That speech or an action aims to bring about material changes, i.e. Selectively withholding information, then, is essential to therapy and is Powerlessness in social work Roberta is much louder and really dominates the room. It is not intended to be a substitute for help from a qualified health professional. S/he's got the clients cards marked. But we also know that a particular setting will constrain one's words or actions, e.g. The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) is the largest - Every paper finds readers. The recording process detaches the author from what s/he writes such that we often say of some judgment in a report not "Ms Susan Social-Worker says here ?. " Niklas Luhmann, as a systems theorist, understands power rather as a symbolically generalized communication medium and thus means the possibility of selecting an alternative for others by one's own decision and thus reducing complexity (cf. By demanding help that is due to him, a client also possesses and exercises power. 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. The more opportunities workers have to reflect on and analyse their feelings and relationships with involuntary clients, the less chance there is they will become hostile relationships and the surer they can be that their work and major decisions (including to remove children) will be done ethically and free from hate and retaliation. "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). In so far as social work is about making changes to the conditions of human life, social work is fundamentally about the use of various kinds of power. A lot has been written about power, there are theories of power and concepts of power or to speak with the words of Theodor Fontane "that is a wide field". power imbalance is being expressed when one partner (or a group of partners) is able to dominate decision- making or otherwise asserts power in ways that disadvantages other partners or are not in the best interest towards achieving the partnership objectives. 2. She disputes that she has harmed her children. Power is often used synonymously with terms such as violence, domination or control. At the beginning of this paper, I would like to present four basic theses that I developed during the theoretical discussion of the topic and that are reflected throughout the paper. As Brett Kahr (Citation2020) shows, when Winnicott (Citation1949) first published his work on hate in the counter-transference there was considerable resistance to it within psychoanalysis and the idea that therapists sometimes hated their clients, but this is now a fully accepted part of psychotherapeutic knowledge. Given the inherent power imbalance between social workers and their clients, social workers maintain skills, methods and training in several forms of disciplines such as sociology, social administration, social policy, psychology and law; (2) Law and legal powers pertaining to social workers, e.g. endstream endobj 30 0 obj <>/Metadata 15 0 R/Pages 25 0 R/Type/Catalog>> endobj 31 0 obj <>/ExtGState<>/Font<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageC]/XObject<>>>/Rotate 0/Type/Page>> endobj 32 0 obj <>stream Rebecca raises her voice to talk over them, she talks about the concerns of nursery. Amy is in a car seat under the sink in the gap where a dishwasher or washing machine usually goes. WebSocial workers often grapple with difficult professional and systemic power dynamics with both service users and the other professionals they encounter in multi-agency working. with courtesy or aggression. She tries to gain control of the meeting. %PDF-1.5 % 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. 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. Social defences and organisational culture in a local authority child protection setting: Challenges for the Munro Review? Whats in a name: Client, Patient, Customer, Consumer, Expert by Experience, Service UserWhats Next? The oppressive collateral consequences resulting from mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, and the school-to-prison pipeline have exacerbated economic inequalities in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. WebThe role of power in social work practice has been generally understated despite its importance to the course and outcome of the clinical process. But Olivia had been on the receiving end of Robertas anger and was already deeply emotionally enmeshed in the casework, which prevented her from achieving the kind of detachment necessary to critically reflect and think clearly about the work. One thinks of oppression and dominance. Sudland (Citation2020) shows how working with high-conflict parents and families is enormously emotionally and practically challenging. She told the worker they were being rude and that she would search their name on the internet and then hung up. Professionals and families were only shadowed and interviewed if they gave informed consent. Heidegger, M. (1996) Being and Time translated by Joan Stambaugh, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. Social Graces: A practical tool to address inequality There is in fact a settee and other chair but they are covered in stuff, so Olivia and Susan remain on their feet and stand for the entirety of the visit. When interviewed after the supervision, Olivia said she was hesitant about accessing her distressed feelings and reluctant to show vulnerability because she feared judgement. 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. The practice encounters between practitioners and service users were observed and audio-recorded. Some 30 of these were done by social workers and their managers. 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). After a period of involvement, things got so bad that having let the social workers into the home the parents walked out and hovered around the front door. Once again, suspended self-preservation was regarded as the safest course, but it only really works as a healthy long-term strategy if the attention to the emotional impact of the work that is being postponed is provided as soon as possible. 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. Power Creating space to think and feel in child protection social work; a psychodynamic intervention, The impact of work-related violence towards social workers in children and family services, Sustaining relationships: Working with strong feelings: Part l: Anger, aggression and hostility, Engaging with involuntary service users in social work: Findings from a knowledge exchange project, Challenges and dilemmas working with highconflict families in child protection casework, Understanding defences and defensiveness in social work, Resistant parents and child protection: Knowledge base, pointers for practice and implications for policy, A relationship-based approach to engaging involuntary clients: The contribution of recognition theory, What makes it so hard to look and to listen? 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. Graduate Students' Perceptions of Professional Power in Social The social work team manager was deeply immersed in the case and had been on the end of Robertas rage from the start. - Completely free - with ISBN In this sort of example we can say that power in discourse is to do with the ability of the social worker to control and constrain the contributions of a non-powerful participant, in this case a client suspected of neglecting a child. Well, no, youre not because youre just causing problems and making everything a lot worse and worrying people and stressing people out rather than actually doing anything to help anyone. Against this view we can say that a person may act or refrain from acting because s/he anticipates what others could or would do if s/he did or omitted to do a certain action. Did you know that with a free Taylor & Francis Online account you can gain access to the following benefits? To remove a child from someone you have got to say that this child is at significant harm, the child is not at significant harm and she hasnt been throughout this whole process, and they thought it was appropriate to lie [When SWs visited] they were like standing up in the middle of the room and you know sort of like this whole squaring off with me sort of thing. This move requires that we couple the concepts of power and subjectivity within a consideration of critical social work practice. Nothing changed and by the end of the research the children had been removed. People often have sex when they're tired, meaning the sex is more likely to be short, perfunctory, goal-oriented, and mechanical. 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 7 ways to rebuild your faith in humanity. It seemed self-evident that a social worker would be aware of his or her professional power and know how to use it wisely in terms of purposeful work with clients. There is a remarkable contrast between Rebecca, who sits rigidly and tensely upright on the sofa, and Ron and Angela who give off an air of not caring. She wants to show us photos of them, she retrieves them from the sofa next to me. Power In addition, in essence, the client is the therapist's employer. The social worker is very emotionally flat. They were seen 24 times by social care over the course of the year they too prevented/avoided more visits and we observed 15 of these encounters. After the birth of the baby social work visits lasted between 18 and 33minutes, which given the high level of concern was short. Drawing on a range of psycho-social theories, the paper adds to the literature on relationship-based practice by developing the concept of a hostile relationship. We have certainly made mistakes, but we are also a group of professionals committed to helping, lifting up, and advocating for oppressed and marginalized groups of people and fighting injustice in society.
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