3 Interplay between values, ethics and the law

The values that you have considered so far are interconnected in a number of ways. For example, a commitment to working in partnership, empowering service users and respecting their rights requires a commitment to valuing diversity and to anti-oppressive practice. Anti-oppressive practice involves working positively to challenge myths and stereotypes and speaking out and combatting discrimination against certain groups of people that occurs through social practices, and the law itself (Braye and Preston-Shoot, 2016).

You should be aware from the outset, however, that social work values are not necessarily reflected in the law. For example, you will find law preventing discrimination, but you will not find legal duties to promote anti-oppressive practice. Nonetheless, good social work practice and professional responsibility go beyond fulfilling the obligations in law.

This is a course about both law and social work: it aims to introduce you to the legal framework and to consider its implications for practice, which can be affected both negatively and positively by how you apply the law. For instance, people who work in social work need to be able to reflect on the impact of their decisions to use legal powers and intervene in an individual’s or family’s life.

Social workers often have to resolve a tension that may arise between the compulsory interventions they make and the values they espouse. The following activity is an example of how the interaction between law and social work values can be fraught with tension.

Activity 7 Parents Against Injustice PAIN

Timing: 30 minutes

Listen to the interview with Sue Amphlett, who, at the time, was the chairperson of Parents Against Injustice.

Figure 5 Parents Against Injustice logo (PAIN)

In the interview, Sue, who was herself a professional, talks about the effect of compulsory intervention in her family’s life. It is clear that the intervention was carried out in accordance with the statutory framework, under which the social workers had the power to intervene; however, listen to Sue talk about the impact of that intervention. Then answer the following questions.

Download this audio clip.Audio player: Audio 2

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Transcript: Audio 2 Interview with Sue Amphlett

LESLEY-ANNE

Parents against Injustice was set up in 1985. At the time of this recording Sue Amphlett was its Director. Although she is no longer involved with the organisation, the issues Sue describes in this interview still have important implications for social work practice. Parents Against Injustice still continues its work and Sue begins by describing how it started.

SUE

We were set up because myself and my husband got caught up in the system when our youngest daughter had a series of fractures from very minor tumbles. Both her and her sister’s name was put on the Child Abuse Register as it was called and we very much lived in fear that they were going to be removed from us because the professionals kept saying ‘it can’t have happened the way you said it did, Mrs. Amphlett, children don’t get fractures from minor tumbles like that’. Eventually, quite some time later, and on our insistence at getting second opinions, she was diagnosed as probably having mild brittle bone disease. I was a nurse by profession, I was a registered child minder at the time, I’d held very senior posts, I’d worked with abused children, I knew what the system was about. And I had an image of myself and my family and my children, that I was a very good mother, and my children were happy contented children; and suddenly I had a complete batch of strangers looking at me with a suspicion that actually I was abusing my children. And we felt so marginalised in the process. Only our GP had met us to any degree, or even seen the children. The social worker who came to do the initial interview actually went on holiday the day before the conference, so there was nobody at the conference who knew us, and we’re sitting to make judgements as to whether these were abused children and whether they should be removed and what action they should take.

We spent a long time trying to get help; we thought there must be other people out there who’ve gone through this, they must be able to advise us what the system is, I didn’t know what a conference was, I didn’t know what my rights were, I didn’t know what the law said, you know, and I considered myself to be reasonably informed person, working within the system as a nurse and a child minder. And we found there wasn’t anybody. And certainly there wasn’t anybody who was prepared to believe that we might actually not have done anything. And at the end of the process we were very damaged, very traumatised, as were our children, if it nearly destroyed us - and we had the use of a telephone and we could try and get help and it cost us a lot of money to some legal aid, we were a poor, young family at the time - what was it doing to people less able than us?

LESLEY-ANNE

How do people feel when the go through this experience?

SUE

Most people just can’t comprehend it. Somebody is looking at you in a way that you cannot comprehend. It’s like looking at a fractured mirror of yourself and suddenly you begin to question everything that you thought you were, and this is why people struggle with it so much, that they lose their self-esteem, their self-respect. There’ve been one or two people who have been incredibly tough and have not lost that self-image but most of them lose their self-image and of course if you are a struggling single mum, or a struggling family that’s got a lot of social difficulties got a lot of problems, financial difficulties, you have something like that come on top and people just cannot cope. And they will tell you things like, ‘it wasn’t just trying to cope with that particular issue but I felt I couldn’t even wash the dishes anymore’. ‘I felt I couldn’t even get out of bed to take the children to school’. Because the whole structure of their life - which is for most people structured around their children - just disappeared, the base has been taken away out of their triangle and everything just falls through.

LESLEY-ANNE:

Why did Sue feel that the process was damaging?

SUE

The whole focus was the child protection process. Protecting a child is a very small part of a long process. The point at which you decide to protect a child, a huge other raft of work has gone on and that is the investigative process of alleged abuse. There was no focus, there was no recognition of what was happening because everybody believed, you know, if I am working in the best interests of the child I can’t be doing it any harm, can I? It’s what I call the Snoopy syndrome. There is a wonderful cartoon of Snoopy who’d left total mayhem behind him and when he got to the end caption he stood there and he said ‘But how can I be wrong when I am so sincere?’ You know he just couldn’t understand how he caused this mayhem and that’s exactly the same attitude and the problem is, of course, you can, the road to hell you know is paved with good intentions, and unless you stop and question what you are doing and evaluate what you are doing you will never see that.

LESLEY-ANNE

Sue gave her opinion of key points that social workers should consider when working with families.

SUE

The first one is just because you believe you are doing good doesn’t necessarily mean you are. You do have to evaluate what you do, you do have to have standards in what you do and you do have to be responsible for your own decisions and not place the onus of decision-making upon other professionals or practitioners within the group. The second is the things that I have already mentioned, you know, that in fact if you get people needlessly caught up in the system you’re not doing them any good; and the ones that you’re causing the most harm to, very likely, are going to be the children themselves. There’s no work process going in to helping families put themselves back together once you have weeded them out of the system. There’s not support groups for those families. They don’t even appear in the statistics any longer because the only statistics that are actually being kept are those who are on the register. So if your child isn’t on the register you don’t even appear in the workload of a local authority once you are weeded out. So, all those people have to find a way of putting their lives back together with all the drain that that has on GPs and hospitals and counsellors and schools and their education and so on.

 

End transcript: Audio 2 Interview with Sue Amphlett

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Audio 2 Interview with Sue Amphlett

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• How did Sue view the intervention of the social worker?
• Was it enough to say ‘the children haven’t been abused, we will withdraw’?

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Discussion

Listening to Sue highlights the tensions between the law and social work. Arguably the intervention in the family was justified in law, but the fact that the family were left so bruised by the experience, even after the adults were cleared of any wrongdoing, suggested that the process itself can be damaging and perhaps the intervention was based upon the law and the social workers lost sight of social work values? It is important to remember that at the end of the social worker’s intervention or input there is a family who have to pick up the pieces and try to carry on with their lives.

Social work is a responsible and demanding job. Practitioners work in social settings characterised by enormous diversity, and they perform a range of roles, requiring different skills. Public expectations, agency requirements and resources, and the needs of service users all create pressures for social workers. The public receives only a snapshot of a social worker’s responsibilities; and, against a background of media concentration on the sensational, the thousands of successful outcomes and years of hard work in childcare and with vulnerable adults are never considered.