Daily Practice Narratives of Child Protection Workers:
The Power of the Frontline
By Yvonne Gomez

Introduction

All interactions in child welfare are based in power. Power relations in child welfare have been documented in social work literature. Dumbrill and Maiter (1997) provide a clear example of the way that clients understand power in child welfare as "an encounter with child welfare authorities…often experienced as an encounter with 'absolute‘ power" (cited in Strega 2007, p.69). "For some clients, particularly Indigenous clients, the encounter is connected with historical, social and political oppression" (p.69). In this paper I present my thesis findings which are based on a narrative inquiry of frontline child protection workers, as well as present the implications on practice. This study was done to better understand how power is conceptualized through the analysis of daily practice stories. In my own practice experiences as a frontline child protection worker, I have found myself engaged in many complex relations of power. My curiosity, therefore, lies in how workers understand these relations and how analyzing power in daily practice could be transformative to the practices of child welfare. In the study of child welfare, little research has been done from the perspective of the frontline child protection worker.

Who are the Frontline Child Protection Workers in Canada?

Central to understanding frontline child protection workers is the question of who they are. This question is challenging to answer in Canada as the literature is limited and statistical data on social work as a profession is scarce, particularly in child welfare. What is known is that many new graduates of social work begin their careers in child protection but "few are committing to long-term careers in this field" (Kufeldt & McKenzie, 2003, p.41). The data provided in the report A National Profile of Child Protection Workers dates back to 1998 and is by no means comprehensive. Unfortunately it is the only study conducted on child protection workers in Canada to date.

Although the profile of workers might have seen changes since 1998 (which was my own experience, being hired in a large urban center where there were linguistic and culturally specific recruitments), overall the face of a worker in child protection is that of a young, white female BSW graduate with less then two years of direct practical experience in the field. Further research needs to occur to update this information as it was limited in participant numbers and the data is now more than a decade old.

Literature Review

The literature reviewed for my thesis was extensive and looked at existing knowledge about frontline practitioners and power in the area of child protection work; specifically, the perspectives of frontline practitioners in the literature and remarks on areas where these perspectives of are either well-represented or missing from the literature. The review was divided into three parts. Part One: Power in Child Protection examines the ways power has been understood in social work literature from various perspectives, as well as Foucault‘s concept of power and how it has been applied to social work. Part Two: Perspectives from the Frontline explores the ways that child protection workers have been represented in the literature and identifies gaps in the literature. Part Three: Anti-Oppressive Practice in Child Welfare presents an alternative means of practice for frontline child protection workers. The literature conveys that there is a gap in practice knowledge, and I hope that my research will begin to address the topic of frontline protection workers. The full literature review can be found in my thesis (Gomez, 2008).

Methodological Theory: Narrative Analysis

Narrative analysis as a methodology is broad in its beginnings and, as Riessman (2002) suggests, "does not fit neatly within the boundaries of any single scholarly field" (p.217). I used narrative analysis as a way to expand what is currently understood of frontline child protection workers‘ practices. In addition, this methodology provides a means of documenting knowledge from the perspective of those in the field. Narratives provide data where operations of power can be analysed and new ways of understanding social work practice can be formed. The key influences in shaping my understanding of narrative analysis have been the works of Riessman (2002, 2005), as well as Urek (2005) and Fraser (2004). Fraser (2004) adds to Riessman‘s (2002) work by taking the analysis further and by entering into the discussion of social context and how we are active subjects in our world. Narrative research that is done from a critical social work perspective looks at "author[ing] the stories that 'ordinary‘ people tell" (Fraser, 2004, p.181). This makes narrative methodology well-suited to the task of examining the stories of 'ordinary‘ frontline child protection workers.

Analysis

Central to the research was developing a better understanding of how frontline child protection workers conceptualize power in daily practice. Their stories could be analyzed in many different ways. Although using personal stories could be interpreted as a criticism of British Colombia‘s Ministry of Child and Family Development or of state child protection authorities in general, it is not the intention. This research could prove harmful if used against frontline child protection workers and the information shared with me during the interviews could, if it became public knowledge, marginalize a participant in his/her workplace. Obviously, I did not want this to happen. Likewise, I did not want these interviews to be used to reaffirm stereotypes about workers in child welfare. My intention, rather, was to disrupt the dichotomy of the power hungry worker and the powerless worker. It is my hope that the research will be understood not only as a challenge to the status quo in how frontline child protection practice is understood but also as a "challenge [to] my own complacency in the systems of domination and subordination" (Strega, 2007, p. 3) in which I have worked and in which I aspire to continue my career.

Stories of Daily Practice

It is important to present frontline child protection workers as a means to honour their knowledge and participation. The stories have been named as a means of respecting their experience and contribution. For the complete stories please refer to my thesis (Gomez, 2008).

I Fell for her Sherri‘s story is titled I fell for her as it draws attention to the fact that Sherri feels she is doing something wrong or illicit by having a "human" relationship within the structure of child protection.

Nobody wants me Vickie‘s story is one of practicing alone, even when she has peers. She separates herself from her colleagues, supervisors and even from the structure of child protection, her family, and herself. By the end of her narrative, the reader is left with a sense that Vickie cannot see value in her way of practicing.

The White man Marc‘s narrative shares his experience of power and how it can be perceived by others. Marc is very aware of his particular place in the child welfare system, yet he maintains a sense of humour on his role as a helping professional.

One of my children Amber‘s narrative is an example of the positive potential that daily practice holds in child protection. Amber‘s understanding of relationship, relationship building and the impact that worker-client relationships can have on the client, in this case the youth and all the peripheral people that are involved in the youth‘s life.

You’re upright and still laughing Jean recounts a heart-warming story of how her relationship with a particular mother was a gift to her own learning and to her journey of becoming a better frontline child protection worker, where family can be a celebration and the worker can practice alongside the client in a judgment-free environment.

I don’t really know why As in all the stories, relationship building and keeping the practice client- centered are at the forefront with Gillian. Throughout Gillian‘s narrative, she attempts to work out what was going on for her at the time that she was practicing on this particular case. It was as if she had never reflected on this particular practice experience before.

Talking about Practice

What daily practice looks like from the perspective of the frontline worker is not easily found in social work literature and it was not freely spoken about by the research participants. One participant spoke nervously even before being recorded, and referred to the research process as visiting a confessional. Another stated that talking about practice was not something she had done in the past. There was a real element of participating in a secretive or illicit act while talking about daily practice. This being said, one participant was glad to have someone to listen to his/her story. Another worker thanked me profusely at the end of the process, commented that she was very glad to have shared her stories, and noted that she has never done so before, even with colleagues. There was a pervasive sense among all participants that there is a lack of space or realization that collaborating in practice means bringing yourself, as a frontline child protection worker, into discussions about practice. Vickie, one of the participants, expressed this sentiment of doubt in her narrative: "I’ve had so many wicked things happen. One time, I don’t know if this can be shared, but it is just too weird not to share to illustrate my practice.” The sharing of one‘s stories is not a simple task as there is an element of risk and vulnerability particularly when referring to one‘s own practice.

Participants raised concerns about confidentiality, not wanting to compromise the families or other people involved in the files. There was also a real hesitancy around sharing actual stories of practice versus their thoughts on daily practice. An important point here to highlight is that these participants self-selected to participate in the research and yet speaking about themselves and telling stories from their perspectives was a challenge. I expected that it would take a bit of time for participants to warm up to telling stories, as this was common in the interview skills and narrative methodology literature that I read. In all cases it took the participants a significant time (up to half the interview) to become comfortable enough to speak about their own daily practice experiences. In two cases, I was not able to use the interviews as the participants were not able to enter into a comfortable enough space to speak in a narrative way about daily practice. The fact that it was such a challenge for participants to speak in the first person shows how removed from their own practice these frontline child protection workers are. Yet their expression of satisfaction and relief about participating in the research shows that frontline child protection workers benefit, at least personally, by having their experiences heard and validated. This reinforces the need to examine daily practice experiences from the perspective of frontline workers.

The Conceptualization of Power

Power, for the participants, took on many forms during their stories. Traditional scripts of power took shape in the workers‘ stories; such as the roles of hero or martyr in Sherri and Gillian‘s stories, as well as the role of the powerless worker that appeared in Marc, Vickie, and Jean‘s narratives. What came out consistently during the interviews was that each of the participants flowed in and out of different understandings of power, often in the same story.

What does it mean to have an inconsistent presentation of power throughout the participants‘ stories and to each other‘s narratives? Foucault‘s thinking allows for the traditional notions of power to exist while acknowledging that they are limited to understand power. All workers in child protection have some notion of distance and the expectation of being a neutral worker, but what we persistently see is that there is resistance to engage in different types of relationships within the system of child welfare. This resistance occurs for a myriad of reasons that are outside the scope of my research but are generally moral and ethical in nature.

The Practice of Frontline Child Protection Workers is Relational

Workers‘ conceptualizations of power have been observed through their daily practice narratives. Throughout the narratives, I found that no matter what philosophy of practice, or theory of social work each participant came into the interview process with, every participant spoke about their practice in terms of relationship. Does this mean that all workers have the same understanding of relationship? No. But what is shared among all the participants is a collective language of relationship when speaking about clients. Using this relational language presents the frontline child protection workers‘ enactments of practice as postmodern even within a dominant script that holds the understanding that power flows from a central place, in this case the legislation and mandate of child protection.

The narratives also show that frontline child protection workers do not use this same conceptualization of power in regards to peers, colleagues or supervisors. What is key to my understanding of this focus on relationship is how workers understand themselves when practicing with clients. According to Foucault‘s understanding of power, even when workers do not make the connection between their practice beliefs and how they carry out their practice, they enact their power as relational. Therefore in child welfare, where frontline child protection workers are constructed as subjects that have the capacity and will to enact power over their clients, the workers‘ conceptualization of power involves daily practice experiences with and for clients through their relationships with these very clients. The frontline child protection workers that participated, even those with the most traditional understandings of their role, understood and presented their practice as relational. Examples of this relational practice can be seen throughout the narratives, particularly in Amber‘s connection with the youth where foster placement was an issue, as well as in Marc‘s stories where he dealt with the sensitive issue of inter-family sexual abuse and also in Vickie‘s story of being an ally to the client with police. Even when the practice is challenging and the worker does not have positive feelings about the outcome (as per Marc and Vickie), we can see the relational practice of the workers. For example, Amber expresses the youth‘s sentiment so well although the youth‘s feelings were not directed at Amber but were speaking to the bigger picture: “…it wasn't I'm [Amber’s] great, it was “ chose this, thank you”. This tiny excerpt shares so much feeling and implies that relational practice is meaningful and being practiced successfully every day. Amber‘s narrative is a perfect example for doing so and always maintains that she is indeed practicing inside a system of child welfare where she has not always been supported. Daily practice has the capacity to move beyond traditional understandings of power and rigid expectations of the child welfare system although worker/client is not the only relationship that needs further examination.

Is Change From the Bottom Possible?

Sawicki (1990) provides us with the postmodern understanding of Foucault‘s work that power is productive and not repressive, that power can be analysed from the bottom up. I feel that the narratives collected are a first step to challenge frontline child protection workers to take the notion of relational practice and test its potential to effect change. This would require further initiatives and research. I am not the first to take social workers to task; Wharf and McKenzie (2004) state that for change to be successful it must come from a bottom up in order for policy and practice to connect in a meaningful way. Moreau‘s (1989) work encourages frontline child protection workers to exploit their time alone with clients, outside of the watchful eyes of the system and bureaucracy that is child welfare. Much research has been done on alternative means of practice and best practices, see for example, Callahan (1989, 2000), Swift (1995) and Strega (2005, 2007). My research provides narratives from workers‘ enactment, of relational practice on a daily scale, which moves beyond techniques and theories such as anti-oppressive practice in place of looking at those people/workers that carry out the practice. My research is only a small step in wanting to understand daily practice from the perspective of frontline child protection worker and, as mentioned, relationships with clients is the factor that stands out. This is similar to what is found in the literature on anti-oppressive practice and I would like to suggest that further research on this subject include the exploration of other relationships that exist in child welfare. Further analysis of daily practice can only enrich the movement of wanting to see change from the bottom up, where frontline child protection workers and clients can work toward shared goals.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Frontline child protection workers have the potential to be transformative in their daily practice. This idea of transformation is not original and can be found in social work literature that looks at systems and occupational culture from Parton (1996) and Scourfield (2003). If the potential of frontline child protection workers is to be utilized, there is a need to study what workers are doing at work, as suggested by Parton (1996). Emphasis on "paying close attention to the effects of what workers do, the beliefs they profess, and the organization of social services departments, their routines and bureaucracies" must enter into our academic and practical thinking (Scourfield, 2003, p.31). What my research brings to light is the idea that each frontline child protection worker thinks that they are the only one. By this I mean their feelings of practice are not shared or normalized with each other. My findings show that they practice alone and are isolated from peers and supervisors both systemically and by their own beliefs and that they are doing what no other worker is doing with and for their clients. All of this occurs in spite of the existence of professional associations such as the British Columbia Association of Social Workers (hereafter BCASW) that aim to provide space for professional development and discussions around practice issues to occur. The BCASW has committees, such as the committee of Child Welfare and Family, which have organized listening tours to engage child protection professionals, families and communities in discussions together. Despite the availability of this resource, frontline child protection workers cannot engage with the outside. Perhaps we need to focus our attention inward on ourselves before looking to change the system. It is difficult to build relationships, but this needs to occur outside the constraints of the child welfare system before there is any kind of transformation from the bottom up. What would happen if all frontline child protection workers placed relationship as a practice priority? What would the impact be on the structure of child welfare?

The Master’s House

Much like Lorde (1984) and then Strega‘s (1995) work on the view from the poststructuralist margins of research, I too feel that the master‘s tool will not dismantle the master‘s house. The role of frontline child protection worker has many facets, a few of which are to act as professionals, enforcers of policy and to protect children, while simultaneously acting as advocate and ally with clients. This leaves workers with an overwhelming sense of responsibility that they carry as individuals, not as frontline child protection workers forming part of a team in the bigger picture of child protection and child welfare. I use these words 'with‘ and 'for‘ even when it is not easy to see because at the heart of anti-oppressive practice, or whatever the newest best practice methodology is being labelled, this is the biggest shift in practice.

Is change from the inside possible? This is an ongoing debate, most eloquently articulated by Audre Lorde (1984) and Strega (2005, 2007). Audre Lorde (1984) stated "the master‘s tools will never dismantle the master‘s house" (p. 112). A strong emphasis is placed on community and its ability to meet its own needs on its own terms. Lorde (1984) goes on to say that "they [the master‘s tools] merely allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change" (p. 112). It is Lorde‘s position that change is not possible from inside the already-established institutions, a position that oversimplifies the debate of child welfare. It is not as simple as breaking down the challenge of meeting children‘s needs to an inside/outside debate. Child welfare is missing community from within – the workers are splintered and judgmental of each other (as seen in Vickie and Amber‘s stories) and they are policing and controlling themselves (as seen in Gillian and Marc‘s stories).

An alternative way of seeing change as possible is presented by Mohanty (in Turner et al., 2004): "genuine change results from fighting power and domination, using and modifying the master‘s tools, creating our own tools. Genuine change must be demanded and worked for; it is never a gift" (p. 37). Yet as social workers we form a group that we rarely acknowledge. The BCASW is doing work to bind workers together to have discussions by way of projects like the Listening Tour done by the work of the Child Welfare and Family Committee.

Final Thoughts

My research has reinforced my own personal experiences as a frontline child protection worker, specifically the idea that one thinks that one‘s practice is individual and that one is practicing alone. My research shows that this sentiment of practicing in isolation is shared. Normalizing these feelings of practicing alone could both open the discussion on how practice is occurring and broaden our understanding of how practice is being done from the perspective of the frontline worker. Furthermore, such a dialogue could tackle the possibility of how conceptualizing power in these terms may provide us with a different way to discuss change from the bottom up.

Finally, without understanding the perspective of frontline child protection workers in their daily practice, we are in the same place we have always been with an incomplete narrative of child welfare. The study‘s six frontline child protection workers have given us an understanding of how to continue the pursuit of practice knowledge. I hope that, in part, my work presents alternative views of child protection practice and how dedicated the workers in this field are to the families they serve.

About the Author:

Yvonne Gomez has worked in the field of Child Welfare in several facets for the past seven years; as a frontline child protection worker with the Catholic Children‘s Aid Society of Toronto, an international caseworker with International Social Service Canada, an adoption and guardianship counsellor in Victoria, British Columbia and presently as a kinship worker at the Children‘s Aid Society of Ottawa. Yvonne recently completed her MSW at the University of Victoria. Her thesis focuses the daily practice narratives of frontline child protection workers. What this research has answered for her is that there is a place to impact change in the larger system of Child Welfare through those who deliver the services, and that this transformative practice is underway on the front lines, although we as practitioners and researchers do not fully grasp its reality yet. What has also come out of her own daily practice and research is that there is not enough thoughtful sharing between professionals or academics on the topic of Child Welfare practice.

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