Sarah Smith

I’m a child welfare social worker. I’ve chosen the name "Sarah Smith" as my nom de plume because in a training we saw a film about abuse investigation, and the child’s name was "Sarah Smith".

I didn’t know about A.B.’s site until recently, when someone in the office mentioned that it spoke badly about social workers. I went to the site and read several pieces, including the scattered and poorly described stories of his own experience with the system. I also read his story about his great grandmother Mrs. Brigid Wise and her nearly fraudulent application for assistance.

I experience ambivalence, even cognitive dissonance, as I read his work. On the one hand, I know the system does the best it can; on the other, I understand his anger and Mrs. Wise’s suspicion.

It was more than twenty years ago that he was in the system, and he was in the juvenile offender section, which is slightly different from child welfare, but not much. I can’t say things are better now than when he was a ward, in fact, we would not place him with his great-grandmother now, since we don’t approve of home schooling, and he would need to be exposed to age appropriate playmates and a variety of professional caregivers.

In a way, that is the source of my ambivalence. He was best off placed with Mrs. Wise, regardless her recreational use of controlled substances and her on-going and barely compensated alcoholism. There is no substitute for a caring person, no professionally trained care-giver can take the place of a loving relative, even if the upbringing doesn’t conform to the conventional wisdom that controls the decisions we social workers make. Mrs. Wise taught him lessons of the value of family, of God, of hard work and of good citizenship. Few foster homes and no group homes can really teach those values.

We social workers are guilty of the flaw that Mrs. Wise identified: we are bureaucrats. We need jobs, and these are the jobs there are. We need the money; we need the health insurance. Working with the very poor makes me terrified of poverty, of being on the wrong side of society with no money for doctors or lawyers. I have children myself, two still in my home. They are older, but one drives and the other will be driving in a year and a half. I can’t be without legal income for my own children. My degree doesn’t guarantee a job, just the right to look for one.

In a way, Mrs. Wise was right, except it isn’t the desk, it’s the computer on the desk, and if I don’t behave as I should the computer will eject me and find someone else right away.

When we go into a home I have very little latitude. If a professional mandated reporter like a teacher or doctor makes the allegation of neglect or physical or sexual abuse, I would have to work very hard to find the allegation anything but substantiated, unless the child, in an interview in preparation for investigation, provides a reasonable explanation for the physical mark or alerting comment. My agency will only allow certain findings, because if we know the child might be in danger, and don’t act, we’ll be sued. It doesn’t have to be the child’s family who sues, it can be an organization, someone who doesn’t even live in our county. Even if no one sues us, our numbers will look bad. The state will see that the child was in a report or reports but that we didn’t act to prevent further neglect or physical or sexual abuse. I could be officially reprimanded by a judge, I could be demoted or fired. I could be sued. The agency could lose money.

Besides, above all, we have to provide for the safety and stability of the child. The safety of the child, not the best interest of the child.

I chose to be a social worker to help people. I still try to do that, but helping anyone falls behind the safety of the child, the agency, and my job. That is why we don’t want kids home schooled, we want other professionals to keep an eye on them. Teachers, playground monitors, bus drivers, emergency room staff, letter carriers, we are all charged under the law with reporting suspicions of child abuse and neglect. We want the child swaddled in a network of people who will, regardless of the best interest of the kid or her family, keep the child, and the agency, and my job, safe. That’s what makes me a bureaucrat.

The other problem is one of culture. There is no real reason a child couldn’t be placed with Mrs. Wise except for the culture of the agency and of our profession. We always talk about the "culture" of our clients, but we have a culture, too, and it is really nothing more than enforcing middle class values on the working class and the poor. I think the best example is dirty dishes. A middle class mother could have a dishwasher full of dirty dishes and we would find "the kitchen sink was empty of dirty dishes and sufficiently sanitary." If a poor mom with no dishwasher had the same number of dirty dishes but in her sink we would find "the sink contained unwashed dishes, cups with spoiled milk, decaying food in pots." It is how things look.

Mrs. Wise doesn’t look right. She drinks shots of hard liquor in the bar in town and has occasionally displayed a firearm in public. She is a hermit and discourages county visitors. But, even I have to admit she did a good job on Mr. Blinken, who, regardless his admitted soft drug use, is a good person and a benefit to our community.

I’ve taken a lot of abuse. Angry parents and grandparents have called me a Nazi, a child-stealer, a cop. I don’t debate the meaning of those names. I do what a professional has to do, I redirect them to the realities at hand, and promise to help them change the situation so the child can come home. That’s what I can do. In my defense and the defense of many other social workers in child welfare, we try to help, and we really do care about the child. You should see some of the things I’ve seen. I wouldn’t leave a dog in the filth some people raise their kids in. I know moms who are addicted to meth and accept physical and sexual abuse for themselves and their children just to stay with someone who will provide them with more meth. I’ve seen little girls who accept that they must provide sex for any man who requests it, even relatives. I’ve seen children who were bruised in layers under their clothes, with new bruises on top of old bruises but never a bruise where it would show.

But, not all our calls are like that, or even very many. Most are just stressed out, poor people with little family support and little choice in how they live. I help them all I can. A lot of times I make things worse.

In our society, we value individuals, not families or tribes (Native American children fall under a few different laws). In some societies, child abuse is almost unknown because in-laws and aunts and uncles have access to children, and the family steps in. We try to involve families, but they don’t want to interfere, and often a relative won’t harbor a child because they don’t want to alienate the family. A lot of times, though, the family wants the child, but we can’t place them because of past crimes in the family. The child’s real family isn’t good enough for us, we want them placed with a better family.

There isn’t much we can do; we make the best decisions we can, under the laws and regulations as they are now.

If you have kids, the best thing you can do to keep us out of your home is to keep the children clean, keep your house clean, join a church (seriously, a big asset to the family), keep your kids in school, attend parent-teacher conferences and stay on good terms with the school, get your kids regular checkups and make sure you keep your adult behaviors of sexuality, illegal drug and immoderate alcohol use away from your children. The next thing is to tell your children to simply not answer questions about your family from teachers and social workers. So many times a family escapes our jurisdiction because the child simply wouldn’t open their mouths and speak. We can use almost anything, but if they don’t say anything, there isn’t much we can do. Teach your children to remain silent, the only real right they have.

I understand how, to a liberal person like Mrs. Wise, this might not seem in keeping with the idea of liberty and personal rights, but we reason that the child has rights, too. The right to a clean, safe home with caring, invested adults.

Still, I am often ambivalent.