When the bough breaks (1985)

From the September 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The dismal roll-call of children who have been battered and tortured to death by their parents has recently had some well-publicised names added to it. With the trials and sentences of the batterers complete, the next stage is the process known as An Enquiry. which should more properly be called How To Make (almost) Everyone Happy By Missing The Point. These cases of child abuse did not appear unexpectedly out of happy, united homes; in each case the child was imprisoned in what is known, in the Town Halls of this country, as a Problem Family, which usually means that a local authority social worker had the job of keeping a protective eye on the child. And that, of course, means that when the child's miserably agonising death revealed too late that all was not well there were, in the personal shape of the social worker and the bureaucratic shape of the local Social Services Department. some scapegoats conveniently to hand. In the popular press social workers now rate, in the league table of denunciation. a little above football hooligans and a long way below professional killers in the armed forces and social and economic parasites like Princess Michael. The press love cases of child abuse for the copy they provide; nothing sells newspapers like an apparent official malfunction which can be given an indignantly human angle in two-inch front page type. Then everyone — the judges, the politicians, the media hawks, the Sun readers — can feel better, provided they can forget the fact that nothing has effectively been done about an extremely nasty problem.

Given the essentially defenceless appeal of a child, it would be strange if cases of battering did not arouse some powerful emotions. The media exploits these responses with demands for vengeance plastered up with some sort of assurances that something will be done to prevent it happening again Racist mumblings were also heard when two of the recent cases — Jasmine Beckford and Tyra Henry — involved black parents but there is no evidence that a coloured skin makes for a neglecting, violent parent. A few days later a white mother was given life imprisonment for the murder of her white child and one of the most notorious cases of recent years, which resulted in the establishment of a set of rules for social workers, police officers, doctors and the like, was that of Maria Colwell, a white child who was beaten to death by her white stepfather. If there were a disproportionate incidence of child abuse in black families it would be readily explicable by the extra dimension of social alienation in their overall poverty — which makes a useful starting point in any discussion of the subject.

The cry for revenge on the child batterer is answered — perhaps if there is enough public interest in the case — with long prison sentences. Punishment does not end in the court room, for it is no ghoulish myth that violent treatment is meted out by other prisoners — female as well as male — to anyone convicted of such offences. The people who were sent to prison in the cases of Jasmine Beckford. Tyra Henry and Christopher Stock will probably count themselves lucky if they complete their sentences in undisturbed isolation behind a locked cell door. Of course the prisoners are not supposed to take matters into their own hands in this way — in fact officially they don't — but they probably need some reassurance that, no matter what they have done to get themselves into prison, there are others who are held in even lower esteem.

It is, after all, a relief to have a scapegoat to ease any nagging doubt about where the responsibility lies for a situation too stressful to be openly faced. Sometimes a family needs the common cause of a sick or wayward child to plaster it into unity; in the same way this society needs its deviants and criminals to provide a diversionary explanation for its inherent inadequacies. The parents of a battered child fall easily into that role and close after them are the people who in many cases have legal parentage — the local authority social workers. It is not unknown for social workers to be custom-built for the type of media assassination which is based on professed outrage at the alleged laxity of present day morality. Many are comparatively young, recently qualified, female and single, with no experience of parenthood themselves. In the case of Jasmine Beckford there was something else, an added piquancy — the social workers came from abroad.

Whatever impression may be gained from the columns of the gutter press, the life of a social worker is not all drinking coffee, sitting in at long meetings and composing jargon-laden casework assessments. When they are involved in child care cases they are immediately faced with a dilemma. The parental rights which have passed to the local authority, and which the social worker is paid to administer, are in conflict with capitalism's concept of the family, in which parents have not only the obligation to raise their children into profit-making members of the working class but also some rights of possession over them. This ideology has its own mystique and when a child is taken into care it is usually on the assumption that it would be healthier, and that the case could be closed, if it were eventually returned to its parents. This course often involves a risk, which the social worker is not always discouraged from taking although of course the real risk-taker is the child, who rarely has any say in the matter.

This illustrates another dilemma of social work, which is that its function is to reconcile people to the irreconcilable. Members of the working class — those who depend on employment for their living must endure varying degrees of deprivation which, if they become identified as social casualties by falling sick or getting old or simply being inadequate. spiral down into destitution. Social workers move among the most serious casualties to bandage them up and send them back into the fray, which rarely means anything more hopeful than returning them to the conditions which they were originally unable to cope with. For social workers and their clients, progress is often measured in the ability to pay all the bills out of a state benefit giro, to learn the knack of survival almost like Royal Marine Commandos on an endurance exercise in the wilderness. Social workers operate at the sharp end of poverty; their working life is largely a succession of slums, malnutrition, mental and physical disablement, social conflict. To come through it they need to be like commandos themselves, especially as their wilderness becomes more threatening under the government's policy of spending cuts.

And that brings us to the question of what the scapegoats are protecting the rest from. Child abuse existed a long time before the first lady social worker ventured a sensibly shod foot into a graffitied council estate. It has not been unknown in the ruling class. In the late nineteenth century the wife of the ninth Earl of Carlisle, whose home was at Castle Howard, bore eleven children and then, with her fanaticism and antagonism, drove them all away from home; two became alcoholics and all five sons came to an early death. The future twelfth Duke of Bedford was made to stand silently on one side while his parents ate. until his father dismissed him; he later committed suicide, like another of that dynasty of disturbed, unhappy people. There is some evidence that child cruelty is a repetitive problem, passed from one generation to another. As an article in Community Care (27 June 1985) said: "So many awful things may have happened to the parents that emotionally they are still children". A 1973 study Born To Fail (National Children's Bureau) — showed how some children were born into conditions of social adversity which affected every aspect of their health, family relationships and education. Another, similar investigation published in 1982 followed up this work with conclusions no more optimistic. One common result is that:

Many of the families have not been able to remain together through their difficulties and the children have been received into care of the local authority. (Children In Adversity, Peter Wedge and Juliet Essen.)

So it was not surprising when the NSPCC recently stated that there is a connection between the increase in unemployment and that of child abuse. Poverty pressure is very destructive of human relationships; the Marriage Guidance Council believes that unemployment puts an extra strain on marriages already in difficulties; two specialists at a Glasgow hospital have reported that children in the deprived districts of that city are up to 100 times more likely to suffer diseases serious enough to need hospital treatment; the Nuffield Centre at Leeds University has said that the evidence of a link between unemployment and suicide is "overwhelming".

Families which are sick, worried, sliding into the sort of desperation with which unemployment flavours their normal poverty are not serene, optimistic, healthy and they are therefore unlikely to be able to deal with what are accurately called the everyday problems of life. Accurate because under capitalism life for the vast majority of people is not an experience of joy or fulfilment but a grinding problem which they face every day. One of the sharpest elements of stress in a suffering family is its children, who have not yet been conditioned into acceptance of a world where adults have to produce wealth which they can't get at. even though they need it desperately and where a few people can be born into riches beyond measure while millions suffer deprivation. The very dependence of children makes them especially vulnerable to, and expressive of, the stresses of poverty. To an adult who has been driven into a pitch of frustration and an angry cynicism about human interests and safety children are too easy an outlet for despair. Like capitalism's other social problems, child abuse cannot be separated from its context.

What then of the family? Why doesn't it protect a child in peril, rather than acting as its prison and. perhaps, as its execution chamber? The apologists of capitalism tell us that the family is a protective, caring organ (remember the Tory campaign about supposed Victorian morality?). In fact an important part of the family's role under capitalism is to socialise its children to brain-wash them into accepting that, like their parents, one day they too will go out to work to provide for their own family. The child's real talents, its basic emotions, its need for expression, quickly become strait-jacketed into that stifling ideology. In the process the child is taught that its parents should be its protectors and confidantes; but many of them find that working-class existence is no preparation for sensitive parenthood.

What it amounts to is that the family, far from being protective, is perilously fragile When it fails, its very privacy exacerbates the problems, sometimes to the point at which a child is killed amid an angry conspiracy to conceal the awful truth that it was all too predictable and avoidable. This then is a plea for a new look at the problem of child abuse. Not just another solemn enclave of ministers and councillors and managers; a great deal of that went on after Maria Colwell was killed and out of it came an elaborate machinery of consultation and buck-passing which did not save those poor kids who have died recently. Whatever reforms are introduced are overwhelmed by the inhuman crush of capitalism's events.

So this is a plea to the people who suffer the frustrations and indignities of capitalism, who mostly come through heroically but who sometimes lash out blindly in some unspeakable act with such terrible consequences. It is a plea to turn away from scapegoats and towards an examination of this society and at what it does to human beings. It is by our decision, that the world is organised as it is. By our decision we can change it. into a great place to grow up in.

Ivan

The Stretcher Bearers (1972)

From the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

At a time when it is still the professed policy of the Heath government that we should all learn to stand on our own feet, the social services, which are seen as a crutch for social cripples, are expanding at an unprecedented pace.

In fact over the past couple of years social service has become one of the great growth industries. In local government it is already a powerful factor, with budgets which can run into several millions of pounds a year, which puts it second (although a long way second) to education. The prospect is that the power and influence of social service departments will grow and that they may become dominant at most Town Halls throughout the country.

This makes a job in social service an attractive proposition. One Director of Social Services in a London borough remembers that when he was at Oxford none of his fellow students would have dreamed of going to work in social service. Now, when he goes back to the university to lecture about his job, he finds many undergraduates prepared to consider it as readily as they would the law or industry. (A Director of Social Services in a large, busy borough can earn £10,000 a year.)

Most of this has come about after the Seebohm Report of 1968, which suggested sweeping changes in the structure and organisation of the social services. The Seebohm Report came as another stage in a long, typical development. For centuries the state has had to take some sort of an interest in social casualties like the sick, the aged, the mad. The Industrial Revolution, with its increase in population and the concentration into towns, brought its own particular problems as well as the machinery to administer them. At first government interest was comparatively slight but here, as in so many other fields, the ruling class have now accepted the economy of state intervention and after Seebohm this is here to stay.

Until the Second World War social work was often considered the field of the amateur or the part time do-gooder. It has been really discovered during the past twenty-five years, as local authorities have taken over more and more responsibilities in the field. But it all tended to happen piecemeal, with the scope of the service varying from area to area and with separate departments springing up as problems came to light, with little overall strategy or communication.

Imagine a family where the father is out of work and behind with the rent, where there are a lot of children and the mother in hospital having another. Before the Seebohm reorganisation, this family might have been attended to by an army of social workers, all coming from the same Town Hall — Education Welfare, Childrens Department, Housing, Family Welfare, Home Help, Medical Social Worker.

Now this would never do, in the age of rationalisation, in which capitalism has so diligently sought out those jobs being done by two people where one would do. Seebohm was in this tradition, something of a hatchet job. It proposed that each local authority set up a Department of Social Service responsible for such work as child care, mental welfare, home helps, the elderly and the handicapped; a few fields such as those attached to hospitals were excluded. The report described this reorganisation, in established social work jargon, as providing “. . . a community based and family orientated service, which will be available to all.”

The stated aim was to set up a service which would take care of every problem which could conceivably afflict a worker from the cradle to the grave. In each case, this service would be applied through, just one social worker instead of, perhaps, five or six as before. The Seebohm Report also gave support to social work as a profession with the status and authority of a separate department and no longer as an adjunct to the medical and education services. The result has been the mushroom growth of the powerful departments, the career structure in social work, the death of the old image of the do-gooding spinster in her flowered hat and dress.

As might have been expected, Seebohm was widely welcomed among social workers. The Report’s recommendations were largely passed into law in the Local Authority Social Services Act 1969 and now it needs only a ’phone call to suck us into the great, caring, organising, providing machinery of modern social service.

All of this sounds very comforting but what of the snags? One of these is the enormous power which social workers can exert over the lives of the people they call their clients. A social worker can exercise — or choose not to exercise — influence which can affect a family’s chance of rehousing or of help with cash grants. When a child has been ordered by a court into the care of a local authority it is the social services department which decides — without reference to anyone else — whether the child remains at home or is taken away, perhaps to what was once called an approved school but which is now known as a community home.

So this is a good time to ask what it is all about. Why does a social system which is so clearly uncaring spend so much resources on apparently caring for us? All capitalist parties, whatever incidental differences they might have, support the idea of social services. In wartime, social services have expanded and established themselves in many fresh fields. It is, of course, at such times that the ruling class place special importance upon keeping their workers as healthy and as contented as possible; hence schemes like welfare food, controlled rents, subsidised prices. These guidelines lead us to the conclusion that social service can be an effective method of keeping the working class docile, of defusing their discontents and dampening their problems by giving them the impression that capitalism cares about them.

It is no coincidence, that so many social workers are to be found in courts and town halls, the very places where capitalism is administered by its laws of privilege and suppression. When the social worker comes tripping through the front door of the problem family she does not bring only material help or emotional support (if she even brings those) but also a whole lot of advice and counselling aimed at conditioning the recipient to accepting life as a misery of denial and repression in the slum, on a worker’s poverty income.

Sometimes this counselling is mashed up with a fair measure of psychoanalysis, which qualifies it for the description of casework. This can be a fascinatingly complicated and skilful process in which the elements of a dialogue may be played backwards and forwards like an endless game of tennis which is very entertaining except that the ball becomes increasingly battered and misshapen. The really dedicated (let us not say bigoted) caseworker can move in on a family living in a rat-infested slum, where everyone is sick and apathetic, and tell them in the kindest possible way that their material problems are irrelevant. What such a caseworker would really like to toy with are the parent/child relationships in the family, whether they have all passed adequately through all the Oedipal phases, whether they were successfully pot-trained.

Help with material problems can in any case have only the limited object of helping the family tolerate the intolerable. If the electricity has been cut off because the last two bills are unpaid the social worker may try to arrange the instalment of a prepayment meter, which deals with the temptation to get behind with the bills but not with the urge to break open the coin box when times are hard. In the 19th century voluntary social workers would organise mothers’ meetings where the women were taught needlework, simple cookery and the cheapest ways of making nourishing soup. Now, there are homes where women can stay with their families while they receive expert (and it really is expert) instruction on how to survive on Social Security payouts. It is all rather like the army training shock troops to exist on iron rations in the desert.

Although most social workers accept the present order of priorities, there are many who are becoming increasingly frustrated at their function in capitalist society. Some of these have supported groups like the squatters and Claimants Unions, which has the disadvantage for them that these groups tend to become respectable with time, like the squatters who have been tamed into another office of the council housing department, with their own allocations of dwellings to find tenants for. Other social workers have set up their own underground, with its own magazine — Case Con. There are Case Con groups in many parts of the country, angrily but confusedly questioning the established concepts of social work. They are aware that capitalism needs social tranquilisers and angry at their own part in providing them; at present they have no better answer than what they call “revolutionary social work”. Despite their discontent, the Case Con adherents have yet to realise that social work is essentially aimed at meddling with the problems of capitalism and that it cannot be revolutionary because it does not operate in the political field where the revolution, which will end social work just as it will end the problems of capitalism, must be carried out.

Capitalism is a social system of privilege and repression in which insecurity, bad housing, acute poverty, are continuing symptoms of a basic condition. With some perseverance and luck a worker may survive the pressures upon him and die without too many debts or other handicaps. But in the nature of the system there must be plenty of casualties from capitalism’s assaults upon us and it is these that social workers are supposed to pick up and attend to.

It is not difficult to snipe at them, as they pick their way through the battlefield with their stretchers and bandages. Yet there are positives in their situation; like the stretcher bearers, they accept that there is need and that the condition of the people they pick up is not their own fault but that of conditions outside their immediate control. Social workers accept the concept of unconscious motivation; they accept that our behaviour has been largely fashioned for us by the situation in which we find ourselves. They also accept that social casualties should not be left in distress, that they are a communal responsibility.

Because of this, social workers have something to offer in terms of tolerance, co-operativeness and concern. Is it too optimistic, to see hope in the fact that these will be the accepted attitudes in the society of the future, when the social carnage of capitalism is an ugly memory.

Ivan

Observations: Special needs? (1986)

The Observations Column from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Special needs?

In capitalism it is money that determines whether or not people's needs are met. This principle applies to the "welfare state" as much as it does to the market for goods. But in the case of the welfare state it is the government which has the power to decide whose needs are to be met (through the allocation of resources) and at what level.

Take, for instance, draft regulations recently drawn up by the DHSS which will restrict the availability of single, or "special", needs payments to supplementary benefit claimants. At present single payments are intended to cover the cost of such essential household items as beds, cookers, heaters, basic items of furniture, and bedding. It is already extremely difficult to obtain this assistance. But the government now intends to make it even more difficult, through the new regulations which will exclude payments for such things as hot water bottles for the elderly and infirm, curtains, cleaning implements. light fittings and other basic household equipment. Certain claimants, such as squatters, will not be eligible for any such payments at all.

The reason given for the new restrictions is contained in a DHSS memorandum (Guardian, 10 June 1986) which states that "there has been since 1981 a rapid and continuous growth in single payments" and "in these circumstances the Government now proposes to bring expenditure back to around the 1984 level . . . and to ensure an orderly administration of the single payment system in the two years before the Government reform proposals take place". (The "reform" referred to is the abolition of single payments and their replacement with a "Social Fund" which will apply even more restrictive criteria to applicants).

So more people are clearly in need and are seeking extra assistance from the DHSS. What is the government’s response? Those needs are first defined as "special needs” and met on a highly selective basis, and later redefined out of existence. And this is called "social security” — part of the "welfare state".


Diagnosis

There is a man in Broadmoor, sent there for killing his wife, who is a brilliant scientist. At the time he was working in the development of guidance systems for inter-continental missiles. An obsessive man, he was liable to bouts of morbid jealousy. One day his wife could stand no more and left him. After a while he gave up his job and walked, brooding, the hundred or so miles to where she was living and there he killed her. The missiles he had been working on are each capable of wiping out hundreds of thousands of people. At his trial the judge listened to social workers, police officers and psychiatrists and it was decided that killing his wife proved that the brilliant scientist was ill and must be locked away in a hospital until he is better.


Fair cops

There is enough for the people of Greater Manchester to worry about in the colourful menace of their Chief Constable, James Anderton, without all this shock-horror-probe stuff about his deputy John Stalker.

Like most of these sordid affairs, the Stalker scandal becomes more outrageous and ruthless with the dragging out of one piece of evidence after another, which hint at corruption and intrigue at what is called A Very High Level.

It all began when Stalker was given the job of looking into the shoot-to-kill policy of the Ulster police, under which some embarrassingly innocent victims had been mown down. If Stalker took this seriously he is at variance with most of the people who have any experience of these matters, who expect as a matter of course that such enquiries are really designed to sweep a scandal under the carpet.

Whatever the truth of this, there is evidence of a campaign to undermine Stalker's standing as a high ranking policeman by showing him up as an associate of criminals and of other people with a reputation for sailing rather too close to the legal winds.

There are many people who have been arrested and harassed by Anderton's and Stalker's police who coknow what it means to be subjected to a sustained persecution. They will probably appreciate the irony in the fact that the same sinister techniques are said to be now applied to Stalker.

How outrageous a scandal is it? A social system based on the interests of a small but powerful minority cannot be open about much of what goes on in the cause of protecting the standing of that minority. Secretiveness (and the British government is noted for its obsessive concern with secrecy and an elegantly worded suppression of the truth) is endemic to capitalism. When it is demanded, the welfare — even the life — of an individual is of no account; even the most devoted servants of capitalism are expendable.

There was, to put it another way, never the slightest chance that Stalker would be allowed to lift the lid off the RUC.

Meanwhile, the workers of Manchester and of the rest of capitalist society should concern themselves with such events only to take what lessons they can from them. The police are employed as a part of capitalism's coercive, privilege protecting machinery. Their role is repression, of people and of the truth when they need to. They do this to sustain a social system which, even were it morally immaculate, without a taint of evasion or corruption, would still be unsupportable for its impoverishment, degradation and murder of millions of human beings.

We must get on with working towards the abolition of this sordid mess, leaving that odious bunch of thugs and twisters to grass each other up.

Social workers need help (1980)

The Briefing Column from the March 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1968 there was a White Paper and in 1969 there was an Act, and the Act was supposed to help children who were in trouble with the law. It was called the Children and Young Persons Act and it made a number of provisions which excited the sort of people who always get enthusiastic about proposals for some trifling reform of one of capitalism’s nastier features.

Basic to the Act was the replacement of the concept of punishment by that of care. This “care” was to encompass a comprehensive investigation into the problem child’s family background and a hoped-for improvement of it under the benevolent guidance of a local authority social worker.

This was a part of the social workers’ Golden Age. Fertilised by the reorganisation resulting from the Seebohm Report (1968), each local authority was empowered to set up a big-spending department with the stated aim of caring for all the specially disadvantaged from the moment of their birth until they died.

Well it has not turned out quite like that; the Golden Age was short-lived and now social service departments are being forced, under the programme of government cuts, to fight for many of their cherished schemes. Homes for old people and for handicapped kids; funds for equipment needed by the physically disabled such apparently desirable things are among those which are under the axe.

Even worse, the social workers’ strike last year in some areas did nothing to strengthen their case; it merely provoked a searching debate on whether they were doing a useful job for their wages. About a year ago, social work was almost a swear word among Members of Parliament.

In the case of the young offender, much of the Children and Young Persons Act is likely to wither away like a disused limb. The proposal to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 has not been, and is not likely to be, implemented. The powers to abolish Detention Centres and incorporate them into Community Homes have never been taken up. Now the Tories are planning to brutalise the Detention Centres rather than get rid of them.

The failure of the Act to arrange for young delinquents to be “treated” in their own communities is starkly illustrated by the numbers in Borstal and Detention Centres. In 1969 there were 3,046; by 1977 it had risen to 7,692.

Social work was once hailed as an effective ameliorative to many of capitalism’s problems, as a way of reconciling workers under stress to the irreconcilable. Like so many similar schemes, cruel reality has exposed it.

Ivan.