How to solve a problem work style.....

I have no major problems in my life, so i like to get overly worked up about the small ones. The latest of these is Xss going to bed late and waking me up when he does. The first night it was loud whistling in the bathroom, the next shaving with his electric razor (at 11:45pm!!). Rather than get mad (i was silently mad- but when you're in bed, in the dark this might just seem like you are asleep- the opposite of what i wanted). (i tried some angry tossing and turning,to try and make him feel bad). Anyway. whats the adult way to solve a problem like this with your partner? Go to work mad and fire off lots of passive aggressive emails to my friends Honestly and Lovely. All prefixed with, 'Xss is really great BUT.....'

So i asked for inspiration from their jobs. How would they tackle this problem at work?

In my work i would:
- tell him his behaviour is 'unacceptable'
- work out suitable rewards and sanctions for good/poor behaviour
- Issue Xss an Acceptable Behaviour Contract (ABC/ASBO) detailing what specific behaviours are not allowed in the bathroom at what times (which takes a lot of work, and then means nothing once broken)

Lovely, who works for a well known homeless charity suggested that her work would:
- swear
-  write a letter saying that if he looses his home because of his behaviour, he’ll be found intentionally homeless and then no one will help him.
- tell his mum (this is one of Lovely's very effective and non-protocol techniques with her younger teenage clients)

Honestly would:
- Use a Measurement framework (a flow diagram) so that you can measure progress of your responses to his behaviour, learn from that and then adapt your response until it’s perfect (and you sleep well!)
- campaign for change by getting large organisations and MP's involved

12/52 Happy? Having only small things like this to 'worry' about.

Mental health titles you psycho

Did you know i am studying for my social work degree? Well i find the content very interesting (which is good as it motivates my studies). Here is my latest fascinating find:

1913 - Mental Deficiency Act (England and Scotland) made it a duty for local education authorities to identify all children with learning disabilities between the ages of seven and sixteen. It established four categories of ‘mental deficiency’: ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’, ‘feeble-minded persons’ and ‘moral imbeciles’.

(as quoted from K101 An Introduction to Health and Social Care, Open University Course)

I guess these words have changed in time, but i cant work out what the hierachy is amongst these, can you? i think an imbecile is worse than an idiot? Only because in my culture it is more offensive.

Also weren't all women called 'feeble minded' for a while? 

Missing the craic

I've been away from work for 3 weeks, and i admit it, i miss the teenagers. I really do. I also miss regularly being involved in conversations which stump me, and render me silent for a while, generally rending me quite for a week, until i come back at the next session and begin with, 'I've been thinking about what you said last week and.....'

Here are some of my most recent conversation dead-ends:

Kid A (16, a big MDMA drug user): 'I've decided not to drink on New Years because it affects the drugs i take and i don't like it'
Me: 'Brilliant. Not mixing substances is a great step forward, so its just the MDMA on new years!'
Kid A: 'erm, No. We've ordered MDMA, Ketamine and Acid.'
Me: .............

Kid C (13): 'I bought a knife to school today to stab Jade'
Me: 'If you say radical things like that i have to take them seriously, and i don't think you really are going to stab Jade, are you?'
Kid C: 'No. [thinks for a minute]. I'm going to stab my mum'
Me: ...............

Me: Today we are going to talk about contraception as I'm worried your going to get pregnant.'
Girl C (13): ' I'm not interested. I've got a 19 year old boyfriend and we are trying for a baby'.
Me:' well, the baby will wake you up all the time at night, dont you like sleeping?'
Girl C: 'It wont wake me up as i'll be awake gazing at it sleeping'
Me:...........

Mother: 'Tell me, at what age can i give up [parenting her kids]? 16? 18?'
Me: 'Well, some people would say you can never give up on your kids, you will always be their parent. They are your children for life'
Mother: [in all earnestness] 'Nobody told me this!'

Kid K (12): 'I like school, i get good grades and want to go to Harvard'
Me: 'Wow, thats going to be a tough thing to do. But aim high. What do you want to study at university?'
Kid K: ' singing or cooking'

and a great example from my colleague Spinsters session:
Kid A: ' Mum is always calling me names, and putting me down like calling me a prostitute etc'
Spinster: 'Mum is this true?'
Mum: 'well she did it first'.
Spinster: ............

How i know i've 'made it' in social services.......

There was a time when i considered how I'd know when I'd made it in the world of social work?

I came up with a few things- one was if i managed to convince a client to go to Starbucks with me, and i could then reclaim it on expenses, and this might be the closest I'd ever get to a BONUS. We regularly take our teenagers to McDonald's, or such like, in order to find a neutral environment to talk with them, somewhere they feel comfortable and able to verbalise what they are thinking freely without fear of being cut down midstream. This works really well, and i do enjoy a Big Mac, but what i really love is a Starbucks. This is a massive challenge as the culture change from McDonald's to Starbucks is gigantic. Almost 100% of my clients could not 'afford' Starbucks, do not live near one and kids don't drink coffee. So imagine my delight when i have managed to find one older, teenager who does like coffee and chose to meet me at Starbucks for our first session!! score. We have continued in this thread ever since and i love it. I go to work in Starbucks. If I'm feeling indulgent I'll also have a muffin (apple and cinnamon!)

Another previous massive achievement in my books was getting a card from a client. It simply said 'Thanks' but it means a lot to me, and has been posted above my desk for the years since. That's right, over the 4.5 years i have worked here, I've received 1 card. One. So the reason i think this one is so epic is that its so hard to get people in crisis, who don't agree with what you are saying, and generally don't want to work with you, to understand that in fact, yes, you are a human too. I don't want them to get this too much, to know about me so much that they worry or see me as limited and faulted, but enough to realise that perhaps i think about them and have other emotions that i don't display to them.

So now I've made it. Today a client (parent type) came to see me in the office. Not only did she bring me a present, but also a card. I'm much more emotional now i am pregnant, so i nearly cried. She got the baby a baby grow, vest and hat. She not only knows i am human, but knows my baby will be too. I am so so very grateful to this lady, I'd love to break all protocol and reach out to her in so many ways. But this would not be helpful to her, so i wont. She doesn't need to know I'm worried and vulnerable too.

But I'm smug. I've made it. If only this was a way that they measured good workers, rather than how often you fill in forms and if they are done by a certain time frame. By the quality of relationships you manage to create with clients, even those that you have to give bad news and disagree with.

Pride and Predjudice, or First Impressions?

We had a team away day this week as we are merging with a Youth Offending Team (YOT) due to budget cuts (somehow it saves money?). Therefore a whole glorious day was given over for us to get to spend some time getting to know our fellow team members and bond. I am useless at things like this, as you will see.

The first 'game' was to tell your partner a car or cartoon character that personifies yourself, which they will then feedback to the group and then everyone will know you. Ok well better than alliteration verbs: Lazy LE? Since i know nothing about cars and no cartoon character is quite as neurotic as myself i found it quite a challenge. I am also very naive at times, and it wasn't until we started to go around the room sharing our new friends' car soul that i realised everything being said was being turned into a sexual connotation and a euphemism for all relationships that person has.

There was raucous laughter at comments like, 'She's a ford, because she's cheap' or 'she thinks of herself as a mini as she is easy', even 'she's a Audi as she grips the corners well', etc etc. As this nightmare pans out before me, i know what I've already said to my new friend, and i know what towards the end of this circle she is going to loudly declare to everyone. Why oh why, did i think it was a good idea to say, 'oh, I'm not a car I'm a bike!'

That's barely even a euphemism, more like a direct statement, 'LE will sleep with anyone who wants a go'. Due to the volume of the laughter and loud catcalls, i never got to explain that i care about the environment and my health. Now all my new colleagues know my name, especially the men.

I've had it with this place

I'm fed up with work. Sometimes it seems that all my job is is to write down bad things that are happening to children. Sometimes once I've written these things down, we will all have a meeting and agree that these things are bad. Sometimes after these meetings we will come up with a plan to talk to someone about something in the hope that these bad incidences might reduce. But really all i seem to do is keep lists of bad things happening to really quite nice kids.

In this country a child cannot be removed from their parents until something really bad has actually happened to them. And this i understand as the incident has to stand up in the court of law. However, this can result in unhappy and unsteady situations continuing in terrible conditions until an ultimate bad thing will give social services the power to remove a child. In Australia you can remove a child if there is strong evidence that significant harm will happen to the child. Here we literally wait for SIGNIFICANT harm to happen to a child before we will consider removing it.

Similarly, if the parent is doing very little for the child, or is emotionally abusive but the child is not deemed to be being harmed significantly, ie not being sent to school and being out down all the time is not significant abuse, then they will continue on a Child Protection Plan for at least 2 years before a consideration for removal will be given, at this time then, the point will be considered that the child has now adapted in these two years and will no longer engage with social workers, nor is capable of significant change due to over two entrenched years of this living, so the situation continues. Where is the hope?

Do we hope for the harm or do we hope for the adaptation? Either way the out come is a significantly harmed adolescent.

Back for good...

Well, I've returned to work for 10 days only and its like i never left. I am yet again back into the familiar situation of finding myself around a small table in a internal window lit room, with a couple of hostile parents and a sullen teenager who is in the process of being delivered into our care. My job is to get them to leave again as a happy family unit, the sooner the better. However, when the kids are badly behaved, they are very rarely apologetic either, and their goading and attitude doesn't help. This situation has happened three times this week.

My job is so full on that often i don't talk about it, as it so quickly ends up in these ridiculous stories that just seem unbelievable and a world away from the existence of me and my educated, healthy, loved, friends born into families with relatively few life altering traumas or histories. My second day back at work i left a house in a hurry as the 15 year old ADHD boy had begun pacing his empty house, hurling baseballs, tennis balls, coke bottles (in fact anything that moved easily) indiscriminately and swinging a baseball bat at the walls in a rage. These days things like this don't even raise any adrenalin in my system, i simply turned to my colleague and suggested we leave. We then called the police from a safe distance. Simply another visit to write up.

One of the great things about having been away for so long travelling, was that i forgot my kids. I was away for so long, i stopped worrying whether A would succeed in committing suicide, whether B had been sleeping rough, or whether S would remain in her foster placement. I forgot about it all, and it was glorious. But part of being a good social worker is caring about your clients, really caring, not just caring about what boxes they tick on your reports. On Thursday i met my first new client that made me care again, and started me on the slow emotional pull back into my job. Welcome back. I know caring makes you a better worker, but does it really have to hurt so much? This year is a new experiment to see if i can care, but not after 6pm at night. Can i be really involved in such vulnerable peoples lives and yet remain unaffected? This is yet to be seen.

I think i am successful in my job, if for no other reason than despite the fact that i work for 'the social' (often synonymous with 'the enemy') my clients still call me long after i have finished working with them to ask for help. When i finally got my work mobile answer machine running, there already on the machine was StaceyG's mum, asking me to call. When i phoned her back, she wanted help with locating a sixth form for her daughter to attend, and then suggested that we meet up sometime for me to see her now almost adult daughter. I probably wont meet them as its not accepted for a professional relationship to become anything else, but despite it not being my job to look for colleges, and even though i am really busy. I'll find her some courses and call her back, because i still haven't stopped caring about Stacey.

Work Reflections:

Since i will soon be leaving my job, I've been thinking back over the highlights of my time with the team. Following are my top 5 days:

1) The day we had an oil sick and our lives were put in minor peril.

I seem to have a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and consistently throughout my time i am ALWAYS up to something stupid when the head of our building walks into our room. On this occasion Rowl had knocked a bottle of olive oil on the floor in between our desks, which also doubles as the only way to access the other desks on the other side of the room (this is why giving us lunch rooms would actually be a good idea). We both looked at it glugging onto the carpet for a while before deciding to try and mope it with a paper towel. Little success, and by this stage Junior had wandered over. We then decided to wash it with soapy water, this now seems like a stupid idea, but I'm sure some sort of logic took place at the time. So Junior got down to wash it with a little bowl and cloth, and VT our managers manager wandered across. He helpfully observed the situation also whilst i made a sign to put on the floor near by (as it had become very slippery) stating that people needed to be careful as there was a risk of minor peril ahead. I then rejoined the observers and the big head manager unnoticed slipped in also. Once we had got over our positive encouragement and criticism of Juniors efforts we notice him and someone remarked how accurate this was of a council situation, one person working with 4 looking on and criticising and managing them!

2) The day when 9/11 almost happened again.

The quality of our equipment at work is questionable and whenever the fire alarm goes off you are dubious at best. I for one enjoy fire alarms as i have not grown up and come from the school of thought that if you hear a fire alarm you should shout/scream joyously, be very noisy, and run out the building in as silly a manner as possible, only after collecting anything you want to take with you and hitting save on your computer. On this particular day several people adopted my philosophies'; especially as the fire alarm would be fixed only for us to have to leave the building again ten minutes later. On the third time of this happening as we were slowly packing up and considering leaving the office for another jaunt outside, a colleague in all earnestness declared, 'Come on people! this is how 9/11 happened!'. This caused us great merriment to imagine that 9/11 could occur again in Peckham in a crappy 3 story social services office where people cannot be bothered to leave the office quickly on a fake fire alarm. I'm not sure many people died in 9/11 because they saw the planes crash into their office but stopped to press save on CareAssess before leaving.

3) The day we developed the box game and were caught on the brand new CCTV camera

New CCTV camera's were installed in the meeting rooms and we were given one of these rooms as an office for several days temporarily. Along with this temporary move, we had no computer access and so work was limited. We developed an awesome game where we hid something in the empty 30 boxes lying around the room and then time someone to find it. We played this game in as noisy and violent a manner as possible, forgetting all the while that these CCTV camera were hooked up. Once we realised we were being spied on we thought the easiest solution was to block the camera as there was no reason for them to be on us (there was no risk of client attack). We then (Junior- it is always Junior who leads me astray) thought we could remedy this by sticking a piece of paper over the camera, which we promptly did and thought nothing more of it. In typical council fashion however, they noticed and without coming to check they called in an engineer to fix it. Imagine our embarrassment when he came in, removed the piece of paper and charged the company a huge call out fee. They never did find out this was us.

4) The day N-Man's draws were reversed.

To deal with the boredom of our office sometimes little pranks get played along a theme and these escalate more and more until we get too busy to be creative, or think independently and have to return to the monotony of record making. On this occasion a theme of altering each others person draws below our desks was picked and several items moved around, draws swapped with other people or even made to look as if they had been emptied. The height of this enjoyment was when we turned around N-man's draws and drew on some lines and blue tacked on her key so it looked like to was the right way around. It was very funny when she spent a while trying to open her draws and then looked around embarrassed as she realised.

5) The day StaceyG told me i was boring.

I work with teenagers, and every now and again i like to think I'm good at it and that i really know how to understand them and get on their level. And then people like Stacey come along and put me straight. Once during, what i thought was a great session about feelings and dealing with emotions, Stacey stopped me mid activity AND sentence and innocently asked, 'Are we nearly finished yet? I'm bored'. Well i was stunned, and promptly wrapped up the session amid stuttering and stammering and embarrassment. That'll teach me for thinking I'm cool.

Does the world have to revolve around The Sun?

Has anyone seen 'The Sun's' headlines today. It is beyond stupid. Seriously. But the frustrating thing is that people will believe it. For those of you who do not have access to the quality publication that is the Sun, the headlines read, '100 social workers fail to stop tow sisters being raped by their dad for 25 years'.

Now I have read nothing on this story, and I have no interest in doing so. Social work bashing has got out of control. Indeed I think some may argue that there should be no 'controls' on democracy, but this assumes that a population has access to non-biased (or both sides of an argument) information. A sector of our society is being led by the nose to think stupid and ridiculous things.

And there is no way to fight back. I'd be more than willing to stand up on a stage or a debate programme and stand up for my profession, but no-one wants to see this stage (unless it involves me being publicly executed for the 'crimes' that my so called colleagues have committed).

Who killed Baby P?
The social workers and GP, not the actual hands of the people involved. Who failed all the children we see in the press- the social workers, not their useless selfish parents, or the violent vicious people who assaulted them.

How is newspapers headline going to help anyone? All it does is reduce collective responsibility and consciousness and allow the angry world to vent at someone other than themselves.
Who failed baby P? ok,. well some blame can lie with the social worker, but can we admit that the only person who clearly cares about any child is a paid professional- NO! The others who never helped him were his siblings, his aunts uncles, grandma's, family friends, neighbours, the woman at the bus stop, anyone else coming in and out of the house, and more crucially, his mother.

The scare mongering in the headline just goes beyond anything I can even laugh off today. 100 social workers- how that many - is every social worker in that borough being blamed? Social workers are PEOPLE not superslothes or SWAT team detectives, they cant magically know things that no-one is telling them, or there are no clues towards. Even if they had some inkling that this is happening, to be able to do anything about it a social worker must be able to stand up in court and provide enough evidence to a judge to prove that it is occurring. We have no power anymore and a judge will not rely on 'social work instinct' or a serious of clues......
Every borough has a serious problem with recruiting social workers at the moment, in my borough even at £2,000 retention bonus for a commitment of 1 years work is failing to keep anyone interested. I know of 9 social workers leaving currently.

I get so annoyed about this situations- can you tell?- that it makes me take all the more seriously the voice in my head that say leave Britain. However, this would be appeasing my emotional state, but who suffers in the long term from these scare mongering articles, the children. The little girl, sitting in a crappy house, with inadequate supervision, regularly told that she was never wanted, and never will be, and knocked around whenever someone is in a bad mood with her. She'll be raped before you know it, drop out of school, develop depression, and then start producing her own disempowered children- probably deciding not to engage with any social workers along the way as she 'knows what you lot are like'. Tell me Sun, how is this helping?

My Terrible so called work

I'd describe this week as terrible. Which really equates to me getting too wrapped up in work bolloctics and not being able to realise that a tense office environment is not worse than many real life situations people find themselves in.

My manager left on planned leave months ago, so the next manager up then loving receives our team with great joy. However he has done nothing for the last 4 months, limiting the work we can do, eroding the teams’ spirit, and putting us at serious risk by not allocating cases or reading any risk assessments on client files. So this week enough was enough and I called the team together to discuss this. It was a productive session in which we wrote a simple list of all the things we needed doing for us to be able to do our job. It was agreed that as a united front we would present this information to said manager in order to force a change.

However, what I did not calculate for was the impish, leprechaun colleague who had other plans! This man, who is less than straight at the best of times, spent two days running around calling each colleague out of the office one at a time for hushed discussions in private corners in which he managed to convince people that should we raise any complaints each of us useless serfs will be fired in the night, desk cleared and never to return again, with no communication or explanation given! Argh. Moment of wanting to sit crying in the toilets arrived. Dramatic emails to Tx in Uganda, who being the star that she is, called me instantaneously and simply encouraged me to do the right thing. She is amazing, after setting me straight, advising me that truth is all that matters, and if you get shot trying to better something, the world will be grateful even if no-one else is, I re-accepted my quest and a constituency of Rowl and I dejectedly entered the dragons den alone.

It was so liberating though to be straight with the manager and let him know how we felt including pointing out that his numerous broken promises mean that we no longer trust what he says and feel increasingly frustrated with him. He took it well, agreed with the 35 points we raised and agreed that things need to change. He also said he did not have the time to change anything that is not an emergency (staff safety does not qualify then), and weirdly agreed to us escalating this to his manager. Which I did via another well worded email.

I'll find out on Monday what kind of response we'll get, I imagine it won’t be revolutionary, but at least I’ve tried my best.

On a more positive note, Rowl discovered an Urban dictionary which when searching for my name says:

The most amazing person you will ever meet. A bit sarcastic but mostly lovable! If you don't know her too bad! the ppl who have met her are extremely lucky! And you should never push her away. A lil bitchy at times but who's not!Go out and find yourself one!

Now normally I don’t believe in this kind of crap, but I’m willing to make an exception for this. Except of course I’m not bitchy. hahaha.

It also describes blogging as:

Short for weblog. A meandering, blatantly uninteresting online diary that gives the author the illusion that people are interested in their stupid, pathetic life. Consists of such riveting entries as "homework sucks" and "I slept until noon today."

YIPPEE>

Latest Moan

Eu sou uma peru. My Portuguese is not coming along at all!! I have finished a whole term of it and i still feel like i cant say anything! It doesn't help that class is on a Monday night 7.30-9.30 by which stage i am fighting to stay awake, and the only thing that interests me on top of that is making sure that the teacher moves on to interrogate the next student as soon as possible, without me making too much of a fool of myself.

We are also struggling to locate a second project to work on in SE Asia, and want to book our flights soon...... the pressure is on! Hopefully by the new year it will all be booked and we will be definitely be going. I'll post the itinerary soon.

I haven't written on her for a while as work is so stressful. People are leaving each week, and we have only a handful of new starters to combat this, coupled with an increased number of referrals! I do feel so sorry for the Americans that have come over though (lots form Miami) as social work is so culturally different and where as before they might have stood a chance of removing kids from risky situations before they have suffered harm, here the standard has pretty much got to the stage where several, very bad things, have had to have actually happened (and been proved by the police investigation), before we can even approach the courts.

Well, at least we are trying to make a difference. Social services are always seen as the bad guys, and it makes me frustrated that charities like 'Kids Company' are praised, people raise money for them and they can give out money and Christmas presents galor, are held in high esteem for working with such difficult young people, but Social Services are legal bound NOT to do most of these things (no handouts), work with the same kids (and their families) and are constantly slated in the press. Roll on a positive press campaign from Britain soon!

P.S Tx comes home next Friday from Uganda for a break- SOOOO excited.