The pride and prejudice of the social worker
Colin Brewer
Almost unnoticed outside the trade press of social workers, magistrates and psychiatrists, a bitter and fascinating argument has been taking place for the past year about the best way of handling truancy and certain other juvenile offences. It is strange that the general public has not joined in the fun, because delinquency is a popular topic. Furthermore, the argument has crucial implications for the whole policy of handing over the 'treatment' of j uvenile offenders to social workers, and so far the social workers have had very much the worst of the debate.
The cause of the argument is an experiment carried out by Dr Roy Hullin, reader in chemistry at Leeds University and chairman of the Leeds juvenile panel, with the assistance of a local child psychiatrist and educational welfare officer. In 1972, Dr Hullin noticed that the usual system of having truants 'supervised' by social workers seemed to be rather ineffective and that truants quite often progressed to more serious offences, possibly committed at times when they ought to have been at school. He therefore started dealing with some cases by repeated `adjournments' so that the offending child had to return to court with his parents at frequent intervals. At these appearances, an educational welfare officer would present a record of the child's school attendance and those who persisted in truancy would either be brought back more often (with increased inconvenience to their families) or threatened with being briefly put `in care' if they didn't mend their ways. (In care' is, of course, the current euphemism for taking children away from their families and even, sometimes, locking them up. The idea of a magistrate saying; `If you don't behave yourself, we'llcare for you for three weeks is no more surreal than some of the philosophy behind the Children and Young Persons Act of 1969).
In effect, then, truants whose cases were adjourned simply had a magisterial finger wagged at them every so often, and their `treatment' thus consisted essentially of repeated exposure to the rather low-key majesty of juvenile courts and, in many cases, pressure from parents to conform to the requirements of the law to minimise the number of visits to court. Initial results suggested that this approach was much more effective than regular chats with the friendly, neighbourhood social worker. '
Although Dr Hullin and his colleagues had tried to ensure that the children who were `adjourned' were similar to those who were dealt with by social workers, truants were not allocated randomly to the two methods as required for a truly scientific and watertight study. The experiment was therefore repeated in 1975-6 in such a way that the results would withstand scientific scrutiny. As before, the two groups of truants were comparable in the incidence of such possibly relevant factors as age, sex, class size, broken homes, social class, police record and immigrant status. Indeed, there were slightly more children from broken or immigrant homes in the `adjourned' group. Both groups had identical truancy records, averaging 75 per cent absences out of 190 possible half-days in the period before their court attendance.
The results, in Dr Hullin's words, `again clearly demonstrated the superiority of adjournment over supervision; the average absence of youngsters on adjournment was 67 half-days out of a possible 190, compared with 97 in the supervised group. The difference was highly significant statistically.'
But it was not just in respect of their school attendance that the adjournments group did better. They were less likely to have committed crimes other than truancy compared with the social-worker group. Anticipating criticism that treatment by nasty, unfeeling magistrates might be more psychologically harmful than supervision by caring, sensitive social workers, Dr Hullin arranged for teachers and psychologists to assess the subsequent degree of emotional disturbance. The two groups were identical, although much more disturbed than children who did not play truant.
The results of the Leeds experiment are remarkable enough, but the response of the local social work establishment is even more remarkable. As an aspiring profession which feels entitled to the sort of social and political respect which doctors take for granted, it might have been expected to examine and modify its own practices, or even to have withdrawn gracefully from a field in which it performed so badly. After all, social workers are always saying how busy they are.
Instead, social workers have attacked both the setting-up of the experiment and its results. However, in criticising the blank et treatment of children with widely differing backgrounds and personalities, the social workers inevitably make us question whether the contrary position — that everyone benefits from being exposed to social workers — is true. In fact, most studies show that therapeutically speaking, social workers are without measurable effect. They are little more than walking placebos — and not very good placebos at that. Perhaps that explains — even if it does not excuse — the anger of the Leeds social workers, and the claims that if they cannot help truants, it is only because they do not have enough time. One apologist even suggests that `ticks against the register' and other objective measurements are not what matter in curing truancy.
A distaste for scientific assessment is characteristic of many social workers, probably due to the Freudian origins of casework, which is what social workers call their brand of psychotherapy. Psychoanalysts have been equally reluctant to submit their craft to therapeutic trials, and when they have it has not shown up well.
Fortunately, some social workers are honest enough to admit their failings. Peter Baird, who lectures in the subject, even went so far as to write recently that `one of these days, the Tory Right . . . is going to tumble to this effectiveness issue and use it as a cogent argument for sacking social workers'. But the implication of the Leeds experiment is that social workers are not just therapeutically valueless but may actually do harm. This, of course, will not surprise doctors, who know that a treatment which can do good is likely to have certain dangers, and who may occasionally recall the old Hippocratic maxim; `first, do no harm'. If social workers want therapeutic status, they must accept that their efforts must sometimes be harmful, but that degree of insight seems to be beyond most of them.
Social workers do, of course, have an important function as itinerant bureaucrats and guides to the complexities of the welfare state. In the days when they were called almoners, many of them were content with this function, but now that they see themselves as therapists, they often seem to regard it as beneath their dignity. I believe though, that social workers can make effective therapists, and that if they are useless overall it is probably because the efforts of the good are cancelled out by those of the bad. An example of the latter sort was provided by a social worker who was 'supervising' a truant. I asked her whether she would take the girl back to court if she played truant again. She was horrified at the suggestion and said that she would do so only as a last resort. In other words, she would let the child get away with it a few times and then no doubt be surprised when her client found the habit difficult to break. Attitudes like that may explain why Dr Hullin is reported as having come away from meeting his local social workers with the impression that some of them did not believe respect for the law was important.
Patricia Morgan says in Delinquent Fantasks (her impeccably referenced hatchetjob on current orthodoxies), 'If professions accepted almost entirely on trust cannot meet their promises, they can end with no task to fulfil and no position to defend but their own entrenched interests'. In the case of Leeds, it sounds as if some social workers not only cannot meet their promises but feel no obligation to do so if it means abandoning their much-discredited methods.
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