Who abuses who? (1993)

Book Review from the April 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Suffer the Little Children by Dr D.H.S Read. Medical Institute for Research into Children Cruelty, Step Rock House, St Andrews, Fife, Scotland, KY16 9AT. £15.00.

On a cold morning in February 1991 police and social workers invaded the Isles of Orkney. These pre-dawn raids, unlike those carried out by the Vikings over 1000 years earlier, though similar in that the perpetrators had the element of surprise, were carefully planned and synchronized.

Seven homes were forcibly entered and searched, and 9 children aged between 8 and 15 years were removed in a matter of minutes. For those who were to live through the following nightmare it might have seemed as if history was repeating itself. Not only was there the Viking analogy, but the events resembled in many ways the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries that also visited the islands. Indeed, witchcraft, or rather the satanic abuse of children, was what the parents and friends of the 9 children were alleged to have perpetrated.

Dr Reid’s book is a careful study of what followed in the Orkney Child Abuse Scandal, revealing much that was suppressed by child care “experts” and the media. Many pages are given over to what an advert for the book describes as “how social workers—police— the medical profession and the law courts combine to destroy innocent families in child abuse allegations”.

The recent industry in child abuse allegations is traced back to the late 1960s when:

 under the benevolent torpitude or turpitude of a Labour government, which forgot that it should protect the weak against the strong, and not the other way around, the public bureaucracies in Britain developed a life and momentum of their own. The bosses in local government, in the health service, social services and other publicly funded bodies, decided that it was time that their powers were increase.

The Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968 and the Childrens and Young Persons Act 1969 greatly increased the powers of social workers to take children into care “on the flimsiest of grounds”.The result being that there has been in excess of 50 inquiries into child abuse disasters since 1970. There was only one such inquiry before this date.

Among the hundreds of sources Dr Reid uses is an article from the Daily Telegraph Magazine of 11 January 1991:

What organisation does the following, the Stasi before 1990 or the social work child care system today in Britain?

1. Takes people into custody without warning at any time of the day or night.
2. Opens, copies and even confiscates their post. Denies them rights.
3. Keeps surveillance of more than 4 million people.
4. Has a network of informers.
5. Depends on loyalty to the system, from self-interest. And is a State within a State.
6. Is expanding at a phenomenal rate at vast cost.
7. Has no statutory provision governing or constraining some of its powers, apart from guidelines.
8. Threatens those who disagree with it.
9. Ruins many lives.
10. Says, when things go wrong: "What could I have done differently?”.

“The answer”, says Dr Reid, “is both”. And much evidence is presented to corroborate the parallel.

The book goes on to reveal one of the great contradictions when it comes to child law, which is basically that in spite of so much legislation on the subject, the child has in fact few, if any, legal rights once in the custody of the social services.

A child taken into care by social workers is compared with a criminal in police custody. Whereas the prisoner has the right to remain silent, the right to legal representation, access to a telephone, uncensored mail and contact with family, the child has no rights.

Social workers have become very dependent on “Disclosure Sessions”, so much so that the entire case for the social services in the Orkney Child Abuse Scandal rested on “evidence” extracted at them. “Disclosure Sessions", as Dr Reid points out more than once, “involve constant repeated interviews with children in which suggestions are made to children by social workers or others until the child agrees with the professional worker . . . a form of intellectual rape”.

It does not matter that the child may not have been abused, nor that the parent alleged to have committed the act may be by now suicidal. The skilled social worker will, without fail, extract evidence of abuse, and “how much more might a child agree to errors and fantasies when suddenly wrenched from his or her home environment and told that he or she will not be allowed home until he or she agrees to the story told by the inquisitor”.

There are those who maintain that children always tell the truth and cannot be made to tell lies. Dr Reid shatters this argument with plain fact. The Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, men not children, confessed to crimes they did not commit. If the well-known television presenter Stuart Hall can “admit within ten minutes of a police interview to a theft he had not carried out then we cannot expect a child to be more resistant to manipulation”.

And so the book continues. Not a stone is left unturned and no body connected with the State-established Child Abuse industry escapes criticism. That the book ends with pointers as to how to reform the system along the lines of the “Dutch model”, and does not consider the capitalist social system we are conditioned to live in, does not distract from its excellence.

John Bissett

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

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.

Capitalism: the sick society (1980)

Editorial from the July 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

To paraphrase the famous words of Marx: The experience of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of tragedies. And for every tragedy there is someone with a proposed palliative—a protester, a reformer, a counsellor—who are often described under the collective sneer of “do-gooder”.

“Do-gooders” come under the lash because they are more than patient reformers; they are busy-bodies, seeking everywhere for trouble to deal with. They excavate society’s misfits and force them, square pegs though they may be, into round holes. They flush out lame dogs and dump them, willing or not, over precipitous stiles. They are all over the place, insisting on the inherent goodness of people, even if they have to probe for it like some surgeon exploring the farthest recesses of an etherised patient’s bowel.

The reformers might argue that they are at least better than the “do-badders”—as if that were all there is to the argument. It can be conceded that “do-gooders” are anxious to involve themselves in social problems, which is preferable to trying to ignore them. They talk about a “caring society” and, although they may be confused about what that means, it can be taken as evidence of their desire for a world which looks after its people.

But further than that the “do- gooders” begin to fall apart at the theories. In many cases they attribute someone’s particular problem to some individual shortcomings or misfortune. There are, for example, still social workers who explain poverty, and the inter-reaction of this upon family relationships, by referring to an insensitive toilet training in infancy. A worker who, having been raised in a slum where only the toughest survive, is quickly aggressive will be pigeon-holed as “anti-social” or “lacking confidence in forming personal relationships” or (most damning of all) “anti-authority”.

Another glaring fallacy is the theory that social ailments can be dealt with in isolation. Bad housing, for example, is not seen as an unavoidable product of capitalism's poverty but as a mass of separate families or persons each of which has a peculiar difficulty and must be treated separately. Mental illness is regarded as arising from one person’s stressful situation when it is truer to say that it is a small fragment in the kaleidoscope of remorseless pressure in the everyday process of trying to exist in capitalist society.

The “do-gooders”, as they trudge their weary way among capitalism’s chaos and dereliction, are blind to the fact which is there in every vagrant’s eye, every city slum, every mental hospital ward. All of these problems are inter-connected; they have a common root and can be eradicated only by attacking that root.

The first matter to be considered by anyone who is concerned with social problems is the nature of society: what is its basis, how does it determine its social relationships, how does it operate? Capitalism is more than an immense collection of individual problems; it is a social system, with the basis of the private ownership of the means of living—the means of producing and distributing wealth.

The owners of the means of life are a privileged class, who employ the rest—the non-owners—in the processes of production and distribution. This privileged class are always alert to preserve and extend their superior position. Assaults against their position are outlawed by capitalism and there is a massive machinery to punish those who try to accumulate wealth outside the system’s legalities. Crime is a problem of property society.

The non-owning class depend upon selling their labour power for a living and their restricted access to wealth expresses their poverty. No member of the ruling class has this problem; none of them suffers from poor housing or involuntary’ malnutrition or vagrancy. Workers’ poverty sours their personal relationships — friendships, marriages, break up under the stress of poverty. Children are rejected and battered by parents who are unable to cope with capitalism’s demands upon them. It is hard for affection to survive in a slum.

It is not surprising that so many workers react to these pressures by trying to escape. Youngsters look for an identity apart from the uniformity of wage slavery in the mob—punks, teddy boys, football hooligans. Or they seek an outlet for their frustrations, or some mark of distinction, in a fantasy of violence. Others retreat into drugs, which can dull the effects of this insecure world and for a while offer an apparently stress-free personality.

Like any attempt to escape from reality, this response is unhelpful. Yet when it is faced, the reality of capitalism is not so hopeless; all that is needed to end this tragic state of things entirely is for the very people who endure it all to cry enough. It needs the working class to resolve to abolish the root cause of their misery and to replace capitalism with socialism, a society based on the common ownership of the means of living and free access to wealth. Socialists have faced this reality and we are confident that only socialism offers hope.