The something we're talking about is usually the kind of extreme situation we've become accustomed to seeing plastered in bold letters across the dailies' front page. Starving children left alone in a filthy apartment and abuse or neglect leading to the death of a child do not happen often, but when they do internal investigations are soon to follow. Repercussions for caseworkers and supervisors are usually next, which can frequently include termination of employment. With this in mind, caseworkers and their supervisors, more so during certain periods, as after a recent high profile child death, are prone to recommend foster care placement and oppose return home. Juvenile Court judges' decisions too, I think, are often rendered through a similar lens.
Is the fear that child welfare workers allow to influence their decisions based on the possibility that they will be accused of maleficence or incompetence? If they have acted appropriately how consequential can these fears be? Can they have reason to believe that even when their actions have been carried out appropriately they still will suffer negative repercussions? Even if a mistake was made should the response be job termination? Is it possible to predict and prevent any and all scenarios? Do physicians, for example, lose their licenses when they are unable to prevent their patient's death or even when their errors lead to a similar fate? Are the same processes at play in other professions? If not, what is unique about child welfare work?
What differentiates child welfare work from other professions in this regard are possibly four factors: 1) The public's ideas about the lives of vulnerable children and their parents; 2) Child welfare, always city, county or state run, is directly tied to politicians, their positions, and their desire to satisfy their constituencies and their continued need to receive their votes; 3) The media's long established precedent to publish and broadcast major stories, sometimes in series format over an extended period, about the most extreme child abuse and neglect situations, and, 4) The public perception and expectation that much of the work that has been and will be carried out by child welfare personnel has not been and will continue to not be competent.
This political aspect is reminiscent of some public school systems' evaluation of the ability and competence of teachers based upon student performance, even though many other variables also contribute to these outcomes.
Here too is an area of child welfare that must change. And it is an area that is directly tied to the kind of change that I have been addressing in previous blog articles: The need to elevate child welfare work in order to attract highly competent and knowledgeable workers, which will in turn, itself, lead to an eminent system. Part of what is also needed is promotion and advocacy of what child welfare is really about. About the complex situations families present and the new, highly trained and knowledgeable caseworkers who are dedicated to working to help these parents and children have better lives. This is what the media should be presenting to the public. And this is what would be possible once such a system is in place. These new, highly knowledgeable caseworkers who would be able to articulate the true nature of child welfare work to the media, by doing so, will also instill confidence that these families are in good hands. Politicians would then be reassured that the media would not go after them, even when tragedy occurs, with the subsequent result that caseworkers would not have reason to fear for their jobs.
What the current system, with its pattern of terminations, really shows, quite likely, is that it's no secret that so much of what has occurred in child welfare is misguided and plain incompetent. That may be one of the underlying thoughts behind these terminations, and the rationalization behind the political motivation. Perhaps there have been administrators and government officials whose sleep has been disrupted by their seemingly hopeless and futile ruminations about how to finally change child welfare but have never been able to hit upon a workable solution. Perhaps they have also not had the necessary background and knowledge to properly deal with this complicated issue.
The possibility and fear of being terminated if and when something serious, even death, goes wrong, is counterproductive to competent and ethical child welfare casework. But this is true only if highly competent and ethically thinking caseworkers populate the system. If they don't, and the status quo continues, it is hardly something as severe as a child death that should probably warrant termination.