Social injustice and inequality in the care system Part 2: “We need to be more ‘counter’, committed and personal”

There are lots of things psychologists and social workers can do to ensure that families are treated more humanely by the care system

Photo by João Rafael on Unsplash
Sinead Peacock-Brennan

On August 16, the British Association for Social Workers (BASW) and Psychologists for Social Change (PSC) co-hosted an event to highlight social injustice and inequalities within the child protection and care systems. This is the second part of a blog responding to the event. You can read the first part 'How professionals can inadvertently make things worse' here. 

While there might always be cases when children need to be taken into care, the focus of the event was on “reclaiming humanity” in child protection services. How can we ensure that families are treated more humanely? How can we ensure that services don’t worsen their situation?

Care leaver, social work student and children’s support worker Aijannah de Nisci shared an initiative in her workplace which challenges the assumptions underpinning the labelling and “othering” processes at work in the system. She explained that whenever “neglect” is discussed in meetings, other team members ask “what do you mean by that?” and “what does that look like”? This opens up a wider discussion of the family’s experience and allows for the possibility of change at a preventative stage. This led us to consider how professionals can help tackle smaller problems for families, before children are put onto child protection plans or taken into care.

Shoda Rackal, a breastfeeding peer supporter and member of Legal Action for Women, shared some of the community groups available to support families in the child protection system. She spoke about a monthly support group for mothers whose children have gone into the care system, and the monthly picket held outside a family court on the first Wednesday of every month. She also recommended the Legal Action for Women dossier, available online, on the unjust separation of children and their mothers.

Professor Gupta presented a quote from Michal Krumer-Nevo which encourages social workers to become more comfortable resisting – or countering – “the system”, more committed to social action, and more personal in their interactions, standing alongside families. As a psychologist, these are aspects to our practice which I think we can all incorporate, both those working in the care system and in other areas of health and social care. We could also look to Community Psychology. Community psychologists have long acknowledged the importance of working with marginalised groups to challenge social conditions, through both therapy and activism. Sue Holland’s social action model of psychotherapy is often used as an example of this, and I wonder whether some of the psychologists involved in the event might be able to incorporate some of the examples of collective action listed below into their clinical practice.

Ideas for individual and collective action

• Support individuals or families to apply to charities for grants for specific purchases. One social worker shared her success in applying to the Skinner’s Benevolent Trust and relayed how this can change the focus from a family neglecting to feed a child, to a family not affording a new fridge to keep food for the family to eat.
• Lobby service managers to recruit and retain welfare rights advice workers, to support families to obtain the financial support they are entitled to. This has both the concrete impact of reducing the material impact of poverty, alongside the symbolic power of ensuring services are standing alongside families in poverty, challenging the resulting blame and stigma.
• Share the anti-poverty framework for social work, recently published in Northern Ireland, with colleagues and consider the implications for our service and practice.
• Psychologists should incorporate wider social inequalities into their formulation and state this in their reports. This includes acknowledging the impact of reductions in community resources, how this has impacted parental mental health and what community-focused interventions might be helpful as a result.
• Shift the narrative in meetings by acknowledging risk but also by asking about needs. Based on this, focus on the strengths of families, and how these can be practically supported.
• Join in direct action and campaigns against damaging government policies through groups like PSC and BASW. Work alongside allied groups to challenge dominant individualised and medicalised models of mental health to build a broader range of stories for our professions to draw upon. This includes citing important social factors in multi-disciplinary meetings and noting the impact of racism, poverty and inequality in people’s lives.
• Attend the upcoming Legal Action for Women event ‘Do No Harm’ on September 11 at the House of Commons; a seminar to gather evidence of the significant harm caused to children by separating them from their mothers and families.
• Social workers should attend the upcoming BASW London branch AGM on September 29 to continue the collective action of BASW, engage with community groups and learn from a variety of invited speakers. Social workers are also invited to  the BASW England conference and membership meeting on September 7 which will give them the opportunity to shape monitoring standards and contribute their voice to policies which impact the clients and families they support.
• Support parenting advocacy projects, such as Reframe, a user-led action collective focusing on issues related to care proceedings. They provide training for social workers about this experience, and are available to provide consultation. They will also be speaking at the upcoming Community Psychology festival in Hertfordshire, alongside many other activist and community groups on September 23 and 24.  

Interested in finding out more? BASW London would love to see you on September 29, or look on the PSC website to find out where and when your local PSC group meets.
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Read the first part of this blog 'Social injustice and inequality in the care system Part 1: How professionals can inadvertently make things worse' here.

Read BASW member, Eve Wilson's, take on the event here.

​A recording of Anna Gupta presenting is available here.

Author

Sinead Peacock-Brennan is a clinical psychologist based in London.