My experience with an autistic son ensures I’m wary of social workers

ONE OF the social workers had an unblinking stare which was fixed on me at all times.

It was the kind of stare which, in any other circumstances, would be seen as provocative. But here it seemed to pass for professional.

My little boy was deeply troubled. We were beside ourselves.

At the age of four-and-a-half he had suddenly flipped. He did terrifying things, like running into the sitting-room and smashing all the ornaments on the mantelpiece.

I hit the panic button. Straight to the doctor and straight to the State psychological services. But minutes into our first case conference I realised we were under suspicion of causing his distress. When all the time he was autistic.

No-one could blame them for not copping it immediately. They had to check the family out properly. I accepted that.

But they never did. No social worker ever visited the home or met the other three children, none of whom bore any signs of stress. They just kept talking to us for months on end.

We used to meet the social workers two at a time and sit there, with our son between us, discussing him. They decided that I had a problem because I had given up my job as an editor and was at home with my children.

Up and down the country, women would give their left arms to have had my situation. But it didn’t wash with the social workers. I was frustrated, they decided. What I needed, to sort us out, was a job.

The woman with the staring eyes finally came out and said my problem was my “traditional role in the home”.

“Traditional role?” I spluttered.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” she said. “Fifty per cent of Irish women still work in the home.”

I’m pathetic enough to be proud that I smiled and said: “You didn’t offend me. I just differ from you philosophically.”

I never saw the woman with the staring eyes again, but her replacement picked up where she left off. I remember saying, “This is a problem which comes from outside the family”, and being told, “Here we believe everything comes from inside the family”.

I tried to explain, “What’s wrong with us is what’s wrong with our son,” and the new social worker said, “So now you’re blaming him, are you?”.

The minute he had a diagnosis of autism they dropped us like hot potatoes. We haven’t seen a single social worker in six years, though my son has had the welcome attention of social care workers at school.

But the experience has made me very questioning of social workers in general. Especially when I think how I would have felt had I been the more usual client of the services: less well educated, socially disadvantaged and lacking in confidence.

That’s why I can’t be a “rah, rah” yes voter in the Children’s Referendum. I am a yes voter. I have great respect for the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child and the revolution in children’s rights it signals. I want the child as a human being in his or her own right recognised in the Constitution, if it helps even slightly in those “exceptional cases”.

But if the Amendment passes, former social worker Minister Frances Fitzgerald and her Cabinet colleagues should put regulating social work practices further up her agenda. Because if social workers are the first point of contact between the State and one of those “exceptional cases”, ideology must not come into it.

The Professional Code of Conductdrafted by the new Health and Social CareProfessionals’ Council, CORU, clearly states that social workers should respect an individual’s dignity and rights as well as different cultures and values.

Social workers will have to sign up to the code and register with CORU from next year. But that won’t solve the problem because we are mostly inclined to see our personal ideologies as the unvarnished truth. Separating personal ideology from professional work of social workers should be made an absolute priority from the Cabinet down to the first-year lecturer.

The International Federation of Social Workers says the social work profession should “promote social change”. That’s fine, as long as the change is not along ideological lines. The fear is that a young social worker will go into a families to impose his/her values, like a missionary.

Entrants into the profession are, says a UCD report on the retention of social workers published this year, usually “politically liberal or left-wing”. They often see their work as a pathway to “personal growth”. One social worker is quoted as saying, “They [the young people] needed support and all that so it suited my altruistic ego”.

The report confirms that social work students have a strong chance of having been influenced in their choice of course by difficulties in their own background. And though this may make them more empathetic, the report does mention the need for better “gate-keeping” to the profession.

Particularly, as one former social worker mentioned to me, there is no requirement to go into counselling. “I looked around me on my last day on my course and I wondered which of these would I go to if I had a problem? There were one or two. I was the last person I would have gone to,” she said.

Another social worker told me about the horror of interviewing the parents of injured children and trying to work out if they had had an accident or had suffered an attack. “And the truth is, you can’t know unless you were there when it happened. You can only use your hunches. And once I was wrong.” When she had children herself, she said, she threw out everything she had previously thought about families.

IT IS worrying that young social workers can still be sent to deal with families, though the UCD report underlines the importance of sending experienced professionals out on cases involving vulnerable children.

The intake of the profession doesn’t mirror the general population, being disproportionately made up of childless people, with over half of UCD respondents marking “number of children” as “not applicable” to them. And it has to be a source of worry that the profession is overwhelmingly female.

Clear statistics on social workers will not be available until they all register with CORU, but in the UCD report there were 146 female professional respondents as against 36 male ones.

It’s not exactly the same profile as that of the Medical Missionaries of Mary in their heyday, but it’s not a million miles away. And my experience would suggest some have a similarly coherent ideology.

We need our social workers, of course, and their main problem is that they are poorly resourced. The UCD report underlines that it is stress which forces so many experienced social workers out of the profession.

But as their role gains in importance with the passing of this Referendum, they must be strongly reminded to leave their own ideologies at home.