STRESS AND INCOMPETENCE IN CHILD PROTECTION / 542

Not everyone in the public sector is convinced that inquiries in the past have corrected the recurrent errors in the child protection service of our province. This blog identifies faults in the present practice of professionals which means that recommendations may have been read and implemented but somehow it has not reached far enough to improve practice and delivery.

Communication skills are fundamental to social work. Parents, whose children have been apprehended, whether or not the children have been returned, have been saying the following kinds of things about the way social workers communicate. Social workers raise concerns. They are seldom clear about the nature of the concerns. They ask closed questions. They rarely identify positives. The do not demonstrate a supportive level of empathy. Yet empathy is central to good social work communication in child protection cases. Empathy reduces resistance in clients as well as increases a client’s willingness to divulge information. The development of skills in empathetic communication seems imperative, not only for the sake of parents but for the sake of the CP workers themselves.

CP workers cope with significant job stress which is understandable. To be faced with case after case of resistant clients (parents) who sense no empathy and therefore appear uncooperative generates stress. Case workers are not seeking to be mean spirited family destroyers. Their cases have huge investments of emotion. Emotional exhaustion is real and frequent. Burnout is predictable. Coping strategies such as emotional disengagement/avoidance do not work for every social worker and when employed can make the CP worker less effective because empathy is compromised.

Further, the case work is further degenerated when disengaged or exhausted workers base their assessments of risk on a narrow range of evidence, which is information that is readily available rather than significant data which other professionals would uncover. In fact, that range of evidence when questionable has often been biased toward that which is first or last, dramatic, specific and which provokes sensation. Often that immediate or most recent evidence is dishonest, wrongly motivated, faulty or erroneous and was accepted because it corresponded with the existing impression of the family. The CP workers are reluctant to revise their opinions. What’s the problem? Child Protection workers under the stress of an almost thankless job are predictably going to base their research and judgements upon simplified reasoning processes which will be prone to error. Intuitive judgements need to be checked rigorously.