Reflection

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Part III

Developing critical practices within

the organisational context of social

work

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Doing Critical Social Work : Transformative Practices for Social Justice, edited by Bob Pease, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=6215114. Created from uow on 2024-05-21 11:51:05.

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Beyond the dominant approach to mental health

practice

Noel Renouf

Introduction

Good critical social work practice has proved to be very challenging in the mental health field. This chapter will focus on social work practice within specialised mental health services, which are actually concerned less with mental health than with mental disorder and control (Vassilev & Pilgrim 2007). Much of the challenge relates to the pervasiveness of medical discourses that frame the way that mental distress is assessed and the treatment response. Mental health services rely substantially on coercive power, especially around involuntary treatment, with pervasive attention to the management of ‘risk’.

This chapter outlines an approach to mental-health social work practice that focuses on the circumstances of people affected by mental distress and distur- bance, and is based on establishing respectful relationships with consumers and their families to support change. ‘In Australia, the term “consumer” is used to describe those people who use, have used or, when help has been sought, have been refused use of mental health services’ (Olsen & Epstein 2012: 279). Of the core principles of critical social-work practice outlined by Allan (2009), working alongside people who experience oppression and marginalisation is the most

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fundamental principle in the mental health field. Work of this kind requires an awareness of power relationships, and challenges assumptions and beliefs that are taken for granted and dominate the mental health field. Social work practice that is fundamentally committed to a partnership with consumers and their families goes beyond the dominant mental health discourse, even while it takes place within the mental health system. This chapter describes how this works in practice, paying particular attention to some areas of strategic importance: recovery-based prac- tice, working with involuntary treatment, and forming alliances for promoting social justice and system change.

Working beyond the dominant discourse

The mental health system is dominated by the discourse of psychiatry which combines with organisational imperatives to regulate and constrain the type of ‘services’ that are provided. In so doing, this combination determines the way that we are led to think about mental distress and disturbance. This has been aptly described as the ‘bureau-medicalisation’ of mental health care (Nathan & Webber 2010). However, the field is contested and there are contending and overlapping discourses of lesser prominence: human rights, the consumer and carer movements, social perspectives, and the new discourse of recovery.

In the public mental health service in Trieste, Italy, one of the espoused principles of practice is to put each person’s mental illness ‘into parenthesis’ or brackets. The point is to move the centre of attention away from the diagnosis to focus instead on each person’s ‘human reality’ (Norcio et al. 2001). The person (not the illness) is at the centre of things. A similar principle is contained within the emphasis given by the consumer and family carer movements to the ‘lived experience’ of mental illness (Bland, Renouf & Tullgren 2015). Social workers need to learn about and value the lived experience of the people they work with. This is the starting point for critical mental-health social work practice. Engaging with the particular lived experiences of consumers and families is more important than the ‘treatment’ of ‘illness’.

Consumers and their families all have different understandings of mental health, and some fit more easily than others into the dominant medical paradigm. Diagnoses are sometimes very liberating, serving to make sense of painful and perplexing experiences. Yet it is possible to accept the reality of distress and disturbance without necessarily agreeing with the way that mental illness is constructed and understood by psychiatry and mental health services. Rather, an agnostic view about the classifi- cation and causes of mental illness and, in practice, a ‘not-knowing’ position allows

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much more openness to the expressed experiences of consumers. Attention can then be paid to the experience itself and the ‘illness’ is in parentheses.

In conducting mental health assessments, for example, an assumption that the problem lies primarily within the individual tends to skew the focus more towards the form of the distress than to its content and context, leading us to note the pres- ence of symptoms (delusions, depressive thoughts and so on). What we look for profoundly affects what we see. Unless we listen properly and try to understand the meaning of such experiences in the lives of consumers, they may experience the assessment quite literally as a systematic process of not being listened to.

Practice example: careful use of language

Because the medical discourse is carried through language, social workers in the field should watch their own language very carefully. One strategy is to regard the language of diagnosis and treatment almost as a ‘foreign’ language; one that needs to be learned in order to function well in the system, but not the language to use at ‘home’, doing social work. An expert grasp of the language can allow us to help consumers make sense of what is occurring, and help us to amplify the voice of consumers within the system to maximise the way it can be acted upon. This applies to the language of psychiatry and expert knowledge about the mental health system; assessment processes and criteria for example. Such are the pressures on the system that social workers often find themselves in the position of supporting consumers to gain access to mental health treatment and care.

Our language will always be ‘person-first’ such as a ‘person with a diagnosis of schizophrenia’ rather than ‘schizophrenic’, to put it very simply. People experi- encing distress and disturbance are people first in the sense that there are many other things going on in their life aside from mental illness. Great care needs to be taken to ensure that our language reflects the fact that it is the person, not the illness, that we work with.

The language of diagnosis and ‘helping’ powerfully constructs identity. In everyday practice, such language is ‘used to formulate the “case history”, which is elaborated in reports, referral documents and multitudinous files you construct about us, usually without our knowledge or contribution. Such cascading descriptions can become the dominant stories told about us, entrapping us in our problem- satuated lives and future prospects (Bland, Renouf & Tullgren 2015:37).

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Language can be very slippery, of course. It is striking to witness the re-badging of Australian mental health services as being recovery-focused with little (if any) funda- mental change to their mode of operation.

Being aware of the operations of power can inform how we use language because power imbalances between staff and patients in a mental health system find their way into the language used by staff in small interactions, sometimes by effectively giving orders, sometimes by presuming to ‘know’, or understand the consumer’s experience, sometimes by presuming to use terms of endearment. In little ways like this, the pattern of control in mental health services is expressed in seemingly benign language and reproduced through relationships, which may have a profound impact on the person’s ability to regain control over the rest of their life (Melville-Wiseman 2012).

Psychiatry seeks to associate certain inner experiences with illness, and provide treatment accordingly. Part of the weakness of this approach is its inadequate classi- fication systems, which have failed to produce a stable and reliable basis for diagnosis and treatment (Bentall 2014). Further, it is based in an explanatory system that tends to discount the meaning of experience and relies instead on the authority of medical knowledge and action. Critical psychiatrists (such as those associated with ‘post-psychiatry’) have responded by adopting an approach that seeks to respond to the meaning of specific symptoms of people as they experience them with less reliance on the medical model of classification and diagnosis (Thomas & Bracken 2004). This is the most pertinent and powerful critiques to come from outside the mental health professions.

Practice example: hearing voices

Hearing voices is one aspect of the experience of (some) mental illness, but the voice hearing ‘movement’ provides an exemplary approach to practice beyond the dominant medical paradigm. Hearing voices is quite common in the general popu- lation—‘roughly 5% to 15%’ of adults (Beavan, Read & Cartwright 2011: 289). Some people cope well with their voices but many mental health consumers find them to be extremely distressing, disruptive and difficult to control, tending to echo and intensify suffering, despair and previous traumatic experiences such as bullying, sexual abuse and loss. Lives are disrupted and constricted, and the most ordinary activities may require ongoing reserves of conscious willpower (Kalhovde, Elstad & Talseth 2013).

An emancipatory movement of and for people who hear voices has developed that is based on the work of Romme and others (Romme & Escher 1989). One of

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their fundamental insights was to argue that voices should not necessarily be elimi- nated but instead that the person should be supported in making sense of the voice experiences:

hearing voices is a meaning-ful experience; its first lesson is that voice- hearing is not a meaning-less symptom of an underlying illness or disease, but a key part of a person’s identity (Woods 2013: 264).

In this way, the inner experience of people hearing distressing voices can be linked with and reflect intense difficulties in their interpersonal and intimate relationships as well as reflect their persecuting, marginalising and ostracising experiences in society.

Groups for people who hear voices may be run by voice hearers or facilitated by professionals. Activities typically include sharing the experiences of hearing voices (what they say, what it is like), discussion of explanatory frameworks for hearing voices (where the voices come from), exploring the meaning of voices in the broader context of the person’s life history, exploring and sharing practical strategies for acceptance and change (such as dialogue with the voices), setting boundaries to chal- lenge the power of voices, and not taking them literally. Such groups are often also a place to develop distraction and self-soothing strategies, reflect on recovery stories and explore hopes and dreams (Voices Vic 2009).

The important practice principle here is the focus on the experience, and providing real practical support for managing distressing and disruptive aspects of what might be regarded otherwise as simply a ‘symptom’ for ‘treatment’. The person who experiences the ‘symptom’ becomes an expert by experience.

If critical psychiatry moves the focus away from diagnosis towards the phenom- enology of ‘symptoms’ such as voices, what marks out the approach of critical social work practice in mental health is its focus on the social context and social conse- quences of mental health problems, and its fundamental concern with social justice. Social work practice in mental health takes place within the context of relationships. We are all social beings and each life is embedded in that of others. Whatever the impact of biology, there is rarely a psychiatric crisis without a wider context. Social workers have always recognised in their work that recovery takes place within rela- tionships and environments. Because of its different focus, mental health social work can operate alongside psychiatry without offering a real challenge. Critical social work practice, however, is based in a social model (both relational and structural) that challenges the dominant medicalisation model.

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Relationships with therapeutic potential

There is a lot of talk about partnership principles in the mental health field, but much of it is superficial. Removing the medical-model lens is a necessary but not sufficient step for authentic engagement. Relationships of the right kind are both the foundation for effective helping and are helpful in themselves. A large recent Australian study found that two-thirds of people who are diagnosed with a psychotic illness reported that their illness made it difficult to maintain close relationships; nearly a quarter reported feeling isolated and lonely; one in eight had no friends at all; and the same number had never known someone they could confide in (Sane Australia 2011).

The quality of the relationship will depend on many factors, including the person- ality and wishes of the consumer, and will require the willingness and capacity of each social worker to draw upon their own personal attributes and risk emotional vulner- ability. Therapies need to be capable of acknowledging and responding sensitively to trauma, abuse and neglect where it has occurred. Some therapeutic approaches are more consistent with critical practice than others. Critical practice problematises the structure of the relationship between worker and client. Dialogue is encouraged in preference to the re-statement of a single-minded view of the situation, which tends to focus on the consumer’s behaviour and diagnosis (Seikkula & Arnkil 2006).

To use narrative practice as a brief example, many first-person accounts of recovery provide strong examples of narratives that run in opposition to previously dominant ‘illness’ narratives, which generally relate to something ‘inside’ the person. In narrative practice, externalising conversations about the influence of experiences associated with mental illness (such as voices, the symptoms of depression, alcohol and drug use, and so on) help to illuminate the person’s effect on the problem as much as the problem’s effect on the person. Re-authoring conversations aim to build ‘full histories of resistance to the problem and of sources of inspiration and meaning’ (Hamkins 2005: 9). A narrative approach may support people with symptoms such as voices to construct the story of their experiences; this is a simple, powerful process of formulation by the voice hearer (Place, Foxcroft, & Shaw 2011). Much of the power of narrative approaches comes from their strongly respectful and ethical position, and their concern with the history, culture and context that affects people’s lives.

Among psychosocial approaches in the contemporary mental health system, there is a clear preference for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and current policy in Australia is shaping mental health social work accordingly, especially outside the public-sector services. Some consumers express a strong preference for CBT but, so neat is its fit with the dominant diagnosis–treatment medical paradigm, that

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social workers who use these techniques need to take particular care to be critically reflective. This is necessary to ensure that they work with consumers in a genuinely dialogic manner. Critical reflection of this kind will most likely lead to a change in practice.

The really important thing is an attitude of respectful curiosity about the experiences of the other person, not just what has been happening to them, but also their personal responses and emotions, or what is happening within. Often, depending on how much consumers choose to share this information, the social worker needs to be able to hear about and to bear intense inner pain and torment. Really respectful relationships of this kind have therapeutic potential if the social worker has the capacity to pay close empathic attention and engage with these feel- ings in a sustained manner over time. It is not just a matter of doing things with the person; it is about being with them (Waddell 1989). It is hard to illustrate this work simply, but there are some good published accounts of sustained social work practice of this kind, drawing upon psychodynamic principles (Kanter 2000; Keeping 2008). Disinterest or even hostility to the inner world is inconsistent with an approach to critical social work that aims to understand and connect with the real experiences of people with mental illness. This inevitably involves inner disturbance, turmoil and pain. This has been described as a ‘human being with’ rather than an ‘opera- tional doing to’ approach (Bailey 2002: 177). We bear witness to these experiences, acknowledging a responsibility to take action in response.

At the same time, the ‘meaning’ of experiences includes the way in which dimen- sions of social structure such as class, gender, race and culture, are played out in the lives of both consumers and workers. Social inequality and individual psychology are related ‘like a lock and key’ (Wilkinson & Pickett 2010: 33). For example, if a consumer is diagnosed with ‘depression’ following an accident at a poorly paid job, the plain fact that needs acknowledgement is that poverty and unsafe work practices give rise to psychological distress and disturbance. This is part of the meaning and the cause of the ‘symptoms’. To act as if it is simply a case of an illness called ‘depres- sion’ is a powerful denial of this personal and social reality, and obliterates meaning.

Entering into the consumer’s own story is a way of cutting across prejudices and avoiding being an organisational ‘functionary’ (Parton & O’Byrne 2000). It requires tremendous commitment because, in addition to the personal resources required, it will often tend to bring the social worker up against bureaucratic requirements. It may not be humanly possible for the social worker to sustain this level of engage- ment with the numbers of people on their ‘caseload’ in many agencies. The welfare of consumers and workers is interrelated and interdependent (Spandler 2013).

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‘Recovery’

The concept of recovery, which has become a consistent unifying theme in contem- porary mental health policies and services, has radical implications and, even as more and more services adopt the rhetoric, the radical implications are becoming clearer. As Slade puts it:

People with mental illness don’t need treatment; they need a life. Treatment may [be] a means, not an end . . . The overarching principle of recovery is that the impoverished expectations, clinical preoccupa- tions, and stigmatising beliefs sometimes held by mental health workers should not preclude everyday ways of addressing common human problems (Slade 2012: 704).

Mental health professionals can neither define nor bring about someone’s recovery; the best they can do is to support it. In practice, this will often mean help with dealing with distress and disturbance, but more often than not it means supporting everyday practical solutions to everyday problems related to how much money that people have to live on, work, issues with family and friends, living arrangements and so on.

Recovery is related to a person’s place in society. It involves ‘simply being let in’ (Davidson et al. 2001), but achieving this under existing social conditions is not simple. Essential components identified by Davidson and his colleagues include friendship, feeling like a worthwhile human being through meaningful activity, and hopefulness through an affirmative stance adopted by professionals and others in the person’s world. Social factors can be critical in enabling recovery; factors such as empowerment and control over one’s life, connectedness (including both inter- personal relationships and social inclusion) and rebuilding positive identities (often within the context of stigma and discrimination). These can be addressed in work with individuals, families and communities (Tew et al. 2012).

Some of the ideas about recovery in common use put so much emphasis on indi- vidual meaning and narrative that the social and political connections are ignored or lost. Recovery discourse can be used in a way that individualises people’s problems and, if they do not ‘recover’, this can be seen as yet another individual ‘deficiency’. In this way, ‘the recovery model, inadvertently perhaps, decontextualises the environ- ment of poverty, deprivation and unemployment, let alone long-term sequelae of a childhood marked by abuse, parental mental health problems and so on’ (Webber 2011: 27).

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Actually, it is a struggle for both consumers and workers to ‘get into a recovery position’ but it can be facilitated, in part, precisely through the kind of democratic dialogical relationship described above (Cameron & McGowan 2012). There are implications, of course, for the power relationship between mental health workers and consumers. From the point of view of social work practice, it means being both willing and able to treat the encounter as an essentially human relationship, ‘relin- quishing the omnipotent, but a delusional belief that recovery is something which can be prescribed according to the dominant yet misconceived theoretical presup- positions of a particular discipline or mind set’ (Cameron & McGowan 2012: 28).

Working with involuntary consumers

Almost all mental-health social work involves actual or potential use of statutory authority. Critical social work practice cannot evade the question of how that authority is exercised. It is no solution to try to leave all of the exercise of authority to other members of the mental health team. As Weinstein (2013) has argued, ‘just because statutory powers can be used carelessly or callously does not mean that authority should not be used when people are at risk’.

Voluntary or involuntary status is not the absolute concept in the context of mental-health service systems, nor does it fundamentally determine the quality of the working relationship. So pervasive is the use of statutory power that its shadow casts over all work in the public mental health system. In practice, the issues of safety and risk, as they affect the consumer and those who are close to them (children, part- ners, parents, etc.) are often complex, and the best decisions require careful thought and moral courage. Writing in the ‘critical best practice’ tradition, Ferguson (2008) has advanced the concept of ‘good authority’, which involves a knowledgeable and sensitive use of self on the part of the worker, and a deep and continual awareness of their role and responsibilities. This is combined with the skill to be clear, honest and direct (but not punitively blunt) about why difficult questions need to be asked and difficult decisions may need to be made. This is exactly the kind of authority that can be exercised best in the context of the kind of relationship described in this chapter. Its focus is on the politics of the situation (including interpersonal politics) rather than normalising judgement.

Critical social work practice applies a strong human-rights perspective to work with involuntary consumers. This requires detailed knowledge of mental health, guardianship and other relevant legislation, clarity about exactly what the law allows and requires, the knowledge and experience to know how much discretion may be allowed, and the determination to ensure that the legal limits of the mandate are not exceeded.

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Practice example: involuntary treatment

Almost all mental health legislation asserts the principle of least restriction. While there may be no choice about the fact of involuntary treatment, what is the least restrictive setting for the treatment: hospital or community? Specifically, what crea- tive arrangements may be made to make community treatment a realistic option (respite from an aversive living situation, for example, or short-term arrangements for additional support from others such as family members or clinical staff)?

If treatment will be in hospital, what is the best possible way to get to the hospital? It will often be possible here to ensure that choice is available and respected. There can be all the difference in the world between being driven by a family member or friend, going by ambulance, or being brought in by police.

We tend to assume that our role is to ‘manage’ risk by seeking to minimise or even eliminate it; an impossible idea, but one so pervasive that it might be considered ‘the new clinical model’ for mental health services (Holmes 2013). Yet this approach tends to draw attention away from the positive benefits of considered risk-taking for clients and their families (Ramon 2005). Risk avoidance in the absence of risk-taking is not an effective strategy for human change. The capacity and right to take risks reflects an empowered position and is an essential element of recovery. So risk is not just something to be avoided. Rather, what is required is a thoughtful approach to risk-taking, with the right balance of risks and protective factors. This will look different for different people in different situations.

Mental-health social workers will be called upon to make assessments of risk. A ‘positive’ risk assessment will focus on the benefits, advantages and opportunities of a particular course of action as well as addressing the areas of risk, concern and potential harm. The aim is to do what is necessary to minimise harm while working towards the best likelihood of positive outcomes. It is important that we actively ask about the effects of what we do, conscious that ‘well-meaning’ actions will often have disempowering consequences. In these and other situations, we aim to position ourselves as accountable allies with consumers, rather than experts acting on or even regulating them.

Alliances for change

The development of effective consumer and carer activism and advocacy has been one of the most significant changes in the mental health field. A decade ago, Beresford and Croft (2004: 53) argued that ‘social work is unlikely to develop a more emancipatory role, unless social work practitioners . . . develop much closer links

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and alliances with service users and their organisations and movements’. This is the most important challenge for the profession in a complex service system, but one that mental health social workers as a group have not been able to meet. The most effective recent Australian campaign by social workers concerned access to health care rebates (Mendes et al. 2012) had an overwhelming element of self-interest and weak alliances with consumers.

So strong is the relationship between social inequality and psychological distress and disorder, that almost any action that reduces inequality will have a positive effect on mental health. This chapter has focused on work within the mental health system where the breadth of the domain of mental health social work, if combined with a genuine depth of engagement with the real-world concerns of consumers and their families, forms the basis for genuine alliances. There are many pressing priorities, including the quality of mental health services themselves, which are regarded by many consumers as an environment for discrimination and re- traumatisation. Violence towards women in psychiatric inpatient wards is a specific example. There are other strategic opportunities for advancing the human rights of people with a mental illness, including reducing the reliance on physical and chemical restraints, strengthening ‘advance directives’ which are drawn up when a person is legally competent to say what their preferences for support and treatment are at times of mental disturbance (Topp & Thomas 2008), and challenging the reliance on involuntary treatment as a mainstay of the mental health system. This is something that has been achieved in Trieste, for example, where the ‘illness’ is in parentheses.

Conclusion

Although challenging, critical practice is by far the most satisfying approach to mental health social work. It is engaged and principled, and it requires skill, persis- tence and courage. Critical practice engages with the mental health system itself and develops detailed knowledge and skill in its language, policies and procedures, and therapeutic approaches, without accepting or cooperating with its premises and assumptions. Instead, the approach described in this chapter seeks to use a social model to achieve genuine and therapeutic partnerships with consumers and their families in a manner that does not reproduce the dominant operation of power rela- tionships in the mental health system.

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Embedding critical social work in child protection

practice

Robyn Miller

Introduction

Social workers in child protection and family services work can have a potent effect when promoting the human rights of family members. Power is implicit and explicit in the statutory child protection role and the ethical, wise use of that authority has initiated a rights-based practice approach and whole-of-system reform in Victoria over the past decade. This chapter focuses on the critical social work principles that have contributed to reform at an overall policy level, and the frontline practice at a more detailed level, in Victoria. I argue that the ‘doing’ of critical social work in a statutory context is essential when considering the structural disadvantage and complexity of child abuse and neglect.

The Victorian reforms have challenged the earlier polarised position of child protection being child-focused and forensic, and family services being parent- focused and supportive. The social exclusion and structural inequality experienced by many families in the child protection system requires both a child-focused and a family-centred approach. Practitioners need to have emotional intelligence, intellectual rigour, and systemic support to critically reflect on their practice. The reforms promoted a joined-up system in local areas, with a shared-partnership

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and strength-based practice. This has been a deliberate strategy, in contrast to the ‘bureaucratisation’ of child protection. As I discuss the ‘doing’ of critical social work from my perspective as a practitioner who has provided practice leadership within child protection in Victoria for the past eight years, I am aware of the limitations and inherent bias. However, I remain passionate and committed to the importance of critical social work’s contribution to both policy and practice in this challenging, yet most rewarding field of practice.

Does critical theory fit in a statutory context?

Allan (2009: 4) gives a powerful reminder that ‘it should be stated at the outset that the term “critical theory” does not designate a unified theoretical perspective. It is a term that embraces a variety of different theoretical positions’.

The Canadian work of Donna Baines’ (2007) ‘anti-oppressive practices’ and Bob Mullaly’s (2007) ‘new structural social work’ are influenced by postmodern ideas and provide useful conceptualisations for statutory practitioners. Turbett stresses that the use of authority in a statutory child protection setting aligns with radical social work practice ‘if one believes that child protection, and, indeed, social work as a whole, has a positive function’(Turbett 2014: 79). Turbett highlights the need for practitioners’ open acknowledgement of the differences in power inherent in statutory work, and the need for practitioners to display openness, honesty and reliability in their interactions with families. Turbett situates relationship building, which is central to Victoria’s case practice model, within a radical social work perspective, noting that a practitioner who blames the client for their circumstance may find it difficult to build a good working relationship with that client and in doing so, compromise their ability to best serve the client’s interests.

June Allan’s position that critical social work is key in addressing issues of social justice and equality (Allan 2009: 40), is one that inspires me and fits the contempo- rary statutory context in Victoria. Her list of core principles that provide a common ground for different approaches to critical social work are relevant to the Best Interests Case Practice Model that has been used in Victoria since 2008 (see Chapter 1).

Allan also draws on the work of Yeatman (1998) and Healy (2001) to remind us that we should not overlook the sometimes invisible, effective forms of activist work that can be found among government bureaucrats (Allan 2009: 43). This activist work has been evident within the Department of Human Services (DHS) bureaucracy; to develop and implement innovative policy that is informed by current research in order to effectively guide practice. Baines (2007) also notes that, to increase possibil- ities for social justice, managerial and supervisory positions need to be taken up by

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critical social workers. I would add that in Victoria, the critical social work values and expertise shown by key leaders within government and non-government settings, who persisted to effect social change, were intrinsic to the incremental success of the system-wide reforms (KPMG 2011; DHS 2013). These remain a work in progress in this state.

The reforms in Victoria have shifted the practice culture towards a different model. This new model is one that both engages families (which wasn’t being achieved well before) and partners with other services. This practice shift fits with Allan’s (2009) core principle of working alongside oppressed and marginalised populations. Prevention and the need to intervene earlier is prioritised. This is in contrast to previous approaches which involved regular risk assessment of children and moni- toring of the perceived risk, through a procedural, task-focussed approach. This shift is towards a practice orientation that is influenced by neuroscience’s evidence about the impact of neglect and cumulative harm on the child’s voice and experience. Stability for children and their development are prioritised as key considerations under the legislation and practice model, across program silos and sectors, rather than the previously narrow focus on immediate safety.

The historical context

The social construction, causes and meaning of child maltreatment and professional views regarding the most appropriate interventions, have historically been under- pinned by the notions of blame and anxiety. The pendulum has swung in different directions over time from blaming children, to blaming parents, social workers or the system (Scott & Swain 2002). Earlier theories were influenced by psychodynamic psychotherapists who conceptualised child abuse as being primarily a disorder of the parent–child attachment that had roots in the parent’s early childhood experi- ence. Of note, by the 1970s, Gil (1970) and Gelles (1973) strongly critiqued the parental psychopathology model and developed a structural model that prioritised the significance of social circumstances, such as poverty, unemployment, racism, violence and marginalisation impacting on children and families involved with statutory services.

Robin Clark (1988; 1997; 1998), a preeminent social worker and leader in child protection, highlighted in her work the structural inequalities and over-representation of poor families. Clark critiqued the policy settings of the day and was a strong advocate for a refocusing of services in Victoria to better meet the needs of vulnerable families: ‘Large numbers of unsubstantiated reports preoccupy the child protection staff and divert attention from those children most in need. The Child Protection

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Service is being asked to respond to an increasing number of families and children, where a short-term investigative service, is not the answer’ (Clark 1988: 219).

Thorpe (1994) also critiqued the Australian child protection culture, which had a disproportionate number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and single parents who became the focus of the child protection system. Reflecting on the lack of partnership, Armytage, Boffa and Armitage (1998) who were then employed within the DHS, identified the alienation of non-government support agencies and other services by earlier child protection practices that claimed the expert position. They were instrumental in developing earlier partnership approaches and also the well- regarded Victorian Risk Assessment Framework (VRF), which has subsequently been integrated into the Best Interests Case Practice Model (BICPM) (Miller 2012). The lack of analysis of the policy framework and possible alternatives has also received comment from experts in child protection. For example, Dorothy Scott elegantly summarised the dilemma commenting in The Australian newspaper that: ‘It is not the people working in child protection who are at fault; it is the policy framework in which they operate that is fatally flawed. Rarely is this examined. Instead, more money is poured into bigger child protection systems and more inappropriate refer- rals flood in’ (Scott 2007).

Scott (2009) critiqued the overloading of child protection services, noting that in Australia, only one in five notifications is substantiated or believed to be child abuse and neglect. She strongly advocates a public health approach, requiring an under- standing of the underlying social determinants of child abuse and neglect, just as we would with any other public health issue.

Unless proactive strategies are identified to support practice, a more rigid and bureaucratic system can become the reactive response to managing increased demand on the ground. The outcome of such rigidity can be unnecessary statutory intervention in the lives of families who may already be marginalised. For example, Mansell et al. (2011), and Higgins and Katz (2008) have reported the damaging impact of such unwarranted intervention.

Vulnerable children and young people need creative, flexible, dynamic and skilled social work practice. Munro (2010) from the UK has also written about the media’s influence on the mistakes made by statutory child protection systems and the increase in regulatory and risk-averse responses which lower the threshold for statutory intervention.

In order to foster creative, flexible and dynamic practice culture, practitioners need to be supported to think critically and to enact social-justice values that underpin our profession. Establishing this culture requires strong leaders within the policy and bureaucratic domains as well as in operational practice.

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‘Doing’ critical social work at a system-wide level

The Children, Youth and Families Act 2005 (enacted in 2007) articulated a set of Best Interests Principles for the Children’s Court, child protection and family services, to place the best interests of children as paramount while aiming to provide the widest possible assistance to the family. For the first time, the legislation focused on the development of children and cumulative harm, and the rights of Aboriginal families were specified. The willingness of government- and non-government-sector leaders to engage with the legacy of colonisation and the ongoing over-representation of Aboriginal children, in both the child protection and youth justice services as a rights issue, was significant.

Child FIRST and Integrated Family Services is a major element within the Child and Family Service system reforms in Victoria. After a statewide consultation, eval- uation and critical reflection at multiple levels, this strategy focused on radically redesigning the service system to intervene earlier to prevent harm, and to divert families from child protection. Building on the evidence from earlier successful pilots, it was significant to note that from 2002 to 2007 the funding to family service agencies in Victoria almost trebled, which increased their capacity to provide a service for longer where needed and possible, given the demand. Community-based child protection practitioners are now co-located with the Child FIRST sites around the state in local areas, improving collaborative practice, and alliances have been established in each sub-region.

Instead of separate agencies and silos between family services and child protec- tion services, agreement was reached that a lead agency would provide a visible point of contact and coordinate intake processes, joint professional training and reflective practice sessions. It was agreed that more vulnerable families would be prioritised and require outreach services. Muriel Bamblett from Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency (VACCA), through her powerful presentations and ongoing dialogue, also challenged the commitment of government and non-government agencies to ‘walk’ more of the cultural competence ‘talk’. The first Commissioner for Aboriginal Children and Young People, Andrew Jackomos, was appointed in Victoria in 2013, and the continuing attention on cultural planning and outcomes for Aboriginal chil- dren in care remain sharply in focus.

Victorian services use the BICPM that has been collaboratively developed and endorsed across sectors. The model symbolises the increased partnerships and inte- gration of services and creates a shared language and commitment to systemic, relationship-based practice.

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Figure 1: Best Interests Case Practice Model (BICPM)

Source: Miller (2012: 5: )

The essence of the BICPM is simple: the child and family are at the centre and the process of what we do as practitioners, and how we do it effectively, is symbolised in a circular and dynamic way. Practice is not a linear process where we tick boxes on computers. The BICPM acknowledges the structural inequalities inherent in the work with vulnerable families and of the interpersonal skills required to be effec- tive. There is a BICPM summary guide, one-page practice tools, and a series of ten specialist practice resources, many of which have been co-authored by colleagues from the Australian Institute of Family Studies and are used by other jurisdictions. These resources are freely available online.

The BICPM positions practice as iterative, interactive, and a practice that requires practitioners to be intelligently responsive to emerging information. The model acknowledges forensically astute practice in which risk is skilfully assessed. As noted by Dumbrill, failing to take an ‘investigative and policing’ approach when necessary and, on occasion, to remove a child from their home, will ‘ultimately fail the children they serve, and failing to protect a child who was relying on a social worker to protect them from harm has to be considered oppressive’ (Dumbrill 2011: 53). However, Victoria continues to have the lowest rate of children in care compared to other states, and effort is made to keep children within their family wherever possible.

While there is an inevitable difference in power that is at its most explicit in statutory child protection, if this is respectfully transparent and the practitioner’s engagement is skilful, the partnership with families and young people towards safety is generally possible. Research that has looked at the factors that lead to change in

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families where children have been at risk, consistently highlights the significance of the quality of relationships between children, families and practitioners (Department of Health, UK, 1995; McKeown 2000; De Boer & Coady 2007; Brandon et al. 2008; Furlong 2013; Trotter 2013).

The BICPM has consistently embedded the critical importance of culturally safe practice and the healing power of connection to culture. The lens of culture is not conceptualised as an ‘add-on’. Instead, it is the lens through which everything else should be understood. This does not mean that practice in regions is necessarily immediately improved by such a document. As Fixsen et al. noted, ‘it is clear that paperwork in file cabinets plus manuals on shelves do not equal putting innovations into practice with benefits to consumers’ (Fixsen et al. 2005: 6). Regular cross-sector training opportunities based on BICPM, the development of practice tools and the continued focus on practitioners receiving personal supervision are some of the efforts being made to promote the understanding and use of the model in practice. These training opportunities have been well received.

Judy Atkinson, from the contextual perspective of Aboriginal experiences of violence and healing from trauma, writes powerfully of the transgenerational transmission of trauma that results from colonisation and genocide: ‘These create chronic endemic crisis. Government interventions may increase the trauma’ (Atkinson 2002: 83). The BICPM stresses that practitioners remain committed to not repeating the oppression of the past and understand the impact of the dispos- session of Aboriginal lands and language, and the cruel impact of having their children taken away. At the same time, there is a clear message from Aboriginal leaders such as Muriel Bamblett, that the expectations around safety should not be seen as less of a right for Aboriginal children today, and that there should not be higher thresholds for intervention where the pendulum swings the other way, and children are harmed through a lack of response from professionals. This is an ongoing conversation in Victoria.

Systemic changes and improvement

Practice that privileges building good working relationships with families requires a stable workforce that develops the experience and knowledge of new practi- tioners. This was an ongoing issue prior, during and following the development of the BICPM. The rate of frontline practitioners leaving the profession in the years prior to 2009 was around 26 per cent per annum, which was clearly unsustainable. This contributed to broad concerns about the performance and competence of the program. However, over the past six years, through very purposeful actions that

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demonstrate support for practitioners, the exit rate of frontline practitioners has reduced markedly to a healthier 12–15 per cent.

Concurrent strategies that promote good practice and a learning culture have made a difference, despite a 14 per cent increase in demand on services from new reports each year. The new operating model in child protection, which was intro- duced in 2012, created structures to enable improved practice. It has established specialist senior practitioner positions in every team, strengthened supervision and regular reflective practice sessions, and increased support of new practitioners with more experienced practitioners who work with the most challenging situations.

Significantly, DHS has also funded postgraduate training in child and family practice, provided by a consortia of universities. Over 300 professionals in child protection and family services have enrolled in this training in the past five years.

Leadership support and training has been a feature of the reforms, as it is one of the key ways to enable good outcomes with families. The modelling, the way we talk about families, and the attitudes towards other professionals permeate the work culture, and are prevalent in formal supervision and meetings. The team culture is more powerful than any training, and the way social justice is enacted within a statutory context is very much influenced by it. Supervisors’ attitudes and conceptu- alisations powerfully shape less experienced practitioners.

All of these professional development actions have had a coherent focus on crit- ical reflection, which stems from earlier work and literature on reflective practice. Are we walking our talk or is it just rhetoric and jargon? The difference between what we say we do (espoused theory) and what we actually end up doing in action (theory in use) is central to Argyris and Schon’s work: the theory which actually governs his [sic] actions is his [sic] theory-in-use, which may or may not be compatible with his [sic] espoused theory; furthermore, the individual may or may not be aware of the incompatibility (Argyris & Schon 1974: 7).

The ways in which individuals can be made aware of these discrepancies in their own professional situation was the subsequent creation of what Schon (1983) went on to name ‘reflective practice’.

However, as Furlong observed, while the directors of agencies and those who set the development of agencies are in a unique position to influence the attitude and skill set of employees, ‘this is not a ‘monkey-see-monkey-do’ exercise, staff are not robots and may kick back against unwelcome change’ (Furlong 2013: 209). Of note, evaluations have found that practitioners across sectors have had a positive response to the BICPM, despite the practical implementation and demand problems, because it provides a shared language and understanding, and it aligns with the social justice values that inspired many people to work in the field. It aspires to integrate evidence

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from research and critical reflection at every phase of practice. An independent evaluation undertaken by KPMG (2011) made an overarching

finding that outcomes of the reforms ‘are extremely positive’ and suggest that the intent of the reforms is being met. KPMG note: ‘This suggests that the quality of case work is improving, as is the relationship with community-based services (such as Child FIRST and Integrated Family Services) so as to sustain change for families’ (KPMG 2011: 8. Of key significance is the consistency between the KPMG data with compelling data from the Child and Family Services Outcome Study (DHS 2012), which independently found that practice has become more child- and family- focused, and informed by research evidence. Results from focus groups undertaken in 2012 with those working at a range of levels in child protection and family services further corroborated these findings (Miller 2014).

Empowerment in practice

Early engagement with families and where appropriate, facilitating family meetings where problems are shared and outcomes negotiated is one practice representing ‘empowerment’; providing the process is one of genuine participation which is transparent and respectful in negotiating the power inequality between the practi- tioner and the family.

Practitioners need to understand the parent’s perspective while keeping the child’s needs front and centre. Dumbrill describes engagement as being the ‘process of a worker’s establishing an agreement with a parent to work together towards a shared purpose’ (Dumbrill 2011: 54). Further, an ‘alliance’ is described as ‘the interpersonal bond through which worker and parent work toward that purpose’ (Dumbrill 2011: 54)

The empowerment of children through hearing their voices and acting to keep them safe is a key part of the statutory role, as is the building of an alliance with parents; some who may have been victimised by an oppressive partner or have been groomed by a sex offender. Supporting victims of family violence to seek interven- tion orders, for example, can be seen as an empowerment intervention and clearly the notion of social justice is closely aligned to such practices. Helping families to ‘get on with their lives’ with full respect to their human rights is central to this concept.

White and Epstein (1989) and McCashen (2005), from a strengths-based perspec- tive, see empowerment as an expansion of choices, a ‘re-authoring’ of one’s life; the concept of taking responsibility and agency to reclaim one’s life in an enhanced way. While disempowerment and disconnection are core experiences of trauma, recon- nection and empowerment occur when people choose and are supported to reclaim

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and make sense of their stories (Herman 1992: 133). Understanding of the power of stories underpins the strengths-based theoretical models of change that focus on strength, knowledge and resilience rather than predominantly on problems or defi- cits (McCashen 2005); the BICPM has drawn on these approaches.

However, I will never forget the powerful lesson given by a father in a very trou- bled family, when I was working as a family therapist trainee. In a session one day, using the narrative approach I clumsily referred to his pain as ‘his story’. He looked up at me, with a distressed look and said, ‘Love, that’s no story; it’s my bloody life’. Jargon, even if used with good intention, can alienate people and minimise deeply painful experiences, which is the antithesis of skilful critical social work in action.

Case study: Sally

I recently joined a residential carer and a child-protection case

manager with Sally (a pseudonym), who was a profoundly sad adoles-

cent who had attempted suicide. She had been sexually abused as a

preschooler by her stepfather and, as is the norm, had kept it a secret.

Her primary school years were uneventful and she only came to the

attention of services at the age of thirteen when she began running

away. At the age of fourteen she was in a secure unit where I first

met her as she showed us her recent self-harm; the fresh cuts were

evidence that she ‘just wants to die’. In these situations, providing

immediate support and remaining curious about what has happened

to her rather than quickly assuming what is wrong with her can power-

fully influence a different care team response and future planning. A

trauma-informed approach means working with her to unpack what

she is feeling, and how this is normal given the circumstances that

underlie her distress. Central to this approach, which is supported by

recent advances in neuroscience (Perry 2001), is the hope that can be

offered to the person and that with the right therapeutic care things

can be different. Sally felt enraged and so hurt by her mother’s rejec-

tion, but Sally ached for connection. It was very reassuring to help her

to know that she was not ‘weird’ and that her feeling overwhelmed is

a ‘normal’ response to the trauma she has experienced. Cutting was a

strategy to manage unbearable emotional pain, and intrusive feelings

and thoughts that she could not stop.

Understanding her trauma helped others remain effectively

engaged with her and reframed the unhelpful view that she was

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‘attention seeking’ or ‘sabotaging the placement’. For Sally, it was

the relationships with her carers and her child protection practitioner

that made the immediate difference and gave her some reassurance

that she was not on her own. Sally loved animals and some creative

casework set up work experience at the local vet surgery (which

later became a part-time job). She was unwilling initially to go to

formal counselling, but the skilled and compassionate engagement

by her practitioner eventually helped her to see the point in going

back to school. These conversations often took place in the car as

they were doing other practical things.

None of this would have been as effective if her child-protection

practitioner had not also built an alliance with her mother who was

initially still living with the offender. Gradually she engaged and was

helped to understand that her daughter was not ‘attention seeking,’

and that the earlier sexual abuse that she had suffered was ‘not a

lie’ and was deeply disturbing. Sally’s mother was trapped in an

overwhelmed state herself, as her partner had been the perpetrator,

and Sally had only recently disclosed this information when she was

already in trouble for shoplifting, and had started using drugs and

alcohol. Her mother had struggled to believe her as Sally retracted

her initial disclosure and then was angry, distant and rude to her.

Sally’s mother was deeply confused and regularly heard her ‘nice,

middle-class’ partner saying: ‘Would I do that? Your daughter is

off the rails! No wonder she’s in resi; she needs help!’ Sally later

reflected that her child-protection practitioner ‘hanging in there’

with her mother enabled her to separate from the offending step-

father and was the turning point in her recovery.

Care team meetings with Sally and her mother involving mental

health and other services sometimes got stuck, and respectful

dispute-resolution skills were critically important. However, Sally

has now returned to live with her mother and she is still attending

school with the aim of becoming a lawyer. She has met with police

and is getting ready to make a sworn statement to assist the crim-

inal investigation.

These complexities underline the acute need for facilitation and

partnerships that can deliver what the young person needs rather

than maintaining territorial service boundaries. Practitioners all over

the state are required to respectfully deal with conflict and difference,

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remain creative, assertive and ‘think outside the square’. Listening

to everyone in the room (including those cynical and critical of

child protection services), remaining curious, while managing the

practical issues of time, urgency, placement issues, waiting lists for

assessments or adult treatment, and legalities are daily challenges.

Conclusion

Fiona McColl strongly challenged the lack of critical reflection in child protec- tion systems in Australia as contributing to the retention problems of experienced frontline practitioners and noted that other community services are becoming ‘increasingly risk aversive and proscriptive’ (McColl 2009: 128). Mindful of this analysis, a consistent theme throughout the BICPM publications is that a culture of critical reflection is crucial so that professionals: can be astute to the possibilities for change; think about what they are observing; reflect on how they are feeling about the dilemmas; experience support; have robust debate; integrate relevant theory and research; draw on the practice wisdom of their colleagues and not become stuck and biased in their views (Miller 2010: 116–119).

I witness the critical social work principles as articulated by Allan (2009) being worked on the ground by good practitioners who are committed to ongoing critical reflection in action, and about our actions. These skills are vital in being able to think about complexity and multiple versions of truth, judgements and possibilities for change; never more important than when children have been hurt, and we have the chance to make a difference.

References Allan, J. 2009, ‘Theorising new developments in critical social work’ in J. Allan, L. Briskman & B. Pease

(eds), Critical Social Work: Theories and practices for a socially just world, 2nd edn, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, pp. 30–44

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Critical social work in Centrelink: an oxymoron

or an opportunity?

Peter Humphries

Introduction

A few years ago, while participating as a panel member at a public seminar with a focus on ‘welfare reform’ (and at that time working with Centrelink), I mentioned that social workers had been active participants in Australia’s income-support agency, the Department of Social Security, and then Centrelink, for over 60 years. This prompted a question about how social workers had survived in such a bureaucratic and poten- tially hostile environment. The questioner asked whether I thought the longevity of the social work service was a result of them being either very clever or very compliant. My response was that they had been ‘cleverly compliant’. This off-the-cuff comment encapsulates the challenges of social work practice in Centrelink (which is now a part of the Commonwealth Department of Human Services). As public servants, social workers in Centrelink have to recognise the right of an elected government to set policy directions and have their policies implemented by the public service. As Briggs notes the Public Service Act 1999 ‘requires public servants to be responsive to the Government of the day’ and ‘this means that the public service acts non- politically and professionally in support of the Government of the day’ (Briggs 2007: 501). So this is where the ‘compliance’ comes in, as it does for any social workers directly

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employed by government. ‘Clever compliance’ involves the interpretation of policies and guidelines in the ‘interests of the client’, and this is where the opportunities for critical social work practice in Centrelink emerge. Carey and Foster explore similar territory when they talk about ‘deviant social work’, which for them is about providing ‘tangible support to vulnerable people’ and being able to largely evade ‘managerial or policy-led forms of location, surveillance and control’ (Carey & Foster 2011: 576).

Fook comments that ‘critical social work practice is primarily concerned with practising in ways which further a society without domination, exploitation and oppression’ (Fook 2012: 18). Healy echoes this, stating that critical social work is ‘concerned with the analysis and transformation of power relations at every level of social work practice’ (2005: 172). Allan observes that there are many different ways of understanding critical social work, while identifying what she considers to be five inherent ‘core principles’ (Allan 2009: 40; see also Chapter 1).

Allan considers there are many challenges for critical social work that emerge from these principles, not the least of which is ‘how to realistically promote social change in a neoliberal context with its stringent managerial controls and account- abilities’ (Allan 2009: 42). It is difficult to see Centrelink in the context of this debate as anything other than a ‘neoliberal’ organisation that undoubtedly displays ‘strin- gent managerial controls and accountabilities’. For this reason, I have often been confronted by the view that social workers in Centrelink have essentially ‘sold out’ their social work values in exchange for secure well-paid employment as ‘agents of the state’. This may be true of some social workers working in Centrelink, but in my view it is an unfair assessment of the majority who are in there doing all that is possible to support vulnerable people and act as advocates for a fairer approach to social policy. So yes, critical social work practice in Centrelink has its challenges but, in my view, it is possible.

Ife makes a strong argument that community-based social work is ‘the most fruitful position from which to develop significant alternatives to the managerial and economic rationalist orthodoxies’ (Ife 1997: 75). Ife’s view is that the practice context is the key determinant of the possibilities for critical practice and he does not consider it to be possibile in a large government bureaucracy. In this chapter, I explore an alternative view that critical social work practice can also occur in a large government organisation such as Centrelink.

Centrelink in the ‘service system’

As noted earlier, social workers have been working in Centrelink, and its predecessor, the Department of Social Security, for nearly 70 years. Centrelink currently employs

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over 600 social workers (DHS 2011). It was fully integrated into the Commonwealth Department of Human Services in 2011 and its key function remains to provide income-support payments including Newstart Allowance (unemployment benefits), the Disability Support Pension and the Age Pension. Centrelink is a key ‘point-of- first-contact’ agency in the Australian welfare system and has contact with over six million Australians every year. Most of those who have contact with Centrelink do so because they have to, as they need income support payments, rather than because they want to, but this contact does allow for other support to be offered. As an example, a sixteen-year-old person who is unable to live at home will come to Centrelink to obtain income support, but also brings a range of other possible issues and concerns. It is the extent of this contact with the Australian community that creates possibilities for critical social work practice in Centrelink, acknowledging that there is a strong view that these possibilities have been greatly reduced over the past few years (for example, McDonald & Chenoweth 2009; Hart 2013).

Social work in Centrelink

Centrelink (DHS 2014) describes its social workers as offering ‘help during difficult times’ by providing confidential counselling, support and information, and that this social work support and information can include:

• short-term counselling and support for difficult personal or family issues • exploring options • providing information about, or referring to, government and commu-

nity support services • discussing difficulties in meeting activity tests or participation require-

ments.

The Centrelink pamphlet goes on to state that ‘people of all ages can talk to social workers about a range of issues, including domestic and family violence, homeless- ness, relationship breakdown, loss and bereavement, mental health and addictions’ (DHS 2014). The ‘priority customer groups’ are said to be:

• customers expressing suicidal thoughts or experiencing mental illness • young people without adequate support • customers experiencing severe distress, family and domestic violence,

homelessness or hardship • individuals caring for an adult or child with a disability or serious illness.

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Much of this contact with Centrelink ‘customers’ tends to involve crisis intervention. A recent survey of Centrelink social workers found that 48.2 per cent of the 460 social workers who completed the survey reported that their most common contact with Centrelink customers focused on crisis intervention (Humphries & Morgan 2010). The same survey also found that 80.6 per cent of the social workers who responded reported that at least 50 per cent of their work involved ‘direct customer contact’(Humphries & Morgan 2010: 4). The ‘crisis’ nature of the contact is not surprising given that the social workers are in contact with the poorest Australians; that is, those reliant on Government income support payments. Also, social work practice in Centrelink is unquestionably focussed on the frontline of Centrelink’s service delivery to its ‘customers’.

Welfare reform in Australia

Ife considers that ‘another area where this is a tension between mainstream social work and the critical theory approach is in the area of authority and control’ (1997: 146). Ife is primarily focused on areas such as child protection and corrections but there are aspects of social work practice in Centrelink where issues regarding authority and control emerge. This can be in the generic work associated with deter- mining the customers’ eligibility for income-support payments, but has become more noticeable as the ‘welfare reform’ agenda initiated by the Howard Government has emerged over the past ten years. In Australia, ‘welfare reform’ and concerns about ‘welfare dependency’ have led to stricter conditions being put in place to retain eligibility for particular payments (such as Newstart Allowance for those who are unemployed), with a focus on compelling active job seeking, generally through a government-funded employment services provider. The paternalistic use of authority so often inherent in approaches to welfare reform (Mestan 2014) has, and still does, create difficulties for social workers in Centrelink as they attempt to balance their ethical obligations to work in their clients’ ‘best interests’ and with their respon- sibilities, as public servants, to implement government policy. Turbett sets out this dilemma well: ‘Social work is riven with ambiguities that underlie its position as mediator between state agencies and the desire to control social problems on the one hand, and social workers’ trained response to exercise compassion and outcomes that favour the individual service user on the other’ (Turbett 2014: 66).

Financial Case Management (FCM)

An example of this issue is the provision introduced during the Howard Government that allowed for any person who received an ‘activity tested’ income-support payment

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(that is, one with provision for some employment-orientated activity) who failed to keep an appointment with their employment-services provider on three occasions, with no ‘reasonable excuse’, would lose their payment for eight weeks. The social workers in Centrelink responded to this policy by drawing together hundreds of case studies that clearly demonstrated the harm that this policy was doing to very vulnerable Australians. While the policy continued, this internal policy feedback did lead to some moderation in the harshness of the policy’s application. This was a good example of how well-targeted and accurate feedback on the impact of social policy can influence its application in practice. I want to focus on just one aspect of this policy, which demonstrates how critical practice can be possible even in the most seemingly difficult circumstances.

Eight weeks without any income support would create serious difficulties for most people, some of whom would be particularly vulnerable as they had dependent children or some form of disability. To avoid putting these people at further risk, Financial Case Management (FCM) was introduced. FCM enables ‘exceptionally vulnerable’ people to receive some assistance during this eight-week non-payment period. Initially, this assistance was to be provided on a contract basis, through case managers working for non-government welfare organisations. These case managers were authorised to provide non-cash assistance for ‘essential’ items up to the value of the person’s usual income support payment (for example, food vouchers, medication and school clothes) for this eight-week period. There were many parts of Australia where social workers in Centrelink were also required to provide this service due to a lack of non-government organisations (NGOs) that were willing or able to take on these contracts. Many of these NGOs were opposed to the broader policy, believing it to be too harsh and hence were not prepared to be involved. Many social workers in Centrelink also had moral and ethical concerns regarding this and other welfare-reform policies and had mixed feelings, to say the least, about engaging in this work. Hart (2013) conducted in-depth interviews with ten experienced social workers in Centrelink, which highlighted their concerns regarding the implementa- tion of welfare reform/work first policies.

There was an active debate in the Centrelink Social Work Service around the ethics of social workers undertaking the FCM work. One group of social workers decided to approach the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) with a complaint that they were being asked to undertake ‘unethical practice’. My view at the time (from a ‘decision-making’ position in Centrelink), was that it would have been unethical for social workers in Centrelink not to deliver FCM, as this would have further disadvantaged an already vulnerable group. FCM did, in part, moderate some of the harsher aspects of this policy and it was a case of providing as much

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as possible given the situation. It is also important to note that some of the FCM services provided by NGOs at that time were both authoritarian and overly directive. The challenge was to provide FCM in a manner that allowed the person as much dignity as possible within the parameters of the policy. FCM provided the opportu- nity for a Centrelink social worker to have regular supportive contact with a person who otherwise would have been without income for eight weeks and to ensure that they continued to receive a form of income support. To do this work ethically did require a critical approach to practice as questions of power, oppression and social justice had to be considered. The FCM work also provided the opportunity for many case studies of those affected to be included in the policy review process. At this time, there were few genuine opportunities to influence the ‘what’ of welfare reform policy, but the experience of providing FCM services did allow for some influence on the ‘how’ these policies were implemented. Are we looking at critical social work prac- tice or at these social workers being merely co-opted as participants in an oppressive and discriminatory policy? I think this question well illustrates the contradictions inherent in this work. I want to briefly explore another couple of areas where social workers in Centrelink have been active before I discuss the concept of ‘front-line autonomy’ as a vehicle for critical practice, in even the most potentially difficult practice contexts.

Responding to homelessness

Centrelink has always been a key agency in responding to homelessness and this continues to be an important focus for the social work service. The only homeless- ness prevention program directly funded by the Commonwealth Government, the HOME Advice Program, was partly developed by social workers in Centrelink (in partnership with the CEO of a Victorian-based homelessness agency). The HOME Advice Program continues, with a site in each state and territory, and focuses on assisting families at risk of becoming homeless to not lose their accommodation. The program at each site is staffed by a Centrelink social worker in partnership with workers from a local NGO. (Of note is that the program has been fully evaluated twice, and shown to be a cost-effective response to preventing homelessness, but has not expanded beyond the initial eight sites in the twelve years it has operated).

A strong focus on homelessness and homelessness prevention in the early years of the Rudd Government, from its election in late 2007, created the opportunity for social workers in Centrelink to further expand Centrelink’s role in this area. The Rudd Government’s ‘white paper’ on homelessness described Centrelink as a key ‘first to know agency that was well placed to identify people at risk of homelessness

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and to refer them to appropriate services’ (PM&C 2008: 35). Also included was the development of a ‘homelessness indicator’ to be placed on the Centrelink ‘system’ to identify any ‘customers’ who were homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, additional support for young people applying for youth allowance on the basis they were unable to live at home, and putting in place a team of ninety Centrelink community engagement officers whose explicit focus was to provide outreach services to those who were homeless (and those at risk of becoming homeless). These were all initiatives of the social work service in Centrelink and demonstrate a concerted attempt to look at the issues surrounding homelessness beyond the provision of income support to ‘eligible’ customers. The homelessness indicator, for example, provided valuable information about who was homeless in Australia and, just as importantly, raised the awareness of Centrelink’s frontline staff around Australia to the need to identify and support those who were homeless or at risk of becoming homeless.

These initiatives were supported by social workers in Centrelink through the provision of regular ‘homelessness awareness’ training for all Centrelink staff. In my view, the social workers were able to broaden the response to homelessness, well beyond their own efforts in providing crisis intervention and support services, to a more broadly based organisational response that influenced the service delivery system as well as government policy.

Place-Based Services Program

My final example of potentially critical practice in Centrelink is the Place-Based Services Program (PBSP) which was developed in 2008 and 2009. Social workers again provided a strong underlying ‘practice framework’ and direction in imple- menting the actual service delivery to Centrelink customers. The social workers in Centrelink had long argued that each community has different characteristics and hence needed a different and better-targeted service response from Centrelink. They also consistently promoted the idea that Centrelink provided the opportu- nity to connect with, and support, marginalised and disadvantaged Australians who had no other contact with the broader ‘service system’. The then Commonwealth Government’s social inclusion agenda, which was based on the premise that a socially inclusive society is one in which all Australians feel valued and have the opportunity to participate fully in the life of our society (PM&C 2009), provided the impetus to establish the PBSP, particularly as the role of ‘place’ factors in the creation and maintenance of disadvantage was overtly acknowledged. Tony Vinson’s study high- lighting what he termed areas of ‘concentrated disadvantage’ (Vinson 2007: xi) also

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influenced the Government’s support for the PBSP and all of the sites initially chosen for the program were identified as being ‘disadvantaged’ in Vinson’s study. The chal- lenge here, from a critical social work point of view, was to maintain a focus on the structural and economic issues inherent in these areas, and not to see those who lived in these locations as being in some way inadequate.

The first three PBSP sites were the Peachey Belt in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, Logan in the southern suburbs of Brisbane and Morwell, a regional town in Eastern Victoria. The focus of work for each site was established through a partici- pative workshop involving the local Centrelink social workers and a representative group of other frontline staff (and I was fortunate enough to facilitate these work- shops). Peachey Belt decided to provide better-targeted and more intensive support to disadvantaged sole parents, young people and Aboriginal people; Logan decided to focus on people experiencing domestic and family violence, young people leaving care and people with ‘unmet’ mental health needs (a full account of the develop- ment of the Logan project can be found in Hall et al. 2012); while Morwell decided to provide additional assistance to ‘very long-term’ unemployed men aged between 35 and 55 years. Without question, these workshops would have been more effective had they also included some representation from Centrelink ‘customers’, but even the level of local decision-making that was included was hard fought for at the time.

Four additional PBSP sites were subsequently established. They were Broadmeadows in Melbourne and Fairfield in Sydney, which both focused on increasing the ‘social and economic participation’ of young refugees; Cooma in NSW that focused on assisting young carers; and in Darwin where the initiative aimed to provide further assistance to itinerant and homeless people (most of whom were Aboriginal people). An evaluation of the PBSP by Darcy et al. concluded that these initiatives ‘demonstrated the effectiveness of holistic approaches and a more collabo- rative approach to service provision in improving the wellbeing of participants’ and ‘this approach contrasts with the traditional approach of applying rule-based compliance rather than addressing problems in partnership with the individual’ (Darcy et al. 2009: 83). They went on to conclude that ‘the effectiveness of the inter- ventions in assisting individuals who have been very difficult to reach in the past was clear’ (Darcy et al. 2009: 83). The evaluators documented a range of what they termed ‘social inclusion outcomes’ including better connections for ‘customers’ to key services such as mental health and domestic violence services, decreased social isolation, increased engagement in education and to some extent, increased engage- ment in employment (Darcy et al. 2009: 61).

The achievement of the PBSP, with social workers in active leadership roles, was to demonstrate that flexibility and individualised responses, along with more equal

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and respectful relationships with other services in the community, could make a difference to the lives of the most marginalised and disadvantaged Australians. There was a further expansion of this approach under the previous Labor Government but the various trials ended in June 2014, following the election of the Coalition Government the year before. What is important though, is that this more activist and respectful approach to service delivery has been demonstrated to be effective, it and can be reintroduced when the political will is there. It is also important not to forget the positive impact this work had on the frontline staff who had the opportunity to work in a more relationship-based and less process-orientated way with Centrelink’s clients. As the PBSP evaluators noted, program participants ‘were overwhelmingly positive about having their perspectives heard and most responded by taking steps to improve their circumstances’ (Darcy et al. 2009: 83). This is indicative of a critical approach to practice, in that questions of power in the worker–client relationships were actively considered, and more equal and participatory approaches were utilised in this work. The achievement was to create the ‘room’ to work in this way within a very large and procedurally driven organisation and to demonstrate that, given some support and additional resources, people living in some of the most disadvantaged and stigmatised parts of Australia could improve their circumstances.

Critical practice in Centrelink?

By describing the role of social workers in implementing FCM, developing Centrelink’s response to homelessness and in the development and implementation of the PBSP, I have attempted to demonstrate that critical practice can, with thought and effort, happen in a large, regulated government bureaucracy such as Centrelink. This does not mean that all social workers in Centrelink think about the ‘core prin- ciples’ of critical social work identified by Allan (2009) that were discussed earlier. While many bring a well-developed awareness of the nature of power and inequality in our society, and the capacity to critically reflect on their practice, there are others who merely succumb to the ‘invitation’ to follow the rules and who define their practice in purely procedural terms. For me, the difference between these two groups is their capacity to utilise the level of frontline autonomy that can be found within social work practice in Centrelink.

The use of frontline autonomy

White observes that ‘a growing number of writers have presented social workers as having turned into unreflective people-processors by waves of managerialism over

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the last thirty years’ (White 2009: 129). Jones (2001) argues strongly that this has created a new working environment within state social work. He describes a new type of highly regulated and much more mundane and routine-based relationship with clients, which many of the social workers whom he interviewed believe could not even be described as social work. The argument that frontline discretion has been greatly reduced by ever-increasing managerialism has been made by a number of writers (for example, Ife 1997; Ellis et al. 1999; McDonald & Marston 2006). Evans and Harris, however, offer a strong argument that the ‘death of discretion’ in social work is ‘greatly exaggerated’ (Evans & Harris 2004: 871 ), and while we may debate the extent of the discretion that exists in social work practice, the key point is that it does still exist. This point is made most strongly in Lipsky’s seminal text, Street-level Bureaucracy and the progressive ‘potential’ inherent in his work has only recently been restated by Turbett (2014). Lipsky’s central argument is that no matter what the rules are, when implemented, they are always ‘interpreted’ by the frontline worker (the street-level bureaucrat) when interfacing with the organisation’s clients (Lipsky 1980). This is where the opportunities for critical practice exist, even in the most apparently regulated of service delivery organisations. There are undoubtedly some social workers in Centrelink who have become ‘unreflective people processors’ and utilise very little of their ‘discretion’ in their practice but I do also agree with White (2009) that the continuing existence of professional discretion offers ‘spaces for resistance’ (White 2009: 130).

The examples I have provided illustrate how positive change can emerge through the creative use of the discretion that social workers can utilise in their practice. It is also important to note that these examples were all informed and influenced by the frontline experience of social workers in Centrelink.

Conclusion

Centrelink provides a powerful, and at times difficult and ambiguous, practice context for social workers. It is a large government bureaucracy that is highly mana- gerialised and with a responsibility to implement the policies of the ‘government of the day’. The challenges for social workers are acknowledged by both McDonald and Chenoweth (2009) and Hart (2013), who are the only external researchers to have explored the experience of social workers in Centrelink. McDonald and Chenoweth, in the context of discussing the inherent challenges of social work practice in Centrelink, comment that ‘nevertheless we have demonstrated that social workers can and do exercise agency in experiencing institutional change and in shaping outcomes’ (McDonald & Chenoweth 2009: 158). Similarly, Hart comments that

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existing accounts of social workers within state welfare institutions have ‘conceptu- alised social workers as mostly passive and resigned recipients of the discourses of change . . . resulting in either active or passive compliance with contested organisa- tional practices, or withdrawal from regulated public services’ (Hart 2013: 207). Hart then adds that ‘the conclusion reached by this thesis in the case study organisation Centrelink, demonstrated active processes of reflection and engagement that drew upon various elements of self-identity’ (Hart 2013: 207). Both of these key studies do not underestimate the challenges facing state-employed social workers, but both acknowledge that social workers, on the ‘inside’, can contribute to progressive social change through utilising a critical approach to their practice.

Fook observes that ‘there seems to be an assumption that practice is determined by context and therefore it is not possible to counter the influence of context’. (Fook 2012: 184) Fook goes on to challenge this idea by suggesting that:

reframing our practice as contextual therefore means we reframe our practice as working with environments, rather than working despite environments. We see ourselves as part of a context, ourselves respon- sible for aspects of this context. In this way we see possibilities for change, for creating microclimates within broader contexts (Fook 2012: 185).

This does not mean that context does not matter, but Fook suggests that we aim to influence the context rather than just trying to work around the context when diffi- culties arise. The practice examples that I have discussed have equally focused on influencing the broader practice context as on providing more effective intervention and support to the organisation’s clients.

Bringing a critical perspective to bear in a neoliberal organisation such as Centrelink is always going to have its challenges. Perhaps it would have been better to call this chapter ‘Towards Critical Social Work in Centrelink’. However, I do believe that these examples can be understood as seeing possibilities for change in Centrelink and creating opportunities where some change can occur. Critical practice involves seeing the possibilities for change, rather than continuing to argue that change is not possible.

Opportunities for critical practice exist within Centrelink from the way in which a social worker engages and supports a young person applying for Youth Allowance, to influencing governments to implement more active approaches to prevent home- lessness. It all matters; it can all make a difference.

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References Allan, J. 2009, ‘Theorising new developments in critical social work practice’ in J. Allan, L. Briskman &

B. Pease (eds), Critical Social Work: Theories and practices for a just world, 2nd edn, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, pp. 30–44

Briggs, L. 2007, ‘Public Service secretaries and their independence from political influence: The view of the Public Service Commissioner’, Australian Journal of Public Administration, vol. 66, no. 4, pp. 501–6

Carey, M. & Foster, M. 2011, ‘Introducing deviant social work: Contextualising the limits of radical social work whilst understanding (fragmented) resistance within the social work labour process’, British Journal of Social Work, vol. 41, pp. 576–93

Darcy, M., Gwyther, G., Perry, J., Wood, J. & Richardson, R. 2009, Centrelink Placed Based Services Evaluation, Sydney: University of Western Sydney

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community care’, Social Policy and Administration, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 262–80 Evans, T. & Harris, J. 2004, ‘Street-level bureaucracy, social work and the (exaggerated) death of discre-

tion’, British Journal of Social Work, vol. 34, pp. 871–95 Fook, J. 2012, Social Work: A critical approach to practice, London: Sage Publications Hall, G., Boddy, J., Chenoweth, L. & Davie, K. 2012, ‘Mutual benefits: Developing relational service

approaches within Centrelink’, Australian Social Work, vol. 65, no. 1, pp. 87–103 Hart, D. 2013, Processes of Social Work Engagement with the Reforming State in Australia: The case of

Centrelink, PhD thesis, Sydney: University of Sydney Healy, K. 2005, Social Work Theories in Context: Creating frameworks for practice, London: Sage

Publications Humphries, P. & Morgan, G. 2010, Centrelink Social Work Mental Health Survey, unpublished survey,

Canberra: Department of Human Services (Centrelink) Ife, J. 1997, Rethinking Social Work: Towards critical practice, Melbourne: Longman Jones, C. 2001, ‘Voices from the front line: State social workers and New Labour’, British Journal of Social

Work, vol. 31, pp. 547–62 Lipsky, M. 1980, Street-level Bureaucracy: The dilemmas of individuals in public service, New York:

Russell Sage Foundation McDonald, C. & Chenoweth, L. 2009, ‘(Re)shaping social work: An Australian case study’, British Journal

of Social Work, vol. 39, pp. 144–60 McDonald, C. & Marston, G. 2006, ‘Room to move? Professional discretion at the frontline of welfare-

to-work’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, vol. 41, pp. 171–82 Mestan, K. 2014, ‘Paternalism in Australian welfare policy’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, vol. 49,

no. 1, pp. 3–22 PM&C see Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet

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Turbett, C. 2014, Doing Radical Social Work, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan Vinson, T. 2007, Dropping off the Edge: The distribution of disadvantage in Australia, Melbourne and

Canberra: Jesuit Social Services/Catholic Social Services White, V. 2009, ‘Quiet challenges? Professional practice in modernised social work’ in J. Harris &

V. White (eds), Modernising Social Work, Policy Press, Bristol, pp. 129–144

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Building relationships and effecting change: critical social work practice in

prison settings

Sophie Goldingay

Introduction

Social work has a stated concern ‘to alleviate social suffering and improve the quality of people’s lives’ (van Heugten 2001: 14). It was my first choice of profession as it aligns with my belief in the innate worth of every human being. I have spent much time observing how oppressive power relations caused by differences in race, sexu- ality, gender and class diminish choices, create suffering and generally impair the quality of life for those who are on the receiving end of social work practice. When I trained to be a social worker in the mid-1990s, I learnt a number of theories, which I hoped would serve me well in the world of practice to enact these quality-of-life goals. Over time, I realised that the theories, devised in contexts other than those I was working in, did not take into account the complexity, contradictions and ‘messi- ness’ of frontline social work. I was not aware of post-structural theory or critical post-structural theory while I was involved in practice in the prison setting so this chapter is written in hindsight.

Some of the strategies which proved successful in shifting oppressive power

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relations and improving the quality of life for prisoners and their families could be theorised as being consistent with a critical post-structural approach (Fook 2012) due to a focus on changing oppressive dominant discourses, working to moving beyond polarised identity positionings (for example, compliant/manipulative) and creating possibilities for new identities for prisoners, custodial staff and me. In this chapter I integrate theory and practice in such a way that it may be helpful to others who are interested in working in this or a similar field. It discusses a recurring practice scenario that I encountered while I worked as a prison social worker/social work team leader for the six years leading up to 2003. While the scenario is drawn from real life, some aspects of it have been combined or removed to ensure it is not possible to identify any prisoner or staff member.

Critical social work in criminal justice settings: what really happens

Principles that are common to critical social work include a ‘commitment to social justice and equality . . . to working alongside oppressed and marginalised popula- tions . . . [and] an orientation towards emancipatory personal and social change’ (Allan 2009, pp. 40–1). Extensive research has demonstrated that the majority of women prisoners are from disadvantaged backgrounds (Carlen & Worral 2004; Chesney-Lind & Pasko 2004; Gaarder & Belknap 2004). Further, researchers have identified a high prevalence of mental health problems, self-harm, trauma and substance abuse among women prisoners (Morash, Bynum & Koons 1998). It has been cited that 81 per cent of women prisoners have been victim to physical or sexual abuse or both at some point in their lifetime (Ambrose, Simkins & Levic as cited in Chesney-Lind & Irwin 2008: 168). Clearly, this is a particularly marginalised population.

Nevertheless, goals of social justice and equality become more complex in an institution that is already set up to deliver its unique form of ‘justice’ to a popu- lation that is seen as inferior, bad and unworthy by the very nature of their status as prisoner. For example, prisoners are constructed by many people in society as ‘oppressors’; they have created victims as a result of their criminal activity, whether it is against a person or property. I do not agree with this construction due to structural disadvantages experienced by women who are identified as criminals. Tax payers expect a number of outcomes from the delivery of public penal services, including that the person will be punished (retributive function) and that the imprisonment will be so unpleasant that the person avoids future offending (deterrent function). With these functions of prisons being made clear by government policy and the

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media, a social worker may wonder where they might fit in with the purposes of day-to-day prison life. This was certainly my experience, particularly in the early months of my employment there.

There is another, less populist, goal of imprisonment, which is rehabilitation. This has the potential to align more with the goal of social work improving people’s quality of life and alleviating suffering, than the other two goals of retribution and deterrance. While rehabilitation is not the answer to the problem of crime because offending is generally caused by structural disadvantages that impact on a person’s life choices (not a fault in prisoner psychology), rehabilition was a discourse that staff and management within the institution understood. A key to a postmodern critical approach to social work is working within dominant discourses to trans- form and create new ones, which may shift oppressive power relations (Fook 2012). For the remainder of this chapter I describe how I worked to transform the oppressive power relations through a process of analysing those power relations and questioning ‘taken-for-granted and dominant assumptions and beliefs’ (Allan 2009: 41) while working within the dominant discourse of rehabilitation within the prison setting.

In order to do work to change oppressive power dynamics, I had to learn to analyse how power was operating at any given moment. Theorising how power is operating is central when considering how life is experienced by both prisoners and staff who are working in the prison setting, where ‘prison is the only place where power is exercised in its naked state, in its most excessive form, and where it is justified as a moral force’ (Foucault 1979: 210). While the exercise of oppressive power is sanctioned by government, power operates in multiple and complex ways, and is influenced by prevailing ways of constructing events and practices through language. It is used within the media, within staff members and prisoners’ families and friends, in management meetings and in everyday conversations in the lunch- room, the corridor and the prison control room.

Allan (2009) gives an account of one of the key tensions in how to address inequitable power relations in critical social work. She notes that while both modernist and postmodern social work are influenced by a concern for the impact of social structures on people’s life opportunities and experiences, critical postmodern social work allows for consideration of how power relations are played out both at micro and macro levels, not just at the government level (Allan 2009).

Post-structuralism is related to postmodernism (Fook 2012) and is an approach, which explores the role of language in social life and its influence on power relations, truth claims, and identity (Burr 2003; Fook 2012). Critical post-structuralists adopt a stance that seeks to foreground the perspectives of those who are marginalised, with

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the view of alleviating oppressive power relations, which cause suffering and impair quality of life (Fook 2012).

My practice experience in mental health and criminal-justice social work settings means I can recognise the existence of multiple, context-dependent truths about the cause of (and hence multiple and context-dependent ways of addressing) oppressive social dynamics and power relations. Examples of this will be explained in more depth in the vignettes. In brief, however, this means that each setting will have its own unique power relations. This will be due to the unique combination of person- alities, authority lines, context-related problems to solve and dominant ways of constructing identities and events through language in that setting. In being open to multiple and context-dependent causes, one then becomes open to multiple and creative solutions which would not otherwise be considered. This possibility is one full of promise, especially in an institutional setting, despite the fact that such solu- tions are likely to take a lot of time, effort and careful planning.

While I was not aware of critical post-structural thinking during my time at the prison, I was acutely aware that those who had power in the institution were able to define what discourse or version of events and identities was ‘true’. As demon- strated in the vignettes below, there were some established ways of talking about prisoners, drug addiction, prisoners as mothers and the institution’s role, and this way of talking was oppressive to prisoners and limiting for staff, and the overall culture and function of the institution.

To analyse what was happening, I draw on an adapted version of Fook’s (2012) critically deconstructive process, whereby I name the discourses operating, how my beliefs fit with these discourses, what perspectives were missing and devalued, and how these discourses and related practices reinforced power relations, thus constructed the various actors in the vignette. I will problematise assumptions that were embedded in my initial account of what happened, explore where these assumptions may have originated, and discuss how I developed alternative ways of constructing my own role and that of others through exercising power via discursive practices. I do this by presenting a vignette in two parts, with analysis and discussion in-between.

Vignette: part 1

I would like to introduce you to a typical Monday morning working as a social worker for the women’s division of the public prison service. Imagine it is 9 a.m. and you drive through the gates, past the razor wire, and through the time-locked electronic doors with paint peeling off them. You go into the control room (like

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a nursing station for officers and set up in a panopticon style) where you issue yourself your key set and chat to the female officer who is stationed in the control room. Another female officer arrives and they bemoan the latest exploit by a prisoner whom they label ‘manipulative’ due to her attempts to request visits with her chil- dren through various officers. They outline their perceptions of the prisoner’s moral failings, the number of times she has received a prison sentence, her entrenched drug use, her ‘obvious’ lack of real care for her children. They snigger about how the current caregiver of the children is likely to try to smuggle drugs into the prison via the children’s nappies while they are wearing them. They shrug their shoulders and declare their prediction that these children are already lined up to be the next generation of prisoners.

Your heart sinks as you realise you will have to think carefully about how (or if) you will advocate for this prisoner when you receive the inevitable request for help from her. Her request ‘chit’ is probably waiting for you in your pigeonhole. You walk down the corridor to your office and hear the rattle of keys, the echo of metal doors slamming, the buzz of the radio intercoms, and the voices of prisoners and staff. The corridor is bleak and as you enter your office you are reminded that there is an element of neglect or lack of value in your role since you are greeted with dated, tatty carpet and a rather damp odour. You see the large pile of prisoners’ requests to see you in your pigeonhole. Mondays are always busy following what is the usual chaotic weekend for the prisoners. A partner has taken up with another woman, housing has been lost, pets have been abandoned, children have got into trouble, become ill or had an accident, phone calls have reawakened intense grief or family conflict, or a family member has been victimised or died. You feel the burden of being the only social worker for a group of over 100 highly vulnerable, traumatised and marginal- ised women based in an institution that is set up to contain and punish them.

In the first of my five years working as a prison social worker I wondered how long I could last. I certainly could not imagine I would be there for over five years. I was acutely aware that, at best, in those early months, I was positioned as ‘naive’ if I spoke out directly in conversation with officers about my views about the well- being and quality of life of prisoners and their children. When I tried to advocate for prisoners to management I was constructed as not only being irrelevant to the core business of the institution, but as undermining its purpose as well.

The custodial staff were positioned as ‘judge, jury and executioner’ every day. There was an expectation that they enlist punitive discursive practices and use these to justify a restrictive, limiting and punishing regime. I identified the discourses as ‘women prisoners as sneaky, manipulative and dishonest’, and ‘women who are addicted to drugs are thoughtless, selfish and irresponsible’. From these discourses

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came others which include that ‘women prisoners are dangerous or damaging to their children’, that ‘these mothers do not care about their children and only want to see them to get drugs’, that ‘their children would be better off without them’, and even that ‘their children already possessed a degree of criminality that is inevitable due to the actions of their mothers’. From this, the implication is that there is no point in striving to help them as they are already on an unstoppable path to criminality and hence worthlessness.

I did not agree with these constructions of the value of relationships between prisoner mothers and their children because several things are missing from these accounts. For example, the perspectives of the prisoners and children in relation to the impact of the prison sentence on them are not included. Nor is the value of ongoing contact and regular visits, or the positive benefits to prison staff in relation to prisoner behaviour should regular visits be facilitated.

Those custodial officers who did not join in with these discourses tended to be marginalised in the workplace, and they were discussed in disparaging terms as being a ‘softie’ or ‘naive’. The discourse of prisoners being victim to oppressive life circum- stances was never used, nor was the rehabilitative function of the prison service considered in discourse at this point. Thus, there was a dichotomy of ‘soft’ versus ‘effective’ approaches where effective was defined as restricting and punishing pris- oners and ‘soft’ was defined as undermining the goals of the institution and possibly putting its role at risk.

Vignette: part 2

I would like to invite you back into the prison now, where you have looked through your large pile of chits and seen the request from the prisoner who was discussed by the custodial staff in the control room earlier. You know this prisoner as she has been inside before. You double-check the client card that you have made for her when you saw her last, which details hers and her children’s personal situ- ation. She has three children between the ages of three and twelve, and battled a drug addiction since she was a teenager. She has a history of being physically and sexually abused as a child and an adult. You recall the prisoner’s expression of grief from being separated from her children during her last sentence and her remorse about how her drug addiction significantly interfered with her ability to parent them. The children have all had behavioural problems and issues at school, and the child protection services have been involved a number of times. You visualise the grief and disruption the children will be experiencing with the loss of their main caregiver yet again, moving house, being separated from each

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other, either living in foster care, or with extended family members who are barely managing themselves.

You have a gut feeling that even though this family has multiple and complex problems, supporting the ongoing relationship between the mother and her children is important for the wellbeing of all of them both now and in the future. Armed with this view, and seeing that the initial request for a visit has been denied, you make an appointment to talk to the unit manager to advocate for the prisoner, and you feel confident, anticipating a positive outcome. You are therefore unprepared for the response, which is: ‘Well, she should have thought about that before she came here! No I will not approve her visits. Last time we did that, her family tried to bring drugs in the kid’s nappies!! No! It would be a security risk.’

You leave the manager’s office crestfallen and wonder what move you can make next. You also mull over the fact that alleviating suffering and promoting wellbeing for the prisoner and her children are not the highest priority for this senior officer and others like her. They are charged with the role of upholding the security of the institution, and promoting the retribution and deterrence function of the prison. Should they be seen to step outside this, they risk undermining their own credibility within the institution.

One of the assumptions that is embedded in my account above is that social workers are the only group who are concerned about improving the culture of the prison and the situation for these women; setting up a ‘me against the institution’ mindset, which was unlikely to be helpful. This assumption comes partly from the way I interpreted people’s talk as a reflection of their set views and unable to be changed, as opposed to the way they had learnt to talk in order to have a place among their colleagues. It took me some time to move beyond this. In the next section of this chapter, I will discuss some of the practices that I began to trial in my struggle to improve the quality of prisoner’s lives within the prison.

I would like to note that while the following practices may have had some influ- ence in this particular setting at this time with these particular people, it is not the only way to practice critical post-structural social work. In fact, Fook (2012) emphasises that it is important to be flexible enough to adjust one’s practice to the setting and not try to impose knowledge from outside. She draws attention to the inductive process needed to practice critical social work, which needs to be suitable for the specific context. This process requires a social worker to watch and gather empirical evidence of the dynamics of the context and their impact on those people involved. From this, contexts can be analysed through a process of deconstruction; that is, resisting discourses that cause oppressive power dynamics through naming them, challenging them by considering alternative or missing perspectives, and then

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constructing alternative discourses that enable the situation to be seen and acted on in new and non-oppositional ways (Fook 2012).

As mentioned earlier, I entered the social work profession with core values of the intrinsic worth of all people, irrespective of their circumstances, history, or social location. Alongside these values, and through personal experience, I have adopted the habit of striving to see issues, events and practices from numerous perspectives. My belief in the intrinsic worth of all people extends to my attitudes towards my colleagues as well as those I am employed to ‘help’. While I did not agree with many views held by my colleagues in the prison service, I was committed to working as a team and acknowledging their experience as custodial staff.

One of the first tasks I prioritised was to understand the dynamics of a prison and how it was experienced by those involved, since I saw myself as a ‘context’ worker rather than one who was only there to work directly with prisoners. I read work such as Goffman’s (1961) Asylums and Zimbardo, Maslach and Haney’s (1999) Stanford Prison Experiment. Such reading led me to conclude that the way prisoners and staff may talk and act in prison settings has little to do with any in-built personality or personal deficiency. Rather, I theorised at the time that it is the power relations created by the authoritarian structure of the prison and its perceived purpose, which may encourage staff to talk and behave in ways that dehumanise, demean and deni- grate prisoners in their care. I acknowledge, however, that while staff may have been co-opted by the oppressive environment and its discourse, staff still have some degree of agency or choice in their beliefs and actions.

This knowledge enabled me to move beyond polarising constructions of officers (for example, at times custodial staff were constructed as callous or lazy) which I had overheard others in my field use, which served to alienate allied health and welfare staff and custodial staff from each other. I stopped blaming the custodial prison staff for their apparent callous and punitive practices and I focused on building positive relationships with them. I volunteered for the dragon-boat racing team and ensured I always came to practice and competed at events. I joined them for Friday night drinks. I began to really value their professionalism and commitment to their role as custodial officers even though I did not necessarily agree with how it was carried out or the premises that it was based on. While the oppressive dimension of prisons needs to be acknowledged, through many informal conversations it occurred to me that we did actually have a shared goal, and that was the organisation’s goal to ‘reduce reoffending’. The differences between custodial staff and myself lay in regimes of truth or interpretations about how this could or should be achieved and why. While I was concerned for the wider forces in society that defined these women as criminals, other prison staff were focused on the psychological factors that led women to offend.

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At the same time this was happening, I was fortunate to be in a senior social work role and was invited to attend ongoing meetings with a senior manager who was involved in developing policy. I do think that he was open to taking my views seri- ously because I had established a positive reputation as one who worked closely with custodial staff, respected them in their role and therefore was respected in my role. I had also kept abreast of some global advances in ways of conceptualising the reduc- tion in reoffending, which at this time was the Risk Needs Responsivity framework (Andrews & Bonta 1998). This framework conceptualises the causes of criminal behaviour in terms of ‘criminogenic needs’ and these include poor family relation- ships, unstable housing, and lack of employment, among other more psychological issues such as poor impulse control and substance addiction.

While there have since been important critiques of this model (for example, Ward & Stewart 2003; Hannah-Moffat 2005), at the time the framework offered some promise to transform the regime of everyday life within the prison walls into one where prisoners and staff could adopt less restricted and more empowered iden- tities. At the time it seemed that working to transform the discourse from within might offer some opportunities to move towards more emancipatory possibilities at the micro level.

I began to speak with this senior manager about how all staff shared the goals of reducing reoffending and how each of the professional groups contributed to this outcome. While custodial staff controlled prisoners’ behaviour and prevented crime from occurring by their efforts to contain prisoners, professions like social work reduced reoffending by supporting positive relationships between prisoners and their children/families and attending to reintegrative needs to help them fit back into society. These reintegrative needs included advocacy and community develop- ment, which addressed the impact of the more structural causes of crime such as income inequality and its associated issues. We discussed the potential for all the staff ’s involvement in supporting prisoners to address their ‘criminogenic’ needs, not just social work and psychology. I shared with him some research I had located from overseas about the positive correspondence between maintaining mother–child rela- tionships and female prisoner motivation for rehabilitation (for example, Clarke 1995), and how this may reduce prison misconduct and the incidence of mental health problems.

A development occurred when the manager agreed for me to present this infor- mation to a unit management meeting. How was I to respond to this invitation from a critical social work approach? One possibility was to refuse to participate on the basis that the criminogenic model has its potential, through its location of deviance in the individual woman, to further oppress. On the other hand, I was being given

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the opportunity to reframe (even to a minor extent) elements of the model that might result in greater freedom and support for the women in prison. As I was witness to the daily pain and suffering experienced by both women and children as a result of the punitive and restrictive environment, I chose the latter option.

As a result of discussions at the management level, where the prison leadership was endorsing this new way of conceptualising what we all as a team were working towards, I noticed positive changes in the responses to prisoner requests for visits with family. I received fewer request chits for help from prisoners for social work advocacy, as prison management were now more likely to approve requests straight- away. There were fewer discussions by custodial staff about requests being a threat to security.

While there were times when the previous discourse of prisoners not ‘deserving’ visits were used, these were replaced by the less oppressive discourse that family visits were a part of their rehabilitative plan and as such matched the goals of the institution to reduce reoffending. I was delighted when I was no longer the only one drawing on this discourse. My role was to continue to support this way of thinking and talking about family visits through relevant discussions in a respectful way with custodial staff and our focus on shared goals as a team.

In reflecting on these events, I can see that the team of various staff roles were able to move beyond the dichotomies that kept the old punitive discourses alive. This had occurred through creating a new discourse, which included attending to prisoners’ wellbeing and their connectedness with family as one pathway to reha- bilitation. For example, prior to my presentation at the management meeting and the shift in practices that followed, there was a binary between custodial and welfare staff which kept us polarised in our roles, one to control and punish (custodial) and one to protect, care and support (social work and other allied health professions). By aligning all staff to a clear aim of reducing reoffending, we were able to focus on what united us, not what set us apart from each other.

While some may note that this process replaced one form of disciplinary prac- tice with another, it is important to remember that we are all disciplined in every field but the impact is felt in how this plays out on a day-to-day basis. Foucault (1984: 343) said that ‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous’. My interpretation of this is similar to that of Fook (2002: 16), in that ideas are not good or bad in themselves; it depends on how they are enacted. In the case of the prison, the enactment of rehabilitation as a disciplinary practice was less oppressive for both prisoners and workers than the enactment of retribution and deterrence as disciplinary practices.

I observed prevailing discourses moved away from discourses of blame and as a

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result I noticed fewer oppressive interactions between prisoners and custodial staff. Not all the custodial staff agreed with this new way of thinking and talking about their role in relation to prisoners but over time, more staff did see it that way. From a critical post-structural perspective, custodial staff were able to legitimately adopt an expanded and more flexible identity, so that their roles were less oppressive for both them and for those they were charged to contain. Prisoner perspectives and experiences were now also taken into account in decisions that affected them, which constituted a small step towards emancipatory social change, while acknowledging that as long as the model remains the dominant discourse, women will continue to be oppressed. However, I had been able to carve out an effective and valued social work role, thereby expanding the possibilities for my own and my social work colleague’s identity in the prison setting as well.

Conclusion

This chapter conveys my own experience as a social worker in a prison setting while I struggled to find a meaningful and relevant role as a critical social worker. Prison is an institution that is already established to inflict pain and take power away from its inmates, so the traditional critical social work goals of social justice, equality and emancipation may struggle for relevance. Social workers may at times feel frustrated and even despair if they are expecting that direct advocacy with managers at the unit level will achieve social work’s goals of alleviating suffering and improving the quality of life for prisoners and their families. This can be especially so if workers do not work closely with custodial staff in a respectful way or if social workers adopt adversarial ways that pit them against management or the institution’s goals.

Nevertheless, the goals of social work practice to reduce suffering and improve quality of life through emancipatory social change can be achieved in an institutional setting through analysing power relations and questioning dominant assumptions, especially our own assumptions as workers. In particular, carefully observing the localised practices of power, including discursive practices, enables social workers to develop a plan that can improve the overall culture of an institution over time. Such a plan may involve identifying where staff are polarised, what discourses are leading to oppressive uses of power, and where marginalised or silenced discourses may have the potential for being foregrounded in new ways.

A key learning from these vignettes is that power can be exercised in creative ways by taking control of what discourse is dominant; or in other words, what version of events, accounts, or causes of problems (and hence the solutions) are seen as ‘true’. There are multiple ways of doing this. I chose to do it in this prison setting

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through building respectful relationships with staff at all levels and different disci- plines, working hard to acknowledge and respect perspectives that were different to my own. I used the language of alliance to develop shared goals among the team of various staff including myself, as opposed to being adversarial. This was particu- larly the case when advocating on behalf of prisoners to management. Importantly, I created opportunities to build shared understandings with management, and together we created a new vocabulary and way of talking about prisoners and their family visits which did not polarise staff or blame prisoners. This was just one small achievement in an ongoing struggle for emancipatory social change for those who have been convicted of crime.

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(eds), Critical Social Work: Theories and practices for a socially just world, 2nd edn, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, pp. 30–44

Andrews, D. & Bonta, J. 1998, The Psychology of Criminal Conduct, 2nd edn, Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing Co.

Burr, V. 2003, Social Constructionism, 2nd edn, London: Routledge Carlen, P. & Worral, A. 2004, Analysing Women’s Imprisonment, Devon: Willan Chesney-Lind, M. & Irwin, K. 2008, Beyond Bad Girls: Gender, violence and hype, New York: Routledge —— & Morash, M. 2013, ‘Transformative feminist criminology: A critical re-thinking of a discipline’,

Critical Criminology, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 287–330 —— & Pasko, L. 2004, The Female Offender: Girls, women and crime, 2nd edn, Thousand Oaks: Sage Clarke, J. 1995, ‘The impact of the prison environment on mothers’, The Prison Journal, vol. 75, no. 3,

pp. 306–29 Fook, J. 2002, Social Work: Critical theory and practice, London: Sage —— 2012, Social Work: A critical approach to practice, London: Sage Foucault, M. 1979, Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison, New York: Vintage Books —— 1984 ‘In the interview with Paul Rainbow and Hubert Dreyfus’ in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault

Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin Gaarder, E. & Belknap, J. 2004, ‘Little women: Girls in adult prison’, Women and Criminal Justice, vol.

15, no. 2, pp. 51–80 Goffman, E. 1961, ‘Asylums’: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates, London:

Penguin Hannah-Moffat, K. 2005, ‘Criminogenic needs and the transformative risk subject: Hybridizations of

risk/need in penalty’, Punishment & Society, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 29–51 Morash, M., Bynum, T. & Koons, B. 1998, Women Offenders: Programming needs and promising

approaches, National Institute of Justice Research in Brief, Washington DC: National Institute of Justice,

van Heugten, K. 2001, ‘Social work: its role and task’ in M. Connolly (ed.), New Zealand Social Work: Contexts and practice, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, pp. 3–17

Ward, T. & Stewart, C. 2003, ‘Criminogenic needs and human needs: A theoretical model’, Psychology,

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Crime & Law, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 125–43 Zimbardo, P., Maslach, C. & Haney, C. 1999, ‘Reflections on the Stanford prison experiment: Genesis,

transformations, consequences’ in T. Blast (ed.), Obedience to Authority: Current perspectives on the Milgram paradigm, Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum

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Professional practice standards and critical

practices: addressing the tensions in social work field education settings

Norah Hosken, Lesley Ervin and Jody Laughton

Introduction

This chapter considers the constraints and possibilities for university staff and agency-based field educators to enable social work students to practise critical social work while on placement. While recognising the differences in power, students are placed in a unique position to respectfully introduce and model critical social work views and practices to their placement field educators and teams. We authors are members of a university social-work field education team (the team) who draw on our collective experience to write this chapter. This experience includes teaching of field education units and placement integration seminars, organising social work placements and providing liaison visits to students and their field educators during placements. The examination of constraints and possibilities for critical social work practice occurs in an Australian context. We hope that readers from other locations

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may find the discussions and suggested critical responses relevant when these concern the normalisations of the ideas and practices of neoliberalism as they relate to social work field education.

The team identify a major constraint on critical social work practice as the influence of neoliberal values and associated implementations that affect funding, accreditation, management, policies and service provision of universities and human service organisations. We explore the possibilities for creating environments that foster greater opportunity for students to practise and model critical social work with a focus on working in solidarity and using suggested critical social princi- ples and process orientations within locally developed frameworks for change. It is suggested that ‘listening ethically’ (see Chapter 4) informs people’s capacity to think and see critically to reveal the policies, or their components, that constrain the practice of critical social work for social justice. Policies are contained in a variety of texts that organise much of the work and behaviours of social work academics, field educators and students in education and human service organisations.

A case study frames the chapter, describing the efforts we have made to enact critical social work practice. The case study introduces and illustrates suggested critical social work practice principles, drawing on many critical social work process orientations (see Chapter 4), and located within the Framework for Critical Social Work Action (FCSWA) that we have developed. The principles and framework could be nuanced for different situations, including students’ practice of critical social work on placement. Central to FCSWA is the experience of the authors that the value of the day-to-day use of critical social work is increased when listening ethically to those who are most affected by policies and practices, and when forming part of collective efforts. This collectivity involves working in solidarity and purpose with others, towards the longer-term goals of transforming practice, organisations and societies towards social justice.

Practice principle: draw on experience and critical theories for one’s own work and working with others

In early 2014, when we as an author team planned the content for this chapter, we as the team, were concerned at the lack of opportunities for social work students to practise critical social work on placements. Over the following twenty months, using a process inspired by feminist participatory action research, we endeavoured to improve our own understanding and enactment of critical social work within our educational setting as a form of praxis aimed at social change. This was a parallel process that would guide our efforts for improved structure and support for social

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work students’ opportunities to be prepared for, learn and do critical social work on placements. The dual process of using the writing of the chapter to inform the way we align the ideas, texts, teaching and practices of social work field education more strongly to critical social work are referred to as the ‘project’. Students and practi- tioners may find similar ways to use this parallel project process within teams and organisations to increase motivation, resources and collaborative critical reflectivity towards social-justice-oriented change.

Practice principle: develop shared understandings of theory to increase practice

The opportunity to discuss and develop shared understanding of the theoretical base of critical social work directly influenced the team’s practice of critical social work during the project, an outline of which follows. The team arrived at a shared under- standing of critical social work to include a range of social work practice approaches that were primarily informed by critical theories as supplemented by postmodern insights (Allan et al. 2009; Pease 2013). A theory is critical ‘to the extent that it seeks social transformation as forms of justice and emancipation’ (Gray & Webb 2013: 77). A major impetus for the development of critical social work was profes- sional’s dissatisfaction with perceived limitations of the dominance of traditional social work that involved ‘taken-for-granted professional assumptions of the time, which gave prominence to individualist explanations of social problems’ (Healy 1993: 4). These individualist explanations primarily focused on the individual in a casework model, which were often underpinned by psychological theories that recognised the causes of clients’ problems as mainly located within them, and the aim was to promote the clients’ adjustment. The team had observed many instances of our own policy-shaped practice in the university setting, and of social work in placement agencies, that aligned with this individualistic model of understanding and responding to the problems of those using services. In contrast, while critical social work comprises different approaches, there is a common view of the problems that social workers and service users experience being primarily caused by hardships entrenched in economic, social, political and cultural stratifications (Weiss-Gal et al. 2014), and the goal is to support service users while working individually, and with others, to change these inequalities. This understanding of critical social work acknowledges the inter-relationships between interpersonal, institutional and macro or structural levels of critical practice. Explanation of the team’s use and localisation of these core principles of critical social work to the project follow.

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Practice principle: listen ethically and learn from the location and views of those who are most affected

We adopted the feminist perspective embedded in Dorothy Smith’s (2005) insti- tutional ethnography as has been applied in social work contexts (for example, de Montigny 1995; Brown 2006; Hosken 2013). Using this method, inquiries into how organisations and practices are structured to create their outcomes commence from the partial views from the locations and experiences of those most affected, often the least powerful and least privileged, in particular situations (Smith 2005). In terms of positioning, inquiries into how social justice and critical social-work practices are constructed or are absent from these views aims to ‘create the vision, and ability, to challenge [unjust and] discriminatory policies and practices as they are normalised and inflect at individual, supervisory, organisational and societal levels’ (Hosken 2013: 91). Social work students on placement have discussed, expressed numerous concerns and posed many questions to us; some of these points are referred to in this chapter, and served to orient the project.

Practice principle: examine the regulatory texts for how they organise normality

Texts can standardise and exert control The examination of the texts regulating placements commenced from the views and experiences of those most affected, field education staff and the many students who expressed concern and stress while navigating their roles in their unpaid place- ments. In particular, we were interested in how the regulatory documents governing field placements might support, or inhibit, the ability of field education staff, and placement students, to do critical social work. Smith’s concept of the ‘text-reader conversation’ (Smith 2005: 105) alerted us to how texts that regulated student placements may ‘exert significant control’ (2005: 108) in activating certain actions in the daily work of educators, practitioners and students. One key purpose of a regulatory text, such as a code of ethics, is to standardise and control how people reading the text then act. Regulatory texts often embed dominant discourses and majority culture expectations as norms (Hosken 2013). The term, discourse, as used here, refers to a: ‘systematic way of knowing something that is grounded in expert knowledge and that circulates widely in society through language, including most importantly language vested in texts . . . [and] appears almost as common sense’ (Mykhalovskiy 2002: 39).

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Identifying the regulatory texts The day-to-day work of the field education team included developing the curri cu- lum and teaching of academic units that related to field placement; editing the field placement manual and associated documents; telephone, video-conferencing, email and face-to-face conversations with students and staff to organise and manage field placements; and providing liaison visits for first- and final-year social work students on placement.

We observed and identified the key documents that organised our own work in these areas, finding: university staff members’ position descriptions, workload agreements, complaints procedures, assessment policies, audit regimes, performance appraisals and the field education budget; the Australian Social Work Education and Accreditation Standards (AASW 2012c) [the ASWEAS] that set out required principles, standards, graduate attributes and core content for accredited social work courses in Australia; ASWEAS Guideline 1.5: Guidance on reaccreditation reviews (AASW 2012a); ASWEAS Guideline 1.2: Guidance on field education programs (AASW 2012b); the Practice Standards (AASW 2013b) [the Standards]; the Code of Ethics (AASW 2010), [the Code] and Ethics and Practice Guideline—Ethics and Field Education (AASW 2013a). Even when the subject of debates and tensions regarding value of their content the authors noted that these AASW documents remained instrumental in organising the work of social work staff in the field education team and the agencies that provide placements, and the students who were undertaking placements.

Dominant discourses that organise normality The team identified how government-led, neoliberal-informed values and business management practices were a major influence that shaped our work. Examples of neoliberal values infiltrating the thinking and behaviours of team members included:

• team discussions during the project meetings of our own experiences and feelings of individualised inadequacy, accountability and responsibility, for our performances in demonstrating compliance with university and professional body regulations governing placements;

• how the construction of students and services users as purchasers of a product or service invoked risk management, rather than holistic, responses to issues;

• the team’s exposure to regular emails from management that promoted competitive funding and staffing processes and ‘successful’ individual staff who self-managed within expected behaviours and ideals as contained within strategic plans, accreditation processes and corporate brands.

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The team’s experience appeared consistent with others in the way that staff organisation of student placements takes place in Australian universities have been subject to government-led corporatisation, ‘transformed into a business by mobi- lising processes, discourses, and practices of marketisation, managerialism and privatisation’ (Blackmore 2014: 285). The authors observed first-hand that students undertake placements in the human services sector which has been the ‘proving ground for NPM [New Public Management]-inspired market-focused service provi- sion’ (Butcher & Dalton 2014: 142). The team talked with workers in organisations that had traditionally taken students on placement who were not able to do so due to staff retrenchments and funding instability.

Regulation of mythical norms The requirement that universities delivering professional social work programs must meet accreditation, and re-accreditation, standards as set by the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) was a major influence on how the team under- stood and organised our work. One example of the significant disciplinary control of the AASW regulatory texts was the additional work activated from field education staff, and students, as they aimed to comply with the ASWEAS Guideline 1.2.3 that placement students can have no leave of any kind included in their completion of a minimum of 1000 hours in at least two field education subjects (AASW 2012b: 3).

We found that the ASWEAS Guidance on field education programs (Guideline 1.2.3) produced disproportionate negative impacts on those students who were furthest from the ‘mythical norm’ of the social work student (Hosken 2013: 96) on placement being ‘young, Anglo, unencumbered, and financially supported by parents’. A mythical norm is a socially constructed ‘stereotype . . . perpetuated by society, against which everyone else is measured’ (Lorde 199: 362), forming a hierarchy under which others fall. For example, we found that students from a range of non-Anglo-Celtic cultural backgrounds experienced greater disadvan- tage under the ‘no leave of any kind’ rule than students closest to the mythical norm placement student. Those students from a minority-culture background explained to the authors that absences from placement were needed due to cultural requirements associated with birth, bereavement or mourning, or participation in decision-making forums within interdependant family and community struc- tures. Some of these students talked about the additional burdens on students from minority-culture backgrounds that arise when Anglo-Celtic cultural norms (reflected in regulations) conflicted with their own cultural requirements. In other situations, experiences of racial micro-aggressions and racism (Szoke 2012) combined with poverty (Brough et al. 2015) to create extra physical, emotional

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and financial work, and stress, when undertaking placement. A number of these students expressed emotional distress to us where feelings of personal and cultural inadequacy were invoked by having to request permission for absences from their placements and then request to extend placements to cover those absences. In conversations with these students, some authors actively drew on their under- standing of critical social work developed in the project to define problems in ideologies, policy and practices first, rather than in individuals. Some of the critical social-work process orientations (see Chapter 4) were used by authors including witnessing, ethical listening, mutual consciousness-raising, acknowl- edging, validating, resisting, universalising, individualising, and critical reframing of experiences. A number of students reported to the authors that their feelings of inadequacy lessened after these discussions, particularly in relation to exploring possible deficiencies in policies that were not culturally inclusive. These and other conversations with students about the adverse impacts on them of policy and regulations were a major impetus in our developing a localised FCSWA to critique and challenge aspects of university, and AASW policy and practice.

Neoliberal enforcement of individualism The impacts of the ASWEAS Guideline 1.2.3, as discussed above, appears to both contradict and invite action regarding the AASW’s own requirement to eliminate violations of human rights, to ‘challenge, and/or report . . . policies, procedures, practices and service provisions which: are not in the best interests of clients . . . are in any way oppressive, disempowering or culturally inappropriate . . . ’ (AASW 2010: 32). Enforcing individualism and eroding capacities for collectivism, which appears to be one of this guideline’s unintended outcomes, is one way that the ASWEAS could be said to promote neoliberalism and constrain the potential for critical social work. Similarly, efforts by the AASW to concentrate on the ‘professional project’ (Olsen 2007) that seeks to elevate the standing of the profession, while understandable on some levels, also dovetail with neoliberal concerns that prioritise self-interest. Not just ‘one discourse among many’, neoliberalism is identified as a ‘strong discourse’ that has the goal of individualism through eradication of collectivism at its core (Bourdieu 1998).

Texts that activate discriminatory effects We discussed how our shared understanding of students as being diverse and often subject to ‘poverty as structural violence’ (see Chapter 7), influenced our responses to the needs and concerns of placement students. One of these responses was to work in solidarity with a larger group to advocate that the AASW amend the

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ASWEAS Guideline 1.2.3 as it appeared to produce unintended, discriminatory effects. The understanding of this guideline producing discriminatory effects is consistent with the Australian Human Rights Commission’s view that policies and practices can be discriminatory with, or without, intent being present on behalf of those designing them to be so. The measure is if these practices have ‘an unequal effect on the rights and freedoms of the individual or group involved’ (HREOC 2000 in Hosken 2013: 95).

Practice principle: critically interrogate the ideologies, policies and practices of employing, funding and regulatory organisations

Our understanding of critical social work appeared, on one level, as compatible with the stated principles and key provisions in the AASW Code of Ethics. The AASW statement of the social work profession’s responsibilities for social justice is the section of the Code most clearly aligned with a critical social work approach: promote justice and social fairness . . . ; advocate for change to social systems and structures that preserve inequalities and injustice; oppose and work to eliminate all violations of human rights . . . ; promote the protection of the natural environment . . . ; and promote community participation (AASW 2010: 13).

The AASW’s statement that the social work profession has an ‘equal commitment’ to working across personal, cultural and political domains to ‘support personal and social wellbeing’ and to ‘achieve human rights and social justice through . . . social and systemic change . . . ’ (AASW 2010: 7, clause 1.2) is another example of a stated commitment that appears to balance working to support people with structural change towards creating a more equal society that is consistent with the vision of critical social work.

Dissonance is present, however, within and between, the Code and the Standards. The assertion that social work is, or should be, underpinned by social justice and human rights principles (AASW 2010: 7) and works to eliminate all violations of human rights can easily contrast with aspects of the Code that guide social workers in ethical practice and decision-making. For instance, where tension exists between ‘observing the Code and complying with legal or organisation requirements’ social workers are instructed by the Code to ‘act in accordance with the law and with organi sational directives’ (AASW 2010: 14). This contradiction has been mentioned by field educators and students during liaison visits as excusing social workers from the requirement to work to eliminate violations of human rights, to ‘challenge, and/ or report . . . policies, procedures, practices and service provisions which: are not in

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the best interests of clients . . . are in any way oppressive, disempowering or cultur- ally inappropriate’ (AASW 2010: 32). Moreover, of the eight Standards, only one appears to require that social workers, and students on placement, demonstrate that they not only understand, but ‘practice’, what is required in the standard.

More students means more risk and less placements Now there are more enrolled students due to deregulation (Koshy 2014), it has intensi- fied existing social work placement shortages across much of Australia. The increased caution arising from government funding cuts across the human services sector alongside output-focused funding contracts have combined to embed management and audit regimes that invoke risk-averse work cultures (Keevers 2010) that are not easily amenable to supporting the learning needs of students. In this environment, human-service sector organisations increasingly seek compliant, ‘job-ready’ gradu- ates, ‘high performing’ and ‘low-risk’ placement students (Cleak & Smith 2012).

From the view of field education team members, it is clear that the organi- sation, progress and experience of student social-work placements in the human service sector are inevitably full of risks. Things can go awry in small and big ways as students navigate their lengthy field placements, which are frequently in organisa- tions experiencing turmoil, with service users subjected to harsher welfare regimes. This is amid the students’ own life situations, often involving part-time paid work, financial and time-shortage stresses, and the pressures of caring responsibilities (Brough et al. 2015).

Current assessment of social work student placements The Standards identify requirements and practice expectations for a qualified social worker and are also the basis for students to develop learning goals, and to evaluate students’ performance on placements. The 23 specified practice standards are segmented into 8 components of practice and 102 detailed indicators to illustrate the requirements for meeting that standard (AASW 2013a).

The AASW require an assessment of whether students on placement have demonstrated an acceptable level of understanding and enacting of the standards, and that a range of learning activities and methods of assessment should be used to assess the student’s level of achievement and whether they have met the perfor- mance outcomes specified (AASW 2012b). The Standards, indicators and ASWEAS Graduate Attributes use a competence-based approach of measuring a student’s performance on placement. These centre on the descriptions of the standards and indicators.

The majority of Australian universities delivering social work programs have

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additional assessment requirements for placements involving student contributions to university-run integration seminars, portfolios and written reflections to demon- strate critical reflection and an ability to integrate theory and practice. Contributions to student teaching, assessment and passing or failing field placement units are shared between students, field educators and university staff. The responsibility for the final assessment, however, rests with the university.

Our experience indicates some support from workers and students in universi- ties, and human-service sector organisations for the structuring, consistency, clarity and seeming transparency contained in specified standards and outcomes. However, there is also recognition of a philosophical divergence between the use of practice standards, measured by outcomes and competence, and of critically reflective prac- tice that accepts complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity and humility.

Fragmentation and technicism Social work courses at universities have to meet the requirements of the AASW to gain and maintain accreditation. The regulatory documents of the AASW are, there- fore, a dominant influence on how university staff write field education manuals and construct the student placement learning and assessment processes. The AASW definition, purpose, value base, core curriculum, practice expectations, supervision requirements and some guidelines for assessment of student placements for social work are in different places, not necessarily aligned or coherent, across a range of documents including: the Code (AASW 2010); the sixteen online Ethics and Practice Guidelines (AASW 2013); the ASWEAS (AASW, 2012) as revised in 2014; the Standards (AASW, 2013a); specific practice standards for school social workers (AASW 2008) and for mental health social workers (AASW 2008) and Supervision Standards (AASW 2014).

The following vignette, drawn from a number of liaison visits carried out by us during the project, highlights the interface between regulatory documents and human service organisations, both shaped within neoliberal work values and practices.

Vignette Running late, I grab my liaison pack with the Manual, the Code and

pop in the student’s learning plan. Between the jerks of station stops,

reading the student’s learning plan, while making notes of points to

discuss, I am struck by the realisation that, again, many students are

interpreting the learning plan in a ‘technicist’ manner. Is the learning

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plan itself inviting this response? Where is the inspiration, the sense

of social justice purpose, the requirement for students to learn and

practise critical social work among these fragmented standards and

endless indicators?

Absorbing this reflection, I prepare to go in to the liaison,

intending to create a space for critical social work informed reflec-

tion. I imagine meeting the student and field educator in the

organisation with the aim to cohere threads of the Manual, learning

plan, the Code, Standards and indicators—using artistry to make a

holistic and meaningful learning experience out of siloed columns

and clauses, decoupled from context. I hear about the most recent

restructuring of this agency to accommodate the new programs

that reduce the length of time for client involvement. This includes

the types of services allowed to be offered.

The student shows and explains the various intake, assessment

and planning documents. I see that our learning plan is similar in

style, another tick-the-box template form, divorced from what it is

meant to represent, familiar in the everyday life of social workers

here; our competency-based learning plan with rating scales is

perfectly compatible with, and contextualised to, risk-averse, time-

and resource-poor, predefined outcome-focused, organisations.

I gently explore with the student and supervisor some changes

to the learning plan that could enable the student to undertake tasks

to learn and demonstrate competence in Standard One, which

was seemingly missed: ‘works to eliminate all violations of human

rights; identifies social systems and structures that preserve inequal-

ities . . . and advocates for change; challenges policies and practices

that are oppressive and fail to meet international standards of human

rights’. (AASW 2013b:9). The field educator looks at me and says

quietly, ‘You know of course there is no way that we can actually

do these things like challenge policies and practices. If we did, that

would become our whole job. I can try to create an understanding

with the student of how they might do it, but we can’t actually do it.’.

Identifying dissonance The vignette above points to the dissonance between how prominent the discourse of social justice and human rights is in the definition and core principles of social

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work adopted by the AASW and many universities’ Schools of Social Work, and the lack of this discourse’s coherent, holistic and contextualised presence in the university’s Manual as influenced by the Practice Standards and indicators. This disjuncture also occurs between those Practice Standards requiring students (and practitioners) to do social justice, human rights, and critical social work and its lack of implementation by many social workers in education and human service organisations. The language used in most of the eight Practice Standards only requires that students and social workers demonstrate an ‘understanding of ’ what is defined in the standards. However, Practice Standard One requires social workers, and students on placement, to demonstrate not only understanding but ‘practising’ what is required in the standard, that social workers:

uphold their ethical responsibilities and . . . act appropriately when faced with ethical problems, issues and dilemmas . . . practice within a social justice and human rights framework . . . work to eliminate all violations of human rights, identify . . . inequalities . . . and advocate for change, challenge policies and practices that fail to meet . . . stand- ards of human rights (AASW 2012: 9).

The Standards and indicators are a fragmenting and technicist influence when experienced by the social work field education team member in the above vignette. The liaison person does what seems possible in a given moment, to use ‘spheres of influence’ to achieve more critical social work cognisant, ‘micro-climates’ (Fook 2012: 185) within broader business-like contexts. It appears, though, given the preva- lence of NPM in their respective organisational contexts that the university liaison person and the social work supervisor make a private pact to settle for the student just demonstrating an understanding of social justice, human rights and critical social work practice, rather than the student demonstrating they can actually do these things. The liaison person found that individual critically reflective practice was important, but not enough on its own. The team found the ability to achieve small or big changes was increased when working with others to form plans to challenge the embedding of neoliberal values and practices within people, within practices, within texts and within organisations.

Principle: use critical reflection, informed by those most affected, in purposeful solidarity with others

Our experiences of using the competency-based approach are that it invites an uncritical tick-the-box response to learning and assessment (Aronson & Hemingway

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2011: 283) against the contextual backdrop of neoliberalism and NPM that impact on social work educators and field education team members at universities, liaison staff, students and field educators in busy organisations. Our conclusions, based on 20 months and comprising some 30 liaison visits, is that learning and assess- ment processes are needed to complement or replace competency-based methods, enabling ‘integrated knowledge’, ‘highly developed intuition’, that provide for combinations of ‘critical reflection, practice experience, discipline-specific theories, and empirical research’ (Regehr et al. 2011). We agree with Pease that learning and assessment would benefit from a foundation in: ‘critical knowledge-informed practice to encompass radical sociological thought, ethnographic qualitative research, tacit knowledge, critically reflective practice, parity of participation and citizen based knowledge’ (Pease 2013: 32).

We suggest the assessment process needs to match the values and processes of learning and practice. This could be achieved by the assessment of a student’s perfor- mance on placement having a greater integration of reflection, holistic approach and critical thinking as part of the assessment culture and practice (Wilson 2011). This would include considering how the university, placement agency and societal context differentially affects the opportunities for students to learn rather than just viewing a student’s pass or fail of a placement unit as a function of atomised, individual competence (Bourdieu 1998). The team is currently working to trial placement learning and assessment processes that incorporate these understandings.

Practice principle: work in solidarity while recognising differences with others, towards social-justice oriented change

Working in solidarity, in a team, provided much needed inspiration and motivation to sustain us while undertaking this project. Involvement in the project fostered collec- tive, rather than individualised, responsibilities and responses. This strengthened the ability of the team to understand and respond to the complex issues surrounding student placements to be responded to as structural, rather than individual problems. We feel this is a good example of how working in solidarity with others creates oppor- tunities, and a sense of protection, for people to practise critical social work. The collective nature of the team work also provided validating occasions to acknowledge each other’s work and moments of safe reprieve, to ‘let off steam’.

Drawing on this experience, the team member responsible for teaching integration seminars with students on placement further emphasised fostering a sense of solidarity between herself and students, and between the students as a

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group. Students’ own placement experiences, an ongoing case study (see Chapter 4) and critical policy analysis practice were scaffolded across the three placement inte- gration seminars to explore, and support students to practise, critical social work in their placement contexts.

Practice principle: ‘good enough’ critical social work within a ‘Framework for Critical Social Work Action’

Although we were disappointed that our workloads prohibited a full re-think and re-write of the Manual and the learning plan it contains, we decided an incremental review was possible and worthwhile. Despite falling short of our initial goals, this ‘good enough’ progress initiated the development of a ‘Framework for Critical Social Work Action’ (FCSWA) in the social work field education team that broadened as the project developed. The FCSWA provided a longer-term plan and approach that alleviated feelings of inadequacy, the pressures of perfection, and an ‘all-or-nothing’ mentality.

Practice principle: work alongside marginalised groups to advocate for change

The inclusion of other goals into the FCSWA included applying for seed funding for a number of projects to provide and share learning from: opportunities for student placement that promote critical social work practice; developing the university social-work simulation website to share ways of providing opportunities for the practice of critical social work in student placements; and improving the educational preparation, and support, for critical social work placement practice. Importantly, the FCSWA was broadened to include work and goals that were already underway but that had previously lacked coherent prominence in the plan. In this way, we could honour our witnessing (see Chapter 4) of the students’ experience to advocate for changes to those university and regulatory provisions that adversely impact social work students on placements in Australia such as lack of cultural inclusivity in ‘no leave of any kind provisions’.

Conclusion

The accumulated learning by the team in this project includes how regulatory texts, covering those of the professional body representing social work in Australia, and the university social work field education manual plus the learning plan that it contains,

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are influenced by neoliberal values and practices. The neoliberal discourse embedded in regulatory texts activates certain responses in social work staff and students in the university, and in placement organisations, to constrain the practice of critical social work. Our plan, within our locally developed FCSWA, is to continue to be informed by students to challenge policies and regulations that are not inclusive or social- justice oriented, and to change the Manual to invite responses from readers that enable critical social work. This is part of the process of critical social work, to question, to reflect, and to work with others to create change.

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