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5 OCTOBER 2009
NO 1496
Authority
Authority is often seen by the worker as being ignorant of the child's needs, insensitive and intolerant, and therefore certainly not something to be looked up to. The residential worker often feels with some justification that his expertise and sensitivity to the child is unreasonably attacked by the police, the courts, or irate members of the hypocritical public when they come into contact with our children. I recently attended a court case concerning fairly serious offences committed by a deeply disturbed boy and watched him duly sent to a detention centre despite our most careful reports indicating that this would reinforce the negative aspects of his personality. My blood boiled and indeed continues to boil that the courts should be so utterly insensitive and short-sighted. How dare they ignore me! Yet in the court's view its actions were entirely justified, being conscientious and just considering the gravity of the offences. They knew the law, I knew the child — there was very little sign that we would be able ever to reach agreement! Conflicts, expressed or silently held, between the agents of the law and residential workers in such situations are, I would suggest, much more common than we are prepared to admit and are seldom brought out into the open.
Plainly in these instances the concept of 'right' and 'wrong' is not the same for the court as for the residential worker. It is not necessary here to decide which view is to be favoured. What is important is to understand that essentially the residential worker may well find himself in conflict with the values of society despite his appointed role as a guardian and 'trainer' of society's delinquent children, and despite the fact that very often the worker may well find himself fulfilling such a role with apparent ease.
I would argue that the importance of this conflict is not just experienced externally in the strained relationships between magistrates and social workers, or society and the social worker. More fundamentally, and much more destructively, it may often be an expression of the conflict already felt within the care worker both about the child and about himself.
Knowledge of the disturbed child is not, for most of us, confined to a brief clinical document or assessment report. Living with the child over an extended period and in an intensive situation brings a knowledge about the child that cuts across the artificial, emotionless, format of the social enquiry report. Knowledge is based often upon the personal and harrowing involvement of the worker with the disturbed child. The distress felt by the child, the pain at abandonment by parents, the brutality of life, the sense of rejection, of hostility and of anger may often be experienced by the residential worker himself. This is a point readily admitted by those of us who are 'involved' with the child. Often this knowledge will in itself force the residential worker into an anti-authority position. Knowledge of the child at such a level will considerably influence our judgement of that child. To know all is indeed to forgive all, we would argue with pained justification, and we may rightly view the child's hostility to society as being the just deserts of society's hostile reaction to the child. O how sonorous we may become in defence of a good cause!
What is not so readily acknowledged, and
indeed may well be actively repressed by the residential worker, is the
idea that the disturbed child activates in the worker aspects of his own
personality which are delinquent and anti-authority. It is hard to
acknowledge that we as adults, and adults in responsible positions at
that, have aspects of our own development which are immature and have
unresolved conflicts, perhaps stretching back to our own childhood,
which continue to seek expression and find such expression in working
with children who openly show their immaturity and delinquency. We dare
not even consider such a possibility despite the fact that it distorts
much of our perception of the children in our care — how could we
possibly openly entertain such ideas!
These unresolved conflicts and poorly developed areas of our own
development are 'surfaced' at those moments when we are considering the
morality of the children in care and viewing their behaviour. Our
attitude towards delinquency, for example, often shows the ambivalence
of our reaction brought about by these conflicts.
STUART R. WALKLEY
Walkley, S.R. (1985). The struggle to maintain
personal integrity and morality in a community home. In Evans, D. (Ed.).
The Best of the Gazette. Surbiton, Surrey. Social Care
Association.
