Fascism in Social Work?

Toni Morrison addressed the Howard University Charter Day celebrations in 1995. In her speech, Racism and Fascism, she states that the ‘final solution’ of fascism doesn’t arrive immediately. There are ten steps, which Morrison eloquently shines a light upon.

Reflecting upon this speech through the lens of the child protection system in England, there appear to be worrying similarities. Some are hazy and others are resoundingly clear.

I am not and do not claim to be an expert on racism or fascism, and although I have worked within and alongside children’s social services, I am not a social worker. The following only offers food for thought and a note of caution.

Step One — Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.

It may start unintentionally. An opinion being misrepresented as a fact in a report or assessment. This constructs a narrative that spreads through future reports. Amanda Boorman’s article in Community Care frames the potential problems that may be faced by those unwilling or unable to challenge local authority reports. Once the lie has become credible and irrefutable, the subject of the lie becomes the enemy of the child.

Featherstone and Morris claim parents distrusting the local authority can lead to deception, exacerbating the issues and cementing a negative view of them.

Children may also become the enemy. Numerous reports tell of children becoming criminalised in the care system. Ella’s misbehaviour became criminal damage which eventually built to being ‘convicted of criminal damage and common assault’.

Children in care are more likely to have their own children removed. Whilst in care the child or young person will be ‘protected’. If that young person then becomes a parent, there is a move from ‘in need of protection’ to ‘potential risk’. The line isn’t clear. It doesn’t happen all of a sudden, but over subtly over the duration of a pregnancy. ‘Providing support’ changes into ‘building a case for removal’ and the cycle continues.

Step Two — Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.

Coded name calling occurs frequently in child protection and safeguarding. Victim, perpetrator, drug-user etc. Abbreviations (LAC, CIN, RTC) or jargon (failure-to-protect, emotionally unavailable, risk-taking behaviour) all categorises a person in a dehumanising way.

This language creeps into social work reports and may not even be recognised as harmful language. Language that marginalises, demeans, humiliates, vilifies and condemns people without trial. Implicitly accusing the labelled. Language that is hard to dispel once cited and often based upon poor evidence and without context.

“There is nothing more isolating as a parent caught up in the child protection system than sitting in a meeting listening to professionals using language or jargon you don’t understand.”

The escape of mother and children to a women’s refuge to flee the isolation, coercion, beating, strangling, raping and threatening to murder that may exist at home, is a clear course of action, unless radical societal change occurs. However, refuges are shutting and women trapped in domestically abusive relationships are at greater risk of losing their children. Often seen as part of the problem and not a victim. This type of ad hominem attack (attacking the person and not the situation) leads to more loss, upset and pain. It substitutes one set of problems for other problems.

“I was trying to protect myself and my children. I didn’t have any support and when I cried out for help the only place for me to go was social services. Instead of helping me I felt they were against me.”

Characters can be assassinated by professionals, implicitly or explicitly, based upon nothing more than a feeling of distrust or a bad interaction on someone’s worst day. Before long the thoughts and reports of professionals become reality.

Family members that have never been met can be written off based upon assumptions and sweeping statements. ‘Single stories’ develop such as, “Dad’s family are no good”; “they weren’t there when the child needed them”; or “the grandparents are coercive”. This may also come from professionals choosing sides between warring paternal and maternal families. Only hearing one narrative or perhaps seeing only hostility on all sides.

The adversarial nature of care proceedings can be isolating for all involved. Breaking families and relationships.

Step Three — Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power and because it works.

Child protection conferences, strategy meetings, funding panels and team meetings are, among others, places in professional networks where information is shared.

There is seldom control for bias or quality of information shared, and there is a danger that, unknowingly, good people share bad ideas. Those bad ideas grow into a construct and lead to panic; panic in turn leads action and potentially to bad, life-changing decisions.

Previous reports and case notes, no matter how biased, misrepresentative or factually incorrect, can be taken as canon by new social workers when there is a change of staff — and there is a high staff turnover in social work. If they start with bad information, a whole family may get demonised unnecessarily.

If political powers promote adoption (as in this government’s recent message and changes since the COVID-19 pandemic), those with power may steer away from kinship placements, thus giving local authorities bad incentives. Adoption may appear to be a ‘neat’ solution and a great outcome for a child, but it comes with its own problems.

Jaded senior social work professionals may pass on anti-family messages from the top down to new social workers; stunting innovation. I have been at senior professional meetings and heard sweeping statements about whole families, which has had a direct impact upon child removals. Assistant directors and service managers writing off a dozen people based upon their detached intuition.

Step Four — Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.

Although I believe Morrison literally means art in its widest context. I propose this could have wider meaning in the context of local authority agenda.

For example, local authorities may champion young people that have survived the care system, and use them in a tokenistic way. They may be part of ’child in care’ councils and figure heads for the ‘success’ of the system.

These young people shine, and rightly so, as examples of the possibilities of outcomes, like lottery winners. This is not a slur against those care experienced young people doing great things. Care experienced alumni deserve recognition. They have survived adversity that I may never know. I only question the motives of authorities that champion them.

For there are silent and unseen masses that are not so lucky. The quiet children that have missed out opportunities (like weddings, parties, funerals) because they do not have pro-active social workers, or they are unlucky to be part of a case-load with some really high need children and get forgotten. They may leave care at 18 with no-one — isolated, emotionally aware and utterly abandoned. The local authority don’t champion this group so much.

Let’s also include those that go missing and that have multiple placement breakdowns. Those that cost the police and other services millions of pounds in their childhood. The children whom I have heard referred to as ‘trouble, chaotic and unstable’. The children who, when they turn 18, are gladly dispensed to other services, including prison. Young adults that destabilise the care system. I have heard social work senior managers, that I know to be good people, very happy to say that “in a few months the child will turn 18 and be someone else’s problem”.

Like Morrison’s art, selecting to showcase the few that propel the desired message whilst pushing thousands of others out the proverbial back-door.

Step Five — Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.

Social work professionals that do not conform to the culture of the local authority are left frustrated. They may subsequently quit having been stifled in their attempts to make the change they wanted to. The vast majority of social workers in England (over 60%) have been in the service for less than 5 years.

During care proceedings, family or friends may present themselves and be in support of parents. Family members that challenge the system end up in a bureaucratic legal minefield, silenced or simply excluded from proceedings. I have seen social workers schedule meetings on days they know that identified ‘difficult’ people cannot attend.

Local authority have the power to delete non-statutory services and these are often the first to go in times of austerity. The world views of children’s services directors play a large part in how much effort is given to supporting family in the form of job roles (family group conferencing, social work assistants). An anti-family view will cascade deliberately throughout the practice of a local authority.

Step Six — Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.

Family members and/or professional people that support the local authority are given more of a voice, especially within the court process. Those with power may implicitly or explicitly ask those that support them to influence those that don’t.

For example, “X listens to you, why don’t you have a chat with them to help them see that it’s really a good thing we’re doing”.

Bad practitioners with strong personalities, who are out for personal gain, may get the rewards they seek if their anti-family narrative fits with local authorities. The local authority may not see past the professional smoke and mirrors.

Practitioners working to make positive differences with families may be ‘coached’ into excluding ‘difficult’ family members and implicitly push the power agenda.

Restructures may remove anyone who is not pushing the power agenda by simply and creatively deleting their role.

Step Seven — pathologise the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.

Morrison may specifically talking about racism and racial prejudice, referring perhaps to books like Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. However, the lens of child protection can be applied here too, at perhaps a stretch.

The media’s portrayal of bad parents has, in the past, been a false flag for societal breakdown. These stories are used to promote the agendas of religious groups and governments.

Recently the UK government wrote a letter to directors of children’s services promoting adoption based upon their figures and political pledge to reform the social care sector. Radical ‘new’ powers for social workers (actually an outdated concept) are proposed too. These moves lead to pathologise struggling parents, making them seem abnormal and stigmatising swathes of people out of context.

Cherry picked research that pre-judges family can be circulated through social work teams. New research can be commissioned that is designed to render family focussed practices substandard or ineffectual. “There is not enough evidence to say that it works” is a common sentiment in post-positive scientific papers regarding holistic work with families when only quantitative and cost effective evidence is desired.

Step Eight — Criminalise the enemy. Then prepare, budget for and rationalise the building of holding arenas for the enemy — especially its males and absolutely its children.

A disproportionate amount of care experienced people are in jail.

Children, placed in care, with few good role models, poor life experience, emotionally hurt, with adverse childhood experiences, are then criminally charged for misdemeanours like breaking a window.

Children in care that become involved in drug running across the country face criminal charges when they themselves are the victims that have been groomed and coerced into the illegal activity.

Criminal investigations, even when dismissed by the Crown Prosecution Service, will resonate still within child protection circles. Sometimes rightly so, but not in all cases, however this is a default position.

Step Nine — Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions, a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press, a little pseudo-success, the illusion of power and influence, a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.

Those that conform, obey and act in a way befitting the department are given promotions, opportunities to train others, and more kudos within their agency. They become spokespeople, leaders, earn more, and perhaps hold office.

Pseudo-success may mean unpaid promotions; leading new initiatives; secondments; trips away; supervising teams; likes and endorsements on social media; their name on a door or a plaque; or an article in Community Care; and they may be invited to important meetings or speak to the council members.

The illusion of importance often fleeting and always inconsequential.

Step Ten — Maintain, at all costs, silence.

The department is a bureaucratic hinterland for which family and those who love a child cannot get through to, or hear from, by design.

Families face frustration; unanswered calls and emails; presents and messages locked in a cupboard with no notification to their addressee and no acknowledgement to the people that sent them.

“We cannot tell the child about this because we need them to be on-side with the social worker and the department”

Family members requesting anything may be met with a wall of silence.

Letters written by family are censored if they speak out against the bureaucracy or even cast perceived negative allusions. I know because I have censored, begrudgingly, but I have. There is always a reason, logic and rationale behind it. To maintain the stable placement. To keep a good relationship with a social worker. Now is not the right time.

Lies. Deception. Silence.

NB There are no hyperlinks in the last 2 points. It is hard to draw a straight line to public evidence. I can only offer an idea and some personal experience.

Closing Remarks

This is a proposition. It is not, I’m sure, reflective of all departments in the country. There are no solutions other than being conscious of the processes within social work departments (or educational establishments, or banking, or politics).

I’ll add that social workers will experience their own unfair treatment from people outside the local authority. Many will have been verbally and perhaps physically assaulted.

Speaking at the British Association of Social Workers, Owen Jones recognises the difficulties faced by social workers and calls upon them to counter the stereotypes portrayed in the media by telling stories of the people they work with.

Some local authorities are going further and giving people, with lived experience of child protection, a platform to tell their own stories and working with them in co-production of children’s services.

There are absolutely good practices and good people. Unfortunately there is a rotten core of ‘old school’ social work, power grabbers, jaded practitioners, chancers, frauds and people doing unintended harm through poor training and supervision due to lack of funding and poor management. A lot needs to be done.

You may disagree with everything written, and that’s okay. You may disagree with Toni Morrison’s proposition of the route to fascism, and that’s okay. We don’t have to agree, but we do need debate and challenge bad practice when we see and experience it. Presently, there is not a lot of care in the care system. Things are not okay.

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives” — Toni Morrison