Health and Social Development, Faculty of (Okanagan)
Social Work, School of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
St. Jean, Sean Armand Roy
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
Child protection workers are routinely faced with emotionally intense and traumatic work, both personally and via the traumatic narratives and experiences of parents and children. Researchers have developed various theoretical constructs such as vicarious trauma to describe the effects of repeated exposures to the traumatic stories of children and families over time. What remains largely unknown is how child protection workers’ own childhood memories might influence the manner in which they experience and are affected by those stories. After reviewing the existing literature examining the historical, political, and policy contexts in the child welfare field, the review considered the effects of early childhood adversity on the present-day experiences of social workers. It also reviewed the concept of countertransference as a potentially useful lens through which to consider the relationship between one’s nascent memories and the effects of their work in the field. Interpretive phenomenological analysis was used as a research methodology to answer the research question, “In what ways do social workers experience, and make sense of, their own childhood memories in the context of their child protection practice?” The study used semi-structured interviews with eight child protection workers, aiming to understand their personal and professional experiences with regard to this question. The study found a consistent relationship between participants’ adverse childhood experiences and negative present-day triggers when they were faced with practice scenarios that bore similarity to their own childhood experiences. Implications with regard to worker well-being, countertransference, and risk decision-making are discussed. The dissertation concludes with recommendations for mitigating the effects of negative triggers in child protection workers.
TODAY IN LIGHT OF YESTERDAY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY OF CHILD PROTECTION WORKERS’ VOCATIONAL EXPERIENCES AS INFORMED BY MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD By SEAN ARMAND ROY ST. JEAN B.S.W., The University of British Columbia, 2009 M.S.W., The University of British Columbia, 2010 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) October, 2018 © Sean Armand Roy St. Jean, 2018 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled: Today in Light of Yesterday: A Phenomenological Study of Child Protection Workers’ Vocational Experiences as Informed by Memories of Childhood submitted by Sean St. Jean in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Dr. Brian Rasmussen, School of Social Work Supervisor Dr. Judy Gillespie, School of Social Work Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Daniel Salhani, School of Social Work Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Kathy Rush, School of Nursing University Examiner Dr. Lucyna Lach, School of Social Work, McGill University External Examiner iii Abstract Child protection workers are routinely faced with emotionally intense and traumatic work, both personally and via the traumatic narratives and experiences of parents and children. Researchers have developed various theoretical constructs such as vicarious trauma to describe the effects of repeated exposures to the traumatic stories of children and families over time. What remains largely unknown is how child protection workers’ own childhood memories might influence the manner in which they experience and are affected by those stories. After reviewing the existing literature examining the historical, political, and policy contexts in the child welfare field, the review considered the effects of early childhood adversity on the present-day experiences of social workers. It also reviewed the concept of countertransference as a potentially useful lens through which to consider the relationship between one’s nascent memories and the effects of their work in the field. Interpretive phenomenological analysis was used as a research methodology to answer the research question, “In what ways do social workers experience, and make sense of, their own childhood memories in the context of their child protection practice?” The study used semi-structured interviews with eight child protection workers, aiming to understand their personal and professional experiences with regard to this question. The study found a consistent relationship between participants’ adverse childhood experiences and negative present-day triggers when they were faced with practice scenarios that bore similarity to their own childhood experiences. Implications with regard to worker well-being, countertransference, and risk decision-making are discussed. The dissertation concludes with recommendations for mitigating the effects of negative triggers in child protection workers. iv Lay Summary Child protection workers perform emotionally difficult work. Protecting children who have been abused or neglected requires them to frequently hear negative or emotionally shocking stories that can traumatize them over time. Sometimes, child protection workers enter the field with their own history of childhood abuse or neglect. Researchers have studied how child protection workers are affected by this, but very few have considered how child protection workers’ own difficult childhood experiences influence their present-day protection work. Eight child protection workers were interviewed about these things and found that when they were in work situations that reminded them of their own abuse or neglect as children, it was more emotionally difficult for them. The dissertation discusses how this affected both their well-being and their decision-making with children and families. It then explores some ways to lessen the negative effects of these triggers on their lives and in their work. v Preface This dissertation is an original intellectual product of the author, S. St. Jean. Collection of the interview data reported in Chapters 4-6 was covered by the UBC Okanagan Behavioural Ethics Board [certificate #H15-02664]. vi Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ................................................................................................................. iv Preface ............................................................................................................................ v Table of Contents .......................................................................................................... vi List of Tables ............................................................................................................... viii Chapter One: Introduction ............................................................................................. 1 Personal Sketch I ...................................................................................................................... 1 Background and Rationale ....................................................................................................... 5 Purpose of Study and Research Design ................................................................................. 10 Bias and Insider Knowledge ................................................................................................... 11 Thesis Overview ..................................................................................................................... 12 Chapter Two: A Review of the Historical and Policy Contexts of Child Welfare .... 14 Personal Sketch II ................................................................................................................... 14 Overview ................................................................................................................................. 15 Operational Definitions ........................................................................................................... 16 Canadian, Historical and Recent Foundations of Child Welfare ............................................. 19 Elements of Frontline Child Protection Practice ..................................................................... 24 The Political and Policy Contexts of Child Protection Systems .............................................. 40 Other Issues in Child Welfare ................................................................................................. 45 Anxiety is the Outcome ........................................................................................................... 50 Chapter Three: A Review of Challenges to Child Protection Workers and Their Practice ......................................................................................................................... 54 The Difficult Practice of Child Welfare .................................................................................... 55 Emotional Challenges in Child Welfare Practice .................................................................... 56 Constructs Regarding the Experiences of Child Protection Workers ..................................... 57 Recollections of Childhood ..................................................................................................... 73 Countertransference ............................................................................................................... 79 Chapter Four: Methodology ........................................................................................ 87 Personal Sketch III .................................................................................................................. 87 Chapter Overview ................................................................................................................... 89 Rationale for the Choice of Phenomenology .......................................................................... 90 Rationale for the Choice of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis ..................................... 91 Research Design and Purpose ............................................................................................... 95 Target Population and Sample Selection ............................................................................... 96 vii Procedures ............................................................................................................................. 98 Instrument ............................................................................................................................. 102 Subjectivity of the Researcher .............................................................................................. 103 Qualitative rigour ................................................................................................................... 105 Chapter Five: Results ................................................................................................ 108 Sample Description ............................................................................................................... 110 Themes Overview ................................................................................................................. 111 Theme 1: “I am the same kid”: Descriptions of Child Protection Workers’ Childhood Experiences .......................................................................................................................... 114 Theme 2: “I cried every day”: Descriptions of the Work Experiences of Child Protection Workers ................................................................................................................................. 128 Theme 3: “I’m too close to this”: Descriptions of Experiences that were Triggering for Child Protection Workers ............................................................................................................... 138 Aggregate Results Summary ................................................................................................ 153 The Research Question Revisited ........................................................................................ 156 Chapter Six: Discussion ............................................................................................ 159 Childhood Experiences and Present-Day Triggers Are Conjoined ....................................... 159 Indirect Links and the Notion of Questioning ........................................................................ 161 Findings Suggestive of Vicarious Trauma and Burnout ........................................................ 163 Constructs of Edification ....................................................................................................... 168 Additional Categories of Reference ...................................................................................... 171 Interpretation of Results in Relationship to the Literature ..................................................... 172 Implications ........................................................................................................................... 187 Interventions ......................................................................................................................... 200 Limitations of the Study ........................................................................................................ 207 Future Study ......................................................................................................................... 209 Chapter Seven: Conclusion ....................................................................................... 210 Personal Sketch IV ............................................................................................................... 210 The Mandate for Worker Safety in Child Welfare ................................................................. 211 References .................................................................................................................. 214 Appendices ................................................................................................................. 245 Appendix A: Interview Schedule (Final) ................................................................................ 245 Appendix B: Recruiting Flyer ................................................................................................ 247 Appendix C: Consent Form .................................................................................................. 248 viii List of Tables Table 1: Level of Education and Child Protection Substantiation Rates…………...37 Table 2: Comparison of participants’ adverse childhood experiences and triggering work experiences…………………………………………………155 1 Chapter One: Introduction Personal Sketch I This thesis is grounded in story. The document before you is essentially a collection of stories told by child protection workers. I have formally sought out these professional narratives because over the course of my career in the field of child welfare I have been exposed to many similar accounts of professional trials bound together with personal struggles and I suspected there were more. In this I was not mistaken. The following work is also about my own story. A phenomenological study cannot be conducted without the subjectivity of its author being overtly displayed, so in that way my own narrative is relevant to this study too. My hope is that my own biases become apparent through their telling. In the spirit of this idea, permit me to begin with two personal tales of social work practice that have driven my academic work. My coworker’s heart was racing as she struggled to deliver some bad news. Her and I were sitting in a sprawling Indo-Canadian home, negotiating with a grandmother about the care of her grandchild. The problem was that another adult with a risky criminal past was living in the same house and had to go if she wanted her grandchild to remain there. I was present to support my young colleague as she communicated our child protection agency’s “bottom lines” about this, but I was unable to track what appeared to be a very animated conversation between them in Punjabi. Soon my heart was also racing as I realized that I had scant control of the situation. I could not tell what was being said, but I knew this much: grandma was in charge. A few minutes later, we found ourselves contritely exiting the home. 2 As we escaped the February rain in our government car, I was quick to press my workmate “What happened? Did you tell grandma what the agency’s bottom line was?” My colleague could only stare vacantly as she thought about what was said. She was really rattled. “Seriously, what did she say?” I begged. My colleague could not fully explain what had happened, only that she had lost control of the meeting. She had been unable to relay what the protection agency required of the grandmother. My colleague continued, “I was trying to tell her about our bottom lines when she became upset. She started referring to me as her ‘daughter’. She said, ‘How could you treat me like this after all that I have sacrificed for you? When I came to this country, we had nothing. I worked and scraped my whole life so that you could go to school and become a social worker and now you are slapping me in the face.’” I sat in the driver’s seat, wipers waving, struggling to make sense of their conversation. Why had this lady called my co-worker her daughter? She continued, “As I sat in that meeting, it was like I was talking to my own parents and it felt so wrong- like I was betraying them. I couldn’t get the message across.” What seemed to be happening, as best I could tell, was that in that moment my co-worker had been caught up into a very old cultural and familial dance; a dance that this grandmother knew the steps to very well and that my co-worker could not resist in that moment. This was in spite of the stakes. It was in spite of what she knew needed to be said and done. In that moment, something seemed to seize control of her identity. In that dance, she was no longer a child protection worker, but a dependant daughter who was being highly disrespectful toward her mom. It was as though her present had been consumed by her past. In my mind I could not judge her because as she spoke I was 3 thinking about the times when my own psyche was seemingly hijacked during my career in social work. This brings us to the second tale; a story that is hard for me to tell. I was working the night shift at a crisis line. It was my job to answer the phone and respond to people who were hurting, angry, even suicidal. I was jolted awake as the phone rang at 2am. A woman who sounded like she was in her 50’s or maybe 60’s was reaching out for help. As she spoke, I dug into my still-novice verbal tool kit of empathic responses. She was definitely upset and spoke about wanting to end her life. Yet she also went on about how expensive her home was and about her dogs and about things that seemed tangential to the fact that she felt like she wanted to die. I didn’t see the point of this and felt myself getting bored and oddly put off. I remember rolling my eyes and slouching in my seat as the call went on. Perhaps picking up on this, the caller started asking me pointed questions about my life. I wrestled with emotions that seemed to come out of nowhere. “Do you have any kids?” she asked. “Sorry, I don’t share personal details about my life” I responded curtly. This happened to be the crisis line’s policy, but it was also a relational blow that I mysteriously enjoyed delivering over the phone. At this she became upset. “What kind of counsellor are you, anyway? You obviously didn’t learn any skills.” In that moment, I found myself enraged. How dare she challenge me in that way! With great relish and righteous anger, I slammed the receiver down. For the next half hour, just like my Punjabi-speaking colleague, I stared blankly. In the days and weeks after this event I searched my mind and heart, perplexed about my extreme reaction. How was it that in spite of my responsibility on the crisis line and apparently regardless 4 of the fact that a suicidal stranger was reaching out for help, I somehow parted with reality and was compelled to hang up? Upon further reflection, I came to suspect that in that moment I was also caught up in a very old dance. I soon acknowledged that in the midst of that crisis call, I metaphorically stopped talking to my caller, and began speaking to my mother. Yet not just my mother, but a caricature of my mother during her most criticizing moments in my past; during our most heated arguments. Somehow, it was my mother from 25 years ago and me from 25 years ago, re-conjured on the opposing ends of the phone. Sometimes during our conversations with people- even as professionals- we are vulnerable to the ghosts of the past. Sometimes those ghosts find embodiment in those we meet in the course of our work. I became intensely curious as I continued working in the field of child welfare and heard more and more stories of social workers who were burning out, some of whom had fought to escape difficult childhoods. What is going on inside them as they talk to parents or children? What is their lived experience as child protection workers? What happens when these workers hold cases that look uncannily like their own family? These questions spurred further personal reflection about the potential combined effects of a steep vocational learning curve, high work demands, the presence of intense relational stressors, and a history of childhood trauma or abuse in nascent child protection workers. This thesis is an exploration of those questions. Please permit me one more story by way of introduction. At the child protection agency where I last worked I was a member of the Critical Incident Stress Management Team. When a parent or child dies, or when a child protection worker is harmed, or 5 when something happens that is deemed traumatizing to staff to a significant degree, the team is asked to lead a semi-anonymous stress debriefing to help employees to work through difficult emotions. These are rarely easy. Tears often flow as child protection workers share feelings of deep sadness, loss, anger, self-blame and guilt. What is fascinating to me is that during these circles, workers share not only their feelings about the incident at hand, but they usually vent about other traumatic aspects of their work as well. Not only that, they occasionally disclose strong emotions related to their own experience of abuse as children. Others have approached me in quiet corners afterward with haunting tales from their own past. It is as though their exposure to the trauma of the present somehow summons to the surface those ghosts from their past. More than simply an academic exercise, this thesis is a quest to understand the experience of “today in light of yesterday” as it relates to the emotionally difficult parts of a child protection worker’s workday. This, in turn, is for the purpose of designing interventions to mitigate the great personal toll imposed those who seek to call themselves helpers. Background and Rationale Child protection workers maintain regular contact with children and families who are presently enduring adverse life-experiences, including the effects of chronic poverty, substance use, mental health concerns, domestic violence, child abuse, and child neglect. These professionals are called upon not only to witness such experiences but are also legally empowered to intervene with families in order to mitigate any deleterious effects toward the children involved. In this way, child protection workers 6 unavoidably weave themselves into the lives and troubles of the families with whom they work; a necessarily intimate relationship that may have profound cognitive and emotional effects on the child protection workers involved. Ferguson (2017) concludes from his research that child protection workers are routinely overcome by the emotional intensity of the work, citing “unbearable levels of complexity and anxiety” (p. 1007) that result from having to witness and contain the emotions of abused or suffering children. He suggests that once overwhelmed, an emotionally distraught child protection worker will often fall back on “superficial, non-intimate practice” (p. 1012) in an attempt to protect themselves. It appears as though they dissociate. While Ferguson adeptly covers the “what” of this phenomenon, he does not explore the “why”. Perhaps it is self-evident that being immersed in such an emotionally “unbearable” environment is enough to cause some child protection workers to retreat into a dissociative state. Yet this still provokes the questions, “Why some and not others?” and “What is happening within a helping professional that leads them to this state of overwhelm and subsequent disconnect?” I posit that there exists a missing piece; a gap of as yet untapped experience perhaps related to child protection workers’ own childhood experiences. Largely unexplored are the various ways that memories from child protection workers’ own childhoods emerge within the context of current professional exposures to the adverse experiences of children and families and their accompanying narratives. Although a considerable amount of research has been conducted which explores the incidence of practice-based trauma in child protection workers (Horwitz, 2006), the manner in which child protection workers make sense of their own childhood memories and the ways in 7 which those past experiences implicate themselves in such practice situations has received relatively little attention (Michalopoulos & Aparicio, 2012; Nelson-Gardell & Harris, 2003). A study by Festinger and Baker (2010), found a significant association in child protection workers between reporting a history of childhood emotional abuse and experiencing a low sense of well-being (“well-being” is defined by the authors as attaining certain scores on measures of self-esteem, satisfaction with life, and social support). Those workers who reported high levels of childhood emotional abuse also more frequently tended to report a low sense of professional well-being. Other examples of research involving such posited links between childhood experiences and current professional practice include one’s choice to enter the helping professions in general (Black, Jeffreys & Kennedy Hartley, 1993), susceptibility to vicarious trauma (Michalopoulos & Aparicio, 2012), susceptibility to secondary traumatic stress (Nelson-Gardell & Harris, 2003), risk factors for job strain (Westerlund, Gustafsson, Theorell, Janlert & Hammarstrom, 2012), professional burnout (Mather, Blom & Svedberg, 2014), worker attrition (Middleton & Potter, 2015), and challenges to child protection decision-making (Yoshihama & Mills, 2003; Mandell, 2008). With regard to child protection workers specifically, there are currently only two previous studies that consider the relationship between workers’ childhood histories and present-day professional functioning (Festinger & Baker, 2010; Nelson-Gardell & Harris, 2003). Both studies were quantitative in nature, relying on self-report scales to measure the various constructs involved. 8 There are no known qualitative studies that explore the ways in which child protection workers experience their own childhood memories in the context of their child protection practice. As such, this study was designed to explore the relatively untouched subject of the everyday, yet private emotional and cognitive experiences of child protection workers, as related to their own childhood memories. Why does this matter? If the experience of difficult emotions was the only negative result of working as a child protection worker, then this study might be interesting at best, but not likely to be particularly crucial to the field of child welfare. However, this is not the case. In actuality, three troubling phenomena appear to occur among those in the profession that are addressed in this thesis. The first phenomenon is the reality of high attrition rates in the field (Williams & Glisson, 2013). In some jurisdictions, yearly turnover of child protection workers exceeds 90% (Drake & Yamada, 1996). If one considers the real effects of a 90% attrition rate on a typical child protection team of ten workers this means in effect that after a single year nine will have been replaced. This tumultuous environment is unhealthy for both colleagues and service users. Further, there is strong evidence to suggest that the reasons these social workers leave their jobs and often the field of child welfare altogether are quite serious. Mor Barak, Levin, Nissly, and Lane (2006) conclude that these turnover numbers reflect an experience of high stress and profound dissatisfaction among “outgoing” child protection workers. This is not a casual job change. Instead, these are typically professionals who have invested heavily in both their education and careers and who nonetheless consider leaving to be their best 9 option in light of dire subjective experiences. It is safe to say that at least in the statistical sense, child protection work is a risky vocation to pursue. The second troubling phenomenon among child protection workers is the resulting emotional, cognitive, and existential toll that the work appears to exact upon them. For example, rates of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in child protection workers is disproportionately high at about 70% with a diagnosis rate of 15% (Bride, 2007). Among those diagnosed with PTSD, the average duration of symptoms is about 36 months (Grinage, 2003). However about 30% of those diagnosed with PTSD never recover and 50% carry some symptoms for the rest of their lives. So, what remains in terms of risk for child protection workers is a 7-8% overall chance that they will incur permanent emotional and psychological damage, solely by virtue of their presence in the profession. In most professions, the high prospect of permanent injury and disability would give the average worker pause for reflection. For example, if a prospective employee knew that someone entering his or her profession bore a 7-8% risk of losing a hand within two years of entering the field and that 70% of one’s coworkers endured various hand injuries, it could be argued that the typical rational person would seriously consider a different line of work altogether. Any promise of satisfaction or draw toward such a vocation would be far outweighed by the risk of permanent injury. Perhaps due to the absence of glaring physical symptoms, sufficient attention, whether via research, policy, or legislative interventions, has not been afforded to these concerns. The final phenomenon, to be explored in greater detail in the literature review, is the decidedly dire and persisting effect of childhood adversity which is often carried into 10 adulthood. Many studies (Briggs-Gowan et al., 2010; Anda et al., 2006; Terr, 1991) cite research demonstrating a link between childhood trauma and a number of difficulties experienced later in life in the psychological, emotional, physical realms. Much of these data pertain to the non-specific populations, yet it would be ill-advised to assume that those employed in the field of child welfare would be somehow immune to the effects of a difficult childhood. There is very little doubt that a significant subset of child protection workers experience their work in a different manner than their peers because of early trauma, abuse, and neglect. Yet there is a marked absence of research literature exploring this. The fact of high turnover rates in child welfare, the reality of existing and future harm to child protection workers in this field, and because of the marked absence of research data on the experiences of abuse survivors who practice social work, the imperative for this research is clear. Purpose of Study and Research Design The present study aims to address the apparent gap in the literature by qualitatively examining the vocational experiences of child protection workers, especially with reference to their own childhood memories. The research question guiding this phenomenological study is as follows: “In what ways do social workers experience, and make sense of, their own childhood memories in the context of their child protection practice?” 11 The study will be conducted using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), a qualitative research method that is considered both phenomenological and hermeneutic in nature (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin, 2009). IPA is phenomenological in that it seeks to understand the individual experience of participants and then create a detailed description of their world, usually within a small sample. The goal at this level “is simply to produce a coherent, third-person, and psychologically informed description, which tries to get as ‘close’ to the participant’s view as possible” (Larkin, Watts, and Clifton, 2006, p. 104). Bias and Insider Knowledge My own professional background in child welfare represents a “double-edged sword” with respect to both the research question and the subject matter in general. Favourably, my personal experiences as a child protection worker inspired this line of research. Further, an “insider perspective” presumably lends itself to greater research interview effectiveness (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009) as well as perhaps an enhanced capacity to interpret the content of such interviews. Indeed, attaining such an insider stance is a partial aim of IPA (Conrad, 1987) and an historical aspect of the methodology (Lieblich, 1996). Conversely, my child welfare experience will certainly also introduce an added layer of bias, beyond the general subjectivity recognized to be present within anyone conducting qualitative research. That said, qualitative inquiry has also been construed as the deliberate collection of “bias or a variety of experiences with [a] phenomenon so that we can describe it in its fullness” (Mayan, 2009, p. 19). Indeed, one’s subjectivity 12 has been construed as the very bases for gaining a new understanding of another’s “horizons” and is essential to hermeneutic phenomenology (Palmer, 1969). As such, and in recognition of the “double hermeneutic” or second order sense-making posited by IPA researchers (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009) I will employ the use of personal reflection; a practice which moves one from what Husserl (1927) calls the taken-for-granted “natural attitude” toward the reflective “phenomenological attitude”. This includes a number of “personal sketches” found throughout the dissertation. Thesis Overview Chapter 2 begins with a presentation of operational definitions. This is followed by a description of the everyday work of child protection, presented in three categories: assessment, decision-making, and intervention. I then provide an overview of the relevant research literature pertaining to the history and development of the field of child welfare as well as a consideration of the influence of economic and political factors such as neoliberalism on the field. The chapter concludes with a treatment of the topics of Aboriginal child welfare, worker attrition, and managerialism, considering their relevance to the current state of the profession as well as their emotional implications for child protection workers. Chapter 3 continues the literature review, with the subject matter shifting to the conceptualizations in the literature about the personal experiences of child protection workers. A number of related and often competing psychological constructs are presented for consideration. Research pertaining to the long-term effects of childhood 13 adversity in adulthood are explored. The chapter concludes with a reflection with regard to how these constructs may interrelate. Chapter 4 presents the design and methodology of my doctoral research study along with an overview of the origins of and rationale for the use of interpretive phenomenological analysis. This is followed by a structured account of the operative steps and research methods employed, including efforts to maintain rigour and trustworthiness (Guba, 1981). Chapter 5 presents the results of the study in the form of a detailed description of the participants’ experiences. The participants’ responses are ordered according to a series of themes relevant to the research question. Chapter 6 contains the discussion section. This portion of the dissertation in tasked with two things. First, to carefully move beyond the individual descriptions presented in chapter 5 to consider possible collective understandings identified between the participant’s accounts. Second, to bring the previously bracketed material, including the contents of the literature review, to bear with regard to the child protection workers’ conveyed experiences. Limitations will also be discussed. The dissertation concludes in chapter 7 with final considerations and a summary of this study’s contribution to the knowledge base of the child welfare field. Appended at the end are the semi-structured interview schedule, the recruiting flyer, and the participant consent form. 14 Chapter Two: A Review of the Historical and Policy Contexts of Child Welfare Personal Sketch II Sitting in the passenger seat of an old Toyota during one of my first days on the job, I felt an odd mix of dread, disgust, and confusion wash over me as I listened to a senior child protection worker recount what a father had recently done to his children. Her details were an affront everything I learned to think about parents: to view them within the context of their environment rather than in light of their pathology, not to judge, not to assume. I remember trying to square what I was hearing with what I was taught to believe, but now there was little time for this internal struggle. Anxiety began to gnaw at me as I realized that conflict was coming. We were en route to the family home and my mentor was hurriedly trying to bring me up to speed before we arrived. Because of repeated acts of domestic violence toward his partners over the years, as well as substantiated physical abuse of the children, dad had been ordered out of the house. As is often the case, we received word that he was now back in town and that he was really angry. The RCMP were also on their way, but we knew we would get there sooner. As we arrived, the front door was open. She announced her presence and I followed her into the house. Just then we heard the springs of a back screen door stretch and then slam shut so my senior colleague hustled to the rear of the townhouse. As she ran out the back door after mom she barked back at me, “Run up stairs! Find the kids!” 15 I flew up the stairs, dodging disassembled bikes and clothes and dirty diapers, realizing that I was categorically unprepared for this moment. Not only did I not know the kids’ names, I also suspected that there was a better-than-not chance that I would stumble upon this violent dad in one of the bedrooms. My heart pounded in my chest as I uttered “Hello?” in my most sing-songy voice and peeked into each of the upstairs rooms and closets. I was not safe. I wasn’t supposed to be there. Just then I heard some shuffling downstairs, so I stumbled back down the cluttered steps and into a mess of RCMP officers at the bottom. For a quick but frightening beat they thought that I was the dad in question and treated me as such. I had no badge to present. No pre-rehearsed statement for the police when they asked me, “Why are you here?” Later that day I found myself ruminating on those adrenaline-filled minutes and dwelling on the question: “Why WAS I there?” What gave me the right to intervene, and how did I even know the right way to help this family (or any family for that matter)? This event did not represent “routine” child protection practice, yet it forever changed the way I approach the work. Overview This chapter is the first of two chapters that represent the literature review of this dissertation. It is designed to provide both micro and macro-level contextual foundations for the dissertation, contributing the required definitions, “everyday” experiences, historical understandings, and policy contexts within the field of child welfare; a prerequisite to thinking with greater clarity about the constructs of burnout, vicarious 16 trauma, and secondary traumatic stress among child protection workers covered in Chapter 3. What has developed historically in the field of child protection, I argue, has enabled a number of preconditions both for the quality of the relationships that will inevitably develop between families and their child protection workers and subsequently for certain forms of trouble experienced by child protection workers. After attending to operational definitions, the chapter reviews the Canadian, as well as greater historical developments and policy frameworks that structure the practice of child protection. The chapter then discusses the nature of the work performed by child protection workers within three broad categories of child protection practice: assessment, decision-making, and intervention. This is followed by a summary of what are viewed as key contemporary problems within the field, including the residual nature of the system, the impacts of neoliberalism and managerialism, and the distinctive challenges of residual child welfare. The chapter concludes with an exploration of some of these problems and their sequelae on child protection workers. Operational Definitions While there is no universal definition for the term “child welfare” it is generally understood as the “traditional term for the network of policies and programs designed to empower families, promote a healthy environment, protect children, and meet children’s needs” (Kirst-Ashman, 2016, p. 288). One distinguishing feature of child welfare work is the legislative mandate and the concomitant statutory powers this bestows on staff in these positions who are both accountable to and empowered by the state to act in the best interests of children. In addition to the legal mandate, this relatively high degree of 17 power held by child protection workers and their frontline supervisors is also due to the seriousness of risk-decision work. As Bogo and Dill (2008) stated, “These decisions about the safety of children and the continuity of the family have significant short- and long-term effects on the health and well-being of all family members” (p. 143). There is a considerable overlap between social work and child welfare. The Canadian Association of Social Workers (CASW) defines social work as, ...a profession concerned with helping individuals, families, groups and communities to enhance their individual and collective well-being. It aims to help people develop their skills and their ability to use their own resources and those of the community to resolve problems. Social work is concerned with individual and personal problems but also with broader social issues such as poverty, unemployment and domestic violence. (CASW, 2016a) The newest definition of social work offered by the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) in collaboration with 110 country members shares many points in common with the CASW definition: Social work is a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes social change and development, social cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation of people. Principles of social justice, human rights, collective responsibility and respect for diversities are central to social work. Underpinned by theories of social work, social sciences, humanities and indigenous knowledge, social work engages people and structures to address life challenges and enhance wellbeing. (Ornellas, Spolander & Engelbrecht, 2016, p. 3). In light of these definitions, it would be fair to say that social workers are generally tasked with various aspects of helping individuals and groups to increase their sense of well-being, as well as promoting societal change and human empowerment based on principles of social justice. 18 Social workers are employed in a number of settings from health care to corrections to schools to a vast array of non-profit agencies. Employment duties and standards may vary considerably depending on the mandates and policies of the employer. However broadly speaking, social workers follow a formal code of ethics, such as the Canadian Social Workers Code of Ethics. While many social service and government agencies do not require a degree in social work to qualify for child protection practice and it is not uncommon for child protection workers to enter the profession with undergraduate degrees in psychology, sociology, or even relatively unrelated fields such as English literature or music, the typical qualifying degree held by child protection workers is the bachelor of social work (BSW) and these child welfare social workers are often simply referred to as “child protection workers.” This is how I refer to them throughout this text. The CASW (2016) describes child welfare as “a special area of practice within the profession of social work” that entails working with the community “...to identify children who are in need of protection and to decide how best to help and protect those children. A fundamental belief is that government interference in family life should be as minimal as possible, except when parental care is below the community standard and places a child at risk of harm. The major guiding principle is always to act in the best interests of the child” (CASW, 2016b) In addition to addressing the somewhat ambiguous terminology used to describe child protection workers, a word should also be said about those children and families who make use of, or perhaps more accurately, fall under the authority of the child welfare system. The term “client” is traditionally used in field as well as in this text. However, the use of this term is considered by some to be problematic as these various 19 labels utilized to refer to service users do not adequately capture the complex dynamics between service recipients and the service systems involved (McLaughlin, 2009). As well, the term “client” typically refers to a voluntary relationship, whereas in child welfare, a large proportion of service users participate involuntarily. Yet for want of a better term and for the sake of clarity I use of the term “service user” in some places. I also refer to service recipients throughout the dissertation as simply “families” or “parents” or “children”. That said, most of the research participants use the traditional term “client”, which is reflected in the interview excerpts. Canadian, Historical and Recent Foundations of Child Welfare It is crucial to state that this research is nested within a Canadian context. While this dissertation is informed predominantly child protection practice in Canada, a Canadian approach reflects its British roots and is viewed as characteristic of a group of ‘Anglophone’ countries that includes Great Britain and the United States along with Australia and New Zealand, all of whom share similar policy frameworks (Gilbert, Parton & Skivenes, 2011). Swift (2011) frames the Canadian child welfare system within a child protection, rather than a family service paradigm, highlighting an “intensification” of the child protection view point since the mid-1990’s. She adds that Canada has generally taken a “…residual approach to child welfare, perhaps even more so at this time, since the neo-liberal economic policies currently entrenched in the political system at both federal and provincial levels focus on reducing the cost and scope of the child welfare state while encouraging individuals to take responsibility for their own fate” (p. 41). 20 Swift goes on to highlight the fact that in spite of relatively low numbers of serious child deaths due to child maltreatment in Canada, the level of scrutiny and control of disadvantaged families continues to rise. In Canada, 13 distinct child protection systems operate along provincial and territorial lines, covering a vast and sparsely populated land mass, while serving a variety of culturally and ethnically diverse groups. In spite of this, the national collection of child welfare jurisdictions is considered to be relatively homogeneous in nature (Swift, 2011). That is, each defines “the best interests of the child” as well as protection needs along similar lines as each attempts to strike a balance between parental and child rights. Much of the historical development of the field of child welfare can be traced to Great Britain and the establishment of the English Poor Laws of 1601, designed to address the widespread poverty that festered in the wake of British industrialization and “laissez-faire” capitalism. Through these laws the state established and delegated to local communities the authority to “care for” those without the means to care for themselves including children whose parents were deemed unwilling or unable to care for them. Judged by today’s standards, such care was unimaginably harsh, separating children as young as two years old from “morally unfit” parents and placing them in workhouses or indenturing them to employers, sometimes as part of a package deal of fifty or more children. Piven and Cloward note that one English manufacturer agreed to take “one idiot for every twenty sound children delivered” (1971, p. 27). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mounting evidence of the dismal failure of both institutions and apprenticeship as ways of caring for children led to 21 a “child saving” movement that took many forms. Heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian morality, family and community initiatives focused on education and socialization of families, particularly mothers and children, but also on the development of mutual aid and neighbourhood social relations. At the local level there were movements to create a more “child friendly” public space, and to address issues of air quality, sanitation, and housing, as well as more closely regulate consumption of alcohol, gambling and prostitution. At a structural level, movements arose to institute a “family wage” for men that would reinforce their role as breadwinners, and women’s role as caregivers of children. There were movements to end child labour, to establish universal primary education for children, and preventative health programs for children, i.e. vaccination. It is worth emphasizing the dual nature of this movement. On one level it targeted transformation of family, community, and in some respects, national, norms, values, and social relations. On another level it targeted transformation of political and economic structures to reflect and enforce these norms and values. And with the latter, the political and economic institutionalization of various structural changes, the welfare state began to formulate into three distinct tracks; one which reinforced the role of men in the formal economy, one which reinforced the role of women as homemakers and child-rearers, and a third aimed at children and the promotion of middle class approaches to childrearing (Gillespie, 2006). According to Strong-Boag (2002), this track has consisted of two aspects: on the one hand, universal policies and programs such as health care and public education; on the other hand, systems aimed at monitoring childrearing among a select number of families. In many Anglophone jurisdictions, this monitoring 22 was conducted by upper-middle class Christian women’s groups and as Chen notes, the concern was with both cruelty and neglect: Anti-cruelty activities criticized the immoral use of force, especially by working-class men, on animals and innocent children, who were regarded as harmless, weak, and lowly subjects. The problematization of neglectful parenting emerged from the fear that a lack of discipline and supervision of children would result in a failure to shape children into proper citizens (Chen, 2005, p. 3). In Anglophone countries, these systems of child protection have been highly controversial, with state monitoring and intervention into the family seen to be in direct contradiction to liberal ideology. Yet it was assumed that as long as norms and values stressed a certain kind of family structure – the two parent, breadwinning father and caregiving mother, and as long as political and economic structures were in place that reinforced these norms and values, the need for child protection services would be relatively minor (Schorr, 2000). This assumption has proven to be false and most Anglophone child protection systems are reeling under the weight of overwhelming demands. There are a number of reasons for this. First, while the prevalence of sexual, physical, and emotional mistreatment of children has not necessarily increased, societal perception of them, and of their impact on children, changed significantly over the course of the 20th century. The publication of The Battered Child Syndrome by physician Henry Kempe (1962) highlighted the prevalence of serious child abuse including fractures and broken bones gone unreported and untreated. It resulted in an increased emphasis on children’s right to be protected from such treatment and on the obligation of friends, family, neighbours, and professionals to report concerns over mistreatment of children to child protection services. Second, there has been a cultural shift emphasizing personal autonomy and 23 individual freedom over collective solidarity and commitment to community with a corresponding reduction in support for collective provision for children and an increase in conflicts between children, parents, schools and communities (Prilleltensky et al., 2001). Economic restructuring has also had a profound impact on the welfare of children. There has been an increase in work-family conflicts as more parents work shift work, weekends, and holidays (Duxbury, Higgins & Coghill, 2003). More families are dealing with issues of periodic or chronic unemployment. And more parents have jobs with low pay, few benefits, and little security. The consequence of all this is that child poverty has deepened across all types of families. About twenty years ago, the term “feminization of poverty” was coined to describe the overrepresentation of women among the poor; the term “juvenization of poverty” is an appropriate term to describe current trends (Peirson et al., 2001, p. 66). Cameron and Freymond (2006) assert that child welfare systems tend to mirror the cultural context from which they develop. In the face of economic restructuring, the neo-liberal emphasis on subordination of the state to the market has meant a reduction in supports for children and families from child care to social assistance, and this has spilled over in the form of increased referrals to the child protection system. Child protection statistics across most developed countries show significant increases during the same period that Western countries embraced neoliberal transformations in the governance of welfare (Parton & Mathews, 2001). While it is too simplistic to suggest child welfare caseload increases are the result of welfare state restructuring, there can 24 be little doubt that restructuring had a significant impact (Kinjerski & Herbert, 2000; Prilleltensky et al., 2001). These historical and current contextual influences have important implications for the day to day work done by child welfare social workers. What follows is an examination of this day to day work focusing on three areas: assessment of risk, decision making, and intervention, while looking more closely at the impacts of the previously mentioned historical and current influences on these practices. Due to space constraints, this daily work of child protection practice can only be outlined in broad strokes. In truth, this work is highly nuanced and complex, but what is argued is that the nature of the relationships cultivated in this field likely has the largest impact on the mental and emotional well-being of child protection workers. Elements of Frontline Child Protection Practice Ferguson (2016) asserts that while some research exists that outlines how child protection workers discuss their practice, little is known in the literature about what happens at a “face-to-face” level with children and families. Broadly speaking, the spectrum of activities conducted by child protection workers might be conceptualized in a triune fashion. While they might be delineated within three distinct realms of assessment, decision-making, and intervention, they also are unavoidably fused. Assessment tends to flow into decision-making, which tends to flow into intervention, though oftentimes these do not occur linearly as one might expect. For example, assessment itself has been posited as an effective form of intervention (Berg & Kelly, 2000). That is, inquiry into the status of a family alone can produce helpful change. 25 Alternatively, decisions might be made hastily or through some unknown means and then the assessment tool manipulated to produce a result that is supportive of that decision (Gillingham, 2014). Calder & Archer (2016) refer to the zones of risk-assessment and risk-management as iterative and interactive, each informing the other. While appearing disorganized, this multidirectional process of determining risk, making decisions about child safety, and intervening with various words and actions is actually reflective of the legion of dynamically shifting variables child protection workers confront on a daily basis with their caseloads. This triune approach is also highly relational, as it depends on both information and influence with regard to a web of relationships with children, parents, collateral witnesses, service providers, as well as other advocates and stakeholders. The daily practice of child protection workers’ practice will be further considered within these categories below. Assessment. In the child welfare field, it could be said that assessments are designed to assist child protection workers and agencies to answer three basic questions with regard to at-risk children: “What has happened?”, “What is happening now?”, and “What will likely happen in the future?” Via these three temporally-based questions, child protection workers seek to gather data for the purpose of determining the safety of the children involved, making protection decisions and intervening if necessary. However, each of these questions is inevitably considered though a number of societal, professional, and personal lenses. The reported diversity of protection responses across jurisdictions is a reflection of the various ways that collective conceptions of “abuse” or “service users” are framed. This section considers these 26 questions in turn, along with some of these associated conceptions. The lenses through which families are viewed matter because they serve a priming function for the relationship between worker and service user. What has happened? From the first call, child protection workers begin assigning meaning and making judgments with regard to critical incident narratives (Keddell, 2011). This is the process of answering the question “What happened?” and its follow up question, “What does that mean?” In order to answer these questions, child protection workers adopt an investigative stance. Intake child protection workers conduct an initial assessment on new files based on their perception of risk to children as described in the protection report (Shlonsky, 2007). Protection reports are rarely “clear-cut” but could be said to be based on the interpretations and speculations of the reporter and subsequently the analysis of the child protection worker. To illustrate, I once received a protection call from a concerned citizen who said that a child was walking around alone on a busy street in his pajamas in the rain. She was also concerned that he should be in school at that time. When I arrived to investigate I soon learned that the “child” was actually a “youth” of 14, his “pajamas” were actually neon-coloured sweat pants, the “street” was the private driveway of the townhouse complex where he lived, and that school was out for a “professional development day”. This narrative serves to make the point that notions of child maltreatment are a subjective construct without a standardized definition (Hollis, 2014). At the same time, there is also evidence that a degree of consistency with regard to protection screening 27 decisions can be achieved across child protection agencies (Johnson, O’Connor, Berry, Ramelmeier & Pecora, 2012). The issue of corporal punishment is another example of the subjective construction of abuse. Whitney, Tajima, Herrenkohl, and Huang (2006) considered how various child protection workers decided whether physical discipline crossed a threshold into physical abuse. They explain the many factors to be considered when defining child maltreatment: Defining abuse may be further complicated by differences in how an act is perceived based on the age of the child at the time of the abusive act, as well as the frequency of the act. While some discipline practices (e.g., burning a child with a cigarette) are clearly abusive, regardless of the age of the child or the frequency of the act, others, such as shaking a child, may be regarded by some as non-abusive if they are directed to an adolescent or occur as a one-time event with a school-age child. The broader context of an act also influences whether it is considered abusive…. Contextual factors include the legal definition of abuse, cultural norms regarding the act, the intention of the ‘actor,’ the relationship of the caregiver to the child, the consequences of the act (e.g., injuries), and the historical time in which the act occurred (p. 317). As Dingwall, Eekelaar, and Murray (1995) warn, if child maltreatment is a relativistic and societally mediated construct, then striving to quantify the scope or determine the causes of abuse and neglect will likewise remain subject to the biases and “moral judgments of the investigator” (p. 3). Even in cases where objective findings such as medical reports of non-accidental injuries indicate that child maltreatment has occurred, less tangible elements such as context, intent of the “abuser”, and co-occurring verbal or emotional abuse will be vulnerable to the lens of the assessing child protection worker. In cases with no physical evidence that can only be verified by narratives, such as by the reports of children, witnesses, and allegedly offending parents, determining child maltreatment becomes an even more obscured exercise. 28 Another similar question asked in the course of assessment is “What has happened a long time ago?” When conducting risk assessments for the purpose of child protection decision-making there is an association between a parent’s own childhood experience of maltreatment, and subsequent risk of maltreatment to their own children (Koenig et al., 2016). However, the majority of childhood victims of maltreatment do not in turn mistreat their children and there are a number of intervening variables that prevent any direct links between the two from being made (Dixon, Browne & Hamilton-Giachritsis, 2005). What is happening now? The second question that child protection workers are obligated to answer is “What is happening now?” The state assumes a right of surveillance for the purpose of monitoring at-risk families. This state mandate varies across nations and jurisdictions, but in each case represents an application of power roughly aligned with the values of the populace (Lonne, Harries, Featherstone & Gray, 2015). However, the mandate to protect children from harm is not merely a value of the populace; it may be better described as a demand. The non-negotiable requirement placed upon the state to monitor and act in the best interests if children is held in an uneasy tension with the rights of the liberal family to freedom from undue interference from the state. As such, child protection workers operate according to what Dingwall et al. (1995) refer to as the “liberal compromise”. As with the exchange of resources for access and compliance mentioned in the previous section, the liberal compromise represents a kind of trade between a family and their child protection worker. Dingwall et al.’s compromise is as follows: In 29 exchange for being granted access to the family home for the purpose of assessing the safety of children and monitoring the activities of the family, child protection workers tacitly commit to characterizing those families in the most positive manner possible. A family might be judged to have deviated from parental and familial norms deemed acceptable by the dominant culture, performing acts considered distasteful to society. Provided that those acts are freely viewable to agents of the state and are not particularly egregious, agents will not impugn or discredit the parents’ moral character. Rather they will be cast in the best possible light (the rule of optimism). The negative aspects of this compromise can be witnessed when a proportion of the various types of child abuse and neglect go unaddressed or when the state oversteps the rights of family liberty. Dingwall et al. (1995) assert that this liberal compromise represents what is actually a liberal dilemma. [Child protection workers] cannot be given the legal power to underwrite an investigative form of surveillance without destroying the liberal family. At the same time, the state cannot opt out. There is a collective interest in the moral well-being of future citizens, in the quality of social reproduction, as a necessary condition for the survival of this particular type of society (p. 220). The authors suggest that two tools are used by child protection workers in order to abide by the rule of optimism: “cultural relativism” and “natural love”. Cultural relativism recognizes that there will be deviations in families from “mainstream” parenting practices, distinct from the cultural norms of society. However, Dingwall et al. suggest workers excuse those differences in the name of protecting cultural diversity. For instance, certain parental practices such as spanking might be conceded as culturally-entrenched practices, tolerated in the name of upholding the stance that all cultures are equally valid. 30 “Natural love”, Dingwall et al.’s second “rule of optimism” tool, is also used to excuse familial deviance. This concept frames the parent-child relationship as, ...an instinctual phenomenon, grounded in human nature. As such it has a special, enduring, timeless and culture-free quality…. If it is assumed that all parents love their children as a fact of nature, then it becomes very difficult to read evidence in a way which is inconsistent with this assumption (1995, p. 86) Both of these “tools” are said to enable child protection workers to pardon families for their deviance. The use of these tools is said to be the price paid by the state for the access they require to adequately protect the greater interests of children. Interestingly, some theories currently and commonly employed by child protection workers appear generally congruent with the state’s side of the liberal compromise. In fact, they may in many respects represent an evolution of Dingwall el al.’s tools. For example, the strengths perspective (Saleeby, 1992) suggests that social workers should build upon a child or family’s abilities and existing competencies rather than looking for dysfunction. Ecosystems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1999) challenges child protection workers to view parental behaviour as the logical outcome of the environments in which they live rather than their own internal deficits or moral failings. Theories of anti-oppressive social work practice also arguably take this idea further, although those who subscribe to an anti-oppressive perspective would likely reject the concept of the liberal compromise. Anti-oppressive theory asserts that people occupy lower societal and economic strata due to structural inequality and discriminatory power dynamics (Sakamoto and Pitner, 2005). This theory is presumably taught to social workers in order that they might engage in macro-level activities that act on social structures rather than on the supposed shortcomings of individuals. Anti- 31 oppressive theory also provides explanatory power for incoming child protection workers who may be experiencing dissonance due to their exposures to the difficult familial realities they witness. Dingwall et al. (1995) critically describe these theoretical explanations for parental deviance as “excuses” that allow “...front-line workers, despite substantial evidence to the contrary, to reconstitute families as having some integrity and personal worth through which some gains can be made, however slight” (p. 90). I submit that in the hands of a child protection worker the utility of such tools might be more useful from a relational perspective. It is rare within human relationships for sentiments of scorn, disgust, or moral condemnation to be received well. Yet in the presence of often egregious acts, the fact of these behaviours form a natural barrier to a useful relationship. Other relationships are protected by a shadow of secrecy, but the protection relationship is founded on mutual knowledge of parental “sins”. Given that workers must form working alliances with the families on their caseload, these “tools” represent a manner of obtaining parental confessions (Hennum, 2011), absolving those sins, relieving families of their shame and guilt while perhaps also relieving the child protection worker of her own feelings of dissonance or disdain for the parents. What will likely happen in the future? This question represents an attempt by the system to use a statistical and actuarial process to project into the future and determine what child protection risks likely lay ahead for a family (Palusci, 2011). A large proportion of child welfare jurisdictions use a risk assessment model of some kind, but not all. For example, of the 13 Canadian jurisdictions, eight employ a standardized risk assessment model (Swift & Callahan, 2009). Risk assessment models 32 guide decision making through a scoring system that accounts for a number of variables in a family. These variables include the history of abuse of parents as children, drug and alcohol use, attitudes toward one’s children and mental health concerns among other things (Ministry of Children and Families, 1996). An overall level of risk is determined by the presence or absence of these factors. Although considered “evidence-based”, the fact that this model has been procured by and then applied in a wholesale manner to a large number of US states and Canadian provinces in spite of their evident cultural, political, and historical differences demonstrates that this process is far from scientific. It is argued that a pathologizing philosophy underlies risk assessment models in current use by child protection workers, in that the focus of assessment is predominantly centered on parents’ personal qualities and behaviours, with relatively little attention given to structural or social concerns such as homelessness, poverty, racism, or the capacity (or willingness) of the state to assist with basic needs. Some have criticized the model as serving a neoliberal agenda that includes favouring a managerial need for efficiency over outcome effectiveness (Callahan & Swift, 2007). Rather than supplying foundational resources that focus on overall prevention, such risk-based models save money by blocking resources from “low risk” families. However, the process of assessing families in this manner defines “risk” as an outcome of their behaviours. The result of these prevailing risk assessment practices on the lives of families might be self-evident. However, what is the effect on the emotional lives of the child protection workers who are called upon to administer what could be construed as “pathologizing” risk assessment models? Essentially, workers are asked to engage in 33 guesswork about the “likelihood” of future harm. This places the moral burden for major intervention choices onto unsure workers. Statistically, there will always be “false positives” and “false negatives”. In hindsight, some child protection workers will remove children who would have experienced better outcomes had they remained in their family home. Others should have been removed for their safety but were not and the worker must live with the consequences of that. The price to be paid for the power to sever parental bonds, is the bearing of responsibility for that power. As Shakespeare said in Henry IV, “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”. Decision-making. As discussed, child protection decision-making naturally follows from the risk-assessment process. A wide number of methods exist in various jurisdictions for coming to a determination about the correct course of protective action to take with a child or family. Some use court or court-like systems in a deliberative process, while others use professional panels or even individual decision-makers (Burns, Pvsv & Skivenes, 2016). However, in spite of a large body of statistical data pertaining to the numbers around child removals, these authors found that scant research has been conducted into the manner in which child welfare agencies actually make the decision to remove children, noting a marked lack of transparency around this process. In an effort to ensure that consistent, unbiased and “scientific” decisions follow from risk assessments, and number of technology-leveraged decision-making tools have been developed. With the use of such decision-making tools, risk assessment and decision-making are effectively combined. That is, after a number of relevant data points related to risk factors are tabulated, the tools themselves provided a decision. 34 Ferguson (2010) argues that this approach has been somewhat wrong-headed, leading to an atrophying of the relationship and human-level communication skills required to be effective in the work: Because so much emphasis has been placed on systemic risk and the failures of the inter-professional system to communicate and share vital information and entire new systems built up around it, insufficient attention has been given to the actual practices that are required to protect children and we have lost touch with the lived experience of doing the work and how it needs to be done and theorised. In some respects, we need to rediscover and preserve the best of what the social workers who have shaped child protection for well over 100 years have done (p. 1114-1115). Additionally, Gillingham (2014) suggests that risk assessment instruments such as the Structured Decision-Making Tools, touted as a technological panacea to personal error in conducting risk assessments, are typically rendered meaningless in practice. In Australia it was found that social workers had “...manipulated the tools to achieve an outcome that agreed with the decision they had already made” (p. 384). Individual perceptions or characterizations of risk by child protection workers might play a significant role in risk decision-making. Keddell (2017) compared “risk-averse” and “risk-friendly” child protection workers and found that those who took a conservative approach to child safety tended to prioritize the trauma histories of the parents, whereas those who were less concerned about child safety risks in general more commonly took a tentative approach to their risk assessment based on present-day factors. The personal experience of child protection workers, to be considered further in the next chapter, is also considered to be a non-trivial influence with regard to protection decision-making. Yoshihama and Mills (2003) identified how individual personal 35 experiences quantifiably influenced the protection decisions of assessing child protection workers, especially when the subject families bore resemblance in some way to those personal experiences. Calder and Archer (2016) provide the example of child protection workers investigating cases of sexual abuse but who also have a history of childhood sexual abuse: They might under or overestimate the risk depending on their experience, and there is also evidence that workers may be motivated to work with perpetrators as a means of retribution for their own reasons, or there are also areas where there is less urgency in terms of dealing with the risk, such as neglect with an ongoing history but no major presenting incident (p. 151). Factors influencing major decision-making differences between child protection workers need not be as intense. Another example of such variability between workers is simply their level of educational attainment. There tends to be a difference between child protection workers with an “academic focus” versus a “vocational focus”. As well, it is argued that there may be an ideological disconnect between the academic and professional realms within social work in the form of the theory/practice dilemma (Mullaly, 2007). There is also a longstanding notion that many child protection workers working in the field view social work theory with scepticism, instead valuing practice experience (Barbour, 1984). Higher levels of education appear to be inversely correlated with more politically conservative attitudes in helping professionals and hence a differing response. For example, an Australian study concerning professional characterizations of the unemployed (McDonald & Marston, 2008) reports the attitudes of a sample of employment caseworkers (who did not have any social work education) toward those 36 without jobs, then juxtaposes those attitudes with those from a sample of employment social workers with social work degrees. They found that the untrained case managers expressed overwhelmingly negative sentiments regarding their unemployed clientele. Only 8% conveyed “positive” attitudes. Recurring themes included, “Get tough on the unemployed” and “They’re playing the system” (p. 320). Most of the caseworkers’ comments were focused on internal factors and the theme of personal responsibility, in line with a more conservative or possibly neoliberal political ethos. By contrast, the social workers’ comments portrayed the unemployed as “disadvantaged people with multiple barriers” (p. 322). When asked by researchers why their service users were unemployed, the most common answer was “multiple barriers” and “structural factors”, indicating the social workers’ orientation toward external and structural attributions. They further suggested taking a “strengths approach” and using empowerment as a method of helping individuals to gain employment. The study is important because it highlights both the emotionally charged nature of the “responsiblisation” issue. A focus on structural issues by social workers draws from an understanding of the history of demeaning and inequitable treatment toward society’s disadvantaged and perhaps a grasp of the theories underlying that understanding. At the same time, the “get tough” attitude and focus on personal responsibility displayed by the uneducated Australian case workers is understandable in light of their firsthand perceptions of low motivation and fraud on the part of the chronically unemployed combined with what might be described as an unwitting acceptance of conservative ideology. 37 With regard to the field of child welfare, a similar dynamic can be witnessed. Fallon, MacLaurin, Trocme, and Festiner (2003) highlighted the results of a large Canadian child welfare study that among other things compared substantiation rates of reported abuse and neglect based on the worker’s educational level. “Substantiation” means that the child protection worker has judged that the evidence supports that abuse or neglect has been proven to have happened. The study reported substantiation rate percentages as follows in the table below: Table 1 Level of Education and Child Protection Substantiation Rates Level of Education Substantiation Rates Master of Social Work degree 33 Other graduate degree 41 Bachelor of Social Work degree 43 College certificate 46 Partial degree or certificate 53 It is possible that the reason MSW-educated child protection workers substantiate cases to a much smaller degree than their less educated peers is because they are more experienced or perhaps because of a difference in the nature of cases they are assigned? These were two possible explanations posited by the authors. However, it is also reasonable to consider that those with a more comprehensive theoretical understanding chose to assign less weight to structural risk factors when assessing the veracity and severity of child protection complaints. 38 A final point is that those with more education in the child welfare field tend to also be older, which could suggest that their foundational training and early experience was possibly less influenced by a resurgence of relatively conservative ideologies such as neoliberalism. Interestingly, Fenton (2014) noted that in one study the older social workers experienced a considerable amount of “ethical stress” caused by the recent influence of neoliberalism, whereas new and younger social workers were said to have accepted the purported ideological shift somewhat uncritically. Specifically, Fenton states that the older workers were, ...significantly less happy and objected significantly more to the contemporary neoliberal-informed context of [criminal justice social work], including: - more prescriptive work with service users; - less opportunity for relationship building; - more risk aversion; - less autonomy; - more reliance on procedures; - values taking less prominence within the cultural landscape (Fenton, 2014, p. 325) These sentiments echo the concern presented in the last section: that in practice settings where there is more of a “child protection” focus, marked by greater use of authority-based interventions, relationship-building efforts between workers and parents suffer. In turn, the subject well-being of both worker and family may also suffer. Intervention. In addition to conducting assessments and making risk-decisions, child protection workers use a basket of interventions with families. I argue that the presence or absence of certain acceptable intervention options in effect steer the nature of client-worker relationships, which for the purpose of this thesis hold implications for the present-day experience of child protection workers. 39 Within a child welfare context, an “intervention” commonly refers to state or legally mandated actions taken to ensure the safety of a child in the home but may also include an a “haphazard” collection of services and programs that exist in orbit of state child protection systems (Haskins, Wulczyn & Webb, 2007, p. 2). Such programs might be said to emerge “organically” based on identified needs. Within this cluster of programs, “macro-oriented” interventions consist of voluntary, community-based prevention programs that are tasked with lowering population-level incidence of child maltreatment (Molnar & Beardslee, 2013). Other programs are micro-oriented in that they are designed to target individual concerns, such as parental substance misuse. Voluntariness in child welfare varies between jurisdictions. As will be discussed in the next section, some countries are oriented toward “child protection” in that they focus resources on child safety enforcement, while others are “family service centred” with a focus on the provision of supportive resources. According to Berrick, Peckover, and Poso (2015), interventions by countries with a child protection focus tend to be much less voluntary than those with a family service focus. For example, the authors found that in Finland, a family service-focused system, 21-25% of the care orders were involuntary. However in England, a protection-focused system, 70-75% of care orders were involuntary. In the United States, the percentage of involuntary orders is as high as 89% in some states. The level of voluntariness in a jurisdiction matters in a meaningful way simply because it fundamentally shapes the nature of the client-worker relationship. There is good evidence that these relationships are much more effective in facilitating child safety when there is a greater degree of mutuality; when child protection 40 workers give up a degree of power. Cheng and Lo (2016) demonstrated in a large longitudinal study that a strong and collaborative working alliance between worker and parent was strongly associated with parental progress. Alternative interventions such as differential response, address less severe protection concerns in families by omitting formal mandatory investigations, emphasizing a strengths-based approach to promote family engagement, and providing resources (Fuller, 2014). The Political and Policy Contexts of Child Protection Systems This section puts forward some of the relevant policy issues germane to the state of the field. After framing these issues generally, this subsection offers a consideration of the most pressing concerns within child welfare. Namely, the “residual” state of the child protection field, the effects of neoliberalism in shaping popular thought about child welfare, and the overrepresentation of indigenous peoples within the field. This is concluded with a survey of organizational concerns in child welfare, as well as turnover among child protection workers. The current state of Anglophone child protection systems. It could be posited that at an essential level, law and policy represent the formalization of strongly held values, attitudes, and beliefs about how the world is or how it ought to be. This is especially true in the field of child welfare; its very nature often elicits strong emotional reactions when perceived lines of value are violated. Strong beliefs along with their respective policies are frequently at odds. For example, Gilbert, Parton & Skiveness (2011) conceptualize two broad policy paradigms under which Anglophone child welfare has purported to operate: a child protection orientation and a family service orientation. 41 The former is characterized by a “law-and-order” philosophy designed to mitigate and correct the various effects of familial and societal dysfunction in a relatively adversarial way and via coercive means. The latter, however, conceptualized family issues as emergent from social and psychological maladies and was therefore responsive to the provision of collaborative and therapeutic support services. Public moral concerns about unreported child abuse drove American legislation that both mandated and funded permanency planning (Carp, 2005). American states would be paid to enact long-term plans for children, either by placing them back in their homes or in permanent foster care. Child welfare as a residual system. Critics have characterized certain child welfare systems as “residual” in nature, meaning that the government assistance is considered a means of last resort; a resource to be summoned only after all private avenues of funding and sources of support have been exhausted (Cabrera, 2009). This continues to typify child welfare systems such as that in the United States, which persists in this approach despite the fact that research strongly suggests that poverty represents a powerful risk factor for childhood maltreatment and neglect (Slack et al., 2004). This residual system is said to exist in accordance with the aforementioned “law and order” approach to child welfare which favours a “child-saving paradigm” (Wharf, 2007). Interestingly, Phipps (2001) compared the Canadian child welfare system with that of the United States and Norway, with the finding that Canada can be placed midway on a spectrum that assigns responsibility for poverty upon systemic factors at one end (typified by the Norwegians) and personal deficits on the other (typified by the 42 Americans). The Canadians were considered to hold a somewhat mixed view about why poor people are poor to begin with. This relative ambiguity has led to a plethora of opinions about where Canada might be placed with regard to its approach to child welfare, though there is a degree of variability from province to province (Swift, 2011). What seems apparent, however, is that depending on the political setting and events of the day, this ambivalence allows for movement in either “direction”. For instance, after BC’s Gove inquiry, many reforms of the child protection systems were initiated, with some attention paid to systemic issues. Though to be fair, the resulting changes from the inquiry could be said to have fallen well short of enabling a more family service-centred system and may have even encouraged a stronger “child saving” philosophy (Armitage & Murray, 2007). Conversely, when provincial budget cuts become inevitable, a residualist or “law and order” approach to child welfare provides the moral impetus to reduce costs within the system (Scarth & Sullivan, 2007). Inevitably, the effect of a residual paradigm of child welfare on child protection workers could be considered disheartening by some because it runs counter to the ideals of their profession (Bellefeuille & Schmidt, 2006). Neoliberalism. An ideological critique has gained ground among those seeking explanations for the current state of Western child welfare systems, namely neoliberalism. The term “neoliberalism” is distinct from classical liberalism, which is an ideology centred on personal liberty and relative freedom from state influence (Mahon, 2008). Much more contested as a term and less of a “static, monolithic form”, neoliberalism might be best construed as a process whereby an irregular array of “individually oriented government programmes” is produced (Smith-Carrier & Lawlor, 43 2017, p. 106) based on free market forces. Some theorists contend that neoliberalism’s ultimate effect has been to relocate the burden of responsibility away from state-based institutions or programs and onto individuals when addressing the fundamental causes of poverty. Connell (2014) further defines neoliberalism as an “agenda of economic and social transformation under the sign of the free market” (p. 23) that has been propagated over the past 25 years via a “missionary faith,” pushing beyond its original task of simple deregulation. She suggests that due to the spread of neoliberalism, “...needs formerly met by public agencies on the principle of citizen rights, or through personal relationships in communities and families, are now to be met by companies selling services in a market” (p. 23). Abramovitz (2012) explains that while dire economic conditions in the United States in the 1930s gave rise, via classical liberal ideology, to the establishment of the welfare state and expanded social safety net, a subsequent US economic crisis emerged in the 1970s among the economic elite. This was purportedly followed by rising interest rates, international competition, and higher domestic business costs, thus eroding profitability. The elite responded, as Abramovitz suggests, by attacking high taxation and an expensive welfare state as a drag on the economy. Subsequent cuts to both taxes and social welfare programs have been cited as a neoliberal solution to a problem of the economic elite. Hence, the doctrine has been cited as the major cause of the erosion of many previous social gains as they pertain to meeting the needs of the economically disadvantaged and marginalized. Examples of the erosion of these social gains could 44 include a resurgence of poverty among families (Smith-Carrier & Lawlor, 2017), a reduction of the influence of feminism in Canadian social work (Pollack & Rossiter, 2010), and an affront to the work of “mothering” in favour of the now-essential earning requirements of dual income families (Leigh, Pacholock, Snape & Gauthier, 2012). Armstrong (2014) adds that neoliberalism is also a significant cause of the mass privatization of a number of institutions once owned by the community, of work, and of responsibility itself, as individuals are forced to rely on their own means to support themselves rather than state assistance. Some suggest that due to neoliberalism, in recent decades the term “welfare” has come to denote “laziness” and “reliance on the system”. This is in contrast to its original attribution as a component of a country’s social safety net; a former point of pride for nations valuing the needs of their citizens. According to some, the result of neoliberalism has been a move toward “responsiblisation” where, for instance, health care patients become responsible for their own care, those in the criminal justice system are responsible for not reoffending, and parents in the child welfare system are accountable to reduce risk of future harm to children (Liebenberg, Ungar & Ikeda, 2015). Most relevant to this thesis is the suggestion that neoliberalism constitutes a threat to the field of child welfare in Canada which, because of its influence, has experienced a marked expansion in the use of risk assessment instruments (Swift & Callahan, 2009). At the same time, child welfare systems and the factors affecting their efficacy are far too complex in nature to cite a single cause such as neoliberalism (which is also a highly complex and contested concept) for their shortcomings. The manner in which neoliberalism has been construed has been critiqued as an oversimplification of what is 45 a decidedly intricate collection of influences. The outcome of this oversimplification may be the misapplication of neoliberalism as a convenient “catch-all” term (Weller & O’Neill, 2014) lacking substantiation. Other Issues in Child Welfare Overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in Canada. Most modern forms of western state authority are decidedly secular. Yet they are also founded on laws that afford officers special rights and powers to enforce moral codes of conduct in much the same way as Christian priests (Milloy, 1999). In Canada, the government used this moral and state authority to forcibly remove Aboriginal children from their homes on Indian reservations and send them to church-run residential schools (Walmsley, 2005). It is suggested that the realities and long-standing consequences of profound traumatization in Aboriginal people was justified, among other factors, by reasons tied to strongly-held protestant morals and then enforced by the rule of law based on that morality. This critique includes the stance that the child welfare system in Canada was historically used as a tool of colonization; that governmental powers used protection legislation to enforce assimilation efforts with regard to indigenous children and youth and to “kill the Indian in the child” (Blackstock, 2015). The result of this, in addition to the thousands of children who are reported to have perished at these schools is a legacy of enduring social and economic maladies among surviving indigenous people. By way of illustration, it has been posited that there is a 65% rate of posttraumatic stress disorder among residential school survivors (Czyzewski, 2011). 46 In addition to the widespread use of Indian residential schools founded for the purpose of assimilating children, indigenous people also fell subject to a period of heightened child protection activities known as the “60’s Scoop”. The 1960’s in Canada were a decade marked by large numbers of indigenous children being involuntarily removed from their homes and placed into foster care with non-indigenous families. This occurred shortly after the federal government transferred powers for the well-being of indigenous children to the provinces (Kirmayer, 2009. As of 2011, indigenous children (age 14 and under) represent almost half of all Canadian children in foster care, in spite of only comprising 7% of the all the children in Canada (Turner, 2016). A reliance on market forces appears to have been the prevailing government strategy intended to provide for economic self-development among Canadian indigenous groups (Slowey, 2008). At the same time, the prevailing child protective services model based on “law and order” is such that risk factors within indigenous communities are deemed to be exceedingly high. The aforementioned “evidence-based” child protection models currently in use within Canadian jurisdictions place a heavy emphasis on personal risk factors that result in scores directing child protection workers to bring indigenous children into care more often than non-indigenous children. Yet to an even greater degree than with the non-indigenous child welfare system, many more of these personal “risk factors” are present among indigenous service users due to the result of systemic and historical ills faced by indigenous people. For example, parents’ own history of abuse, socio-economic factors, and substance use issues drive up risk assessment scores, leading to indigenous overrepresentation (Tromce, Knoke & Blackstock, 2004). 47 The effects of managerialism on child protection workers. The process of social work has been described as “variably rational” (Hyslop, 2008) because of its ambiguous and subjective nature. “It constantly seeks to balance an uneasy dialectical essence in its positioning at the intersection of social care and social control, and in its practice of seeking objective outcomes through a process of subjective interpersonal interaction” (p. 63). This could be considered especially true for child protection social work, which Hyslop (2008) describes as an “ambiguous nexus” of “state-sanctioned re-socialisation on the one hand, and of empowerment and redemption on the other” (p. 64). Although appearing to foster better “objective outcomes”, managerialism has been panned by detractors in recent decades as a manifestation or a material facilitator of neoliberalism. Certainly, the notion of management taking responsibility for spiraling budgets and providing efficient and effective service is a commendable one. Yet the assumption of responsibility occurred alongside a shift in power from professionals to managers. If one accepts the position that the central aim of social work is to provide services in support of social justice and human rights, then it follows that social work professionals must be afforded the discretion to develop and implement those services (Rogowski, 2011). Managerialism is considered an affront to this perspective, …resulting in major changes in the distribution and balance of power within social services and social work, including the displacement of traditional professional concern with need and social citizenship by business concerns of economy and efficiency. It amounted to the ‘fiscalisation’ of policy and practice whereby policy and practice decisions are made on the basis of financial concerns rather on social and moral values (p. 161). 48 An inherent risk with regard to managerialism in child welfare is that when this doctrine is implemented in its various forms, the end result might be that the focus of one’s professional life on the front lines may inadvertently drift from the mandate of realizing shared social values such as supporting the best interests of children and my may instead shift toward supporting the often-incongruent aims of the management, which may or may not have the best interests of children in mind. For example, Chuang, Wells, Green, and Reiter (2011) suggest that an increase in performance-based child protection contracts have contributed to “role-overload” (p. 465) and a reduction in the provision of services to children and care providers. Under this regime, Rogowski suggests that managers are “…involved in a struggle with practitioners and use a range of techniques such as procedures, performance indicators and eligibility criteria to exert control and achieve organizational goals” (2011, p. 162). Schwartz and Sharpe (2010) suggest that a similar coup d'état is occurring across many professions, as professional judgment is being eroded by a proliferation of managerial policies and regulations. This, in turn, effectively stifles creative solutions, client-centred practice, and “practical wisdom”. The great irony is that as child protection workers attend to an ever-growing set of mandatory policies, procedures, assessments, and reports, their time for relational interventions with families, contemplation of client-scenarios or necessary next steps, as well as collaborative problem-solving among child protection team members is cut ever shorter. A good deal of “common factors” research has concluded that the greatest outcomes tend to arise from an approach by social workers that is centred on forming and maintaining a strong therapeutic alliance, providing empathy and warmth, adopting 49 unconditional positive regard toward families, and unhurriedly attending to co-created goals (Barth & Lee, 2013). Taken even further, there is also evidence that the uneven power relationships that may develop due to a managerial focus within an agency could also directly harm child protection worker-family relationships, arguably the most crucial component of child welfare practice. That is, pressure placed upon families is reminiscent of unhealthy parent-child dynamics. This is explored extensively in Chapter 3. If a child protection worker is susceptible to countertransference or unique biases based on early childhood experiences and primary caregiver relationships, an organizational culture of power may only serve to aggravate those dynamics. The link between management’s use of power and a child protection worker’s use of power has been suggested by others: These expressions of power at the ministry [British Columbia’s Ministry of Children and Family Development] could be an extension of management’s exercise of power over practitioners…. Practitioners can take this power with them when they enter the home of a family. For example, if a social worker blames parents for the quality of child care, this will increase the family’s fear and paranoia. This may be an extension of management’s tendency to blame an individual social worker when a child is injured or dies (Walmsley, 2005, p. 66). Organizational factors stemming from such policies have been shown to heavily influence the rate at which burnout occurs (Regehr, Hemsworth, Leslie, Howe & Chau, 2004), and are associated with vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress. Intent to turnover. The North American turnover rates among child protection workers is considered to be relatively high with more than 75% of attrition categorized as “voluntary and preventable” (Williams & Glisson, 2013, p. 8). Unsurprisingly, research shows that the rate of Canadian worker turnover is also very high and that the vast majority of child protection workers have relatively little experience (Fallon, 50 MacLaurin, Tromcé & Felstiner, 2003). For example, Fallon et al. studied 327 service areas across the country and found that 67% of workers had five years or less of protection experience and about 35% had 0-23 months of experience (2003, p. 47). Interestingly, the study also found that the more experience workers had in the protection field, the less likely they were to have a social work degree. The degree to which worker turnover can be attributed to neoliberal policies is somewhat unclear; a number of other factors are at play. In my experience in the field of child protection, most new child protection workers are hired directly out of Bachelor of Social Work programs. It could be the case that some choose protection employment because of availability, rate of pay, or to improve their resume. Child protection workers are at particularly high risk of turnover during their first year in the field (Chenot, Benton & Kim, 2009). Many of them have never had a single position in social work and yet they are tasked with duties that are widely described as both complex and crisis centred (Walmsley, 2005). Anxiety is the Outcome When the political and policy contexts of child welfare, the field’s historical roots, workload issues, and the multitude of critical risk-decisions that child protection workers are called on to make are combined, a negative emotional experience may be presupposed to some extent. There are a number of psychological and emotional aspects of practice to be described and considered in the next literature review chapter, especially as they pertain to the everyday practice of child protection workers. However, it is evident that there are a number of external factors already covered in this chapter 51 that drive emotional and psychological symptoms in child protection workers. The predominant emotion to be considered as these factors are combined is anxiety. Whittaker (2011) suggests that strong feelings of anxiety are common in child protection workers due to their frequent exposure to the powerful emotions among both families and coworkers, but especially around their task of risk decision-making. This anxiety is presumably compounded due to child protection workers’ awareness that they are working as agents of the state who may be required to employ coercion that might include severing child-parent bonds (Waterhouse & McGhee, 2009). This notion is confirmed by service users themselves, who state that their experience with child protection workers is often unduly coercive (Buckley, Carr & Whelan, 2011). Further, the requirement of the worker to perform child-protective functions, ...contributes to primary anxiety that arises when social workers as representatives of the state are confronted with the suffering of society’s poor people, the uncertainties associated with child care decision-making and the potential to separate children and parents forcibly. The pervasiveness of social and economic deprivation has the capacity to overwhelm the individual practitioner both for what it is and also because these social realities have to be set aside to determine the concrete decisions required by the child protection system (Waterhouse & McGhee, 2009, p. 485). Additionally, a small proportion of a child protection worker’s time is typically provided for actually seeing and interacting with children (Ferguson, 2016), a fact that is often concerning. When direct contact does occur, it is often characterized by a high level of conflict, as child protection workers often find themselves performing risk assessments while concurrently confronting parents with abuse and neglect allegations (LeBlanc, Regehr, Shlonsky & Bogo, 2012). Taken further, one might suggest that the primary role of a child protection worker is to “embody” anxiety, so to speak. If one considers a dictionary definition of 52 anxiety as a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an uncertain future occurrence, then anxiety might be construed as one of the essential functions of a child protection worker. When considered from a risk assessment perspective, continuous forecasting and an overriding concern for the safety and well-being of children are a paramount driver of anxiety (Waterhouse & McGhee, 2009). It is arguable that the emotionally difficult work of child protection is fundamentally framed by the historical and political contexts within which the child welfare field found its development. These factors which lay largely outside of the individual realm likely drive a proportion of the unease felt by a segment of child protection workers. In time these anxieties, along with a host of other emotions, psychological factors, and a plethora of other variables, might be said to converge in ways that give rise to more serious conditions such as various forms of occupational stress and burnout in child protection workers. Those conditions are explored in further detail in chapter three. It might be concluded that the “everyday” work of child protection workers is replete with the effects of a great many converging forces. Those employed in the field of child welfare do not exist within an ideological vacuum, but instead have inherited a set of contextual factors that affect both the way they think and work. Given the aforementioned challenges of the legacy of historical indigenous and nonindigenous child welfare, the political preconditions faced by incoming child protection workers, the disconnect between social work education and professional practice, and possible neoliberal influences on the profession presumably manifested in the form of managerialism and a “law and order” ethos, it would be fair to say that the contemporary 53 child protection worker is faced with a number of hindering structures that would make her or his success in the profession difficult to attain. These overarching and political challenges alone are sufficient to foster a sense of malaise among child protection workers who have entered the profession for decidedly unselfish reasons. The following chapter continues the dissertation literature review. It includes a review of the various constructs used to describe and explain the emotional and psychological experiences of child protection workers, and a consideration of literature pertaining to child protection workers’ own childhood experiences. 54 Chapter Three: A Review of Challenges to Child Protection Workers and Their Practice This chapter provides a comprehensive review of the literature relevant to this topic along three lines. First, it contains literature about the difficult, highly complex, and deeply emotional challenges of practicing child welfare is reviewed and briefly discussed. Second, the chapter reviews literature pertaining to the experiences of both child protection workers and those in similar occupations is considered. A number of overlapping lines of research have developed which attempt to define various vocation-related phenomena as trauma or stress-induced maladies. This has resulted in the production of various constructs. Here, the most relevant constructs (subjective well-being, vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion fatigue) are presented, followed by other less popular or perhaps somewhat tangential conceptions (vicarious resilience, posttraumatic growth, and burnout) that may nonetheless serve to foster a better understanding of child protection worker experiences. Third, research about the effects of childhood memories, experiences, and adversity is presented. This is followed by a consideration of both the potentially protective and pernicious aspects of childhood, as related to the risk of vocational-centric trauma in child protection workers. A synthesis of the preceding constructs along with a consideration of the dynamic relationships between them is then presented. 55 The Difficult Practice of Child Welfare To be fair, many lines of work are decidedly stressful. One might ask what elements might make the field of social work uniquely difficult or stressful? The next few paragraphs consider some of these unique elements, followed by a survey of the specifically emotional challenges associated with the work. There are many forms of stress present in the child welfare system that would not be considered traumatic yet contribute to worker attrition. “Child protection practice is stressful, complex, has personal safety risks, requires the ability to think on one’s feet, and does not provide immediate recognition of one’s efforts” (Walmsley, 2005, p. 132). High caseloads and extensive paperwork requirements are often cited as contributors to turnover. For instance, although the nature of cases varies considerably, the optimal number of child protection cases has been estimated at about 17 (Yamatani, Engel & Spjeldnes, 2009). Yet in Canada, 64% of generalist child protection workers have more than 21 cases, and 28% hold more than 31 (Fallon, MacLaurin, Tromcé & Felstiner, 2003). One rather sizeable study of child protection workers (Mor Barak, Levin, Nissly, and Lane, 2006) concluded: The strongest direct predictors of intention to leave, based on the quantitative analysis, were lack of job satisfaction, low organizational commitment, younger age, high stress and exclusion from the organizational decision-making process. These findings were echoed by the qualitative data indicating that stress (too much work, not enough time to do it), dissatisfaction with the job (too much paper work not enough face to face time with clients), being younger (older workers saw advantage in staying and keeping their benefits) and low organizational commitment (feeling committed to the field of child welfare, not to the organization) were all major contributors to intention to leave. These findings are consistent with earlier studies that demonstrate the connection between job dissatisfaction...lack of organizational commitment...being younger and less 56 vested in the organization…, and high stress...with intention to leave and turnover (p. 566). Aside from any emotional or psychological trauma that may emerge in child protection workers in the profession, the high-demand nature of the work itself discourages organizational commitment. This, combined with the young age of novice child protection workers, high levels of stress, and having low sense of control within the organization are associated to with workers’ intention to leave. Geoffrion, Morselli, and Guay (2016) add to this sentiment by suggesting that the stressor of high accountability that is uniquely prevalent within child welfare organizations further erodes organizational commitment. Emotional Challenges in Child Welfare Practice Many facets of present-day child protection worker well-being have been the subject of academic research. Examples include studies about child protection workers’ experiences of fear (Smith, McMahon & Nursten, 2003), the effects of shame on worker well-being and practice (Gibson, 2014), child protection workers as parents (O’Reilly, Wilkes, Luck & Jackson, 2014), or the seemingly paradoxical experience of both high exhaustion and high job satisfaction in child protection workers (Stalker, Mandell, Frensch, Harvey & Wright, 2007). Ferguson (2017) highlights the often “unbearable” emotional experiences of child protection workers, suggesting that they often resort to emotional disconnection and “superficial, non-intimate practice” (p. 1012) as a means of self-protection, leaving at-risk children “unseen” and hence more vulnerable. He adds that child protection workers 57 also sometimes adopt aspects of managerialism such as using a “tick-box” mentality as a means of controlling their exposure to emotionally difficult stimuli. Indeed, it can be argued that managerialism itself represents a significant source of emotional distress for child protection workers. For example, Walmsley describes his study of the organizational experience of Canadian child protection workers, saying “[p]ractitioners experience of organizational life...is summed up in four phrases: ‘out on a limb,’ ‘under a microscope,’ walking on eggshells,’ and ‘my goose is cooked’” (2005, p. 64). A large American study corroborates these descriptions, suggesting that challenging organizational factors such as “an atmosphere and organizational culture of tension and fear” (Ellet, Ellis, Westbrook & Dews, 2007, p. 273) as well as anxiety about legal liabilities due to mistakes are a significant source of employee turnover. Related to this is the purported “terror” often felt by child protection workers in response to pressure and questioning by the media, often initiated in response to the death of a child (Ben Shlomo & Levin-Keini, 2017). This tremendous emotional reaction develops because of the nature of the positions child protection workers occupy: they hold profound responsibility for the safety and well-being of children, standing between worlds of worry and grief. The resulting anxiety is compounded by extreme societal pressure as they function “at the sharp end of society’s anxieties” (Taylor, Beckett & McKeigue, 2008) making the impossible decisions required by their community. Constructs Regarding the Experiences of Child Protection Workers This section introduces a number of constructs that are considered the most relevant with regard to the emotional experiences and challenges of child protection 58 workers. These constructs are explanatory theories that clinicians, researchers and social scientists both use and develop in an attempt to provide shape and clarity to an otherwise unobservable phenomenon. The constructs under consideration in this chapter are vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue, burnout, subjective well-being, and self-efficacy. A sampling of “theoretical opposites” found in the literature are also briefly surveyed: vicarious resilience, posttraumatic growth, and compassion satisfaction. After presenting each construct on its own, the literature review includes an exploration of the ways in which constructs intersect as well as a demonstration of how these constructs are conflated and misapplied. A caveat about constructs. When seeking to understand definitional terms such as “subjective well-being” or “vicarious trauma”, there are a few crucial points for consideration. First, such terms are constructs, which means that in a particular situation, based on the observation of these phenomena, a label is construed and applied. Such a construct may be useful for thinking about or describing the respective phenomenon, however the construct also takes on an existence that is separate from the actual thing being observed (Loevinger, 1957). The degree to which “actual” differs from “constructed” represents the degree of “error” in understanding the phenomenon as it is. Each construct develops along its own lines and within its own theoretical territory. However, some researchers believe that the constructs, as they exist and relate to each other, possess confounding and disparate elements (Kadambi & Ennis, 2004). Further, some authors contend that helping professionals have hastily accepted 59 these constructs, leading to premature and ineffective interventions (Sabin-Farrell & Turpin, 2003). Vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion fatigue. A good deal of research has been undertaken to define and quantify the effects of vicarious trauma, mostly centred on the experiences of sexual abuse counselors and therapists, with relatively little linked specifically to the experience of child protection workers (Bride, Jones & MacMaster, 2007). Emotional and psychological traumatic distress, as it’s related to the impact of child protection social work, occurs both directly and indirectly (Horwitz, 1998). According to Horwitz, direct forms may stem from assaults or threat of assault by service users, the vandalism of one’s property, criticism from parents and their relations, from the public at large toward the profession, or from overwhelming demands imposed by the child welfare agency. Indeed, sensationalism by mainstream media combined with fears of personal liability for potential professional misdemeanors adds to psychological burden many child protection workers face (Kanani, Regehr & Bernstein, 2002). These direct forms of emotional and psychological trauma are distinguished from indirect forms of emotional and psychological distress. In this case, the traumas of children and families are experienced vicariously or secondarily. Child protection workers are exposed to the effects of such traumas through the narratives they hear, through witnessing possible physical aspects of trauma such as bruising on children, and by observing associated emotional effects among those on their caseload. 60 The term “vicarious” connotes an element of substitution between the child protection worker and the person with whom she works. As a part of the process of providing services to service users and responding to them in an emotionally empathetic manner, child protection workers attend to individuals’ narratives and actively enter their worlds. Bride, Jones and MacMaster (2007) contend that the effects of such secondary exposures are very similar to those in people who have been directly traumatized. Such effects include “…intrusive imagery related to the client’s traumatic disclosures, avoidant responses, physiological arousal, distressing emotions, and functional impairment” (p. 70). Newell and McNeil (2010) are careful to point out that although vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress are similar constructs and typically used synonymously, they are in fact distinct. They suggest that vicarious traumatization, “…represents the resulting cognitive shifts in beliefs and thinking that occur in child protection workers in direct practice with victims of trauma” (p. 60). Alternatively, the results of secondary traumatic stress “...are the behavioral symptoms that mirror the PTSD presented in the primary victim[s] of trauma, not changes in cognition” (p. 61). While vicarious traumatization refers to changes in child protection workers’ perception of the world; their sense of safety, their views on the nature of people, even their spiritual beliefs (Pearlman & MacIan, 1995), secondary traumatic stress might be alternatively characterized as a normative response based on direct exposure to the pain and suffering of another, often mirroring the post-traumatic stress reaction of the service user. Those symptoms may include “…intrusive thoughts, traumatic memories or nightmares associated with client trauma, insomnia, chronic irritability or angry 61 outbursts, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, avoidance of clients and client situations, and hypervigilant or startle reactions toward stimuli or reminders of client trauma” (Newell & MacNeil, 2010, p. 60). One study found that more than 70% of child protection workers had experienced at least one of these symptoms in the previous week and 15% met the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (Bride, 2007). Interestingly, under DSM-V, vicarious trauma has been included as a new “exposure” criterion for diagnosing PTSD. Clinicians under the new manual are directed to include the repeated hearing of survivors’ trauma stories as a diagnostic contributor to the disorder. While this choice of inclusion may serve to highlight and perhaps legitimize the effects of vicarious trauma in first responders and helping professionals, it may also muddy the diagnostic waters in that it removes the possibility of a distinct vicarious trauma diagnosis (Levin, Kleinman & Adler, 2014). This is certainly apparent in light of the present discussion regarding the distinctions between vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress. Secondary traumatic stress. Figley (1995) delineates the related symptoms of secondary traumatic stress (STS) along three broad lines. First, he suggests that a social worker will tend to ruminate on the traumatic event relayed by the service user. Second, the worker will avoid the traumatic narrative or content and will deny the associated emotions. Finally, the worker will experience a sense of ongoing and heightened arousal. The contributory factors inherent to secondary traumatic stress are related in many respects to those of post-traumatic stress disorder. As such, the relatively large research base attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder is therefore very useful in that 62 it may offer insights with regard to those concerned with secondary traumatic stress. Pertaining to PTSD, “defining vulnerability and articulating its constituent components and the mechanism of action remains essential to the development of the comprehensive understanding of the traumatic stress process…” (Paton & Violanti, 2006, p. 5). Paton and Violanti (2006) whose research is centred on the experience of protective services professionals, further suggest that PTSD susceptibility must be considered dichotomously with posttraumatic resilience. There are a few salient variables with regard to susceptibility to PTSD that may have direct application with STS. The first is that of personality. The personality characteristics of an individual are considered to be relatively stable over time and are said to have a degree of influence on one’s vulnerability to psychological trauma. Shakespeare-Finch (2006) highlights the fact that of the “big five” personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) those who have the trait of neuroticism attributed to them tend to be diagnosed with PTSD more often. She suggests that the effect of this trait is even more influential in a PTSD diagnosis than the effect of exposure to the traumatizing stimulus and the “amount of material loss experienced” (2006, p. 35). Distinctions between vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress. Perhaps the central distinguishing difference between vicarious traumatization and secondary traumatic stress is that the former entails global changes to essential schemas in the mind of the helping professional. That is, their view of the work they do, their client-families, their sense of self-efficacy, and their own self-concept shifts. However, they may not necessarily experience somatically-centred symptoms 63 associated with secondary traumatic stress. A child protection worker may conversely experience secondary traumatic symptoms without the requisite change in worldview and cognitions associated with vicarious trauma. Alternatively, it has been posited that the symptoms of both secondary traumatic stress and vicarious trauma are actually present-day reactions to historical trauma, triggered by a present-day event. This notion holds strong bearing with regard to the research question. Jenkins and Baird (2002) suggest a number of diverging dimensions in the literature that further divide the two concepts. Vicarious trauma tends to be more theoretically conceived and centred upon the experiences of therapists who treat sexual abuse survivors. Additionally, Jenkins and Baird regard vicarious trauma as being clandestine in nature and progressive in its effects over time. Its presence is less apparent but becomes more so as repeated exposure to the trauma in others produces changes in one’s thinking patterns. Alternatively, secondary traumatic stress is focused on the immediate observable symptoms of trauma in helping professionals, is based in research including a broad range of those helping professionals, and is centred on the effects of even a single exposure to trauma as opposed to the effects of cumulative exposure. Compassion fatigue. In addition to the distinction between vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress, a separate distinction can be made between secondary traumatic stress and compassion fatigue. Figley (1995) suggests that the condition arises from an accumulation of three stressors- primary traumatic stress, secondary traumatic stress, and vicarious trauma. Although in this way Figley roughly equates 64 secondary traumatic stress with compassion fatigue, Fahy (2007) conceives of compassion fatigue as being descriptive of a larger framework within which secondary traumatic stress is located. This framework “may encompass philosophical and policy work stressors that devalue workers as a whole” (p. 202). The construct of compassion fatigue is perhaps more holistic in that it extends beyond individual etiological factors to include systemic and organizational ones. Geoffrion, Morselli, and Guay (2016) add another cumulative stressor to the Figley’s STS matrix: “accountability stress”. This is said to be particularly relevant for child protection workers, who are held accountable for their risk decisions and the resulting outcomes. The construct of burnout, which could also be placed under the framework of compassion fatigue and alongside secondary trauma (Adams, Figley & Boscarino, 2008), will be considered in the next section. Burnout. Defined as a state of exhaustion experienced on physical, emotional, and psychological levels that is brought about by ongoing exposures to stressors in one’s workplace (Regehr, Hemsworth, Leslie, Howe & Chau, 2004), burnout occupies its own theoretical space and the literature, distinct from that related to vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress. Burnout symptoms may include “…physical depletion, feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, disillusionment, and the development of a negative self-concept and negative attitudes towards work, people involved in the work (families, colleagues and managers), and at times even life itself” (p. 332). Burnout is also typified by a sense of emotional exhaustion (Lizano & Mor Barak, 2015). 65 Maslach (2003) suggests that the broad experience of job burnout (that is, burnout that is potentially experienced in any field of employment) may be accurately framed using a tripartite model. This includes having a sense of overwhelming exhaustion (a reaction to a chronic stressor), the presence of cynicism or disillusionment (a reaction to the perception of the futility of one’s job), and feelings of personal ineffectiveness (a sense of inefficacy). Susceptibility to burnout varies according to demographic factors. Hamama (2012) cites young age, being female, low seniority, being single, and higher levels of education as risk factors for burnout. She also defines these etiological factors along four dimensions: physical (or extrinsic) working conditions, psychological (or intrinsic) working conditions, social conditions and organizational conditions. These causal factors are strongly associated with the symptoms described by Maslach. Higher pay and opportunities to work in adoptions are said to be negatively related to burnout (Font, 2012). These factors are very relevant to the work of child protection workers in light of the effects of neoliberalism and the subsequent move toward managerialism outlined in the preceding chapter. Low control over one’s working conditions and employment could be construed as a precursor to burnout. Much like vicarious trauma, burnout is a gradual process that often goes unrecognized by supervisors until it produces more recognizable symptoms such as absenteeism, voiced cynicism, health problems, and low morale (Collins & Long, 2003). These may be pathologized or misconstrued by management as character problems within the worker. Further, when these symptoms appear they often indicate an 66 advanced state of burnout. “The unspoken message is if you are burned out it’s already too late” (Fahy, 2007). It could be said that vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress may co-occur with burnout, but it might be more accurate to suggest that the effects of the former are to a degree causally linked to the latter. For example, a child protection worker may have experienced a shift of worldview and sense of disillusionment based on repeated exposures to the traumatic narratives of children and parents. In turn, this may lead to cynical beliefs about the futility of the work or about the worker’s own ability to effectively do the work. So in this way, vicarious trauma generates cognitive symptoms that roughly match those of burnout. In addition, the worker may experience secondary traumatic stress symptoms that, if left untreated, could produce the kind of overwhelming, burnout-related exhaustion that Maslach (2003) describes. What may be concluded is that burnout is caused by many factors across many fields of employment, but for those who are experiencing vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress, burnout is likely the end result. Burnout could be said to be the more popularly used term in everyday language among child protection workers. While this is likely true, what may be missed is the experience of vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress as possible intermediary steps. Subjective well-being. Unlike the previously discussed theoretical constructs, this term makes use of a positive frame when being used to understand the experience of child protection workers. Diener (1984) was the predominant figure in the original study of this topic, and he makes three assertions about the concept. First, that subjective well-being must be measured from the professional’s own experience and 67 perspective. Second, the term refers to more than simply an absence of negative factors. Third, measurement of subjective well-being must be global, rather than focused on individual domains of life. Graham and Shier (2010) define subjective well-being as an self-evaluative construct among social workers that draws on “measures of life satisfaction, lack of depression and anxiety, and positive moods and emotions” (p. 758). They offer a critique regarding the prevalent focus on problems and defects within the field of social work, suggesting that positive focus may yield a broader, more encompassing understanding of social worker well-being. That said, the construct is considered to be highly complex and multidimensional. Baldschun (2014) presents six dimensions that combine to shape this construct: affective, social, cognitive, professional, personal, and psychosocial well-being. These variables interact dynamically alongside other personal and organizational factors in order to constitute the subjective well-being model. Interestingly, one study found that experiences of childhood trauma were strongly associated with measures of low subjective well-being in adulthood (Oshio, Umeda & Kawakami, 2012). Although the effects of these difficult nascent experiences were somewhat mediated by higher levels of social support and socio-economic status, the authors warned that those effects were nonetheless rather independent and enduring, regardless of intervention. With regard to child protection workers, subjective well-being has been measured to exist at lower levels than in similar occupations (Graham, Bradshaw, Surood & Kline, 2014). Lizano and Mor Barak (2015) found a strong association between low states of well-being and high levels of emotional exhaustion in child protection workers. 68 Self-Efficacy. Unlike the previous constructs, which describe an observable syndrome related to the psychological and emotional harms that befall child protection workers, the concept of self-efficacy might be construed as a modifying or intervening variable. That is, the idea of self-efficacy appears in some manner as a variable within each of the preceding constructs. The construct refers to the one’s confidence in their own ability to achieve a goal or successfully perform a task. Self-efficacy research is most prevalent in the fields of sports psychology and educational psychology but has broader application in the field of social work. Extensive research has established the relevance of self-efficacy theory across a number of disciplines, contexts and cultures (Luszczynska, Gutierrez-Dona & Schwarzer, 2005). There have been very few studies that have considered self-efficacy as it relates to secondary trauma (Cieslak, Shoji, Luszczynska, Taylor, Rogala & Benight, 2013). This is important because it represents an apparent gap in the literature; studies exploring the ways that exposure to another’s traumas affect child protection workers’ sense of their own competence, effectiveness, and personal identity do not yet exist. In addition, self-efficacy theory has garnered substantial attention because of its relatively straightforward application and its explanatory power, as well as its utility for clinical practice. As a tool in one’s clinical arsenal, applications of the theory have been shown to positively affect positive outcomes both in families and helping professionals over the past few decades (Bandura, 1986). Related in some respects to vicarious trauma, perceived self-efficacy is essentially a person’s set of beliefs about his or her ability to perform a certain task. A strong sense of self-efficacy is important because it greatly influences the choices we 69 make based on our predictions of success or failure. Bandura (1995) suggests “people make causal contributions to their own psychosocial functioning through mechanisms of agency…” (p. 2) and that those efficacy beliefs direct human motivation and subsequent actions. That an adequate sense of perceived self-efficacy is elementary to both one’s effort and effectiveness is a crucial point with regard to the influence of vicarious trauma in child protection workers. Self-efficacy theory may lend support to the theoretical construct of vicarious trauma and perhaps the broader theories and conceptual models of vocational well-being in child protection workers because each is centred on the worldview of the helping professional. Self-efficacy pertains to the view of a worker’s capacities in regard to their helping skills such as their ability to attend to service users’ narratives or in their ability to assist a parent in achieving identified goals. For instance, a professional may ponder, “Do I have what it takes to handle this role?” Similarly, vicarious trauma pertains to the clinician’s view of herself in relationship with those same narratives, and the subsequent meaning attributed to such. In this case a professional may ponder, “Can I live with the reality of the stories I hear?” Ironically, perceived lack of self-efficacy or ability to make positive contributions in the field of child welfare are likely not caused so much by personal deficits of the worker, but by the structural preconditions the worker finds herself in as discussed in chapter 2. For example, her overall influence in the field might be limited by a managerial constraint on her professional autonomy. Perhaps systemic troubles are better attributed to neoliberal forces. Yet for a nascent worker who quickly becomes disillusioned by her lack of impact and therefore experiences a marked drop in self- 70 efficacy, the ironic result is that her emotions and behaviours could conceivably shift in ways that align with her new diminished view of self. Her thoughts become a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that inevitably result in her general disengagement or exit from child protection social work. There is strong research support suggesting that a person’s sense of self-efficacy in their position is related to the rate at which a child protection worker burns out and ultimately leaves the profession. Chen and Scannapieco (2010) explored the effect of work-related self-efficacy and supervisory support on child protection workers’ desire to remain in the child protection field. Using secondary survey data, the authors measured 455 workers in these areas: desire to stay, job satisfaction, self-efficacy in regard to child protection work, and workers’ perception of supervisor support. They found that in workers with low job-related self-efficacy, workers’ perception of support by their supervisor was the largest factor in their decision to stay. In those with high job-related self-efficacy, job satisfaction was the greater influence on retention. The authors propose that child protection workers with high self-efficacy perceived their work environment to be less threatening and more manageable than those with low self-efficacy. The results underscore the need for new and inexperienced workers to have ample supervisory support, particularly in a manner that would bolster skills and increase the worker’s sense of self in relationship to the work of child protection. Another study indirectly speaks to the need for high quality supervision. Hutchison, Sherman, and Martinovic (2008) studied 72 participants who were randomly and unknowingly assigned to a high-efficacy group, a low-efficacy group or a control group. The participants were then given a “fabricated” grip-strength test. Those in the 71 high-efficacy group were told that their test performance was in the top 10th percentile, while those in the low-efficacy group were told that their test scored in the bottom 10th percentile. After 15 minutes and another reminder of their relative success or failure, the participants were given another strength grip test and asked to hold on for as long as they could. Those in the “high self-efficacy” group had much lower perceived effort during the trial, and they held the hand-grip for 23% longer before giving up. The authors posited a number of explanations for the variance in test scores, but one thing was apparent: perceived self-efficacy certainly has some influence over one’s experience of a task and one’s ability to persevere through the difficult aspects of that task. These findings are particularly relevant to beginning child protection workers, particularly in terms of their early experiences. It may be said that some workers may have their skills and beliefs tested for the first time on the “front line” of practice. A helping professional may be surprised at his or her own reactions to her duties or to hearing a person’s trauma narrative. In light of the hand-grip findings, it may be said that the provision of supervision that includes supporting “failing” child protection workers (such as workers who have perhaps become emotionally flooded or who have made procedural errors) could mitigate against the formation of low self-efficacy. Instead, supervisors could lay a foundation for more helpful beliefs, stronger coping strategies, a more useful view of self, and a sense of resiliency toward the travails of the profession. With regard to the personal childhood experiences of child welfare workers, the hand-grip test findings might provide insight. For example, it has been shown that a 72 significant proportion of social workers found encouragement via childhood helping experiences (Statham, 2009). Research findings are similar with regard to secondary traumatic stress. Regehr, Hill, and Glancy (2000) found that in firefighters, a lower degree of self-efficacy was associated with higher levels of depression and PTSD symptoms. Constructs of vocational growth and resilience. It should be noted that post-traumatic stress has also been theorized as an avenue for personal adaptations and professional development. Such “posttraumatic growth” is conceived as a “…constellation of positive changes that people may experience following exposure to psychological trauma…” (Gibbons, Murphy & Joseph, 2011, p. 19). This may be characterized by improved relationships, enhanced self-concept, and the development of a healthier worldview or life philosophy. While posttraumatic growth generally refers to constructive changes within a person who is using various social services, “vicarious resilience” refers to the positive changes in professionals that occur as a response to exposure to another’s trauma narratives, as well as to the stories of their own resilience (Hernandez, Engstrom & Gangsei, 2010). Some have posited that vicarious resilience may afford social workers a protective antidote to the negative effects of trauma narrative exposures. It appears that under the right conditions, exposure to others’ traumas foster resilience and professional growth in helping professionals, who ...experienced a change in self-perception and, in conjunction with this experience, reassessed their own therapeutic work. The therapists started to adopt more strengths-based approaches and began to let their clients take the lead instead of needing to be in control all the time. This suggests that these changes make therapy more collaborative. Furthermore, therapists gain increased long-term motivation for their work and pay more attention to self-care; 73 this may make them more productive and also apparently makes them less likely to experience burnout” (Edelkott, Engstrom, Hernandez-Wolfe & Gangsei, 2016, p. 721). The implications of vicarious resilience, in light of the experiences of child protection workers, are encouraging because this research provides clues about constructive ways forward for those struggling within the profession. For those professionals with their own histories of childhood adversity, the experience of exposure to the trauma narratives of others could offer them a contextualized viewpoint; an opportunity to make sense of and find meaning in their own experience. Recollections of Childhood The previous section considered the theoretical constructs that have been employed to describe and explain the various emotional and psychological maladies faced by social workers in the field of child welfare. This portion of the literature review pertains to another aspect of the research question: the ways in which childhood experiences may have bearing on the vocational life of child protection workers. A psychotherapeutic lens provides an important layer of understanding with regard to both the preceding constructs of vocational distress and the present consideration of the influence of early childhood memories on present-day experience. Further, employing a basket of alternative yet “indispensable” psychotherapeutic concepts may buttress our understanding of the dynamics of trauma (Rasmussen, 2005). This is essential to the thesis of this dissertation, which is in part founded on the premise that what has come before affects what follows. It is contended that one’s memories, and especially their formative and exceptional memories, that lay the 74 groundwork for a child protection worker’s response to similarly construed vocational experiences, for better or worse. What unique contribution do psychotherapeutic theories have to offer? Primarily, they provide a framework for considering the unconscious aspects of thought and the influence of childhood memories. When exploring what may originate from early childhood trauma that potentially make a child protection worker more susceptible to various forms of vocational distress, the unseen components of such are commonly not observable and therefore are not often contemplated, though we may witness their effects. What unspoken and perhaps unconscious dynamics occur between worker and service user that produce traumatizing effects in one or both? Horwitz (1998) suggests that Psychological Trauma theory holds explanatory power when seeking to understand the dynamic mechanisms underlying trauma. The theory posits that exposures to a multitude of dire narratives and events represent an affront to a social worker’s sense of themselves and their identity. When such exposures overwhelm this sense of self, psychological injury results. Such effects may “develop when a social worker is confronted with an event or series of events that cannot be readily managed, either emotionally or practically, and in which there is an element of danger” (p. 365). Garland (1998) offers a similar definition of trauma as an event “…that overwhelms existing defences against anxiety in a form which also provides confirmation of those deepest universal anxieties” (p. 11). In this context, “defenses” refers to the mostly hidden mental reflexes people employ to protect themselves psychologically, such as putting distressing thoughts out of one’s head or telling one’s self an interpretive narrative to allay fear. 75 So then psychological injury might be said to have two major aspects. The first aspect occurs in the here and now; relatively recent events (and the interpretation of those events) overwhelm the helping professional’s psychological capacity to cope. The second aspect is historical. In that case, past events such as early childhood trauma could be said to create certain present-day susceptibilities to trauma. For example, if the construct of vicarious trauma suggests that one’s worldview changes based on exposure to the trauma of others, perhaps it could also be said that those with historical trauma have already experienced such a psychological shift, hence a vulnerability. This is an important consideration because the idea suggests that some child protection workers may enter the profession with a “maladaptive” worldview as opposed to one forming due to more recent exposures within the field. The implications of this, if true, is that more attention should likely be paid toward facilitating the personal work of nascent child protection workers and those attending schools of social work. This is not a radical concept; those training in fields such as clinical psychology are often required to undergo their own therapeutic process. Adverse childhood experiences. When considered in the general sense, there is considerable research evidence to suggest that early adverse childhood experiences incur a plethora of psychological and emotional injuries that carry with them long-lasting effects including premature death (Larkin, Felitti & Anda, 2014). Early childhood trauma refers to the traumatic effects of acute or chronic exposure to stressors (Bremner, 2005). Such threats may be real or perceived, but these tend to result in a number of hormonal, neurological, and central nervous system responses necessary for survival (Perry, 1999, 2009). A body of literature has emerged detailing the negative long-term 76 neurological and psychosocial effects of early childhood experiences (De Bellis & Van Dillen, 2005). Authors of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study conducted large scale, epidemiological and longitudinal research in the United States with about 26,000 participants that correlated people’s experiences of multiple adverse childhood events with high-risk health related behaviours in adulthood: …publications from this study have repeatedly shown a strong, graded relationship between the ACE score and high-priority health and social problems such as smoking, unintended pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, male involvement in teen pregnancy, adult alcohol problems and, attempted suicides, illicit drug use, and leading causes of death in the United States (Dube, Felitti, Dong, Giles & Anda, 2003, p. 269). The survey was reproduced in 2013 by researchers in Canada, who surveyed about 1200 Albertans with a nearly identical questionnaire. As with the American study, those who had a higher ACE score, meaning they had described a higher number of adverse childhood events, also suffered higher negative adult mental and physical health outcomes and behaviours such as illegal substance use (MacDonald, 2014). In fact, those with at least three “ACEs” held a six-fold risk “of being diagnosed with a mental health condition or substance dependence, suggesting a dose response effect of number of ACEs with this adult health outcome” (p. 11). Esaki and Larkin (2013) recently applied the ACE survey to a cohort of voluntary child service providers in the Northeastern United States. Of interest was the fact that the workers reported a much higher number of ACEs than those polled in the previous ACE studies conducted with more generalized populations. They suggested that higher ACE scores could contribute to the development of vicarious trauma, secondary 77 traumatic stress, and compassion fatigue. Conversely, Howard et al. (2015) found that this notion was not supported by their own sample. Instead, they noted a strong correlation between reports of multiple ACEs among human service workers and higher levels of compassion satisfaction and lower incidence of burnout. This suggests that other protective variables likely exist among those who have entered the helping professions. These posited variables might include having an enhanced sense of personal meaning with regard to child protection workers’ vocational activities due to their personal connection with the work. This matters because it further suggests that one’s early struggles cannot be categorically conceived as a risk to a worker’s present vocational success and in fact may afford unique protections to those in the field. Childhood adversity and vocation. As described above, there appear to be fundamental statistical differences between the effects of early childhood adversity on a sample of those who have eventually become child protection workers, versus a stratified cross section of the population. This section considers the relationships reflected in the research literature between experiences of childhood trauma or adversity and the work-lives of adults. Early trauma and choice of profession. What effect does a history of childhood adversity have on the choice of child protection work as a career? Brannen, Mooney, and Stathem (2009) suggest that for a significant number of people who choose professions of care, early life experiences lead to the development of a “commitment of caring” in the somewhat broader realm of would-be social workers. They suggest that for some, the choice to enter the profession may stem from a strong identification with children who undergo adverse life events that mirror aspects of their own history. 78 As well, Sellers and Hunter (2005) reported that 69% of a sample of Master of Social Work students reported coming from family backgrounds that included substance use, mental health concerns, or family violence. The study found that the more severe these problems were, the more likely the students were to say that those adverse elements contributed to their career choice. In addition to influencing one’s vocational path, such experiences may also foster both a number of special susceptibilities and perhaps safeguards against the damaging effects of the work. Early trauma and vocational distress. Choice of vocation aside, it is conceivable that the presence of traumatic or adverse childhood experiences may influence a child protection worker’s current level of vocational distress or the nature of that distress. In their study of healthcare workers, Maunder, Peladeau, Savage, and Lancee (2010) found a strong association between workers’ experiences of childhood adversity and the psychological distress and impairment they felt. A similar study of nurses concluded that those who had suffered childhood abuse reported higher distress and lower self-esteem (Gallop, McKeever, Toner, Lancee & Lueck, 1995). There are a few relevant studies that associate childhood abuse and neglect with present-day susceptibility to mental and emotional injury in child protection workers specifically. Nelson-Gardell and Harris (2003) conducted a study of 166 child protection workers that revealed a significant correlation between personal childhood trauma and secondary traumatic stress. They found that those workers with a history of emotional abuse or neglect were particularly vulnerable. Those child protection workers who had been sexual abused were also at risk. 79 Early trauma framed as a protective factor. Early trauma may also provide some protective factors against vocational trauma. Eskreis-Winkler, Shulman, and Duckworth explored the effect of “parallel life experiences” on the levels of job dedication in helping professionals (2014, p. 209). They studied the frequent situation of professionals working in a field they were once served as service users. For example, they considered mental health workers who had experienced their own mental health concerns and police investigators who had been victims of crime. The researchers stated that the professionals with these personal backgrounds demonstrated more “grit” on the job; they showed greater engagement and dedication to their work. The authors of the study suggest that this enhanced engagement may be attributed to the added measure of empathy and meaning afforded to the professionals by virtue of their own experience. It was also suggested that professionals might attain a degree of satisfaction by inserting their negative experiences, combined with present “parallel” work, into a larger life narrative. Countertransference The construct of countertransference may be useful to researchers seeking to understand some of the “real-time” effects of early trauma on the present-day experiences of child protection workers as they interact with and think about the families with whom they work. As a concept, countertransference was not included alongside vicarious trauma or secondary traumatic stress because it describes something qualitatively different. Those other constructs largely refer to a basket of emotional and psychological symptoms experienced by professionals. However, countertransference 80 is a term that seeks to serve as a kind of shorthand to describe certain patterns of interaction that might occur between families and professionals in the course of their work together (Katz, 2016). Tosone (2012) broadly defines countertransference as “the totality of the clinician’s conscious and unconscious affective and behavioural reactions to the client…” (p. 156). She adds that countertransference “contains personal, subjective elements as well as diagnostic, objective ones in which the clinician is induced to play a role in accord with the patient’s internal world” (p. 157). Tosone suggests that countertransference might be construed in two ways: first as something for helping professionals to watch out for, as it is somewhat representative of their own biases, and second as something to be utilized as a clinical tool yielding predictable feedback to the professional about the internal state of the service user. It is the first construal that bears consideration here. Research has explored the role of countertransference in a number of settings within the field of social work such as end of life care (Katz & Johnson, 2016), as it relates to vicarious trauma (Rasmussen, 2005), posttraumatic growth (Gibbons, Murphy & Joseph, 2011), in relationship to compassion fatigue (Berzoff & Kita, 2010), among clinicians treating those with borderline personality disorder (Liebman & Burnette, 2013) and schizophrenia (Walsh, 2011), and with regard to supervision (Maroda, 2003). Within the field of child welfare specifically, countertransference research exists on topics such as motherhood and practice (Menache, Possick & Buchbinder, 2014), the interaction of personal and professional selves (Mandell, 2008), and child protection supervision (Ferguson, 2009). 81 Schore (2003) describes the relationship between helping professional and patient (or service recipient) as one awash in transference-countertransference, or as Orange (1995) suggests, “cotransference”. That is, both patient and worker unavoidably bring a life history of relationships and traumas into their present-day relationship. Contrary to traditionally cloistered conceptions of transference and countertransference originating solely from the service recipient and therapist respectively, relational theories posit that transference may be elicited from an “accurate reading of the clinician rather than from a distortion of the therapist’s personality and participation” (Goldstein, Miehls & Ringel, 2009, p. 131). The implication of this cotransference dynamic, as it relates to vocational distress, is that a child protection worker may inadvertently think and act in ways governed by their personal histories, rather than exclusively in accordance with established best practice or policy standards. These wounds, perhaps buried by layers of ego defenses, may be dredged up. Gibbons, Murphy, and Joseph (2011) suggest that a classical view of countertransference is useful to understanding the reactions of social workers to certain scenarios. The view “…suggests that if reflected upon in sufficient depth, such reactions will present at least some connection and resonance with earlier childhood experience of the social worker which remains unresolved to at least a minimal degree…” (p. 18). Both the traumatized service user and traumatized worker are thus potentially vulnerable to present-day biases with regard to their perception of toxic relational elements. “The resulting affective distress, especially associated with painful shameful experiences, may elicit unconscious defensive strategies rooted in practicing period 82 insecure-avoidant and insecure-resistant attachment patterns that are invoked in order to selectively exclude… intolerably painful affective material from consciousness” (Schore, 1994, p. 450). Could a similar bias exist in some child protection workers? And if, so what would their subsequent “unconscious defensive strategies” look like? Could such unconscious factors quietly compromise the provision of child welfare services to families or the judgment of the worker around sensitive and complex child protection matters? For the purposes of this thesis, in this regard, a “totalistic” definition of countertransference will be used. Kernberg (1965) distinguished between classical Freudian countertransference, which is in reference solely to an analyst’s reaction to a patient’s transference, and a broader view of countertransference, which encompasses the entire emotional reaction one has to a patient in a therapeutic context. Identification, bias, and behaviour. A discussion of perceptual distortions and potentially practice-influencing biases naturally proceeds from the previous consideration of countertransference between service user and worker. Rather than simply mentally identifying with one’s therapist in a manner that is allegorical to a service user’s early attachment relationship, Goldstein, Miehls, and Ringel (2009) suggest that one may experience a shift in their behavioural interactions as well. They suggest that repeated transferences may “have the power of inducing the clinician to experience feelings and to behave in ways that cause there to be a re-enactment of the client’s past…. Sometimes these enactments reflect early trauma” (p.141). There is substantial disagreement within the psychotherapeutic community about whether these “inducements” are created by the service user alone or if they are 83 mutually occurring (Brown & Lane, 2000). Stern (1994) suggests that perceiving, then working through this sort of intersubjective dance represents the core aim of psychotherapy. This begs the question: if countertransference-based biases and behaviours occur frequently within therapeutic alliances, and child protection workers are subject to similar effects because of the intimate nature of their work, could those workers not also inadvertently fall subject to the induction of countertransference biases and behaviours within themselves as well? What is more, could those biases and behaviours occur at an even higher rate than they would occur with psychotherapists because the relational power dynamic more closely resembles the parent’s early childhood experience? Constructs of widespread, bidirectional, and bi-causational countertransference, conceived along relational lines, would seem to suggest this. With regard to the question of the effect of childhood memories on present experience, then, theories of countertransference imply that child protection workers may be compelled, albeit unconsciously, to feel and behave in unintentional ways that could contribute to emotional and psychological injury in their families and in themselves. Chronic worker exposure for months and years to individuals with histories of early childhood trauma may serve to amplify the effects of such trauma. Green (1994) posits two sub forms of countertransference-based identification that could conceivably adversely affect some child protection workers: ‘concordant identification’, which occurs when a worker’s feelings strongly align with that of the child or parent, and ‘complementary identification’, that arises when a service user’s words or 84 behaviours foster a strong alignment by the child protection worker with someone significant to that person, such as their child. Implications for child protection decision-making. The aforementioned risk assessment tools, along with guiding legislation, policies, collaboration with families, team leaders, and other stakeholders, are accessed in concert to make protection decisions. Oftentimes, these decisions are unpopular or even emotionally devastating to parents. A challenge for child protection workers is to maintain an effective working relationship with a parent while at the same time balancing this with child-safety decisions that may represent a basic affront to the will of that parent. This uneasy balance manifests in what’s known as “dual role conflict” (Keys, 2009). At best, the nature of the relationship is often one of mutual scrutiny and therefore holds the potential for mutual anxiety (Waterhouse & McGhee, 2009). For example, a single mother who struggles with addiction may build a relationship with a child protection worker over a period of months or years. An authentic attachment is conceivably formed between them as the worker attempts to support the mother through treatment and other services, as well as support the child in the home. Yet if the decision is made to bring her child into care, the front-line worker will often be required to testify against the mother of the child in court. Knowledge of this possibility may lead to a sense of duplicity (dual role conflict) on the part of the worker, who must develop a relationship with parents while at the same time knowing that they will likely have to take steps that will devastate those attachments. For the child protection worker in this relationship, dual role conflict is not theoretical. They carry the heavy burden of forming an emotional attachment as carer, 85 while at the same time being prepared to “switch hats”. They form real bonds knowing that at some point those bonds may be violated when law and policy or their concern for the child requires them to adopt a “policing” stance. What is the psychological and emotional consequence of this reality to both worker and family? Further, could this scenario, multiplied by hundreds of service users and via thousands of verbal and nonverbal exchanges, contribute to vocational distress? Alternatively, could a greater level of professional experience with families over many years of service actually serve to protect a worker from such reactions? If transference reactions occur, in part, because of a lack of awareness about them, then it is arguable that over time child protection workers will not identify their own patterns and correct them. Yet, turnover rates in child welfare are high. Professional growth may be hindered in a child protection worker because they exit the system before they are able to develop the skill set needed to safely buffer against the emotional tolls of protection work. In this case, the fact of a child protection worker exiting the field for the sake of psychological self-preservation ought not to be considered a failure (aside from perhaps a failing of the system). Rather, it is an altogether human decision. Further, could it be that the child protection relationship and its related occurrences such child apprehension (or the anxieties and power dynamics associated with child apprehension), represent an “epicenter” of trauma; an instant in time when a number of past and present-day moments collide for both family and worker? It is evident that child protection settings are often emotionally charged (Mills, 2012). This is true not only for the child and parents involved, but also for the protection worker and supervisor, albeit for different reasons. 86 The preceding sections posited the existence of a number of conscious and unconscious elements that combine to form a dangerous climate within which trauma might cultivate and propagate. These include a history of child welfare that places worker and parent on opposing sides, casting the worker in the role of “omnipotent hero” (Smith, 2006), imbued with the moral and statutory authority to judge and casting the parent as the unworthy offender (Dingwall et al., 1995). Perhaps it goes without saying that the state-mandated work of protecting the safety and well-being of children and youth is emotionally taxing. It pushes a significant proportion of child protection workers to their psychological limits. For some it leads to their professional demise. As discussed, social scientists and theorists have struggled to conceptualize the nature of this distress and have formulated a number of theoretical constructs to explain what happens to child protection workers operating in these environments. Many of these models fall short specifically because the puzzle is highly complex and centred on the personal inner experience of the worker, and thus defies understanding in the positivist sense. Grasping the internal and interpersonal dynamics of child protection worker and service user, fused as they perhaps may be, could be considered impossible from the outside. It is therefore reasonable to solicit information from the workers themselves; to ask them what it is like to work in these environments and what childhood memories come up for them as they go about their work. The reasons to ask them, in light of the above, are very clear: to gain understanding of their experiences and maybe mitigate the emotional and psychological detriment incurred to both child protection worker and their families in the course of this work. 87 Chapter Four: Methodology Personal Sketch III In the field of social work there is a common saying: the personal is political. The phrase underscores the significant, bidirectional relationship between what occurs for people in their everyday lives, and the prevailing political system to which they are subject. Bronfenbrenner (1986) similarly speaks of the relationship between micro-level and macro-level systems. I would add that the personal is also “professional”. That is, it could be said that there is a meaningful overlap between the realms of one’s personal life and their professional life. One of the challenges of research is accounting for the various forms of bias that occur via the researcher. It is my intent, in the spirit of phenomenology, to present my biases as clearly as I know how; to tell my story. This is the essential purpose of the methodology chapter. Shortly after my child protection colleague's difficult conversation with the grandmother who reminded her of her own mother, I found myself thinking about my own "failure” on the crisis line, as well as a number of other times when I personally witnessed child protection workers having something akin to “out of body” experiences. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these were “out of time experiences”. That is that they appeared to be affected by inputs from a previous time while acting in the present. I would suggest that these experiences were not categorically maladaptive. Another colleague, Pat, provides a good example. There was a very angry father who came into the office in a rage. He was quite upset because he had discovered that his 88 ex-partner had relapsed with crystal methamphetamine while caring for their young son. When our agency couldn’t locate him that day, they brought the boy into foster care. The father presented as extremely agitated and appeared to be using his power and body language to find answers. He had been yelling at the front desk administrative staff and someone ran to get Pat. Pat was the duty-worker that day and had never met this man. I came along because I was worried for her safety. What I witnessed between Pat and this father was truly a spectacle. I watched her adopt a submissive stance with him as she performed a kind of verbal dance, bobbing and weaving, such that within two minutes she had guided the father into a deescalated state. She essentially put out the raging fire of anger that he was consumed by. Within five minutes he was laughing out loud at her jokes and speaking clearly and collaboratively. It was masterful. Later I slipped into Pat’s office for answers. “How did you do this and what is your secret?” I queried, fascinated by her otherworldly level of skill. She stated that when she saw this angry dad she realized that she would be speaking to her own father. Her dad had been a very violent man and an alcoholic. Pat was the sibling who learned how to defuse him before he escalated to the point of physically harming them. Her efforts as a young girl were successful most of the time and she honed her skills of reading his irritation level and responding in ways that calmed him down. Pat simply applied the same skill-set with this angry parent. These highly tailored techniques were not learned in her BSW program or taught by her supervisor. Her palette of emotionally and verbally dexterous tricks had been hard-won; developed under repeated threat of physical harm. 89 Yet neither the intervention in the child protection office nor her nascent experiences that made her performance possible were without psychological toll. Pat described how after the father had calmed down and eventually left the office, she felt a wave of post-traumatic anxiety come over her and she had to go home for the day. She had to regroup. After assuring herself that no one was or would be physically harmed by that event, as her siblings often were in their childhood, she dragged herself home to sleep. For Pat the invasion from her past was highly useful, but it also exacted a high emotional fee. As more similar stories accrued in my mind, I began to dwell on the phenomenon of experiencing the present in light of the past and I began to think about the nature of triggers. How is triggering related to professional practice? I knew that I needed to reach beyond my own experience and consider creating an ordered account of the lived experiences of other child protection workers. This was the central factor in deciding to use phenomenology as my research methodology. Chapter Overview This chapter begins by presenting a rationale for the methodological choice of phenomenology. This is followed by a description of interpretative phenomenological analysis including its location within the field of phenomenological research. The latter section of chapter four presents the design of the study, the procedures used to conduct this research, the sample, and the instrument employed. Finally, the chapter revisits the research question, discusses the analytic process, and speaks to rigour. 90 Rationale for the Choice of Phenomenology As described in the previous chapter, there is a relatively large body of literature dedicated to the quantitative exploration of the empirical connections that relate to the working experiences of child protection workers, such as vocational turnover, vicarious trauma, or subjective well-being. However, relatively little qualitative research exists that designed to foster understanding of the “everyday” lived experiences of these professionals. A number of qualitative methodologies in addition to phenomenology, such as grounded theory, were developed to supplement the collection of quantitative field data in much the same systematic manner and provide for qualitative inquiry’s legitimacy alongside the positivistic sciences (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Grounded theory was ambitiously utilized for the purposes of inductive theory formation. Compared to hermeneutic phenomenology, in which some inductive theorizing occurs, grounded theory tends to seek relatively large sample sizes to enable much bolder, macro-level explanations (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009). This is in contrast to interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA), through which researchers attend to understanding experiences on a micro-level. That is, they use very small sample sizes to produce a comparably “detailed and nuanced analysis” (p. 202). A component of the rationale for the use of IPA for this study was it would essentially allow for a series of highly granular “case studies” because of the small sample size. Given the highly complex and personal nature of the phenomena under consideration, interpretive phenomenology 91 could be regarded as the most congruent modality to achieve the aims of the present research question. Another qualitative methodology, ethnography, was considered because of its vast number of applications, allowances for the ethnographer to immerse themselves in a particular culture or context such as the world of child protection, and interesting methods employed such as direct participant observation (Floersch, Longhofer & Suskewicz, 2014). Rationale for the Choice of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is a qualitative research method that is considered to be both phenomenological and hermeneutic in nature (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin, 2009). IPA is phenomenological in that it seeks to understand the individual experience of participants and then create a detailed description of their world that sheds light on their inner process, usually within a small sample. In this case such a sample is advantageous because the focus is on understanding individual experience more so than producing generalizable theories. The goal at this level “is simply to produce a coherent, third-person, and psychologically informed description, which tries to get as ‘close’ to the participant’s view as possible” (Larkin, Watts & Clifton, 2006, p. 104). IPA is also hermeneutical in that it includes a strong interpretive element as discussed in the previous section. The method emphasizes a double hermeneutic that “[tries] to make sense of the participant trying to make sense of what is happening to them” (Larkin, Watts & Clifton, 2006, p. 3). Under this philosophy, it is recognized that 92 meaning-making is a process that occurs dialogically (Brogden, 2010); the notion of attaining a pure record of a research participant’s experience, divorced from the co-creating influence of the researcher, is erroneous. Thus, the undertaking of IPA research culminates in the production of an interpretive analysis that provides for a large degree of collective attributed meaning. In addition to the co-creation of meaning between researcher and participant, seemingly similar experiences described across the sample are tentatively linked together to foster greater understanding of their shared experiences. In this way, there is a certain collectivity with regard to the experiences described. As well, an IPA researcher, after beginning with the “given” or “everyday” experience of the participants, may then reach beyond the participants’ own terminology and conceptualizations and make careful inferences about the phenomena in question (Smith, 2004). The research question under consideration is given to such a method because it seeks to understand ways that child protection workers make sense of the complex emotional experiences of child protection practice, especially in light of their personal childhood histories. Other studies that describe and interpret the experience of helping professionals have been conducted using IPA. For example, several studies examined the experience of therapists undergoing their own personal therapy (Rake & Paley, 2009; Rizq & Target, 2008). IPA was chosen above other phenomenological methodologies for several reasons. First, IPA has been regarded as having the capacity to enable researchers to link helping professionals’ interpretations of their own experience to existing psychological theories pertaining to vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, and 93 burnout (Brocki & Weardon, 2006). So, while the methodology calls for “bracketing”, or the setting aside of their pre-existing theories during data collection and initial analysis, those pre-existing theories and areas of research may then be thoughtfully reintroduced during tertiary analysis. Second, unlike a popular form of phenomenology pioneered by Giorgi (2008) that holds philosophically to a Husserlian approach and by extension limits research to Husserlian form of phenomenological description, IPA is decidedly interpretive. This means that instead of attempting to reach some pure or idealized “essence” of experience such as was sought by Husserl, IPA is concerned more with conveying understanding while attempting to hold true to the participant’s perspective. Also, where Giorgi attempts to form an overall picture or capture an irrefutable or irreducible “essence” of a phenomenon based on common accounts, IPA seeks to compare and contrast accounts between participants. This distinction also sets IPA apart from grounded theory, which tends to be more concerned with developing strong theoretical and sometimes explanatory accounts of phenomena. IPA is generally more nuanced, while maintaining a solid interpretive stance. Those who make use of IPA tend to be relatively unambitious and perhaps uninterested in the notion of identifying the intrinsic nature of some phenomenon. Instead, IPA researchers would like to know how participants make sense of their personal and social worlds. According to Houston and Mullan-Jensen (2012), although IPA is only just beginning to be utilized in social work, it holds promise because of its integration of phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophies. The authors describe how these divergent approaches are integrated under one methodological approach: 94 In the method the phenomenological and interpretative traditions are drawn together. Indeed, the founders see no conflict in using a hermeneutic version of phenomenology and cite the influence of Heidegger and Gadamer to support this move. In their view, this involves the researcher moving through a cyclical process, beginning with an awareness of one’s preconceptions, then bracketing them to engage with the participant’s meanings, then returning to an (ostensibly) altered set of conceptions (p. 269). Husserl (1927) discerned between what he called the “natural attitude” and the “phenomenological attitude”. The natural attitude is defined as a relatively naive mental position that occurs naturally in people and that is based in their assumption of straightforward realism. It therefore must be “bracketed” away. As such, a true phenomenologist would not view phenomenology as an interpretive exercise or even a research method for that matter, but rather a philosophy or study of consciousness. Heidegger challenged this notion, suggesting that interpretation is a precondition for understanding in the first place. So, the pre-understandings of things, or the general, everyday knowledge we have of things both help and hurt us as we seek to know more of those things in question, according to Heidegger. Such pre-conscious knowledge of the objects of our inquiry both facilitate and misguide that inquiry. Heidegger suggests, however, that over time and as we continue to confront a phenomenon with further questions, our pre-understanding will shift and refine itself (Moran, 2000). Likewise for Gadamer, a fruitful or “genuine” research interview, for example, would not be “the one we wanted to conduct” (Moran & Mooney, 2002, p. 312) because the interview itself is the very thing that would take a researcher beyond his or her own intentions or subjectivity or “horizon” toward a new understanding. It is because of this ability for hermeneutic phenomenology to produce new knowledge that Houston and Mullan-Jensen laud IPA as a “method par excellence for 95 qualitative inquiries into social work” (p. 268). However, they also critique the method, suggesting that it inadequately considers the influence of social and structural elements on those actors’ interpretations of their own experience. Thus, IPA studies “provide rich information about the subject’s lived experience...but then fail to contextualize it fully from a sociological standpoint that looks closely at the interrelationship between agency and structure, the micro and the macro and the subjective and the objective dimensions of social life” (p. 270). Research Design and Purpose Moving ahead from discussions about methodology, the following section presents the methods of research employed in the present study. After briefly revisiting the research question, the study population, sampling methods, as well as this study’s sample characteristics are presented. This is followed by an overview of the data collection procedures, ethical considerations, and the interview instrument. The chapter concludes with discussions about researcher subjectivity and qualitative rigour. Research question. The question guiding this phenomenological study is as follows: “In what ways do social workers experience, and make sense of, their own childhood memories in the context of their child protection practice?” In line with this question, other supporting questions provide clarification, such as, “What kinds of childhood memories, if any, emerge for child protection workers and under what conditions and contexts?” Also, “Are there any narratives provided by families that give rise to the re-experiencing of these memories?” And finally, “What is 96 that like for the worker when this happens? Do they recount any effects with regard to their sense of subjective well-being or in the way that they practice?” The design of this study followed these guiding questions. Target Population and Sample Selection Population characteristics. The choice to study child protection workers in particular stems from the nature of their work. Child protection workers are employed among a diverse range of populations with diverse needs and goals. Child protection work is specifically centred on mitigating risks of harm to children and within families and is specifically tasked with reducing the effects of abuse and neglect. It could be said that this population of helping professionals, therefore, has greater exposure to details of distressing childhood experiences than other comparable fields of practice or to the field of social work in general. Further, child protection work cannot be said to be synonymous with social work in general as child protection workers often hold degrees outside of social work. However, in order to maintain consistency within the sample concerning educational background, only those with social work degrees (BSW and/or MSW) were recruited for the interviews. Sample characteristics, size, and inclusion/exclusion criteria. A sample of eight participants was recruited from the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD) in British Columbia, Canada. This sample size is in congruence with Smith, Flowers, and Larkin’s text, which recommends a doctoral dissertation sample size of 4-10 participants (2009). After receiving the appropriate permissions from MCFD, an 97 email advertisement was circulated to invite child protection workers to participate in the study. In addition to the requirement that potential participants be child protection workers with MCFD, they were also required to be currently employed in direct practice with families. This means that they were, at the time this research was conducted, stationed on either a family service team or an intake team. MCFD family service teams provide ongoing services to families and also fulfill a mandated child protection function. MCFD intake teams respond to protection calls with families new to the protection system or who do not currently have an open protection file. Sample description. The sample included seven women and one man, residing in four different localities in the British Columbia interior region, Canada. All participants except one are Caucasian, with one identifying as Aboriginal. At the time of this study, each participant was employed as a frontline child protection worker. Recruiting steps. This study employed a facilitated contact process developed by the Ministry of Children and Development. This procedure was as follows: 1. The MCFD Sponsor sends out the Invitation to Participate to potential participants who meet the researcher’s sample criteria. In this case, the Invitation to Participate is the ‘Recruiting Advertisement’ attached in the documents section. The researcher will not know the identity of individuals who receive the invitation to participate. 2. Interested participants can then initiate contact with the researcher. 3. Participants choose what personal information, including their identity, they wish to disclose to the researcher. The MCFD Sponsor does not know who decides to participate” (MCFD, 2016, p. 2). Further steps were as follows: 1) I followed up with potential participants who have responded to the recruitment notice by phone and email. 2) I ensured that the potential participants met the inclusion criteria. 3) I informed the potential participants 98 about the nature of the study and about the kinds of questions they would be asked. I also informed them that their participation required meeting in person, that it would take between 1 -and 1.5 hours to complete, and that the audio from the interview would be recorded. 4) Assuming the participants met those criteria and agreed to the terms, I arranged mutually agreeable times for them to meet. I complied with each of these steps. Procedures Ethics. This study received research ethics approval from the Behavioural Research Ethics Board (BREB) of the University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus) on January 13th, 2016. There were a number of potential risks to the participants identified with regard to this study. For example, the interview was thought to potentially produce some psychological or emotional discomfort if participants recounted negative memories. This risk was managed in two ways. First, participants were told they could access their employee assistance program to find emotional supported if needed. Second, as a clinical counsellor, I possess the training to assist the participants in processing the difficult emotions that came up. There was also a risk of identification, which could have social and economic consequences for participants. This was addressed by carefully vetting all transcripts and other documents to ensure that all identifying information, including descriptions of unique scenarios, were rendered anonymous. 99 Conversely, it could be said that the interviews lead some of the participants toward a greater sense of self awareness about how their childhood memories relate to their current professional practice. Furthermore, it was considered that the interview process could also provide a sense of validation and acknowledgement for the work that they do. Further, the community of MCFD child protection workers may benefit from this research if it leads to a better understanding of workers' experiences. They may also benefit from recommendations that emerge from the research. Informed consent. Consent was initially obtained verbally from respondents over the phone. I then sent details about the study to each participant in advance and asked each participant to sign a consent form before the interview was conducted. In addition, I booked each interview at least two weeks out from the time of the call in order to provide a "cooling off" period for participants who would change their mind and wish to withdraw. None of the participants withdrew from the study. Finally, participants were told at the start of the interview that they may withdraw their consent at any time, including after the interview was conducted. The protocol is that if a participant withdraws consent, all of his or her data will be destroyed and not used in any way. After publication of the dissertation, it will be impossible to destroy a participant's anonymized data as it will have been disseminated. However, the remaining supporting participant data, such as transcripts and consent forms, will be destroyed at the request of the participant. After five years post--publication all supporting documents will be destroyed. None of the consents have been withdrawn to date. 100 Data security and use. All data was kept on an encrypted USB drive, and was both secondarily encrypted and password protected. At the conclusion of the study, the USB drive was stored in a locked filing cabinet in the Principal Investigator's (Dr. Rasmussen) UBC Okanagan office. His office is located at A103, The University of British Columbia, 1147 Research Road, Kelowna, British Columbia. All collected participant consent forms and any written or physical notes are stored in the same locked filing cabinet at the address listed above for a period of five years from the date of thesis publication. After five years, all data will be destroyed. Identifying information will not be included in the publication of this research and/or will be altered to preserve anonymity. This includes vetting all materials containing names, places, narratives, or the use of unique sounding participant language that could serve to identify participants to others within MCFD. Each participant was assigned a number, which appeared on any printed transcripts. These data are stored in the Principal Investigator's office. At the end of the study, all identifying information will be deleted from the transcripts. Any record that associates participants' names with research identification numbers/codes will be destroyed. Data analysis. The analysis was conducted using the steps outlined by Smith, Flowers, and Larkin (2009) and in a manner consistent with the tenets of interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). Upon completing the semi-structured interviews with the research question in mind, the audio recordings were transcribed and printed. I conducted an interpretive analysis of the resulting text. In this way, the pursuit of the research question shifted from a dialogical process to a purely interpretive undertaking. A line by line immersion in the data was performed, followed by initial noting with 101 comments made along descriptive, linguistic, and conceptual lines. The transcripts were read through multiple times using a method of free textual analysis. IPA does not have specific rules about this, such as finding “meaning units”. Rather, the IPA researcher produces a comprehensive set of notes with regard to anything deemed relevant. I followed an ideographic process, first analyzing each interview text as its own “case” and only later considering categorization (Smith, 2003). I sought to understand each interview as its own whole before attempting to draw comparisons with the other participants. I did this in order to maintain a sense of integrity rather than divorce each participant’s account from its original context. I created a brief summary sketch for each participant, touching on their experiences as children, their memories, their retrospective characterization of those experiences, and their narratives about how those memories emerge for them in their present child protection practice. Following the initial noting process, emergent themes were identified and considered. All initial notes were compiled separately from the transcripts and assessed. Patterns among those themes were then further identified and analyzed with the purpose of creating a collective description of experience that stands on its own terms. One feature that typifies IPA is the generous use of verbatim excerpts, which I made use of as I sought to form an “insider’s perspective” or “emic” description of the child protection workers’ experiences (Reid, Flowers & Larkin, 2005). These themes were then assembled separately for the purpose of identifying thematic relationships among the participants. Once the account was assembled, I applied second-order sense-making to the description in light of current research. This was a process that involved linking participant experience back to the previous data 102 covered in the literature review. Finally, the connecting themes were clustered together under superordinate categories. Instrument The interview. A semi-structured, in-person interview lasting approximately 1-2 hours was conducted with each participant in the sample. The interview schedule is appended at the end of this document. Semi-structured interviews make use of an interview schedule with predetermined questions. However, they are not confined to those questions allowing interviewers to pursue other lines of questioning as needed. The purpose of the interview was to gain detailed descriptions of participants’ experiences as child protection workers, particularly as it pertains to their childhood histories. The interview questions were written and posed in such a way as to not attempt to solicit particularly positive or negative experiences. Specific steps for conducting the interview occurred as follows: 1) The interview took place at various locations that afforded privacy, freedom from interruption, and low noise levels to ensure a clear audio recording. 2) When meeting the participants, I introduced myself, reviewed the format of the interview, told the participant about the steps I would take to maintain their anonymity, told the participant how long the interview would take, and told the participant how he or she may contact me in the future if necessary. I also asked if the participant had any questions and answered any that came about. I asked each participant to sign the consent form. 3) I started the recording equipment and tested it to ensure proper functioning of such. 4) I then conducted the interview. 5) At the conclusion of each interview, I thanked each 103 participant for their time and told them that I will send them the results of the study via email. I also invited them to contact me to discuss the results if they choose. 6) I will send participants a summary of the aggregate results when they are complete. All eight interviews were conducted according to these steps. Subjectivity of the Researcher As a research methodology, phenomenology recognizes the subjectivity of the researcher as an integral part of the research process. There is an expressed understanding of a “double hermeneutic”. That is, my account as a researcher represents an interpretation of an interpretation. As Merleau-Ponty (1962) suggests, for the participant an event is experienced, but to the researcher it is only expressed. Thus, an overtness of one’s own subjectivity must be employed for the purpose of bracketing. In theory, making one’s own thoughts, biases, and attitudes known to the degree possible allows it to be held separate from the account of the participant. This is in order that the researcher might better understand an experience from the participant’s viewpoint. Bracketing. This is a process developed by Edmund Husserl that involves setting aside the “natural attitude”. Husserl suggested that one must recognize the common, everyday manner in which people view the world and see beyond it. This involves explicitly identifying the spoken and unspoken thoughts, attitudes, assumptions, heuristics, and taken-for-granted elements of one’s own everyday experience. 104 Practically speaking, and for myself as researcher, the process involved reflecting on my own identity as a child protection worker working in the field of child welfare. It further involved “suspending” or bracketing the memories of my own child protection practice, my theoretical understandings of the constructs considered, and my preconceptions about what was said in the course of the research interviews. As an additional bracketing step, I reflected on the transcript interview data after the fact to determine whether I was truly “hearing” what the participants were communicating about their experiences. This proved methodologically useful as on occasion I found that while conducting the interviews I had misinterpreted certain statements. This became clear when I both listened to the audio recordings and read the written transcripts after the fact. I recognized that I had come to certain determinations about what they were explaining in error, meaning that I had missed hearing segments of their statements, which lead to some areas of misunderstanding. In truth however, the notion of the double hermeneutic is such that one cannot completely detach from the process of deriving meaning from participant accounts. This means that bracketing as a technique is limited in its capacity to mitigate researcher bias. The “first” hermeneutic is said to represent the highly subjective interpretation of a participant’s own memories and experiences. The “second” is said to be the researcher’s. However, in essence the knowledge produced by this study was co-created (Brogden, 2010). For example, my biases as a researcher were woven into the study from its beginning in that I formulated the research question, which presupposes that childhood memories hold some bearing on the vocational lives of child protection workers. Also, that I conducted the research interviews which, through dialogue, would 105 have certainly altered the participant’s remarks. After all of this, I took the additional step of analyzing the interviews and making further interpretations. Yet this process does not necessarily invalidate the results or conclusions of the research. Rather, the intention is that by making my position and intention as researcher as clear as possible, as well as by as using many direct quotations from the interviews as necessary, the “first” hermeneutic might be faithfully represented. Researcher as ‘insider’. As I am a member of the child welfare community, in addition to potential biases with regard to data collection and analysis I am also afforded special insight into the positions the participants occupy. I made use of this insider knowledge for the purpose of gaining trust among the child protection workers as an understanding ally. Qualitative rigour Often construed as trustworthiness and validity, rigour is something that is, ...evidenced by the degree to which the following are described in materials available to the reader: researcher characteristics, conceptual framework, contextual factors, research paradigms and traditions, research goals, research questions, data collection methods and procedures, and data management processes (Hays, Wood, Dahl & Kirk-Jenkins, 2016, p. 173). In effect, a trustworthy study is one that has carefully and compellingly adhered to the research standards associated with its chosen methodology. Smith, Flowers, and Larkin (2009) cite Yardley’s (2000) criteria for assessing the quality of qualitative research. These include “sensitivity to context”, “commitment and rigour”, “transparency and coherence”, and “impact and importance”. With regard to this study, rigour has been pursued along each of these lines as follows: 106 Sensitivity to context. Smith, Flowers, and Larkin (2009) assert that even the decision to choose IPA as a methodology demonstrates a commitment to the “ideographic and the particular” (p. 180). This means that I sought to understand the participants’ experience on their own terms and in their own unique context. Sensitivity to context was also demonstrated by this study via careful consideration of the interview questions and the process of interviewing itself. This is evidenced by my use of a “pilot interview” and early analysis of that interview conducted by and with my doctoral supervisor. Additionally, I showed a sensitivity to the interview data by predominantly quoting a large number of verbatim participant responses. I attempted to use the participant’s own words rather than my summary of those words when connecting concepts to the relevant literature. Commitment and rigour. This was demonstrated in a few different ways. First, I was extremely attentive to each participant, given the highly sensitive and personal nature of what was shared by the participants. Second, the study involved a high degree of thorough engagement with the interview transcripts. A number of complete readings of the transcripts were conducted to allow for the noting of relevant themes. A separate electronic file was created that exhaustively catalogued every supporting quote for every supporting theme. No attempt at analysis was tried until this foundational document was completed. Transparency and coherence. I have attempted to convey transparency by presenting in detail the methodological steps that I have taken in this chapter. With regard to coherence, I strove to ensure that the themes were presented logically and clearly. In addition, for the purposes of providing further transparency and enhancing 107 the rigour of this study, the interview transcripts and my analysis of them were audited by my doctoral supervisor, Dr. Brian Rasmussen. Impact and importance. Smith, Flowers and Larkin (2009) suggest that ultimately it is only the readers of this research who can determine whether or not this study was useful to their understanding of this topic. It goes without that saying that the dynamics covered and considered were very interesting and important to me. However beyond this, there is good evidence that both the research data and the related implications will prove beneficial for those seeking a greater understanding of the inner experience of child protection workers or who aspire to improve their working conditions from a psychological point of view. In summary, the use of interpretive phenomenological analysis, along with an adherence to its methodological tenets provided both an ethos and structure that was amenable to both the present research question and to the subsequent knowledge sought in this study. As will be demonstrated in the following chapters, the participant experiences were quite diverse in many respects. The methods chosen to elicit these child protection workers’ experiences of emotionally difficult work and some distinctly challenging childhood events were decidedly effective. The following chapter provides the data gleaned from these eight child protection workers. 108 Chapter Five: Results This chapter presents the results of this study in a number of parts. It begins with a restatement of the research question and a brief discussion about the researcher’s own interest in the phenomena described. A sample description is then provided. What follows are the results of the participants’ interviews, delineated along four broad themes of description: 1) “I am the same kid”: Descriptions of child protection workers’ childhood experiences, 2) “I cried every day”: Descriptions of the work experiences of child protection workers, 3) “Different leadership styles have had different impacts”: Descriptions of child protection workers’ experiences with frontline supervisors, management, and coworkers, and 4) “I’m too close to this”: Descriptions of experiences that were triggering for child protection workers. Restatement of the research question. All interviews were conducted with the following question in mind: “In what ways do social workers experience, and make sense of, their own childhood memories in the context of their child protection practice?” This question was designed to elicit memories of child protection workers’ own childhoods, especially as they arise in the course of their workday. It is based on the 109 notion that at times, people reference their own past with regard to the present. The question also invited the participants to “make sense” of these experiences. That is, to provide explanatory narratives to answer why the particular memories they shared were relevant to their professional experiences. Researcher’s background and interest. This section is included to supplement and reemphasize my biographical information provided in the last chapter and in the personal sketches. As a phenomenological researcher, it is traditional for me to state my own standpoints and interests with regard to this research. In this way, I acknowledge the second hermeneutic; the participants make sense of their experience and then I make sense of their description. This exercise not only allows me to be mindful of and ideally bracket my subjective standpoint as much as possible, but it also provides the reader of this thesis a better understanding of my biases for the same purposes. It is also why I have chosen to write this dissertation using first person pronouns at times, as opposed to more formal third person self-referencing. These first person self-references are meant to be deliberate and intended to alert the reader to my awareness of the subjectivity and bias of my comments. Additionally, I have included a number of personal vignettes at the beginning of select chapters for the purpose of revealing my own subjectivity and interest in this topic. This research question was inspired by my own experience working in the field of child welfare. As a frontline child protection worker for the past seven years, I have directly experienced some of the phenomena in line with the constructs of vicarious trauma and burnout. Yet perhaps more importantly, I directly observed what I believe was a pattern of new child protection workers graduating from university with a Bachelor 110 of Social Work degree and almost immediately struggling in the field. Among that group was a subset of individuals who hailed from various adverse life situations. It appeared as though for this group, the early tumult in their lives either provided some of the seeds of their eventual professional demise or alternatively afforded them some additional defense against the unique work stressors associated with child protection practice. As a Master of Social Work student at the University of British Columbia, I began to develop the belief that human behaviour is driven, at least in part, by forces that exist outside of one’s conscious awareness. I recognize that this standpoint requires a questioning stance that some have described as anathema to the tenets of phenomenology. At the same time, interpretive phenomenological analysis is unique within phenomenology just because it provides me with a well-developed scaffold for tentatively and critically analyzing participant accounts, while at the same time staying true to participant’s own interpretations of their own experience. Sample Description This study’s purposive sample consisted of eight child protection workers employed by the Ministry of Children and Family Development. The sample is described as purposive due to the fact that the participants were selected based on their appropriateness to the purpose of the study. Namely, they were chosen because they were currently engaged in direct child protection practice with children and families. The participants selected live and work in four separate communities ranging in size from 5000 to 100,000 people. Seven of them are female and one is male. Their average age is 43, with an age range from the early thirties into the mid-fifties. Their 111 years of experience in child protection average 15 years, ranging between 8 and 30 years. That is to say that every participant interviewed was “experienced”, rather than a novice in the child protection field. All participants are Caucasian except one, who identifies as Aboriginal. All of the participants except one have children of their own. A number of steps were taken to ensure the participants’ anonymity, but two of those steps deserve mentioning here. As the sample contains only one male and one aboriginal person, they are each more vulnerable to identification. For this reason, further actions have been taken to mask their identity. Also, it is typical in phenomenological studies to include biographical sketches of each participant, so that the reader might have a more holistic sense of each as his or her own “case study”. It was determined in consultation to forgo this practice in order to further protect the participant’s anonymity. This is because the local population of child protection workers where this research was conducted is a relatively connected group, making the risk of recognition high. Also, this population, more so than other groups, is accustomed to accessing research literature in their field. That is, there is a real possibility that a colleague will read this research and potentially identify a co-worker. Themes Overview The research question was designed to elicit participant descriptions within two realms. This includes memories from their “yesterdays”; including impressions from their childhood that they consider relevant or informative of their present-day experience within the child welfare field. It also includes more recent recollections from “today”; that is, the child protection workers’ professional experiences with an emphasis on those 112 that harken back to their pasts. As such, each theme is linked to the research question because it either provides subjective descriptions of formative childhood experiences that have been characterized as having produced results manifested in the work-lives of the participants, or because the theme portrays a current or relatively recent set of experiential workplace patterns or emotions that might have some connection to the childhood memories of the workers. Thematic categories are presented in this chapter as follows: 1) “I am the same kid”: Descriptions of child protection workers’ childhood experiences. This superordinate theme encapsulates the range of childhood memories expressed by the participants that they believe held meaning with regard to their vocational history in the field of child protection. This includes Subtheme 1a, “I was a natural nurturer”: Descriptions of childhood helping experiences, and Subtheme 1b: “I grew up in a really abusive home”: Descriptions of childhood trauma, loss, and adversity. These represent both the formative events that the participants believe lead them into child protection work, and the adverse childhood experiences that they disclosed. 2) “I cried every day”: Descriptions of the work experiences of child protection workers. This theme presents the narrative accounts of the participant’s present-day and nascent involvement in child protection social work. Subtheme 2a is entitled: “I was quite lost”: Descriptions of the early work experiences of emerging child protection workers. The theme expresses the first few years of the participants’ employment in the 113 field of child welfare. Subtheme 2b: “I come home feeling pretty exhausted”: Descriptions of high caseloads and heavy work demands, portrays the difficult and sometimes arduous aspects of the participants’ work. Lastly in this category is Subtheme 2c: “I’ve gotten...a skewed view of the world”: Descriptions of the psychological and emotional toll of child welfare work. This subtheme presents the child protection workers’ interpretations of how they believe they have been adversely affected by their time in the field of child welfare. 3) “I’m too close to this”: Descriptions of experiences that were triggering for child protection workers. This major theme in many respects represents the heart of this thesis. That is, the descriptions provided in this section most closely address the research question in that they represent the intersection between past and present experiences in the working lives of the child protection workers interviewed. Subtheme 3a: “When I was looking at that little kid, that was me”: Descriptions of witnessing children endure suffering, presents the phenomena of strong identification with children by some of the child protection workers. Subtheme 3b: “I can barely, barely stand her”: Descriptions of interactions with parents, provides an account of the ways some of the participants related to the parents on their caseloads. Subtheme 3c: “This is not how I wanted to practice”: Descriptions of guilt and moral injury, explores the ways that the participants relate to themselves, especially with regard to their perceived failings in the work. Much of what the participants recounted in their interviews was decidedly grim. However, most of them also shared stories of the positive, hopeful and encouraging 114 aspects of their work. Subtheme 3d is called “It’s how you heal”: Descriptions of reconciling the past through present work. This final subtheme includes thoughts from some of the participants who believe that it was the child protection work itself that has facilitated healing from some of their childhood wounds. It should be noted that each theme is titled using a direct quote from one of the participants that was considered “exemplary” in terms of how it summarized a common experience within the group. Theme 1: “I am the same kid”: Descriptions of Child Protection Workers’ Childhood Experiences This initial identified theme contains the accounts of the participants as they pertain to the overarching theme of childhood memories. The majority of the interview material in this category consists primarily of two things. First, formative accounts. That is, the narratives of childhood that participants provided that they believe spoke to their early identities as helpers. Second, they described recollections of their childhood that they consider to be adverse to varying degrees and that informed their practice in some way. “I was a natural nurturer”: Descriptions of childhood helping experiences Seven of the eight participants recounted some experience from their early years that they believe laid a foundation for future “helping” work. These fell on a continuum from very positive experiences to somewhat bleaker experiences. P5 said that she 115 always “had a knack for peer counselling”. P2 had a similar identity and shared her account: I think I was just always that way. My mom used to tease me...my little sister would bring home stray animals. I’d always bring home stray people…. I’d always have somebody I was bringing home that needed a home, or needed a meal, or something (Participant 2). P2 believes that her history was somewhat prophetic in that it describes a continuity between her early experience and present reality: No, I think I was kind of predestined to be a helper. And my mom is a caregiving type, and yeah. More than a social worker, I may be a foster parent of a billion kids, right? My...kids bring home kids to stay with us, like, they’re always bringing home people, for meals… (Participant 2). The topic of early experiences with caring for animals also arose among the participants. Both P3 and P6 spoke of experiences of nurturing animals as youth. P6 never wanted to work with people, but preferred animals. She volunteered with a veterinarian between the ages of 12 and 18. P3 said she was “attracted to the emergency sorts of things” that came up when animals were in peril: I started doing work that was SPCA, but ended up doing rescue, when they would have to go in and do larger raids and taking the animals out, and I think that’s where I kind of got the idea for child protection (Participant 3). P4, who grew up in poverty, credits a childhood mentor for inspiring her to pursue social work. She says that felt as though she was “lesser” than other kids, but that her mentor at camp gave her a new perspective: I didn’t feel as smart as other people. When I started going to [the camp] and mixing with middle-class kids, and getting to know them and becoming their friends, I just became a new person, I found some confidence, I felt accepted, I didn’t feel lesser-than, if that makes sense, and as that progressed into my 116 twenties...I felt more accepted, and I felt like, “You know what? I’m no different than the middle-class child, it’s just that I ended up being poor (Participant 4). This mentor quickly put her to work at the same youth camp so that she could in turn mentor other children who had been in her position: ...she’s also famous because she’s a child psychiatrist and she had this girl’s camp that I went to and became a staff member and worked under her, and that’s how I became, I landed in this field, so it all – my environment and meeting Dr. _________, she was an inspiration, that girl was a rock star in the world of psychiatry at the time, and she’s passed away now, but, like I said, her legend continues (Participant 4). Other participants view their passages into social work as stemming from personal experiences of adversity. P5 described an experience of childhood physical abuse, exposure to extreme forms of domestic violence, and a history of intergenerational trauma going back a number of generations. She believes that for many who have suffered from childhood trauma, entering social work becomes a way of healing past hurts: Yeah, I grew up in a really abusive home, so I think for me, I think a lot of people that have trauma or unresolved issues? A lot of child protection workers, they don’t want to admit it. But I think a lot of them have a lot of skeletons in their closet. And then, just even talking to my peers. You know, the ones who do open up, they do. There’s always something, right, that happened to them that’s made them -- it’s almost like lots of them use the job to heal 'cause they feel like if they can save other people, but after a while you realize that’s not the case. Um, yeah, I had a really horrible upbringing, so I think that’s probably why I geared towards social work (Participant 5). P5 was quick to point out that she believed that one’s choice to enter social work is a relatively common thing for those who have a history of abuse. She suggests that the job itself is construed by incoming workers as a potential avenue for healing. 117 P7 had a similar experience of domestic violence growing up, but did not realize it as such until she attended post-secondary education in social work: I realized, “Oh, shit! Not everybody’s dad beats up their mom every weekend. Not everybody’s mom will whack their dad with a frying pan, not everybody’s dad goes to jail for beating the shit out of your mom.” Like, “Oh!” Like that was a big moment for me going, “So I guess it wasn’t all that good!” Cause my dad continued to try to beat my mom till I was in grade 12. And I’d always been in the middle, trying to, like, “You can’t do this! You can’t do this!” And by the time I was in grade 12, I was like, calling the police and, “You can’t do this. Like, you just can’t do it! (Participant 7). P7 often found herself in the middle as an impromptu arbitrator for her parents and in retrospect sees why this led her toward child protection as a profession: I was always trying to be the peacemaker or stand up for the underdog. Always trying to stand up for the underdog…. Leaving a seven-year-old and a four-year-old and an 18-month – that was me – while you went to work from four till eleven, and I was making them scrambled eggs and macaroni and cheese and putting them to bed, like, you’d get busted for that now… (Participant 7). For P8, her early experience of childhood sexual abuse and resulting time of homelessness and substance use did not consciously push her toward social work. She said that she just “meandered” into child protection. However, she considers her early experiences to rest at the heart of how she now works with families: I was just a troubled child that followed and did what troubled kids do when they don’t have the appropriated, grown-up, mature, organized, nurturing, attuned [laughs] supports, right? So that’s what happened. So, the quick link is that’s what I focus on in my work; it’s helping parents help kids. That’s I think where I, that’s absolutely where I put my eggs into the basket (Participant 8). Her mission to “help parents help kids” is her primary motivation for being a child protection worker. In fact, later P8 admits (as did P5) that had it not been for her childhood trauma, she would have chosen a different field: 118 ...I wouldn’t probably here today if I hadn’t had that experience. Like I probably would’ve just stayed in school and done whatever else; I’d be maybe a teacher somewhere or something. Which would probably be fine, but I’m good at connecting with my families and I think that’s helped me do that (Participant 8). For most of the participating child protection workers, it could be said that from their perspective, their early experiences provided the foundation for the choice enter the field of social work. “I grew up in a really abusive home”: Descriptions of childhood trauma, loss, and adversity The participants’ accounts of adversity in childhood also represented a range of experiences. Some of them considered their upbringings to be typical and rather uneventful, some spoke of difficult childhood situations that punctuated an otherwise “normal” childhood, and yet others recounted memories of significant abuse and trauma. Broadly speaking, the adverse experiences could be categorized into three classes of difficulty: that of neglect or abandonment, that of physical abuse and/or exposure to domestic violence, and that of sexual abuse. Additionally, some participants experienced difficulties in more than one category. Regarding neglect and abandonment, the stories of two participants stand out. P1 “says she always felt very loved” at home. In fact, she was careful to underscore the point that her mother worked very hard to give them a good life. Yet she spoke of feeling abandoned by her father at a very young age: So my parents separated when I was young, I was… not even four, with two younger siblings. So, for the most part, until I was twelve, I was in the home with just mom. Like, brought out on Sundays. You think about that now as an adult, and it’s like, how was I OK with it? (Participant 1) 119 In that case, P1 was describing a loss of her relationship with her father. P6 also described a loss of relationship, but one that came from being repeatedly left at home to fend for herself. To illustrate, she tells a story about how when she was 12 years old she was left with her brother for the summer while her parents went on a trip to another province: ...they were teachers, so they went on summer holidays and they left me, like five hundred bucks, and like, my brother was 15, he was the babysitter. Well the hospital called and said my grandfather was dying. But I knew where the Greyhound was, how to buy a ticket, where the hospital was, where I could stay, all this stuff, so at 12 I was going on the Greyhound to say goodbye to my grandfather (Participant 6). Repeated incidents like this one eventually caused P6 to become very independent. What P6 described as “the worst” came for her when after being left alone and struggling to learn how to take care of her own needs, her parents would then come home and begin to enforce strict rules; a difficult reality to accept after being forced to learn to be independent. This led to so much conflict between P6 and her parents that eventually she moved out to live with relatives in another town for her grade 12 year. Pertaining to physical abuse and domestic violence, five of eight participants described childhood scenarios that fit into this category. Two child protection workers spoke of physical discipline, but each made a point of stressing that they did not consider it abuse. I was spanked – hard, you know, with, like, a wooden spoon over my ass, so you know… but I don’t look back and think of my childhood as having been the victim of abuse. Like, it didn’t feel like that, because it seemed like all my friends got the wooden spoon on their ass, right? [Laughs].... I guess I relate it to smoking, like if grew up with a parent who smokes you’re either disgusted by it or drawn to it somehow, and, for me, I’m disgusted by spanking… (Participant 1). 120 And there was physical discipline in our home when I grew up, right? But, like, no abuse in my family home (Participant 2). Both P1 and P2 appeared somewhat uneasy as they spoke about being spanked. Their work involves investigating allegations of excessive physical discipline in families, but there was a sense that for them this discipline was normative, but nonetheless noteworthy. P5’s story of abuse is much darker in some respects than that of the other participants and begins with a vivid tale of inter-generational trauma as her parents and grandparents attempted to avoid being captured and taken to Nazi concentration camps: I mean, my parents just, they just starved. My mom was abandoned, like, I don’t think her mother -her mother was an alcoholic, and that was during the Depression, and she couldn’t take care of her, so one day she just dropped her off on her uncle….Like, times then were dire, like, they starved, my parents starved, never mind having any kind of childhood; they were very hungry. Dad’s dad ended up dying when he was six, and... when he got back from the concentration camp, gave Grandma TB, and she passed away, and my dad and two brothers became orphans at very young ages. So Dad had to sleep in barns and work on farms, to try to make it by, at six…. I look at some six-year-olds in my caseload, and I’m like, “Holy shit” (Participant 5). P5 goes on to describe how her parents came to Canada and were subsequently recruited into a strict religious sect. P5’s mother left her father for another man with P5 in tow. Soon afterward, the domestic violence started: He was abusive, and, you know, part of that is being in a religion like that, when there’s “domestics”. Like, the police don’t get called in; they call the elders. And the elders come in –and these are men who are uneducated, who are not trained, educated, in dealing with families that have domestic violence or child abuse, or… They don’t report to authorities; everything’s kept very quiet. I remember one time hearing stories, like from other [members of this religious 121 sect] who left, like, rapes going down on the parking lot of our convention. You know, like it was insane, like how the women were treated in that organization. And, like, yeah, any time there was a domestic in my home – and this is a man who threw glasses, flipped over tables, threatened to kill my mom with a knife, pull weapons out, um – the elders would come in (Participant 5). The leaders in P5’s church appeared to be adding to the effect of this trauma. So, in a lot of ways, things that should have been reported and could have been reported were hidden by the religion. Um, and that’s how I grew up; I grew up in a house being scared – lots of domestic violence, lots of screaming. Where, he was horrific; you didn’t know what was going to set him off, when it was going to set him off. He was an extremely angry man, um, and my father wasn’t around. And when I did try to tell my dad about things, he was so obsessed with my mom being miserable, he was not listening to what was happening to me. All you could hear was that she’s miserable and he’s happy about it (Participant 5). The extensive abuse that P5 suffered was made much worse by the fact that her family were members of this religious sect. Instead of calling the police or child and family services for assistance during difficult times, the church elders were often brought in. These men, rather than preventing further violence and abuse, often provided P5’s father-in-law with the moral justification he needed to continue his violent behaviours. P5’s disdain for this religious group was frequently referenced during the research interview. P7 also spoke of growing up with a significant amount of domestic violence in her family: My dad was a chronic alcoholic, I grew up in domestic violence, like, but we had happy moments. Like, I knew my dad loved us – like he was my stepdad – I knew my mom loved us; my mom never drank, but she was an enabler, she put up with my dad’s drinking, she would go to the bar with him… (Participant 7). She went on to explain how eventually she began to understand her parents’ behaviours in light of their own traumatic experiences: 122 I understood now what [early traumatic experiences] had done to my dad and to my mom. So therefore I’m able to go, ‘Okay, so Dad didn’t really mean this against us…. he needed to prove that he was a man. And what he knew a man to be was macho, you sleep around, you beat your wife, like, drink when you want to drink.’ So that’s what my dad tried to do is the persona, but it’s not really who he was. Same with my mom. My mom didn’t know what love was. She thought fucking was love; like, that’s what she told us: ‘That’s what I thought love was.’ Because from the time she met my dad, she’d had four kids by four different men.... And so, you know, understanding them as I’m older and being a social worker…. So that makes my work easier to work with my families, because I’ve lived it, but now I understand it (Participant 7). In similar ways to how P5 describes the church leaders in her family’s life, P7 speaks of the government in hers, saying that “they’re not a great light” in her world. P7 grew up thinking of the provincial government as an institution that has harmed more than helped her family. Finally, three participants spoke of their own experiences with childhood sexual abuse. P2 describes feeling loved and supported in a Christian home, but also describes how the abuse she endured had a lasting negative impact: We had a neighbour of my grandpa that was basically a child molester, so. Nobody knew that or passed it on, my aunt later in years said that she had been molested by him and I had been, and so that was probably the only thing in my childhood that was really negative… (Participant 2). P2 said that because of her experience of the same, child abuse investigations are more difficult for her to conduct: I just know that any sexual abuse investigations were harder, hard for me, right? And I don’t know if it was because of that, as much as it’s such a trust thing for most, most times, cause it’s in family. Mine was not, he was like a stranger to me, so it wasn’t… I don’t think it was the same as a lot of kids who have, who lose a relationship, basically. Like that trust relationship is a huge breakage if you’ve had that happen, so… I’m not saying it didn’t affect how I feel about sexual abuse investigations, but it’s not as bad as the trust issue for me when I think about that, these investigations. So, those are hard for me. They’re more emotional, yeah. So... Like I said, I think it’s the trust issue. Like I feel for, I just 123 know it breaks kids’ trust, and then that can affect an awful lot of things for them, like I don’t know how you gain that back (Participant 2) P4 spoke of the shame and embarrassment she felt after being sexually abused by a female caregiver: When Mom was out on weekends and stuff. Yeah and so I was angry at my mom for a long time about that, angry with my dad. But, uh, yeah. So yeah, not to minimize what I went through, but in the grand scheme of things, the victimization piece, like I wasn’t, I wasn’t really – once I got over the guilt of the act, if that makes sense, it was – let me just be blunt: so, it was [a sexual act], and I enjoyed it, and that was the guilt. Right? How can I enjoy [a sexual act] with another woman? Once I got over that stigma, I worked through it, ‘cause it was the pleasure that stuck with me more than, how could I let someone do that to me? Like that’s not right, that it’s a woman (Participant 4). The experience caused a significant amount of confusion and shame for P4 and caused her to feel a good deal of resentment toward her parents. Later she spoke of how she found meaning in the abuse she experienced as it enabled her to help a teen in similar circumstances. P8 was the third participant of the eight to recount stories of sexual abuse. When asked about where she thought her struggles as a teen came from, she responded: Well, it was childhood sexual abuse, by an uncle, who was a great-uncle, my mom’s uncle. Who actually – I mean, this is all not something I would normally sit down and chat with a stranger about, but it’s relevant, so. That’s the stuff. It changes, it influences, it impacts the way you perceive yourself, the way you think other people are perceiving you, and you’re just a little kid growing up. And then, you start acting out or whatever, and if people don’t understand how to help you, and they just see this bad kid – “How come this kid isn’t doing this? How come this kid isn’t doing that?” Then all of the things they are doing to help aren’t helpful. So, I mean, it’s very textbook stuff; it’s nothing really surprising, that it went from that to drugs and alcohol as a young person, to raising the bar and having nobody is noticing, and I used to cut my finger tips and do all that crazy stuff that – and then I just fucked off, so that I could continue getting loaded, basically, in a more anonymous way (Participant 8). 124 For P8, what seemed to hurt even more than the sexual abuse itself was the fact was her perception that neither her parents nor her church nor her school did anything to really help, at least according to her memory of that time. In fact, she was labelled by them as a “bad kid” because of the emotional storminess that followed her abuse. Eventually she moved to a different province where she was homeless and struggled with addiction: Well, I did a lot of couch-surfing, and I got – we did stupid things like, I don’t know. I ended up in an apartment somehow. Someone had just moved out and there was no electricity, so we were just using candles. And curling our hair in the laundry room, and just crazy, crazy things. I once kicked the window in because I had forgotten my keys, so just kicked the window in 'cause I was drunk and needed something from inside. How do I get in? Not very bright. But also, not very supported (Participant 8). P8 says that she found meaning in this experience via her current position as a child protection worker. Her memory of her tumultuous past drives her to intervene with parents to prevent a similar outcome in their children. All but one of the eight participants shared stories of abuse and neglect that, had they been reported today, would result in an investigation by MCFD and possible child protective intervention. It is clear that they believe their experiences of mistreatment as children have influenced their present-day social work practices. However, the manner in which this influence has occurred is unique to their situations. 125 “A lot of skeletons”: Child protection workers describe why they and some of their colleagues entered the profession In addition to providing personal childhood accounts, the participants offered their views about the childhood factors that may have lead others into the child welfare profession. P5, who grew up in a strict religious sect, often spoke of both the leaders of the sect and MCFD management in the same breath. It seems as though the leadership of the church made such an impact on her that it remains a strong point of reference for her when thinking about and talking about her child protection managers. In fact, during the interview it was sometimes difficult to tell whether she was referring to the sect or to MCFD in her remarks. After being confronted by the church leadership as a youth, P5 responded boldly: I told them where to go and how to get there, and then they shunned me. So, at 17 I had this whole new world, because it’s like when you’re in that world, you don’t know the world, like you’re isolated. So, I entered university right away to try to figure stuff out and learn and get a degree, and then ended up back in what feels like another...Another cult (Participant 5). She continues: So it’s interesting, because I grew up in [name of religious sect] ... and I went from...this harsh law, lots of rules. Um, [the sect is] ruled by government, they call it the governing body…. I went from [name of religious sect] straight into the Ministry of Children and Families. It wasn’t a lot different in a lot of ways (Participant 5). When asked what specific parallels she noticed between her childhood church and MCFD, she responded: Well, I mean the Ministry of Children and Families, for lack of better, like, words, they’re awful to work for, they’re punitive; they don’t abide by the collective 126 agreement….but if you show any emotion, you’re emotionally and mentally unstable….and some of the women in there are really vicious, they’re a bunch of cackling hens, and it’s like, you know, they remind me of the women in the congregation. Like, the women in my congregation were vicious and gossipy and judgemental, and, ‘You shouldn’t be wearing a spaghetti strapped shirt’ – ‘Oh, look at that little slut, you know, come to church in that shirt’—and it’s not like anything’s changed in the Ministry.... Mind you, some are very nice, but a lot of them...throw you under the bus, and it’s that toxic atmosphere – I guess I just never really got away from it. So, I would, in fact, be back to what I knew, which was that. Not realizing, but it’s almost like growing up with so many rules and regulations, it’s like I think I just went right back into that…. Like, I started in the Ministry at 24, and they pretty much raised me and formed me. Like, I hate to say it, but that job consumes your life, every aspect of your life (Participant 5) P5 said that after having a caseload of 50 families and very little vacation for three years she simply “dropped”. She went on a stress leave. She said that when she returned the management took a stern tack with her, but she stood her ground with them. However, she says that she continued to spar with the organization: I really struggled with, with being in a huge bureaucracy, and like, things, like just like with the [name of religious sect], there’s a lot of things that doesn’t make sense, the way the Ministry does things, doesn’t make sense to me (Participant 5). It is apparent that for P5, MCFD feels like the oppressive church of her youth- so much so that she appears to conflate the two. It is as though the two groups occupy the same space in her mind. Like P5, P6 also drew parallels between her childhood experience and her present-day experience with MCFD leadership. She had been left by herself as a child and was required to learn to be independent. However, when her parents returned and began enforcing rules, the resulting conflict was such that she moved out of her parents’ house to finish high school in another city. While she is proud of her strength of will, 127 independence, and fearless spirit, she says that it has also been a drawback for her professionally: ...being too independent, wanting to do, “Let’s just do it.” You know, some people, especially supervisors...aren’t always receptive of that (Participant 6). She told a story illustrating how her strong sense of independence caused her some trouble with MCFD leadership: ...we just switched supervisors—but my old supervisor and I would, not always, like I really, really respect his work, but every now and then, he would just kind of get in on a file and what he wanted me to do was not in the best interests of the family, like it just really was odd, and yet when you try to explain that to him, he would just kind of get his back up and like, ‘Oh, she’s just pulling her thing’, right, because I’m pretty vocal, and I was like, ‘ Nope, this is how you’re going to do it.’ And it did create a lot of problems with us, like over-talking, not letting the other person finish their thoughts or whatnot, and it wasn’t just on this one file, it seemed like during this period of time of our working together. We just ended up bringing someone in, just the two of us, and sat down with a third party, and just hashed it out, and kind of learned how to respect where the other person was (Participant 6). What makes these accounts of the workers’ relationships with management fascinating is not the fact that they have expressed criticisms. Complaints about management could be said to be ubiquitous in the field of social services. What is interesting is the way in which those relationships are informed by their childhood memories. It appears as though the participants’ nascent experiences produced a legacy of added emotional weight that is now somehow manifested in their present-day dealings with those who hold power over them. P1 suggests that some child protection workers who work in the profession are still working through their own emotional or psychological issues from the past. So, why, if you became a social worker in the first place – and I’m not saying that everyone becomes a social worker for the right reasons – I think there’s some 128 wack jobs in our profession that got into it for all the wrong reasons – I mean, you see it when you’re in social work school: that person is trying to figure out their own shit right now – you know, it’s not about other people… (Participant 1). Similarly, P5 states that she thinks some child protection workers enter the profession from an unhealthy place emotionally: I just see it as a very unhealthy, toxic environment. I see it as a lot of women who are emotionally unhealthy, who have self-esteem issues, um, weight issues, personal life issues, many of them are divorced. It takes a toll on you. But yeah, there’s a few people who seem okay, there’s the odd one…. I mean, everyone’s got their shit, but that job seems to attract people who have skeletons, right? And I think they get in that position and think, ‘Oh, look at me, look where I’m at. I’m going to tell these parents what they need to do, and I’m going to take people’s kids’, and there needs to be humbleness. You know, and you’ve got a lot of those really unhealthy women, who have, you know, are maybe a little too power hungry? (Participant 5) Theme 2: “I cried every day”: Descriptions of the Work Experiences of Child Protection Workers The following interview excerpts contain aspects of the vocational experiences of the participants in the field of child welfare- their work on the job. Some characterize their role in child protection as exhilarating, meaningful, and generally positive. Others provide stories of suffering at work and are eager to leave the work. Many shared facets of both. This section is divided into three sub-themes. The first recounts the participants’ experiences as beginning social workers in child welfare. The second sub-theme presents a near universal report of heavy work demands as case workers. The third theme includes participants’ descriptions of how they believe their child protection work has affected them in emotional and psychological ways over time. 129 “I was quite lost”: Descriptions of the early work experiences of emerging child protection workers This section begins with the accounts of those who found their nascent child protection experiences to be relatively positive. Following this, attention is turned to those who found their early months and years in the field to be somewhat of a struggle. P1 stood out as a participant who, unlike most of the others, related an overall satisfying experience. She describes how she expected child protection work to be rather dreadful: ...unfortunately for me, the impression that I took away from my BSW, from the instructors, is that child protection is not where you want to work, that’s it’s a really negative place, that’s it’s very adversarial work, you know, you don’t feel good when you leave your work at the end of the day, the paperwork is something that drowns you… (Participant 1). However, P1’s experience was not in line with what she had heard: So, when I did my practicum in my fourth year, I did it in ___________, and at that time, that office was very, very healthy, very supportive, a really good place to work. So, the exposure that I got from Child Protection was so far from what I was expecting, and so much better, that I thought: this is what I want to do, I can’t believe it, but this is what I want to do (Participant 1). P1 found that she excelled in child protection and describes a goodness of fit with both the role and with her colleagues. She quickly found her place on an Intake team (Intake teams respond to immediate protection concerns with new families and with those who may have been involved in the past but currently have a closed protection file. Family service teams work with families on a relatively long-term basis). In her words, ...even when I was a teenager, I always knew that, if I was lying on my deathbed, I wanted to be able to look back on my life and be able to say that the career I 130 chose made a difference. And I can’t think of a career that is more that than this is, you know, and I guess that’s sort of what draws me to Intake as well, and investigations, is that when the problems are kind of minor, your intervention can really make a difference for a family, you know, when they just need a little bit of support, and that’ll get them back on the right track. So, for me, the most meaningful thing is helping, you know, like in a word, but more specifically, using the power that comes with being a child protection worker to help people that need help (Participant 1). Like P1, P5 also described a comparably successful foray into child protection work. She credits her upbringing in a strict religious sect as an experience that uniquely prepared her to work for the Ministry of Children and Family Development. Specifically, she spoke of how her involvement in the sect made her fearless when it came to assertively entering the lives of families: Um, they basically do what typical cults do, where they have you so engrossed in activities at the church, you don’t stray cause there’s nothing outside that world….they train you to go to the door-to-door ministries, so my Saturdays, and often other days, were filled with going to the door-to-door ministry, so it wasn’t hard for me to go to the Ministry of Children and Families and go door to door, where I wasn’t wanted, because I’d spent my whole life doing that (Participant 5). It is a point of pride that P5 was able to quickly adapt to the more intrusive aspects of protection work because her childhood experiences had prepared her: ...I was in auxiliary for a while, and she said, ‘Well, you’re really new; are you comfortable with this? We need you to go out in the bush, by yourself, you know, the houses are way up in the woods!’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah’. She’s like, ‘You’re really okay with doing that? You’re not very experienced.’ And I said, ‘I’ve been doing it since I was three.’ And she looked at me, and she was like, ‘What do you mean?’ and I said, ‘I was a [member of the sect]; I’ve done this shit since I was a kid, going where I’m not wanted, and telling people messages they don’t want to hear’. So, yeah, I was good. I did very, very well in the Ministry for a long time. I was quick, right away, because I could deal with people (Participant 5). 131 P2 also describes being thrown in quickly to the work. However, her foray into child protection practice was more difficult than for P1 or P5. She tells of being attacked by pit bulls during her second day on the job: ...as soon as I mentioned the social worker’s name that I was coming out on behalf of, she said, ‘You’d better get to your car fast, because my dogs are coming after you, get the hell out of here’. So, I ran to the car, I barely shut the door, and they were actually on my hood, frothing at the windshield. I was terrified (Participant 2). P2 remembers that each day seemed to be exceedingly stressful for her as a new child protection worker: ... so in my first two years I remember it pretty vividly. My dad was off work because he had ear problems, so he had, he was off on medical leave and babysitting my firstborn, so it was, she was maybe two, two and a half at the time. And, I would come home and pick her up, and he’d say, ‘So how was work?’ and I said, ‘It was the worst day ever’, because it was a hard day. And finally he said to me, ‘You’ve been saying that for a whole month, every single day’ (Participant 2). P2 credits her father for helping her to recognize that she was burned out. She views this time as a major decision-point for her. She realized that something would have to change for her to continue in the work. P3 recounts feeling “thrown into” child protection. When she started she was “undelegated”, meaning that she was given a protection caseload before she had acquired the necessary training and permission from the provincial government to provide protection services. Delegation is a process by which the government affords child protection workers the power to act on its behalf and enforce legislation. As a form of statutory office, it empowers British Columbian “social program officers” to conduct child abuse investigations and perform involuntary removals of children from their 132 parents. Legally, new child protection workers are not permitted to perform these duties or even carry a caseload until they complete supplementary training and pass a delegation exam. However in practice, new hires often receive caseloads right away. P3 continues, I kind of expected to have a mentor and someone would be showing me how to do the things and whatever else, but [another worker’s] entire caseload was suddenly handed to me! ...I sat there for a day, kind of going through, and then I went over to one of my colleagues who had been there for many years, and said, “I have the caseload, and I have no idea what to do with it. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing, so like, what do I do? ... I joined the Ministry at a time when our team was in a lot of transition…. the circumstances around it were quite tense but very secretive, nobody really seemed to know, so I came onto this team, and people were bothered and upset, there was myself and another new grad, and we were kind of like, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ But it was the first year and that team was rough. It was very, again, I was very green and quite unprepared for what it was, and there was, that whole grace period, it was thrown right in. Yeah… so I testified in court, I wasn’t delegated, I testified in court on two removals that I had been present on, and had never been to court before, and the day of court, my team leader wasn’t available, so I went by myself [laughs] (Participant 3). Much like P3, P6 states that she felt “lost” during her first year in child protection: I didn’t really have a supervisor that had the time or, really, the energy for child protection at the time, so it was, um, pretty, I was just kind of on my own…. the first year was just like, “What, what am I supposed to do?” Like I was quite lost, actually...a lot of working with other supervisors, you know, having to reach out to senior workers… (Participant 6). P7 said that she “cried every day” when she first started: ...there was no mentorship, so I was just given a caseload, and said, ‘Fly at her.’ Like, no mentor, um, the guy that left my caseload left it so horrific that he had quit writing; he hadn’t even done the papers. So I’m green, I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, you’re supposed to do this, you’re supposed to do that,’ and I’m like, ‘What? What? What?’ Like, it was awful!... I cried every day, because I was like, ‘Oh my God. If I fuck up, this is somebody’s life, like this isn’t like, ‘Oh, I went to Walmart and bought the wrong milk, I’m going to bring it back,’ right? (Participant 7) 133 In summary, there was a range of experiences among the child protection workers in their first months of practice. However, many of them felt as though they were given responsibilities far before they were ready and that they did not have adequate levels of supervision in their early years. “I come home feeling pretty exhausted”: Descriptions of high caseloads and heavy work demands This sub-theme provides in some detail what child protection work is like for these workers on a daily basis. Some of them describe caseloads that number in the 40’s, 50’s, and even 60’s, as compared to a typical caseload, which according to provincial government policy should not exceed 25. Research indicates that the ideal caseload size is 17 families. P2 described the current demands of her everyday working life: It’s a little hard right now because we’re so busy. We’re short-staffed almost all the time. I’m very often two or three people; I’m her, whenever she’s off, so I’m … like it’s ridiculous sometimes, like I can be up to four people at a time and it’s an impossible job. And even being just myself, my case load’s ridiculous, and has been for a year and a half…. I feel blessed, but it’s just way impossible to do your job nowadays. So, I come home feeling pretty exhausted, at the end of the day (Participant 2). P4 shared about how the size of her caseload lead her into a state of burnout a few years ago: Within two years I was, like the load amount, a caseload over 50? Like I’m talking about 60…. Like there’s usually two social workers there, and I couldn’t keep up. So, I couldn’t help people, I wasn’t doing good practice, and I was really burning out. And that’s when I did burn out (Participant 4). Then P4 spoke of her current caseload: 134 I’ve been in [name of current city] for less than four months, and my caseload’s already close to 40. So, I mean, what do you do, right? You just plug ahead and keep going, but technically, it’s not good work. When I first became, when I first was in the Ministry and started working in [name of different city], that caseload of 45 to 50 in [that city], I used to say things like, “That’s unacceptable”. Right? Even 20 families I think is too much to do really good social work practice with (Participant 4). P7 describes the same: 50 cases, yeah. And you know how many people are attached to a case with one kid: a band, parents, doctors, lawyers, you know, specialists. And they gave me 50…. And I ran with 50 cases for three years; any time you asked for a vacation, they give me just enough, like a couple of days here and a couple days here (Participant 7). P8 shares her caseload numbers and those of her coworkers: I’m at about 30, because I’m still returning, right? Like, we have one that’s at 54…. [Colleague’s name], he had 60 at one point. It’s nuts, it’s nuts. Like it’s nuts. And then it’s fielding all the calls, people texting you, now we can text, like it’s just crazy (Participant 8). P5 explains what is frustrating about her caseload: So, with the Ministry, they want perfection from their workers – our caseloads are through the roof. They’re so high, there’s no way one human being can get through what they want, the countless assessments, the repeat of documentation, which is ridiculous. Plus, you know, I’m a fast worker, so I have guardianship responsibilities. I’m in court; I’m dealing with the parents, I’m doing concurrent planning…. You’re wanted everywhere to get everything done, you know, and you get home from meetings and it’s not done. Well, guess what, it’s not gonna be. You’re not going to get out of me what you want, cause it’s not humanly possible (Participant 5). P6 also laments her caseload from a few years ago: ...it was really, really busy…. the files that were coming in were just really crazy at the time, and they hadn’t been like that before and they haven’t been like that since. So I’m not too sure what it was, but it seemed like we had a flux of organized crime coming through [name of city], so there was a lot of, not high- 135 risk files but safety files for myself, lots of work with the RCMP, lots of overtime…. The caseloads were probably like 50-plus (Participant 6). The clear opinion of most of the participants is this: their caseloads are far too high to be able to practice in effective ways with their families. High caseloads were not only described as a disservice to both children and their parents, but as something that gave the participants a sense of futility or powerlessness in their work. One might wonder how such feelings could mirror similar experiences of having relatively little power in the face of adversity as children. For example, P7 often found herself in the “peacemaker” position within her family. Even though she was a child, she often stepped in to prevent domestic violence between her parents or to look for her alcoholic father; activities made profoundly more difficult due to the fact that she lacked both the status and the relative power to intervene that comes with adulthood. However, it was not only the experience of high caseloads that was difficult for the participants. The nature of those cases was cause for significant anxiety. For example, P3 described how she was required to track the safety and development of many children on her caseload. She often worried about their wellbeing as well as “how they would turn out”. She recognized that the power bestowed her as a child protection worker came alongside the strong societal imperative that she also bears responsibility for these children. It might be said that she was personally and professionally situated at the heart of the “liberal compromise” (Dingwall et al, 1995) referred to in Chapter 2; she was required to both intrude on familial freedoms while also enacting the demands of moral public interest, a relentless task that could be described a basis for emotional exhaustion. 136 “I’ve gotten...a skewed view of the world”: Descriptions of the psychological and emotional toll of child welfare work Participants described a variety of perceived outcomes with regard to their work in the field of child welfare. Some are proud of the personal growth they have noticed in themselves. Others believe that their hearts and minds have been damaged by the work. What is agreed upon is that every participant interviewed considers themselves to be much different than when they entered the profession. P1 notes that her humour has darkened since becoming a child protection worker. Additionally, her family acts as a point of reference that reminds her that what she witnesses in her line of work is much different than what the general public sees. My sense of humour is darker…. what I’m shocked by is different now. I am not shocked by what people are capable of anymore. Like, I will talk to my boyfriend or my mom….and they are, “What the fuck is wrong with people?” And then I’m reminded, yeah, that is messed up. So that has changed, my bar for where shit goes is really different. I don’t know, I guess that’s the biggest thing. It’s changed my view on humanity, what people are capable of. I have to remind myself that we don’t deal with the entire population; we deal with a very small subset (Participant 1). P3 also noticed a shift in her view of humanity, but also appreciates the new confidence that the work has provided her with. I also think I’ve gotten kind of a skewed view of the world. Like, any time somebody says something, like I’m automatically thinking, ‘Yeah, whatever’.... So I think I’m a lot more skeptical and I’ve sort of lost that total belief that everyone is good. Cause you see a lot of lying, and you see a lot of those things, so I think I’m a lot more skeptical, I think I’m a lot less naïve than I used to be, but much more confident and much more brave than I ever thought I would behave (Participant 3). 137 P6 also believes that her career forced her to have confidence and put up boundaries for her own protection: I’ve definitely realized that this job is not worth, um, a lot of things, because it doesn’t care, you know, they don’t care what you’re going through at home as long as you come to work and you fill out these forms and you do your case work. So to put in over-time, or, you know, anything extra? No, my boundaries are definitely really clear. I don’t put in any over-time unless I absolutely have to, now. So, yeah, just I think, and maybe it’s a result of becoming older and more confident and being able to say, ‘Nope. I’m not doing that.’ (Participant 6). P3 explains the emotional toll the job has taken on her: I have unhealthy coping, a lot of my unhealthy coping [sic]. I probably drink more than, than I should, um, like I certainly drink on weekends….I am not the same person I was before I started this job….Um, less balanced, like I think I’m much more emotional than I used to be; I cry over happy things, I cry over sad things, um, yeah, dog rescue videos, I can’t even watch [laughs] – that kind of stuff. So I think I’m just, I’m much more, much more emotional than I used to be. I didn’t used to cry over everything… (Participant 3). P5 described what for her was a complete breakdown: So at 27, I dropped. Like, I physically dropped. I had, like – I wish I still had that problem! – severe weight loss, cause I couldn’t eat anymore, so I got down to probably about 110, 112….And I went to the doctor, looking for sleeping pills, cause I couldn’t sleep at night, and [my supervisor] just looked at me and said, ‘I just don’t, ethically, I can’t let you go back to work. You’re too ill.’ So he termed it, not like as burn-out, but, like, something ‘fatigue’, I don’t know (Participant 5). P6 believes that the high work demands contributed to her divorce: ...it was tough; it actually, probably contributed to my divorce. I would fail at my work, probably…. Yeah, definitely not a great time. There was just so much work and, um, but the reality is that I don’t think the effects of that have hit me until probably now. Where I’m done…. definitely the work didn’t really allow for work to happen on the marriage and the problems, and then before you know it, it’s just over (Participant 6). 138 She also regrets the way that a heavy caseload caused her to miss out on watching her kids grow up. She says that she was not able to be a parent to them in the way she wanted to because she was so focused on the families on her caseload: [Crying] Yeah. And kids, too, so that’s why I’m pretty, pretty adamant that I go to everything, because you know, you miss out on your kids’ lives and—for other kids – so you put the importance of family, you know, you make it important for 50 files, but not your own. So, it’s a weird, weird feeling. So, yeah, I definitely don’t miss any of their stuff now… (Participant 6). P5 believes that the work has contributed to many divorces among social workers in child protection: I just see it as a very unhealthy, toxic environment. I see it as a lot of women who are emotionally unhealthy, who have self-esteem issues, um, weight issues, personal life issues, many of them are divorced. It takes a toll on you. But yeah, there’s a few people who seem okay, there’s the odd one (Participant 5). Although some spoke of personal growth occurring because of the travails of their employment, most of the workers regret what they have suffered. They described significant losses, whether they were marital breakdowns or emotional breakdowns, stress-related health issues or substance issues. In sum, they say that their work has been toxic to them. Theme 3: “I’m too close to this”: Descriptions of Experiences that were Triggering for Child Protection Workers This section contains a description of what child protection workers consider to be the most “triggering” about their work. When asked questions such as “What triggers you?” or “What gets under your skin?” or “What kinds of cases do you find hard not to think about at night?” the participants provided narratives about aspects of their work 139 that are emotionally difficult for them. Interestingly, many of the recollections of “triggering” pertained to interactions with coworkers and leadership that were covered in the last section. With regard to professional interactions with families, statements about triggering fell along three lines: 1) Witnessing the hardship and struggles of children, 2) Perceiving narcissism and selfishness in parents, and 3) Instances of guilt about their own practice. The fascinating aspect of these accounts was the apparent similarities those work-based interactions had to the personal childhood experiences of the child protection workers interviewed. “When I was looking at that little kid, that was me”: Descriptions of witnessing children endure suffering As described in a previous section, P1’s father had left when she was three years old. For her, witnessing children who have been abandoned is the hardest aspect of her work. Umm, seeing parents that have completely checked out, and how that impacts their kids. The ones that, the cases that I find the most difficult, are the parents who just give up and don’t want their children anymore. Those are the hardest. You know, having a child physically, completely abandoned, and not having an answer, any answers. Not only, how does that hurt them right now, but in these cases, most of the kids are kind of used to the disappointment and the unpredictability, already, and by that time they’ve learned that they can’t count on their parents already, but, what I think about is how this is going to impact them for the rest of their lives. You know, like that abandonment, how do you get over that? How do you -- especially once they’re a little bit older, you know? (Participant 1) P1 speaks of another incident of abandonment that deeply affected her: 140 One situation, one family is standing out, and that was a little guy who… he wasn’t physically abandoned, but it turns out that was what mom’s plan was all along. Like, she kind of orchestrated a situation where she would become unable, in our eyes, and she could just check out. And he was, I think, seven… That one really hit me pretty hard, and I was validated in my response in that… I’m a crier; I’m like okay with crying (Participant 1). P1 is also triggered by occurrences that remind her of her own children in some way. In this case a young child was being physically disciplined by his parents. It also reminded her of the discipline she received as a child: Other things that trigger me are things that relate back, that remind me of my own children. So, the first time I remember actually having to have a conversation with a supervisor about a file that was triggering me to the point where I felt that I couldn’t adequately separate myself from it, was right after I came back from mat leave, so my son was one, thirteen months old, maybe. And it was a child who looked like him, who was the same age, and I came back and I said, “I’m too close to this”. So, I did end up finishing everything off, and it wasn’t a removal, and it wasn’t massively serious, but it was just some really shitty marginal parenting, you know, like… um, I don’t believe in spanking, you know, so it’s stuff like that. I was spanked – hard, you know, with, like, a wooden spoon over my ass, so you know… (Participant 1). P2, who shared her own experience of sexual abuse as a child, finds child sexual abuse investigations to be particularly difficult to tolerate. She remembers feeling particularly “fried” in her work at one point, hearing the phone ring and thinking, “Please don’t let it be another sexual abuse investigation.” I just know that any sexual abuse investigations were harder, hard for me, right? And I don’t know if it was because of that, as much as it’s such a trust thing for most, most times, cause it’s in family…. I just know it breaks kids’ trust, and then that can affect an awful lot of things for them, like I don’t know how you gain that back… (Participant 2). 141 P3 also shared about a sexual abuse case that was difficult for her. Specifically, it was hard for P3 to see that the little girl had lost her parents and was “alone in this world”: This would be the one when I first started, I had a young girl, and I really didn’t have much to do with her family – her mom wasn’t here, it was her dad, it was a case of very severe sexual abuse. After she was removed, her dad basically was out of her life, and shortly after that, her mom actually passed away, and she hadn’t seen her mom in several years, so it was sort of like this little girl was all of a sudden just – uh, I was her person. And it was, I was new, I had been there for probably not even a year at that point, and so she was one, like, until we found out a plan for her and found a family and stuff, she was one that really… Like I just thought, this poor kid, like she’s got no one, she’s so alone in this world (Participant 3). P3 says that she is moved by the “stoic” kids who endure in spite of suffering: You know, it seems to be the little stoic kids, the little ones that when you talk to them, they’re so resilient and they’re so whatever, and you think, “You poor little bugger. Like you’ve been living through this for so long, how is it that you’re so…?” Like you meet some of them and you can read them like a book, you know, like you know right away what’s going on with them, but you meet those little ones that have just decided that they’re going to get through this, and they’re going to be fine [crying] … Those are the ones that tend to stick with me, and the ones where I just don’t see any hope (Participant 3). P3 references her own childhood when thinking of children on her caseload. She was the only participant who did not disclose some form of abuse or serious adversity from her past. For her, she sees a disconnect between her own experience of strong familial connections growing up and the isolation and “aloneness” of the children she is triggered by. I think that’s where my intense need, especially for the kids whose parents are passed away or who just aren’t there, I think that’s where that intense need for me to find them a family….So I think that’s how it’s impacted me, the closeness of my own family and how we grew up, um, I just think that’s the way it should be, all kids should get to experience that. And so I think that’s played a huge role in my wanting every kid to have a family, to have their people (Participant 3). 142 P7 speaks a of a time when she realized that she could not work with a family on her caseload after realizing that she strongly identified with the child in that family. ...only once has it affected me, that I had to say, ‘I can’t work with this family anymore.’ I looked at this little kid, like he was trying to take care of his brother and sister; Mom and Dad were domestic violence [sic], she was a chronic alcoholic, mean as could be, and I told my team leader. And I’d worked with this family probably about five years. And when I seen [sic] that, I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I’m done.’ So I recognized, when I was looking at that little kid, that was me. And I had to, like, ‘Nope, can’t do it.’ But it’s only come up maybe once; most of times [sic], for me it comes up in a positive way when people recognize me in community…. So they know that I know what the life is like (Participant 7). These accounts are interesting because for whatever reason, the workers identified strongly with the children on their caseloads. In most of the cases, those children happened to resemble the worker either by way of descriptive identity or in terms of the situation they were enduring. “I can barely, barely stand her”: Descriptions of interactions with parents Aside from viewing the suffering of children on their caseloads, another common trigger for the child protection workers interviewed is centric to their experience with the parents involved. Specifically, the workers cited what they considered to be narcissism or selfishness in the parents; parents who appeared to be putting their own interests ahead of their children’s. P5’s words reveal a strong identification with children who endure narcissism in parents: I think where my trigger is, is like my mother, my parents were the type where they were so self-centred and so narcissistic and lacked in so much self-awareness. Like they didn’t see what they put us through, like they just – I, I sort 143 of got my mother’s borderline or narcissist, qualities of a narcissist, I mean I’m sure I could give her a lot of diagnoses, but she – I think that’s where my triggers lie: parents that just are completely self- centred. And they just, like their kids are an extension of themselves, they’re not little beings. I think, I lose my patience, and I think I lose my patience a lot more than in my 20s (Participant 5). Again, P5 links her frustration with “narcissistic” parents with her experience with her own parents: Yeah, I can’t handle it. I mean, I’ve had a couple of cases, I went to see recently, on two little girls, and the mother was a full-blown narcissist who got a [parental capacity assessment] and everything, and I remember saying to my supervisor, ‘I can barely, barely stand her’....so a narcissist really has no regard for anything or anyone. So I think that, that would be my trigger, because my parents were so narcissistic. Even my father, who I loved… (Participant 5). P7 also connected her professional interactions with a parent with her own abusive experience with her father: I was like, I can’t do this anymore, like she’s verbally abusive, she’s a chronic – like it’s so selfish. It was too much, it was too much like my dad. I just said I can’t work with this, 'cause I won’t be fair to her. At this point when I’m seeing these kids and I’m taking these babies, and I’m taking them somewhere else to another family member, I was like, I can’t do this (Participant 7). After P8’s experience of sexual abuse as a child, she says that her home life became very stormy because her parents took an unfortunate approach in the manner they responded to her. Now she speaks of being triggered when she sees parents acting the same way. So, the triggers for me would be that I really want the parents to understand the role that they can play. That’s where I always put my energy. Like, ‘Man, you are, you can be such a big influence for this. What you do matters more than anybody else,’ you know? (Participant 8) P8 explains: 144 Well, I mean I left home when I was 15. It was difficult. We were struggling and they didn’t know what to do with us, and they were getting information from their friends and family, which was probably….30 years ago, we looked at kids that were struggling, and we saw a bad kid. So, I was a bad kid….and you’re just a little kid growing up. And then, you start acting out or whatever, and if people don’t understand how to help you, and they just see this bad kid – ‘How come this kid isn’t doing this? How come this kid isn’t doing that?’ Then all of the things they are doing to help aren’t helpful (Participant 8). In addition to feeling unsupported and pathologized by her parents, P8 was also expelled from the religious high school she attended. In terms of her present-day practice, she is bothered whenever she perceives that youth are being similarly pathologized. P8 shares a story about how an incident in a foster home with analogous tones to her own experience triggered her: [They kicked] out a child that had been in their home for years and years and years and years, because she had some guy in the house, and he raped her in the house. And she wasn’t allowed to have guys over, and she broke that rule and so they kicked her out. And I was like, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ And they were citing religion, and I was just thunderstruck (Participant 8). Among the participants quoted above, there is a distinct commonality: they each strongly identified with particular children on their caseloads, not necessarily because the children reminded them of themselves, but because the children’s parents remind them of their own parents in some way. Their ability to empathize with the emotional pain those children might be feeling is enhanced by their proximity of life experience. The question might be asked, “Are the child protection workers’ feelings with regard to these children a product of true insight from common experience or could there be a projective element at work?” One may suggest that their insider status is accompanied by a degree of bias as well. 145 “This is not how I wanted to practice”: Descriptions of guilt and moral injury At times the participants described being triggered by the guilt they felt during the course of their work with families. A key aspect of child protection social work is risk assessment. This involves considering a number of factors for the purpose of gauging the level of future risk to children in a home. Inevitably, the outcomes for these children sometimes unfold in unforeseen and unfortunate ways. Where these unintended outcomes are related to actions taken by a child protection worker, this occasionally results in feelings of moral injury. That is, feelings of guilt or remorse that stem from a worker’s personal perceptions of having crossed strong personal boundary or ethical lines. P4 describes a time early in her career when she was required to act against her own moral code and professional ethics at a group foster home: ...that was when I first felt burnout…. I was 26 years old and I didn’t like the work. Um, back then...you were told to make kids eat carpet…. Anyways, it was ugly work, it was more of a fight than anything, and it’s not how I wanted to practice. And I got caught up in the moment, so to speak, and one night I just never went back to work. I came out west, and just decided I’m done. And that was my first, kind of like epiphany, that this was not how I wanted to practice as a... social worker person. I didn’t like it (Participant 4). P4 does not attribute her initial burnout to large paperwork demands or a high caseload, but to the fact that she was required to perform certain acts that were against her moral code. Interestingly, she described this morally awkward situation in the same terms as she spoke of her experience of childhood sexual abuse. What made her feel the worst in each situation was not so much the infraction, so much as her “enjoyment” of it. The negative implications in terms of P4’s self-concept were shame inducing and intolerable to her. 146 P3 spoke of time when she allowed children to stay in their home rather than be brought into foster care. In hindsight, she believes that they were being harmed in their home and feels guilty that she left them there: And the guilt I felt, for not intervening the first time. [crying] Again, it was an assessment, there hadn’t been any abuse reports, there hadn’t been anything, it was more neglect, it was, you know, a little bit of concern about drug use with the parents, but we went in and – it wasn’t that bad, you know, the home wasn’t great...the parents were relatively under control with their drug use, you know, that kind of thing, and we didn’t interview those kids. But, uh, yeah [crying], so when we did, finally got them out, I think that’s the first time I ever cried at work, because when we came back, and interviewing those little guys, and just knowing what they’d been through, and the fact that we could have stopped it six months before, and we didn’t (Participant 3). P3 was moved emotionally by considering how her professional practice had fallen short. Even though she bore neither the responsibility nor the culpability of the parents, and she did not have the foresight which she eventually gained in hindsight, she nonetheless feels guilty that she did not so more 6 months prior. P2 expressed guilt about a time when she believes she endangered her own children as a child protection worker. She had a reputation of, in her own words, “bringing home stray people” in her youth. She says that she was naturally drawn to bringing disadvantaged people home to help them. However, she relays the idea that she crossed a line the day she let someone into her car: ...there was one kid that I found, I picked up hitchhiking, right? And I knew he was kind of a dangerous character, and I had my own kids in the car at the time. That probably would’ve been the time I could’ve made a better decision, right? But I was worried about the kid, and not really thinking, ‘That kid could be a…’ Mind you, I didn’t know the risk of that kid until a little later, but still…. And my kids were, two of my kids were little, at least. Yeah. They might have been the only ones in the car. I just remember thinking, later, once I heard more about him, ‘Gee, that was a bit of a risky situation’.... Yeah, I still pick up kids and take them home, right, so [laughs]… I mean, that’s my first – I don’t anymore, but I mean, that was my persona (Participant 2). 147 Each of these participants expressed guilt over either taking action or inaction that resulted in harm or risk of harm to others. In P4 and P2’s case, one may wonder if there is something about their formative years that contributed to these self-perceived infractions. P4 explained that she came from a past that involved quite a high level of physical violence with others. As an adult she came across with gentleness and soft-spokenness, stating sincerely that she did not want to be the violent sort of person that her childhood environment forced her to be. That is to say that one wonders if the situational guilt she expressed is a part of a more overarching sense of guilt about her past. P2 also acknowledges that she picked up a dangerous youth in her car, breaking government policy and risking the safety of her children, because it was a part of her “persona”. It was something she had always done and intends to continue doing because she says it is such a strong part of her identity forged in childhood. It could be said that the participant interviews in general were dominated by accounts of adversity. However, woven into their narratives were tales of strength; clues about their resilience and about how they have managed to survive a difficult vocation. The following excerpts were organized along two lines. First, descriptions of personal growth. That is, times when child protection workers believe that they had evolved or adapted in some way that made them stronger as people are included. Second, accounts describing how some workers have reconciled or found meaning in their past via their work in child protection. 148 “It’s how you heal”: Descriptions of reconciling the past, growing, and finding meaning through present work Some among the group described helpful changes in their philosophical stance or worldviews that they believe were prompted by their experiences in child welfare. They have also noticed an increase in confidence as they have gained experience in the field. P3 suggests that she has grown in her ability to accept things as they are. As such, she now tends to worry much less: I used to internalize stuff a lot more, I used to worry and kind of do a lot of things a lot more – I’m getting much better at kind of accepting things for what they are, and focusing on the things I can change, and kind of abandoning the things I can’t, um, which is good (Participant 3). She adds that she now also has a higher degree of contentment in life: I was very competitive...I wanted success, I wanted this, I wanted that, but I don’t know where all that went now. Now I more want to kind of be happy and just not have to worry about bills, I don’t need to be rich; I just don’t want to have to worry about things. So that’s kind of, ah, I guess I’m growing up (Participant 3). P4 also learned how to accept her life as it is: ...some things are not in my control to fix, and I’ve got to let that go…. So for me, knowing that I do the best that I can with what I’m given, I have to accept that, or else I would be burnt out a long, long time ago (Participant 4). A few of the participants described how they noticed that they had matured as practitioners and as people while involved in child protection work. P1 described a positive bidirectional influence between her parenting and practice. Becoming a parent 149 informed her child protection practice and her experience in child protection gave her helpful reference points that she says benefited her approach to parenting. I am calmer, because I have what I feel would be a better understanding of child development and what’s acceptable. When my daughter, who is almost four, has a complete meltdown, you know, I see other parents who I think are on the same level as me, become very frustrated with that behaviour and not want to change it in that moment, but I have an understanding that – she’s four. Like, this is normal” (Participant 1). She continues: I wasn’t a parent when I first started, and then I became a parent in the middle of my career, so…. how I practiced changed after I became a parent. So when you say the word ‘learning curve’, it’s -- that’s when I felt it. And I heard lots of other people say, ‘You are going to be so different. There are things you’re going to be harder on other parents about and there are things you’re going to understand better.’ And that’s very much the truth. And I would relate it back to what I said before about understanding child development. Having a child of my own and seeing what is universally understood as ‘bad behaviour’, I have a lot more sympathy for parents who can’t get the tantrums under control, or something like that. And I’m also harder on people who are making bad decisions, like leaving your child in the car (Participant 1). P3 also spoke of a general increase in her confidence levels: My confidence is way different. Um, I’m far more confident now, I mean, I can walk up to any door, I can walk up to random people and start a conversation…. Like, we’ve gotten so accustomed to being in dangerous situations that things that I’ll do with friends [sic] and they’ll be completely panicked by (Participant 3). Additionally, P3 has noticed that she has more compassion for her clients now: I think I’m much more compassionate, I really think about other people sometimes and I just feel terrible for them, whereas before I used to be, like, meh, whatever. You kind of made your bed; now lay in it. But I think I get more to help people in that situation, so I’m more compassionate, and that is hard. It’s harder for me, honestly, caring for people (Participant 3). Taken together, the participants describe a somewhat paradoxical dynamic; a process of taking control while at the same time surrendering control. In one sense, they 150 are proud of the confidence they have developed to take decisive action, especially in situations that would frighten others. Yet at the same time, these participants have learned to foster a sense of acceptance about that which they cannot control. The study participants also spoke of moments in their practice that inspired them. P1 spoke of how she enjoys using her influence to make a difference in people’s lives: ...I guess that’s sort of what draws me...when the problems are kind of minor, your intervention can really make a difference for a family, you know, when they just need a little bit of support, and that’ll get them back on the right track. So, for me, the most meaningful thing is helping, you know, like in a word, but more specifically, using the power that comes with being a child protection worker to help people that need help (Participant 1). Sometimes it is emotionally difficult when a child protection worker uses her power, such as when she is required to remove a child from a home. In P6’s case, after a situation like this, a mother returned to offer her thanks: I had one client, and she just yelled and screamed and she hated me, and I had to remove her child, she was using, and you know, she came in, I don’t know however long later; she came in and she was just, ‘Thank you. Wow, did I ever need that.’ You know, it’s just like those kind of little things that make up for everything else… (Participant 6). P2 has enjoyed hearing from children years later: But the guardianship portion of it probably was my most rewarding part, right? I loved the thrill of the investigation, don’t get me wrong, I loved doing that, but I really loved my kids…. I just love them, they’re in the ends of their twenties, their late twenties, all of them, and I had one of my kids come back and he was holding a baby, and said, ‘Guess what? You’re a grandma!’ And I was, like, 29 when he came in [laughs] – I was thinking, “Really?” I started bawling, it was just – like those are those ‘you get why you’re doing it’ moments, right? (Participant 2). P4 also loves hearing from past service users, sometimes decades later. The day prior to the research interview, a child with whom she had worked contacted her: 151 Yesterday he said to me... ‘You know, you’re a true inspiration, [P4]’. So those words from him were better than all the other birthday wishes I’d gotten yesterday. A kid that I thought, maybe he’s gone down a nasty path, he’s found his way again, and he was thanking me (Participant 4). P4 says that right now she has seven families on her caseload who inspire her: What keeps me going is clients that we can work with. I’m working with a family right now that are very, very supportive, and this gal’s going through a rough time, but these people are awesome, and they’re awesome to work with. And they feed your social work spirit (Participant 4). In the future, P4 hopes to start a camp similar to the one that helped her overcome her negative childhood experiences. Mentioned previously, a fair number of the participants described how their choice to enter the child welfare profession was influenced by their childhood experiences, many of which were positive. Some of the workers interviewed described very unfavourable experiences in their past that apparently directed them toward this helping field. In some cases, they describe how the work itself has assisted them to either heal the hurts of their past or find meaning in their past. As described, P5 considers MCFD to be very similar in many respects to the cultic religious group she grew up in. Yet she believes that working at MCFD has provided her an avenue for healing from past trauma caused or contributed to by that sect because it affords her the chance in the present to behave according to her values in an empowered way instead of being revictimized. ...it’s that toxic atmosphere – I guess I just never really got away from it. So I would, in fact, be back to what I knew, which was that. Not realizing, but it’s almost like growing up with so many rules and regulations, it’s like I think I just went right back into that. But being drawn to that? It’s how you heal (Participant 5). 152 P4 spoke of the sexual abuse she suffered as a youth but said that she was able to use that experience to help others in the same position. She spoke of a time on a group hike with a young woman who had been acting out. So I told the other worker, I said, ‘Wait up there, I’m just going to sit here with [girl’s name] and we’re gonna work this out’. And she tells me about her own sexual abuse, right? That’s what she was struggling with that day, mentally, it wasn’t a physical thing, she just needed to let someone know. So I shared with her my story, after the fact…. She’s a neat kid. And... that was a really breakthrough moment for her” (Participant 4). P8 also experienced sexual abuse as a child, but perhaps the most damaging aspect for her was the way that those in her life- her parents and other professionals- treated her. Rather than trying to understand and care for her, she says that they blamed her and labeled her a “bad kid”. Now as a child protection worker, P8 says that what provides her the most meaning is the opportunity she has to provide other children the care and consideration that she so badly needed. Her approach is to educate the parents: ...the biggest links for me between my childhood experiences and my work are my focus on working with parents. That’s where I think, kids don’t need a better psychiatrist or a different medication; they need their parents to try and understand them. They need to believe their parents are trying, instead of just coming down…. Let’s try helping them instead. Just try this – it seems crazy, but let’s imagine the kid actually wants to do well and let’s help them do well…. that’s why I do the work. Because I think that we can make a difference…. we plant seeds as social workers, right? It’s like gardening. You have to have a little bit of hope, a little bit of faith; you have to do a little bit of nurturing stuff (Participant 8). P7, who grew up in poverty, finds meaning in the way that her experience of overcoming a “shaky” start can inspire her families: Surviving my childhood. Like, for me it’s like, I know those kids, and I feel like the job that I do, that means I’ve graduated from high school, I’ve gone to university, I’ve got a degree, I’ve got a good job: like, it’s something that I can give back and 153 let kids know that, hey, you know what? I kind of grew up like this. Like, there’s hope for your future, like, even all this is going on? You can make it. So for me it’s the role modelling piece, like that’s the most important piece…. So, yeah, it’s just leading by example, you know. You have to. I grew up like this; you can overcome your own stuff, too. Like, you can overcome with the help and support, you know…. I was them. I grew up, you know, sometimes not as bad, but it was still pretty bad (Participant 7). Aggregate Results Summary The research participants shared their insights along a number of lines: they spoke of what inspires them and also what bothers them about working in child protection. They described the toll that the work has had on them and recounted stories about what they believe lead to cumulative stress and burnout. They discussed what helps them find meaning in their work. However, the research question is more focused than the relatively broad range of topics discussed in the research interviews. The question is centred on a desire to understand how child protection workers think about their childhoods as from their current child welfare standpoint and how they believe those childhood experiences have influenced their thinking and practice. From a phenomenological perspective, it could be asked, “What is it like to be a child protection worker in light of your childhood?” Posing this question involved a degree of risk. There was no assurance that these child protection workers would describe formative memories of any meaningful consequence with regard to their present-day working lives in child welfare. What if this sample of participants decided that their juvenescence was not particularly important with regard to their vocation? Perhaps they had never considered it or simply could not articulate it. 154 In actuality, the participants had a good deal to say. That is, they told many stories about both their childhoods and about what they believe their present-day working experiences are like because of those childhoods. Participants uniquely link childhood memories with current practice. It can be stated unequivocally that each of the participating child protection social workers drew a strong link between their memories and their social work practice. Perhaps this is not a revolutionary thought. It may be taken for granted that human beings reference their present in light of their past. That is to say that they learn and adapt based on their memory of previous experiences. What is fascinating, however, is the manner in which these participants describe the relationship between what happened to them in the past and what triggers them now. Most of the participants made sense of those triggers by suggesting that certain childhood experiences are their source. As an aside, the term “trigger” has been frequently used both by the participants and myself and is therefore explored in the next section. While the notion of causality is far beyond the scope of this study, for the participants it could be fairly stated that they found meaning in their own experiences. That is, some of them consider particular childhood events to be a reason, at least in part, for their entry into social work, a reason for some of their negative reactions to parents and coworkers, and a reason for some of the satisfaction they find in their careers. With regard to triggers, a pattern appears to emerge between participants’ childhood recollections and the kinds of scenarios or interactions that precipitate 155 uncomfortable emotions in them. Said differently, when participants were asked about the most difficult aspects of their work or “what kept them up at night” most of them directly referenced aspects of their childhood and adult past. Interestingly, those who did not overtly reference their past nonetheless responded with work stories that happened to generally align topically with some aspect of their own childhood (or past adult) adversity. The following table provides a comparative overview of child protection workers’ triggering experiences and their childhood and significant adult experiences: Table 2 Comparison of participants’ adverse childhood experiences and triggering work experiences Participant Triggering work experience Adverse childhood experience P1 Witnessing child abandonment Abandoned by father at age 3 P1 Working with children who have been excessively disciplined Spanked hard with wooden spoon P2 Investigating child sexual abuse Sexually abused as a child P2 Witnessing “bullying” by supervisors Victim of domestic violence by her ex-husband P3 Seeing children who are “alone in the world” Felt “isolated” as a child P4 Seeing violent males who are “bullies” Experienced bullying as a child by a similar male P4 When she was required to “make kids eat carpet” in a group foster home (take physical control of them) She bullied others as a child to cope and to not feel “lesser” than other kids P5 Witnessing vindictiveness from female coworkers Experienced vindictiveness from women in the religious sect she grew up in P5 Perception of MCFD management as “authoritarian” Experienced “heavy-handedness” from religious leaders P5 Seeing “narcissistic” or selfish parents She was subject to the narcissism of her parents as a child, which she said manifested as extreme emotional, verbal and physical abuse 156 Table 2 (Continued) Comparison of participants’ adverse childhood experiences and triggering work experiences Participant Triggering work experience Adverse childhood experience P6 Watching her team “fail to plan” for teenage girls on her caseload P6’s parents often neglected to plan for her adequate care and she often had to take care of herself P6 Working with homeless adolescent girls who are at “high risk” She felt neglected to the point that she moved out of her parents' house as a teen P7 Difficult interactions with management and perception of MCFD as autocratic Negative early interactions with the government as a child P7 Watching a child suffering from physical abuse P7 was a victim of childhood physical abuse P7 Working with “selfish” mothers She felt that her mother was selfish P7 Watching a little girl care for her neglected siblings P7 says that she was neglected and had to care for her siblings P8 Working with parents who “don’t get it” and who blame their children P8 was sexually abused and her parents blamed her for her stormy resulting coping behaviours P8 Religious people she has had to interact with, specifically a foster family who “kicked out” a girl who had been sexually assaulted in their home Her Christian school expelled her for her behaviours following sexual abuse by a priest The Research Question Revisited It is not particularly easy to provide a simple answer to the question on which this thesis is based. Again, the question is “In what ways do social workers experience, and make sense of, their own childhood memories in the context of their child protection practice?” If a brief answer were to be attempted, it might be answered in two parts. First, the ways that these child protection workers said they experienced their childhood memories was generally central to workplace family and co-worker interactions that conjured a strong sense of familiarity. Memories were triggered by witnessing scenarios at work that reminded them of something in their past. These were neither mundane, everyday sorts of scenarios, nor mundane, everyday sorts of memories. Primarily, these 157 participants spoke of various scenarios at work where they perceived present-day harm to either themselves or a child on their caseload. This in turn brought forth vivid memories of like situations from their past. Interestingly, some were nonetheless able to hold to the child welfare field’s best practices and policies, whereas some departed from them to various degrees. Second, the participants made sense of those memories in a few important ways. Primarily, there was a strong aspect of identification or empathy for the people who triggered those memories. While these and other child protection workers routinely witness all manner of difficult child protection scenarios, it was predominantly the specific scenarios with which they had personal previous experience that appeared to move them emotionally. This may be because they have a first-hand understanding of the magnitude and impact of these events on the children involved in a way that most other child protection workers cannot truly appreciate; they were there. Whereas others might empathize based on a theoretical understanding, they bring an experiential knowledge. There was also a secondary way that the participants made sense of their memories. Going beyond an experience of reacting to difficult present-day scenarios via their own memory triggers, many of them sought to find meaning in both their child protection work and in their own unique experience of childhood suffering by alleviating in others the very thing they could not spare themselves from as children. For many this took the form of becoming child protection workers in general. In some it meant taking proactive and assertive action to respond to and mitigate a specific harm to a child on their caseload that looks similar to something they had experienced. For others, there is 158 simply the validation of knowing that they are making a difference for their families in ways that they themselves deeply comprehend. To summarize, with regard to adverse childhood experiences, seven of the eight participants shared personal stories containing details that could reasonably be construed as a form of abuse or neglect by current child protection standards. Three child protection workers disclosed childhood sexual abuse. Five spoke of childhood exposure to family violence or excessive physical discipline. Four expressed significant pain over either serious neglect or abandonment. Three described what could be considered intergenerational trauma; that is, family narratives that suggest a degree of continuity between the trauma experienced by two or more previous generations. What is clear is that in various ways as described above these formative experiences and nascent relationships had a profound effect at times in the working lives of the participants, particularly when their present-day work resembled those past events or people. The next chapter contains a deliberation about what this means and why it matters both for individual child protection workers and for the profession in general. 159 Chapter Six: Discussion This chapter consists of five main sections. The first presents initial considerations, with a focus on both the direct and indirect links found between participants’ childhood memories and present-day workplace scenarios that give them trouble. The second section further considers the results and accompanying interpretations of those results in light of the relevant literature. Third, a number of implications for the field of social work are presented. Fourth, the chapter discusses the limitations of the study. Finally, recommendations are provided for future study. Childhood Experiences and Present-Day Triggers Are Conjoined The central finding of this study is as follows: generally speaking, the participants’ childhood memories arose in the presence of vocationally-based scenarios bearing resemblance to those difficult juvenescent events. The child protection workers interviewed described a number of practice situations that were emotionally challenging for them and when asked what made those specific situations problematic, they recounted nascent memories as the cause. This finding is tied to the primary question asked: “In what ways do social workers experience, and make sense of, their own childhood memories in the context of their child protection practice?” In terms of what tended to produce emotional triggers in these child protection workers and as outlined in the chart in Chapter 5, the participants described a broad range of settings, scenarios, and interactions that produced a triggering effect in them. However, in addition to childhood memories emerging during practice scenarios, other 160 memories came forth as well such as triggering by client-children who reminded participants of their own children or organizational leaders who exhibited challenging behaviours. Though not universally true, most of the participants’ triggers directly related to their childhood experiences. In fact, in each participant interview, there was at least one clear example of either a direct or indirect thematic link between an emotional trigger and an adverse childhood event. That is, some participants consciously suggested the link between the two. For example, on participant openly stated that she dislikes “narcissistic” parents because she suffered at the hands of a narcissistic mother. Another was triggered by parents who label struggling youth as “bad kids” without trying to understand them. This was precisely her experience as she recounts it. Another stated emphatically stated, “I was that girl!” when referring to episodes in her career where she witnessed a neglected child in a home. Others did not verbally infer a direct connection between their childhood memories and their triggers, and yet there is evidence for their relationship. For instance, one participant stated that it is very unsettling for her to witness “having a child physically, completely abandoned, and not having an answer, any answers”. She expressed strong feelings about the uncertainty these children will have to endure. She wondered how someone could “get over that”, wondering how one might recover from being abandoned as a child. When asked about the difficulties in her own childhood, she spoke of how her father left her when she was three years old. She appeared deeply affected by this, as evidenced by the fact that she rhetorically asked, “how was I okay with it?” (how could she let her father leave without strong resistance on her 161 part?). Although she did not use the word, she is effectively speaking of her own experience of abandonment. She did not verbally connect her work trigger with her own childhood experience, and yet the connection is apparent. What becomes clear when considering the data in this study is that the participants’ personal childhoods directly and profoundly influence their everyday working lives in a way that is granularly matched to those histories. These two worlds are powerfully and precisely linked. Indirect Links and the Notion of Questioning There is more to be said about the fact that some of the participants did not overtly draw any link between memories and practice; some participants denied this connection when I asked about it. In some of those cases, I surmised such a link. When this dynamic is encountered, only one of three logical explanations is possible: either there is truly no connection, or the participant is unable to perceive such a connection, or she is unwilling to acknowledge such a connection. The idea that a person may not notice or acknowledge similarities between her and a service user’s experience is supported to some extent by the literature. Researchers have suggested that this is due to differences in memory types. Often called implicit memories these undigested memories can be triggered when something in the current environment reminds the person of the original experience and can elicit a strong physical and emotional response, an overreaction to a cue in the current situation that resembles some aspect of the traumatic event, although the person might have no story or explicit memory of what is remembered” (James & MacKinnon, 2012, p. 192). 162 This suggests that some of the participants may be affected by smells, sounds, certain turns of phrase, perhaps the look of a parent, or maybe a situation that bears some similarity to a traumatic event from their past. However, if those “implicit” memories have not been integrated into the life-narrative of the participant, the relationship between them and the current experience of the child protection worker may not be obvious. This circumstance holds interest from a phenomenological perspective, as well as in light of the notion of client-centred practice in social work. More to the point, phenomenology affords the research participant a kind of supremacy with regard to the manner in which their descriptions of experience are construed. If a participant believes there is no connection between their childhood and professional experiences, the phenomenologist will usually honour that and rarely adopt a “questioning” stance. Likewise, it is popular among child protection workers to consider their families to be “experts in their own lives” in line with a “de-experting stance”. This is descriptive of the Rogerian, person-centred approach adopted in social work and which interestingly is itself derived from humanistic phenomenology (Rowe, 2011). At the same time, interpretative phenomenological analysis provides for interpretation and analysis. These provide the basis for the researcher to carefully apply a critical lens to participant accounts. An assumption undergirding the concept of analysis in this context is that a third party may be capable of analyzing the words and behaviours of a participant and by virtue of being a third party, both witness and come to determinations about aspects of that participant that the interviewee might be unaware of or even disagree with. 163 It might be stated that in IPA a tension is created between concerns for or perhaps privileging of the research participant’s personal interpretation of their own experience, while at the same time making known, as possible, the motivations and biases of the researcher for the purpose of allowing the researcher’s subjective appraisal to be heard. Unlike the psychotherapist, who is tasked with patients’ personal development or perhaps their relief from uncomfortable psychological symptoms, the goal of the IPA researcher is simply to shed further light on a phenomenon in question by providing to the reader a secondary hermeneutic for consideration. Returning once again to the issue of implicit memory in the study participants, this is all to say that while not all of them drew an overt or direct line between their childhood experiences and their present-day child protection practice, a pattern of such is nonetheless apparent. I maintain that this likely means that there is, in fact, a dynamic relationship between memories and practice among child protection workers, even in those who do not recognize such. The precise nature of that relationship cannot be discerned within the scope of the present study, except to suggest that one’s workplace triggers with the families, coworkers, and others who they have professional contact with is emergent from their memories of childhood experiences. Findings Suggestive of Vicarious Trauma and Burnout Outlined in Chapter 3, a number of theoretical concepts were considered because they represent attempts by researchers and clinicians to understand and label the various collections of physical and psychological symptoms experienced by helping professionals. The constructs considered were vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic 164 stress, compassion fatigue, burnout, subjective well-being, self-efficacy, and constructs of vocational growth and resilience. Based on the study results, two of these constructs will be considered more in depth: vicarious trauma and burnout. The remaining constructs were excluded for various reasons. Secondary traumatic stress is akin to posttraumatic stress disorder and was not a major focus of the research interviews. Compassion fatigue and subjective well-being are each complex theories that integrate a number organizational or institutional factors which were also not a focus of the structured research interviews. Finally, the concept of self-efficacy was not considered to be adequately developed as a construct within the child protection context to be useful for analysis in this section. Vicarious trauma. This condition is characterized by the “cognitive and emotional transformations that occur as a result of empathic engagement with trauma survivors” (Tosone, Nuttman-Shwartz & Stephens, 2012). When repeatedly exposed to traumatic narratives, scenarios, and visible consequences, a helping professional’s thinking, beliefs, or worldview may be adversely affected (Newell & MacNeil, 2010). Many of the participants described such a shift in cognitions upon entering the child protection field. For example, one participant believed that both her sense of humour and her view of humanity grew darker over time as she was exposed to many negative family scenarios. Another suggested that she now has a more skewed view of the world, marked by skepticism. She also notes that she feels more “emotional” in general now. Another expressed cynicism and described the development of thicker personal boundaries after she realized that regardless of her efforts, she would receive neither thanks nor any sort of meaningful concern for her own well-being. In addition, 165 each of the participants spoke of either hearing stories or viewing particular scenes that caused them strong negative feelings. The degree to which those exposures led directly to overarching shifts in cognition was not always clear. As quantitative measures for vicarious trauma were not applied to these participants, it cannot be definitively determined if any of them met the criteria for this condition. However, in the general sense (though not universally), the participants described a foray into child protection work that included a heavy workload, a sense of overwhelm, and a feeling of being “green”. In the course of time, some of those participants felt as though their beliefs had darkened as they witnessed for themselves the potential for human malevolence. This is in line with vicarious trauma research. Canfield (2005) expands on this idea: Frames of reference include world-view, spirituality, and identity. As professional experiences challenge basic beliefs about the world, some therapists realize that their basic frames of reference have shifted. Helpers may begin to see other people as dangerous and threatening, malevolent and evil, untrustworthy and unreliable, exploitative and controlling, and/or disconnected and alienating. Their spiritual beliefs may shift, and they may experience new and more problematic feelings about the meaning and purpose of life (p. 89). The predominant feature of the present research interviews, covered extensively elsewhere, was the presence of emotional triggers, which brings about questions of causality. More specifically, the participants’ emotional triggers were presumably linked to their previous traumatic experiences. Is it reasonable to conclude that the experience of traumatic events give rise to adaptive (or perhaps maladaptive) shifts in beliefs to reflect those new possibilities in experience? If so, then one might suggest that among those with a “high” childhood trauma background, a traumatic shift in worldview had already occurred long ago. Then, when exposed presently to subsequent traumas in the 166 field, child protection workers perhaps encountered those new traumatic exposures from a place of knowledge; positively in the sense that their worldviews are already primed and prepared for the possibility and reality of the traumatic exposure, and negatively in the sense that they may be hypervigilant and perhaps overreacted to traumatic events. Put more colloquially, this theory suggests that some child protection workers enter the profession in a “green” or naive state and become necessarily “hardened” by the work and by those traumatic exposures in order to survive psychologically. However, this hardening arguably comes with the price of the vicarious trauma symptomatology. Conversely, those entering the profession with adverse childhood trauma histories might be said to have already experienced this process. That is, they are perhaps both less shocked by traumatic events and less susceptible to challenges to their worldview. At the same time, they may also be uniquely susceptible to specific triggers that echo their lived childhood experience and may experience an overreaction to certain present-day exposures. Burnout. Maslach (2003) is best known for providing a framework for this construct, suggesting that burnout produces three central effects: overwhelming emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. Leake, Rienks, and Obermann (2017) provide a useful summary: The most important construct in the framework, emotional exhaustion, is characterized by a lack of energy and feeling emotionally drained and unable to meet the demands of working with clients. The second construct, depersonalization, is thought to be the stress response to emotional exhaustion that requires distancing oneself from the emotional needs of clients. While this “detached concern” can be considered a reasonable coping response, a lack of compassion can lead to the objectification of clients and negative or callous behavior that interferes with client engagement. The third and final construct, 167 reduced personal accomplishment, reflects the perceptions of professionals that they are not as effective as they could be in serving clients and making a difference (p. 493). As with vicarious trauma, the symptoms of burnout tend to be progressive and should be distinguished from tiredness due to high workload alone (Grosch & Owen, 1995). However, when symptoms accrue to a threshold where they might be identified as burnout, the condition is likely a more advanced stage (Fahy, 2007). There are strong parallels between the research literature on burnout and the results of the present study. While each of Maslach’s three components of burnout has its own relevance, Leake, Rienks, and Obermann (2017) suggest that there remains a strong consensus that “emotional exhaustion” represents the construct’s core facet. Interestingly, some of the most poignant parts of the interviews involved strong displays of emotion by participants as they recounted heavy work demands and high case volumes. For instance, one participant referred to paperwork as “something that drowns you”. When she first entered the child welfare field, another participant would pick up her daughter from her father’s house and he would ask, ‘So how was work?’ and I said, ‘It was the worst day ever’, because it was a hard day. And finally he said to me, ‘You’ve been saying that for a whole month, every single day’ (Participant 2). She said that even now after many years she comes home feeling exhausted. One participant said that when she first started in child protection she “cried every day” and another said, “So, I couldn’t help people, I wasn’t doing good practice, and I was really burning out. And that’s when I did burn out”. This comment also suggests the 168 presence of the third dimension of burnout: “reduced personal accomplishment”. She had described a very large amount of unceasing work, but what appeared to affect her most was the idea that she had not met her own standards for professional effectiveness. These workload factors culminated in a number of negative consequences for the participants: two cite work stress as a significant cause of their divorces, others said that they began drinking to cope, some were taking sleep medication, one stopped eating and lost a large amount of weight. A few participants went on “stress leave”. These are strongly suggestive of burnout and in keeping with how researchers have described the effects of working in child welfare: Of all of the helping professionals, child welfare workers are considered among the highest risk for burnout. This is due to both the stressful nature of the work—having to make difficult decisions, managing challenging cases, and working with traumatized families—and the presence of organizational stressors such as high caseloads and the negative agency climate often associated with public agencies (Leake, Riekes & Obermann, 2017, p. 492). Constructs of Edification In line with the coupling of childhood memories and practice is the notion of meaning identified among the participants. The idea of triggering is decidedly unfavourable in both experience and effect. That is, the psychological “proximity” of scenarios encountered by child protection workers to their own memories of trauma and adversities is commonly interpreted as somewhat destructive or at minimum disadvantageous to the worker. It is something to be endured or buttressed against. However, there is also a “triggering” of sorts that is based on a positive reaction to events and situations that bear resemblance to the workers’ pasts. For want of a 169 better term, I used to the phrase “light ups” in my written notes. That expression was meant to convey a sense of meaning or renewed energy or encouragement that reportedly occurred because of the experience. The closest hypothesis identified in the literature that bears some resemblance to the experience of being “lit up” is vicarious resilience (Hernandez, Engstrom & Gangsei, 2010), which is typified by a favourable change in perspective or worldview among counsellors who hear stories of their parents who have overcome adversity, as well as a simultaneous increase in energy or motivation (Edelkott, Engstrom, Hernandez-Wolfe & Gangsei, 2016). At the same time, and in view of the participants’ accounts, the study’s “edifying” phenomenon appears somewhat distinct from vicarious resilience in a few important ways. First, vicarious resilience is a construct that describes positive changes to a helping professional’s worldview, mindset or practice that is generally based on encounters with those who describe experiencing or overcoming arduous life events that are fundamentally different from the experience of the professional. That is to say that those changes could be posited to result from the professionals’ exposure to difference. This is in contradistinction to the current study participants, who generally conveyed stories of sameness with their families. It could be said that many of the participants experienced powerful feelings of identification with some of the people they serve or co-workers who they work alongside with. That said, there were a couple of participants who were careful to highlight the differences between themselves and those they work with professionally. Interestingly, their personal stories of childhood adversity happened to be of a milder sort. 170 The second distinction between the concept of vicarious resilience and what many of the study participants appeared to experience, and also closely related to the notion of sameness with families, was the attribution of strong personal meaning among the participants with regard to their work. The ascription of higher existential value to the child protection workers’ vocation became evident in the interviews. That is, they held that their work afforded meaning to what could otherwise be construed as senseless childhood suffering. In this way, the work itself metaphorically makes their own experience of trauma retroactively worthwhile. For instance, one participant was able to use her own story to help a sexually abused teen. This, in turn, provided her with a narrative that in some way validated her own experience of childhood sexual abuse. However, the meaning attributed to their work extends beyond its ex post facto value. It could be said that the participants’ strong identification with certain service users provides a grounding in the reality of similar worlds, such that they may more substantially connect the effects of their efforts on client outcomes. That is to say that they hold deep empathy for those they work with. What’s more, their actions may be attuned in a more granular way to the needs of those whose position they once occupied. Due to the fact that they possess (to various degrees) the same fundament as their families, they arguably have both the clarity and confidence to definitively intervene with greater assurance that their actions will matter. One participant spoke of how she was called on to attend a home because of a protection concern and realized that the mother she was going to interview was a member of the same religious sect she grew up in and took pride in the fact that she 171 could masterfully intervene with this person. She spoke the language of this group and was able to influence her more so and with more ease than another worker might have. This narrative, as with some of the other participants’ accounts suggest that they have found personal meaning and strength in their past adversity. That is to say that their difficult experiences from their past did not categorically set them at a disadvantage in terms of their capacity to endure the workplace stressors associated with child welfare. Indeed, one might say that some of the participants would have found it impossible to endure the work had they not experienced the founding forces of personal adversity. Additional Categories of Reference Finally, with regard to “triggering” it became apparent that there were two additional categories of reference that are technically beyond the scope of analysis with respect to the research question, yet nonetheless relevant. In addition to references of the participants’ childhoods in relation to present child protection practice, the workers described memories that fall into two additional classifications. The first category was that of past adult memories. The research question centred on childhood memories, however the participants also shared memories of adversity that they experienced as adults that influenced their present-day practice. For instance, one participant spoke of years of abuse by her husband that changed the way she views workplace bullying. Another described how the breakdown of her marriage increased her levels of empathy for individuals in like circumstances. 172 The second category consists of memories of the “here and now”. These are comprised of recent past events, the effects of which the participants were currently experiencing at the time of the interview. Examples include a recent divorce, a major health concern, or the birth of a child. The notion of the impact of recent experiences on social workers’ child protection practice represents an interesting, however distinct, question for phenomenological exploration. One participant explained how after years in the field of child protection, including working with child and youth mental health clinicians, she has recently found herself coping with her own child’s mental health concerns. As interesting as these two extraneous categories are, and in spite of the fact that the range of topics discussed over the course of eight interviews was relatively broad, the analysis in the following chapter disregards much of this content for the purpose of pursuing answers to the research question, which is based mostly on early childhood experiences. Interpretation of Results in Relationship to the Literature The objective of this section is to re-examining some of the previously considered concepts from the literature review in light of the study’s findings and providing an overview with regard to three concepts that emerged over the course of data collection. First, the term “trigger” was used generously throughout the interview process by both the interviewer and the participants. Because of the word’s ubiquity and utility among child protection workers, a brief literature survey of the concept is provided below. Second, the idea of identification became apparent as a pattern among the participants 173 and is thus covered. Third, these preceding concepts are considered in light of the countertransference sections of the literature review with the following question in mind: Is a psychotherapeutic lens useful for understanding the experience of these child protection workers? Triggering. The term “trigger” has had multiple uses across a number of disciplines. The most common use is in medicine, where the term connotes something that precipitates a medical problem, such as an emotional trigger of a coronary event (Steptoe & Brydon, 2009). With regard to literature pertaining to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the term applies to a stimulus that evokes some kind of memory, often of something traumatic. For instance, Toffolo, Smeets, and van den Hout (2012) speak of the Proust phenomenon, whereby certain odours evoke vivid memories of past traumatic experiences. Involuntary memory triggers in PTSD are described as being centred on “sensory impressions” or “affect without recollection” rather than specific thoughts. As well, these memories tend to be experienced as though they are happening in the present (Ehlers & Clark, 2000). Saporta (2003) suggests that this often occurs with child victims of trauma because they have fragmented somatic memories of trauma due to their young age. The use of the word “trigger” appeared to occur in a more colloquial fashion by the child protection workers interviewed. That is, it is doubtful if participants were categorically referring to the intrusion of involuntary memories or “trauma triggers” (Figley, 1998) when using the word, although attributions of such should not be discounted. The term is used to describe a phenomenon reported by people in the midst of a traumatic stress reaction, yet such reactions did not appear to occur during the 174 interviews to the interviewer’s knowledge. That said, their use of the word suggests that they described having a difficult time emotionally with the content of what was “triggering” them, and in many cases appeared to be subtly alluding to their own previous experiences. What is proposed, as well as covered in the countertransference section, is the likelihood that as the participants remembered back to times in their practice that were difficult or triggering for them, many of them found those practice situations difficult precisely because they mirrored an aspect of their own identity or experience. This dynamic has been described in the literature. For instance, social work students were said to be “triggered” by their own childhood memories when working with some families during their practicums (Litvack, Mishna & Bogo, 2010). If this is true, then it might be said that the experience of a “trigger” is essentially a countertransference reaction. What is being felt by child protection workers (or any other helping professional) in these situations might be a reminder of a perhaps emotionally-painful past experience or traumatic event. Davies and Collings (2008) suggest that “emotional triggers” can lead directly to countertransference reactions if the practitioner brings unresolved “personal issues” to the relationship (p. 15). If this is the case, then the phenomenon of experiencing/re-experiencing or viewing “today in light of yesterday” could be a significant “why” behind Ferguson’s observations of child protection workers who resort to superficial, “non-intimate practice” (2017, p. 1012) when becoming emotionally overwhelmed during home visits. Emotional dynamics between worker and service user. The complex psycho-social dynamic of child protection worker-service user relational attachment includes 175 both the legacy and present-day realities of the client’s trauma, including a possible propensity to view the child protection worker as a parental figure. It includes the legacy and present-day trauma of the worker, who may also lack insight into who a certain person may unconsciously represent for him or her. Also, the foundational elements include the existence of a subliminal currency; a medium of right-brain communication that subverts our rational, dialogical processes, and utters that which may not be spoken aloud (Schore, 1994). This pairing of the worker’s early childhood traumatic experience, combined with a present-time vocational stressor may culminate in what might be construed as a focal point of transmission: a moment in which the child protection worker, perhaps overwhelmed yet largely unaware of her own countertransference state, breaks with the reality of the real protection setting; that is, what is actually happening, and instead enacts her own historical trauma narrative. This experience could be happening while all the time the worker remains largely unaware of the irrational aspects of her interactions and perceptions. What is determined through irrational means or perhaps as a product or emotional dysregulation (Tyler, 2012) is then rationalized. Such risk decisions may be about whether or not a child is safe in a home, whether or not a parent is safe to remain in a home, or conversely, they may allow a child to remain in unsafe conditions. A child protection worker is capable of taking any number of actions within the normal purview of his or her work, but if motivated unconsciously may make poor decisions (St. Jean, 2017). It seems clear that regardless of the nature of the choices that are made by a child protection worker, they can be justified because of who the 176 worker is within the system. Whittaker (2011) suggests that a constellation of organizational “social defenses” may facilitate this. The professional is trusted as the moral authority; he or she may be perfectly compliant with the managerial system of checks and balances; he or she is afforded the assumption of good faith. Perhaps most importantly, the worker’s own lack of insight provides the best cover against discovery. Indeed, such behaviour need not even be conceived of as malevolent, but perhaps rather a product of the legacy of trauma in the worker. Interestingly, managerial directives, which commonly busy the child protection worker with tasks centred on paperwork, assessments, and computerized documentation, might ironically offer a layer of protection to both the worker and service user by limiting the number of hours available for face to face contact (Waterhouse & McGhee, 2009). Proximity and identification. What is evident among the study members is that there was a natural pairing of triggers between childhood or previous adverse life experiences and with the identities of the persons with whom they interacted. Those child protection workers who had been abandoned found it difficult to witness children who they viewed as abandoned and those workers who had been sexually abused found investigating sexual abuse cases to be particularly difficult. Also, participants were triggered by those who “looked” like them or resembled a childhood version of themselves in some way. For instance, one participant saw a young girl and said, “That is me”. In many cases, whether explicitly stated or only implied, the proximity of the worker to the child, metaphorically speaking, determined whether, or perhaps the degree to which the participant was affected. 177 On the face of it, this is understandable. One could argue that workers could be prone to complex emotions toward those with whom they relate, either because they have experienced like events or because they hold an identity that is viewed as comparable. Ostensibly, when a child protection worker has undergone a similar traumatic experience as the person they are working with, his or her mind is likely stocked with a comprehensive set of memories, emotions, and attitudes that could be referenced when considering the person in question. What is debatable is the nature of those memories. In the most straightforward sense, common experiences and identities could be said to simply inform the worker in a manner that would generally enhance their practice due to the supplementary memories. When child protection workers encounter workplace situations that evoke memories of their own early trauma, this could be interpreted plainly for what it is: a reminder of past pain that is uncomfortable to remember. This straightforward notion of the effect of comparable traumas might find a theoretical home in the construct of “shared trauma”. That is, a situation said to arise when the worker or therapist is treating trauma victims but also sharing in emotional stress stemming from the same or similar events (Saakvitne, 2002). The idea gained greater popularity after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, where first responding counsellors and other helping professionals themselves suffered from the traumatic effects of the attack. The obvious difference between the concept of shared trauma and what has been described among the participants is that the literature pertaining to shared trauma typically refers to the effects of shared events such as attacks or natural disasters. Yet the construct may find utility in that it describes some of the dynamics which may occur 178 when a helping professional is at once the victim and the responder. Many of the participants, in a manner of speaking, are just that. Baum (2012) contends that much of the distress that helping professionals suffering from shared trauma experience stems from a strong sense of guilt because they did not believe that they were being “emotionally available” to their families. The professionals experienced self-reproach because, as they struggled to meet their own needs arising from the traumatic event, they perceived that they were unable to empathize with their families. Could this dynamic be similar to what some protection workers experience as they work with those who have suffered in similar ways? In moments when a child’s narratives remind workers of their own, possibly unresolved childhood adversities, could this lead to lapses in empathy and subsequent feelings of guilt and shame? Countertransference. In addition to the straightforward conceptualization of “proximity” between service user and worker identity and trauma, there are psychological constructs that have been developed to explain the thoughts, intentions, and effects within professionals who have registered strong feelings of concordance with their families. One potentially useful psychotherapeutic idea is the notion of countertransference. Such countertransference reactions have been construed as generally helpful for practice by the recent research material on the subject. In fact, self-disclosure of such by practitioners has the possible benefit of helping service recipients feel reduced levels of shame with regard to their own experiences. However, practitioners should refrain from disclosing if they feel emotionally vulnerable (Goldstein, 1994). Indeed, children 179 and parents themselves often become aware of the ways they have emotionally affected child protection workers. Over time, they occasionally identify and vocalize similarities in life circumstances that are uncomfortable for the professional (Sarasohn, 2005). Freud considered countertransference to be a barrier to clinical work, however according to Sarasohn (2005) and also Green (1994) the use of the phenomenon might actually serve to uncover insights within the world of a service user. Additionally, the sharing of one’s countertransference reaction has been deemed a viable option when attempting to solve therapeutic impasses (Strean, 1999). Green suggests that two subtypes of countertransference, called concordant and complementary identification respectively, might prove helpful with respect to conceptualizing thoughts and feelings that might occur in clinicians: Concordant identification refers to the type of countertransference in which the therapist's feelings parallel the patient's feelings. The therapist's affective state is in accord or in sync with the patient's affective state, even when those feelings are out of the conscious awareness of the patient. The therapist feels "this part of me is you".... This way of understanding countertransference gives the therapist access to the patient's self-experience. Complementary identification refers to the type of countertransference in which the therapist's feelings are aligned with the affective experience of someone significant in the patient's representational world (e.g., the therapist may feel the way the mother or father may have felt). This enables the therapist to understand the patient's internalized object relationships and how they are being enacted in the transference relationship (Green, 1994, p. 377). To be fair, this quote, along with much of the literature pertaining to countertransference, is clinical in nature. The child protection work conducted by social workers is not therapeutic per se, however the nature of their work is such that this literature may have a degree of application. 180 The concepts of concordant and complementary identification, as outlined in the literature review, hold relevance to narratives of the study participants in that they represent constructs that describe aspects of their accounts. Concordant identification is posited to occur when the professional strongly identifies with the feelings of the an individual who they professionally serve. This akin to P1’s interview, in which she stated that she felt an enhanced empathy for single mothers who have experienced domestic violence after her marriage ended. Complementary identification, which is perhaps of greater relevance with regard to the research question, is the phenomenon whereby a professional identifies strongly not with the service recipient, but with a significant member of that recipient’s world, such as their parent or child. There are many instances among the participants where one might suggest that complementary identification has occurred. For instance, there were a number of times in the research interviews when the workers expressed feelings of animosity, frustration, or disdain for certain parents. This occurred in many cases of strong identification with those parents’ children. That dynamic is explored below. What bears repeating from Chapter 3 is the fact that social workers, especially those who work in the field of child protection likely do not have much advanced training in counselling, and especially not in psychotherapy. Additionally, most child protection workers, although referred to as “helping professionals”, would not consider their work to be therapeutic in the strictest sense. As a result, it is likely that if these dynamics are in fact in play between a subset of them and their families, they could go unnoticed by each. 181 This uncovers two points for consideration. First, that the literature cited in this thesis is to some degree, askew or mismatched because it refers mainly to counselors and mental health therapists in therapeutic dyads. Conversely, there is a paucity of research data pertaining to the psychotherapeutic factors that may exist within social worker-service recipient dyads and therefore the next “closest” research with any substance must suffice: that which addresses the relational dynamics between counsellors and those they serve. Yet it is important to note that there are also many differences between the relationships formed between, for example, a child protection worker and a parent, versus a therapist and a voluntary client, such as the mandate and role of the professional, the power dynamic, and the aforementioned training differences. Therefore, some cross-applicability of the research can be said to exist between the dyads, but this requires careful consideration and a degree of translation. At the same time, child protection settings could be said to offer an unique environment whereby the probability of alignment between a service user’s trauma narratives and worker trauma narratives is very high. Child protection workers, perhaps more so than psychotherapists or other clinicians, are exposed to the sounds, smells, and physical environments of their families in such a way that triggering and countertransference may occur more readily. Therapists are usually limited to hearing a story and viewing their patient in a relatively neutral environment. Child protection workers are often “shown” what is happening to a child. They enter homes that may look like their childhood home. They see multiple family members that may remind them of their family. They see photos of inflicted suffering perhaps similar to their own. PTSD 182 survivors are often triggered by similar non-verbal stimuli. Child protection workers likewise inhabit a “trigger rich” domain that most therapists are presumably shielded from. Second, due to the “non-clinical” nature of the child protection worker-family relationship, new but yet-to-be-developed terms might be more appropriate for the purposes of articulating some of the phenomena described in this study. For example, countertransference is considered to be something that, within a therapeutic context, can only be generated by a patient. Countertransference is commonly construed as only traveling “from” the patient as “sender” to the therapist as “receiver”. However, would it not be illuminating from a theoretical perspective to contemplate that the child protection worker might be the potential sender or initiator of such a transference? What if some protection social workers, wholly or partly unaware of the effects of their past traumas unwittingly projected intolerable parts of themselves onto “triggering” parents? This notion has some support to the degree that more recent conceptualizations of transference embrace a mutuality of experience, in which either side of a dyad could be the “sender” (Berzoff & Kita, 2010). Countertransference and compassion fatigue. Some links between the constructs of compassion fatigue and countertransference have been posited. Kanter (2007) linked the two, arguing that if Figley’s definition of compassion fatigue involves the effect of patient influence on the practitioner, then what is really being spoken about is a form of countertransference. Yet Berzoff and Kita (2010) contend that one must be careful to discern between compassion fatigue, which could be viewed as a form of trauma as it entails absorbing “the emotional weight of clients’ traumatic experiences” 183 (p. 342) and countertransference, which can be used as “a valuable tool for the practitioner to gain empathic access into the world of the client” (p. 342). Yet Berzoff and Kita (2010) remain adamant that while every clinician experiences countertransference to some degree, not every clinician experiences compassion fatigue. They define compassion fatigue as something that occurs due significant and unrelenting exposure to the pain of others, and with that the continual need to provide one’s self as an emotional support. However, they offer that the effects of compassion fatigue might be compounded by countertransference and offer an illustrative vignette: A medical social worker, working on a bone marrow treatment floor, was having great difficulty leaving her office and could not see her patients. She would do paperwork, concrete services, and make herself available by telephone and pager, but she could not enter the floor on which she was working. Her own mother had died of lymphoma, and her grief had been complicated by her mother having left the family a few years before to pursue her own career. Now this social worker, unaware of her anger towards her mother and also experiencing high levels of trauma on the ward, was unable to do her job. She experienced unexamined countertransference determined by an unresolved history of loss and abandonment and she experienced compassion fatigue which grew out of the cumulative trauma that made her lose faith in any capacity to be helpful (2010, p. 345). Regardless of their own personal trauma histories, early-career child protection workers may be unready for the ways that service users would wish, consciously or unconsciously, to relate them. Goodman (2005) suggests that novice clinicians may be vulnerable if they enter the counselling profession “...with pre-existing self-representations of incompetence, guilt over anticipated sins to be committed as a result of their incompetence, and depression over their inability to help the object in front of them” (p. 154). These preconditions may carry a professional through increasing 184 experiences of countertransference, or even overt boundary violations with a service recipient (Gabbard, 2005). Is it countertransference? Returning to the study at hand, and in light of the literature, could it be said that some of the experiences described by the participating child protection workers be accurately construed as countertransference? Or is it more likely that the participants described situations that merely bore resemblance to their own life histories and relationships, thus cueing longstanding emotions and established patterns of relating? Countertransference in the child protection workers interviewed generally appeared to occur along three lines: 1. Accounts of children resembling the worker 2. Accounts of parents resembling the worker’s parent 3. Accounts of supervisors resembling the worker’s parent As discussed, participants described being “triggered” in situations and by people that bore resemblance to childhood scenarios and childhood relationships respectively. The nature of that resemblance was outlined in Chapter 4. In “later” stages of countertransference, the therapist is said to recognize the projections sent to them from their patient, process and contain them, then offer them back to the patient in a modified and ideally more palatable form (Schore, 1994). Yet, as posited in the literature review, the possibility exists whereby the therapist, due to his or her unresolved internal conflicts, might unwittingly behave according to those projections, assuming the role projected into her. 185 Could it be said that at any point the participants described anything akin to countertransference? Along those three “lines of resemblance” did the participants act toward their young clients as though acting on one’s own behalf, or toward parents as to their own parent, or to their supervisors as to their own parent? Hints of these types of interactions coloured the interviews. One participant expressed frustration over conflicts with her supervisors that resembled conflicts with her parents. Two others appeared to relate to MCFD upper management the same way that they related to the religious authorities in their lives. Half of the sample described strong emotional reactions against the behaviours of certain parents. The question is whether or not those reactions where typical; whether they would be experienced by anyone in their place, regardless of their personal history, or if there was something unique to their nascent experiences that primed these child protection workers in particular for these specific countertransference reactions. One participant’s interview is relevant with regard to the “acting out” of a countertransference reaction. She shares about her trigger: I think where my trigger is, is like my mother, my parents were the type where they were so self-centred and so narcissistic and lacked in so much self-awareness. Like they didn’t see what they put us through, like they just – I, I sort of got my mother’s borderline or narcissist, qualities of a narcissist, I mean I’m sure I could give her a lot of diagnoses, but she – I think that’s where my triggers lie: parents that just are completely self- centred. And they just, like their kids are an extension of themselves, they’re not little beings. I think, I lose my patience (Participant 5). She explained that when she encounters selfish or narcissistic parents she takes extreme and immediate action: 186 I think my main trigger is parents who are selfish. Cause both my parents were very selfish. That’s my trigger. So, when I get a parent who just completely cannot see their child’s needs, I will go at them. I’ll hit over and over and over and over: ‘Really? That’s what your child needs?’.... Give me a narcissist, man, and we are going to fight. Like, that’s just the way it is. I can’t get past that (Participant 5). When asked if such parents sway her in regard to whether or not she attempts to bring their children into long-term foster care via a continuing custody order, she said that they do. A continuing custody order is a legal order made by a judge that permanently severs parental rights. When a continuing custody order is granted, the state becomes the full guardian of the subject children until such time that they can be adopted. What P5 was saying was that when parents remind her of her own parents, she discriminates; she takes a different course of action than she would with other parents. When it came to one particular narcissistic father, she was resolute about this: I was like, he’s not going to have the kid back. There’s no way. Like his time is up. And I don’t feel guilty about it; I don’t feel like that’s my shit. This parent can’t see past himself, and this kid will be messed if we don’t get them a different home (Participant 5). When probed further, she retreated somewhat in her position, stating that if she did not find that there were valid protection concerns she would not apply for a continuing custody order, even if she considered the parents to be narcissistic. However, if there were abuse or neglect concerns and such an order was warranted, she would have “not an ounce of sorrow” for them. This leads to questions about countertransference. In those moments when they appear to be “narcissistic” can it be said that P5 is responding to the projections of those parents? If anything, it appears as though countertransference, if any, finds its 187 origin in P5. As noted above, this process is not originally intended to be applied in “reverse” direction, from professional to service recipient. That said, a good number of psychodynamic theorists over the past 30 years have challenged this notion, suggesting that transference can indeed be bidirectional (Robertson, 1999). P5 appears to be communicating a dynamic whereby, perhaps because of a strong resemblance to her own parents, she regards certain parents with particular disdain. As described in the results chapter, this was a strong theme among the participants. It is believed that this analysis can go so far as to say with a degree of confidence that the majority of child protection workers interviewed, in light of their childhood and early adult adversities, experienced stronger emotional triggers while working with cases and episodes that were topically and relationally similar to their own life narratives. The question of the particular constructs that may be of use in an explanatory way with regard to this is beyond the scope of this analysis and a promising area for future study. Implications A number of considerations naturally follow from this research. Ten implications are particularly worthy of discussion. Each of these implications pertain specifically to the present understandings of the theoretical constructs used to describe the experience of the study participants, the nature of triggers and countertransference in child protection workers, or the need for more adequate intervention. The term “trigger” can be construed as everyday parlance or shorthand for “countertransference reaction”. The use of the term “trigger” was ubiquitous among 188 the sample participants and is indeed common in the field of child welfare, in my view. Examples of the term’s use are “I was triggered by the way that father was talking to his children” or “Seeing children who look alone in the world is a real trigger for me”. This recognition is deeply important because although passing reference to triggers might be made during the training of child protection workers, the specific imperative to identify triggers as countertransference reactions is not. That is, nascent workers may be casually admonished to be aware of the existence personal emotional triggers, but only in a vague way; comprehensive education and even personal psychotherapeutic work with regard to countertransference reactions may be necessary for child protection workers to mitigate the effects of such on both their professional practice and their mental health. This link between triggering and countertransference also opens a new avenue for academic study based on the colloquial term. A concept analysis of the term “trigger” would be helpful, as would future research that explores the use of the term specifically. Early childhood experiences contribute to theoretical complexity. This research strongly suggests an added layer of nuance with regard to the theoretical constructs of burnout, vicarious trauma, and secondary traumatic stress that were considered. That is, among those with histories of personal childhood adversity, there could be said to be a qualitatively variable or complex experience of those realities. Theoretical constructs are at best generalizations commonly applied to groups more so than to individuals. As well, relatively small subgroups, such as child welfare professionals operating within the larger field of social work will experience distinctive effects due to the distinctive nature of their work. This matters because it implies that 189 the aforementioned constructs of vicarious trauma, burnout, and the like are rendered essentially meaningless if they do not adequately account for individual traumatic histories. As well, those workers with histories of childhood adversity might also represent a distinctive subgroup. For example, although workload demands were cited as a contributor to burnout by the participants (as suggested in the research literature) and are a common reality to the field of social work at large, their effects appeared to pale when placed alongside accounts of moral injury and guilt that were related to childhood memories. Likewise, if “general” vicarious trauma could be construed as the emotional and psychological harm caused by repeated exposure to traumatic narratives, then “childhood trauma-informed” vicarious trauma, or possibly “complex” vicarious trauma might represent a distinct phenomenon whereby child protection workers are not traumatized by certain stories, but retraumatized by them as those stories bring back memories of their own past. Symptoms of secondary traumatic stress might be influenced in a similar way; secondary exposure to people’s trauma may serve as a triggering reminder of the professional’s primary trauma incurred in childhood. The point is that individual-level complexity caused by the presence of more granular variables such as specific occupations, personal identities, and early histories may outstrip these constructs’ capacities to categorize human experience. Early experiences may be concealed, but cannot easily be “left at home” by professionals. The findings in this study confirm a large body of research that supports the general understanding that early experience shapes later experience. That is, people learn from what happens to them and then access those memories both to 190 inform present-day functioning and to interpret present-day experiences. This is not a radical idea. The important point is that powerful emotional triggers predominantly formed in youth often lie dormant until specific stories or scenarios summon them. Many of these memories are partially formed, very old, or perhaps lacking in tangible elements, and because they are often very emotionally painful, they may remain largely hidden to their bearer until elicited. This means that a child protection worker might not be consciously aware of such triggers until they “stumble upon them” in the course of their practice. It may also mean that they will continue to suppress them rather than thinking about them or working them through. Old wounds, often concealed by protection workers, create present-day suffering and perhaps new problems for the workers, their families, and their agencies. However, the more significant implication here is that the strongly held ethos in the field of child welfare of separating “home life” and “work life” might be largely meaningless in this context and even damaging to child protection workers. This study demonstrated that the most emotionally and psychologically painful aspect of the participants’ working lives was anything they encountered that strongly reminded them of the pain of the past. The trouble is that while there is a well-established body of research and a plethora of professional codes of ethics that outline appropriate professional behaviours in child welfare (Reamer, 2003), it could be argued that these have been conflated to include a set of mandated thoughts and emotions as well. While behaviours can be constrained to some degree, a professional’s affect, cognitions, and memory cannot. While behavioural boundaries are valiantly upheld by most child protection workers in their daily practice, this research demonstrates that they are also 191 commonly flooded with traumatic memories and emotions that know no bounds. Could it be the case that child protection workers conflate these emotional reactions with professional boundary violations, thus promoting further concealment? It would be wise for the profession to acknowledge this subtle yet important difference in the promotion of worker mental health. Triggers are profoundly and uniquely stressful. What makes the study about the experience of childhood memories in child protection workers important is the fact that these experiences are not categorically benign. Of course, people remember all sorts of things as they go about their workdays. What matters in this case are the memories that cause the greatest emotional or psychological distress. Exposure to conflict and violence of various forms in social work practice settings is extremely common (Ringstad, 2005). However, it could be said that intrapersonal dynamics such as a child protection worker’s expectation about how they ought to perform in their role could more greatly affect stress levels (Graham & Shier, 2014). As well, emotional pain arising from difficult memories as well as anxieties produced in relationship to nascent trauma could be considered far more personal in nature and therefore more severe in terms of how it contributes to stress (Zosky, 2010). Dane (2000) suggests that some social workers who come from similar abusive backgrounds as the children they work with and are, ...thus seeking to help children in order to heal their own hurt and pain. By superimposing their own pain upon the child, workers can be retraumatized with every case. This can result in a worker’s overimmersion in their work, and lead to exhaustion (p. 28). Acknowledging that overwhelming levels of emotional strain caused by personal triggers can occur in child protection workers is essential because herein lies a 192 fundamental solution for those aiming to mitigate further emotional trauma, burnout, and worker attrition in the child welfare field. In fact, repeated reminders of intolerable childhood memories in the context of adverse practice scenarios may be greater than other emotional threats to one’s professional longevity in the field. It could be said that a diverse number of stressors exist in a work-setting. Each kind of stressor causes feelings of stress for a somewhat different reason. For instance, paperwork demands and high caseloads might cause one kind of stress, while exposures to angry individuals another. One might say that the stimulus itself is not inherently stressful, but rather one’s interpretation of that stimulus and perhaps the subjective threat it represents to one’s physical or emotional safety and well-being. I contend that emotional triggers, representing reminders of past trauma, could be the most stressful kind of stimuli because they represent the most historically significant threat to the worker. Indeed, during the research interviews the participants were predominantly able to rationalize and “make peace with” both demanding caseloads and difficult people. However most stated that they became emotional or overwhelmed when reminded of past adverse experiences. This suggests that continued to struggle to cope adequately with such triggers and that these represented the most stressful aspect of their work. If this experience could in any way be generalized to the greater population of child protection workers, it directly follows that efforts by management to mitigate stress in these workers should integrate these data. Triggers can also be related to coworkers and supervisors, and the resulting stress may be equal to the stress felt in regard to families. Emotional triggers are not limited to being prompted by interactions with families. In fact, the 193 research participants spoke of triggers in relationship to their professional peers, team leaders, and managers as much as they did the regard to service users. This is important, as it adds a layer of complexity to the notion of countertransference, moving beyond the therapist-patient dyad to include other types of relationships. Practice scenarios bearing resemblance to the adversity experienced by a child protection worker as a child might also involve supervisory staff members or management in the here and now. For instance, when some of the participants were growing up they and their families interacted with various authorities: social workers, school principals, and religious leaders. Sometimes supervisors prompted triggers around past parental dynamics. As discussed, one participant drew uncanny parallels between the religious elders in her church and MCFD management. She was greatly triggered by them because they represented an authority in the lives of families who bore resemblance to her family. Others were likewise triggered for similar reasons. One participant was particularly bothered when she noticed that “proper” planning by her coworkers and supervisor was not occurring for her families. This dynamic harkened back to a time when she was left to care for herself at a young age for weeks at a time. Her parents had not planned for her. Put plainly, she perceived that her supervisor was acting like her parents by not planning and she understands at a profound level the pain, fear, and trauma that caused for her. As could be expected, there is a paucity of research about the dynamic being described here: namely projective identification by the child protection worker. This is in distinction to literature that generally speaks to the supervisory relationship, workplace 194 bullying, or other co-worker dynamics. These are much broader topics that do not address countertransference. This is likely due to the fact that countertransference is construed as a phenomenon occurring specifically between counsellor and client. There is not currently a well-established “container” in the literature to hold concepts and research about situations where professional relational dynamics informed by nascent experiences might be considered. However, the notion does find some support, with articles suggesting that countertransference reactions can occur among supervisory relationships (Bennet, 2008). Leaders in the field of child welfare should expect that triggers occurring in front-line child protection workers will adversely influence child protection risk assessments and decision making. In many jurisdictions, risk decisions about the safety of a child in the home are intended to be guided by formalized risk assessment instruments such as the Structural Decision-Making Tools (SDM). These use an actuarial model to quantify levels of risk. Child protection workers are not bound in any significant way to the scores they produce but use them in concert with other means of assessing risk, such as interviews with collateral witnesses, historical file reviews, and consults with supervisors and practice consultants. That is to say that in many respects, child protection practice is more art than science. This idea is aligned with the findings of Gillingham (2014) referred to in Chapter 2. Oftentimes, when a difficult decision is to be made (such as the removal of a child from the family home) the supervisor or even the protection manager will make the final decision, rather than the front-line worker. In making this decision, however, they will rely heavily on the narrative of the front-line child protection worker as the contact 195 with the most knowledge of the file. This is often a dynamic process in that the decision may change “internally” multiple times before it is enacted. As these decisions often involve very complex scenarios with unknown future outcomes, it is difficult to predict what the best course of action is. As Dingwall, Eekelaar, and Murray (1995) point out, in the absence of clinical evidence (such as a medical report), decision-makers will rely on social evidence, which is inevitably sifted through their personal perceptions and “lay social theory” (p. 56) of what constitutes normalcy for a family. This difficulty is the place where a major vulnerability to best practices exists. In the absence of clarity about the actual nature of cases among supervisors and in light of the fact that child protection workers can be influenced by their own triggers, it follows that a proportion of all risk decisions will be adversely influenced by a child protection worker’s own biases and emotional triggers. This idea is in line with Yoshihama and Mill’s (2003) finding that, ...[i]t was only when the [child protection workers’] personal experiences of intimate partner violence was coupled with identification with battered women that [child protection workers] were less likely to view removing children of battered women as the best approach to protect their safety... (p. 331). One study participant stated that when she encountered mothers who were “narcissistic” and “selfish” that it tangibly influenced her risk decision making. Some of the other participants admitted the same, or at least inferred it. Many such cases are much less clear-cut. These kinds of “marginal” cases involve scenarios where there are significant risk factors, but the decision to remove a child from a home can go either way. All else being equal, the influence of strong identification with children or triggered malice toward their parents will sometimes be a determining influence. It would be unwise for leaders in the field of child welfare to ignore or minimize the potential for 196 unfavourable protection decisions due to the subtle but swaying power of workplace triggers. Some entered the social work profession to find healing. This research, along with other literature, supports the notion that a good number of child protection workers chose this field because they were seeking to solve the difficulties from their own childhoods (Sellers & Hunter, 2005; Brannen, Mooney & Stathem, 2009; Dane, 2000). This choice of vocation may alternately be construed not particularly as a quest for personal healing, but rather as a vehicle for attaining higher meaning. It might be said that some workers look to retroactively attribute meaning to dire early experiences through their work. This was certainly the case for P8, who sees it as her mission to help parents to understand their children in a way that she was never understood after being sexually abused. Likewise, P4 finds greater meaning in her experiences of childhood sexual abuse by assisting those in similar circumstances. If it can be said that healing is being had by some child protection workers, either consciously or unconsciously, via entrance to the profession, then a reasonable question for social service agencies to ask themselves is this: Are we equipped to meet these complex psychological needs in our staff? Generally speaking, this is probably not the case. Aside from limited Employee Assistance Programs and the unofficial support that may be provided by coworkers and supervisors, there is little known support for such workers. With regard to addressing countertransference specifically in child protection workers, Cabaniss (2011) has developed a model that includes self-awareness and self-monitoring, personal reflection, and a variety of forward courses of action. One 197 must acknowledge that this would require a good deal of time. Gelso and Hayes (2007) have also formulated a multi-step intervention that is designed to encourage the healing of one’s own boundaries, identification of one’s assumptions and countertransference-based anxiety, and maintenance of empathy and connection with service-using parents while working through one’s own emotions. Triggering and countertransference manifest differently in child protection workers than in other professionals. As detailed previously, much of the research literature about countertransference is centred on the experience of counsellors. There are a multitude of differences in terms of goals, work settings, helping processes, power dynamics, and expectations on the part of both counsellor and patient. Therefore, studies about countertransference are at best only broadly applicable to populations of child protection workers. This is not to suggest that there is no applicability. There is considerable evidence that counsellors and child protection workers alike experience countertransference. However, the latter are decidedly not engaged in therapeutic work per se, but are typically working toward improving outcomes for children, often in an involuntary relationship dynamic. What is needed is further research to gather further countertransference data with child protection workers under these conditions. Dane (2000), suggests that countertransference reactions in child protection workers might manifest themselves as feeling controlled by certain service users, experiencing rescue fantasies and intense preoccupation with service users, a desire to punish certain individuals, various forms of anger, a destruction of “one’s personal and 198 cultural mythologies” (p. 29), and finally (and perhaps most relevantly) projections from the worker’s own history of abuse. One crucial difference for child protection workers is that fact that they hold a relatively large amount of authority in the lives of the families they work with. While most counsellors hold a degree of power with vulnerable families, child protection workers have the capacity (via court order), to remove adults from homes, mandate behaviours within a home, and remove children from homes. They have the power determine the long-term fates of families. While there are checks and balances in place, the child welfare system cannot adequately supervise front line staff’s engagement with the large volume of service users within the system. As discussed in Chapter 2, the present neoliberal environment is said to have profoundly eroded supports for children and families in favour of a “law and order” approach to child welfare. Thus, child protection workers have arguably been saddled with additional stressors not found in other helping professions. Under the backdrop of the liberal compromise (Dingwall et al, 1995) child protection workers are compelled to both violate conventional privacy boundaries with families and then also tolerate the weight of responsibility for the protection concerns they witness. This ironically leads to both guilt and a sense of powerlessness. I contend that those feelings may uniquely manifest as triggers and countertransference reactions. For example, child protection workers may be strongly reminded of a time when they were “parentified” as children; perhaps forced to hear traumatizing material or adopt roles beyond their developmental capabilities. Their present working environment may be keen reminder of this. 199 Presupposing childhood adversity either in none or all child protection workers would be unwise. An important point from this research to be considered is the fact that for one participant, there were no early childhood triggers to speak of. That is, she could not recall any instances of major life adversity, or of abuse or neglect as a child. For example, she remembers her family as being relatively “high-functioning”. Her experiences were qualitatively different from the others in that rather than recounting like experiences from her past that were triggering for her, she offered descriptions characterized by contrast. What was shocking for her were situations where she felt a strong disconnect from the experience of the children and families on her caseload, such as viewing a young boy who appeared “all alone” with nowhere to go for Christmas. This was a scenario that she could not imagine. What makes this point interesting is the implications that follow from it. If this participant is representative of a greater subset of child protection workers, then it would be fair to say that this subset of professionals also enters the field relatively free from childhood adversity. It could be said that a meaningful proportion of child protection workers, not having personal, lived experiences of childhood abuse or neglect, may likewise have an entirely different response to the work just as that one participant did. How then would their personal experiences and professional trajectories look when compared to those with more difficult or complex histories? This is not to say that such relatively “trouble free” child protection workers will fare any better or worse in the field. However, these divergent backgrounds likely influence the manner in which they interpret the narratives of those with whom they work. 200 Dramatically more emotional and psychological support is needed. The final implication is that for this large subgroup of child protection workers to mitigate the debilitating effects of these forms of trauma, they require more organizational resources to be put toward personal use. This research suggests a powerful inner experience occurring for workers with these kinds of histories. Yet, caution must be taken to ensure that those with such histories are not characterized in a pathological or deficits-based manner. On balance, if the presence of childhood adversity in child protection workers could be said to bring certain special susceptibilities to trauma that negatively lessens subjective well-being, it likely also confers special strengths, insights and perhaps protections toward the same. Perhaps those who have struggled through childhood adversities have been given a proverbial “head start” compared to their peers with regard to developing the attributes they need to “survive” in the field of child welfare. These are not workers to be screened out from the profession but embraced as insiders. Yet they must also be supported as many of them continue to work through issues from their past. Some recommended interventions that provide some of this needed support are provided in the next section. Interventions This section provides a brief review of the literature pertaining to the mitigation of the effects of exposure to traumatic narratives and identities that bear resemblance to those of a child protection worker. Care must be taken when speaking of interventions to avoid solutions that might be construed as pathologizing in tone or content. Previous 201 treatment of theoretical constructs such as secondary trauma has made use of an individualistic, deficits-based approach (Harrington, 2007). Instead, schools of social work have an unique opportunity to normalize the common adverse emotional experiences of incoming social workers via their curricula (Strand, Abramovitz, Layne, Robinson & Way, 2014). Supervision. Quality supervision is cited as the most significant factor associated with high job satisfaction among child protection workers (Barth, Lloyd, Christ, Chapman & Dickinson, 2008). Research evidence suggests that the nature and calibre of professional supervision can either mitigate or aggravate the effects of the vocational maladies, such as vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, and burnout that are associated with child protection social work. For example, both qualitative and quantitative studies have shown that routine and positively regarded clinical supervision is strongly associated with a reduced risk of vicarious trauma in mental health therapists (Williams, Helm & Clemens, 2012). As well, effective supervision has been shown to reduce the rate of employee turnover (Chiller & Crisp, 2012). Lee, Weaver and Hrostowski (2011) suggest that supervision occurs along three central lines: administrative, supportive, and educational. Within organizations, “these supervisory roles are significantly related to worker outcomes, including decreased emotional exhaustion and increased worker retention” (p. 481). Positive worker outcomes are enhanced when there is an increase in “non-evaluative” supervision (Bell, Kulkarni & Dalton, 2003) This refers to supervision provided by someone outside the agency’s power structure. This could be said to reduce the conflict within the worker 202 around their feelings about the work and their job performance, potentially allowing for a higher rate of disclosure. Another study suggests that effective supervision represents a basket of formal and informal supports that includes traditional forms of supervision along with peer support, certain structural design elements that are conducive to self-care, team building events, and subsidized health support programs (Joubert, Hocking & Hampson, 2013). Bradbury-Jones (2014) suggests that although the majority of child welfare supervisors tend to focus on procedural issues during supervisory sessions, attending to the emotional needs of social workers may be central to mitigating emotional exhaustion and subsequent burnout. Such supervisory practices may echo those purported to exist under a neoliberal paradigm (Walmsley, 2005), as discussed in Chapter 2. Perhaps ironically, a supervisor may struggle with a similar quandary faced by child protection workers: how does one provide allegiance and support to the frontline worker, while upholding the mandate of the program, especially at times when the effects of vocational distress impact work performance? Foster (2013) suggests that a preoccupation with “bureaucratic procedural requirements” will lessen a supervisor’s ability to receive subtle or nonverbal messages from staff. Rather than taking the increasingly popular managerial approach that centers on worker efficiency and accomplishment, Walker (2004) suggests a relational approach that involves providing “containment” for the emotions of the worker in much the same way that the worker does so for a service recipient. A supervisor may also shield a front-line worker from many of the effects of managerialism in general, as 203 well as other maladaptive trappings of organizational culture, which may produce a sense of disillusionment (Wheeler, 2007). An important point is that child protection workers with their own trauma histories do not generally respond to trauma-mitigating supervision as well as their professional peers do (Michalopoulos & Aparicio, 2012). Further, Etherington (2009) warns that a supervisor herself may experience a countertransference reaction or vicarious traumatization when working with a traumatized front-line worker. Because child protection workers (and subsequently their supervisors) are routinely exposed to angry outbursts and disdain from parents, Ferguson (2009) suggests the creation of “thinking spaces” which serve to diffuse strong emotional reactions on the part of the worker. Rather than providing protection against the effects of vicarious trauma, the supervisory relationship can also be implicated in the promotion of a pathologizing stance toward parents by staff. Supervisors can themselves fall subject to burnout, turning toward a self-protective and demanding stance. This can be viewed as a form of managerialism at the expense of leadership – becoming hard on the outside as a protective shell for the lonely, overburdened and vulnerable, and soft inside. This hardness, evident through increased unavailability and a rather sadistic use of boundaries, is communicated to staff, who in turn pass it onto clients (Foster, 2013). Finally, it appears that at least to some degree, a lack of effective frontline supervision may contribute to the emergence of a somewhat common dynamic or cycle. Considering the nature of the work is very demanding and inherently stressful, filling those positions requires hiring new graduates from social work programs, rather than seasoned senior child protection workers. Often, frontline child protection represents a BSW graduate’s very first social work position. Due to this fact, they may experience a 204 number of phenomena associated with simply being new. Perhaps this is a sharp learning curve or maybe imposter syndrome. Additionally, due to their inexperience, they are not afforded much professional autonomy or input by their supervisors regarding the stressful protection decisions for which they feel accountable. This phenomenon is aggravated by managerialism, which is designed to limit child protection workers’ professional discretion in general. As new workers tend to have few organizational “roots” (little career capital, pension, etc.) the prospect of leaving may appear as a good option. In turn, those who remain are responsible for the existing cases. In short, a difficult cycle of hiring and attrition is maintained. Correcting distorted thinking about service users. In terms of lessening the potentially unhelpful dynamic of over-identification between child protection worker and a family, it could be suggested that both organizations and individual helping professionals develop a position that draws distinctions between the identities of child protection workers and families in receipt of services. It has been suggested that over-identification with certain parents may lead some professionals to view them as “all good” or “all bad”. This occurs in response to perceived threats against the self but leads to a distortion in how one views others (Davies, 2008). In child protection, how one views a parent is extremely important. One’s perception must be very accurate when attempting to assess the safety of a child in the home. A helpful stance to be adopted involves cultivating the ability to view others as whole people, ambivalently characterized by both “good” and “bad” attributes. This serves to afford service users their own identity, relatively free from the projections and distortions of the child protection worker. 205 Mills (2012) suggests that on an individual level, anxieties experienced by a child protection worker can lead him or her into a “black or white” position. …the effects of thoughts about the potential consequences for children, should one of our initial assessments of risk be proved wrong, is the production of very high levels of stress. The idea that we might then be blamed for our incorrectness can become almost unthinkable (p. 309). Davies (2008) suggests that child protection workers must abandon their sense of “omnipotence” which may triggered by high stress, along with a kind of perfectionism: Social workers’ omnipotent fantasy that they are responsible for preventing child abuse thus transfers itself by analogy to mothers and if child abuse occurs, they are both held to account…. Like the unrealistic ideals of perfection we hold mothers to, social workers are bound to an implicit assumption of perfectibility also. Competent, effective social workers ought to be able to detect and prevent harm to children just as good mothers ought to be able to protect their children (p. 147). Instead, Davies (2008) suggests that through the supervisory process, child protection workers can learn to abandon their own anxiety-induced omnipotence and adopt a decidedly calmer and more rational stance; viewing both themselves and the parents with whom they work in an ambivalent way. The challenge is that this entails a “…sense of loss and sorrow in giving up both the idealization and denigration of themselves and the mothers they work with”, yet positively it creates a space where workers, becoming “…attuned to ambivalence can seize the opportunity to work with manageable ambivalence in helping clients find workable solutions” (p. 150). Child protection workers would likely be helped by letting go of a “performance mindset” both with regard to themselves and with the parents they work with. As a protection team or organization, a group may also adopt this stance. 206 When the level of anxiety generated by the task becomes too great for the group to manage instead of operating in work mode...the group falls into basic assumption functioning...meaning that the whole group colludes in this way (Foster, 2013, p. 121). What this means is that when protection concerns, extreme events, or emotionally charged occurrences increase the collective anxiety of a protection team, the group may abandon the more self-reflective and ambivalent position and take on the an all-or-nothing or “omnipotent” position. This is characterized by an intolerance of in-group differences, and anti-task behaviour (that is, behaviour focused on protecting from the task rather than working on the task). If the group leader can contain her own anxiety around a threatening task (such as a dangerous child protection occurrence or risk) Foster suggests that she can then lead the group through a process of considering the way in which the group has been reacting to the threat. This idea may hold special relevance when working with child protection workers such as the ones described in this study, who sometimes find it difficult to refrain from strongly identifying with and reacting to vocational situations that bear strong resemblance to their own adverse histories. Formalized and mandatory intervention programs for child protection workers. Finally, and in light of the above implications, it would be prudent for a nationally recognized program to be developed to prepare and assist incoming child protection workers in their field. It is no longer acceptable for child welfare agencies to expect their employees simply to “keep their personal and professional lives separate” or to view the incursion of past memories into their practice as their own private burden 207 to bear. This responsibility would be borne by both schools of social work as well as child protection agencies. I propose a psycho-educational program for child protection workers that is grounded in the following presuppositions: • That a significant proportion of all child protection workers have had adverse and traumatic childhood experiences in their families of origin that have not been addressed or addressed adequately in a therapeutic setting. • That many have entered the profession consciously or unconsciously in an attempt to reconcile or give meaning to these past experiences. • That these past experiences could be a source of strength and insight while working with families within the child protection system. • That these past experiences also represent a tangible peril with regard to risk assessment and decision-making with regard to children and families. • That these past experiences put them at direct risk for further forms of trauma, burnout, and eventual departure from the profession. Such a program would be useful in addressing and perhaps mitigating the effects of such emotional triggers in child protection workers. Limitations of the Study A number of limitations will be specifically discussed in this section. The first limitation is found in the manner of sample recruitment. This study employed a purposive sampling method. Those who responded to the recruiting flyer and met the criteria for inclusion were included. This introduces self-selection bias into the sampling 208 process. It could be argued that those with a personal interest in the subjects of childhood memories and professional practice may have been uniquely drawn to the study. As such, the sample could not be said to be representative in any way with regard to the total population of child protection workers. Hence, one cannot generalize the findings in any kind of dependable way. Second, as a qualitative study, the results are descriptive in nature and should not connote or be misconstrued to suggest causality of any kind. The study is purely exploratory in terms of what is sought by the researcher. This topic had not yet been explored in this way with this population and therefore the study was essentially limited to the question “what is?” Third, and closely related to the previous limitation, the study used a cross-sectional design and is therefore restricted to “snapshot” accounts. As there was only one interview conducted with each participant, the I had limited opportunity for post-analysis clarification. This also means that the study relied heavily on retrospective accounts and is therefore limited with regard to its capacity to demonstrate causality. Fourth, the study was conducted by a nascent researcher. The study interviews were quite broad and could have been more focused on the dynamic of child protection workers’ memories and their relevance to practice. More time could have been spent “circling back” to descriptions of triggering experiences with queries as to the attributed meanings of these difficult moments. This limitation is reflected in the recommendations for future study. 209 Future Study There are two points for consideration with regard to future study. The first is a caution about the way in which these kinds of data might be used. It is not my intention that this research be used to gauge the suitability of individuals to child protection work. For instance, one could not say that “childhood adversity of such a type predisposes such a worker to such a vulnerability”. Those kinds of determinations are not clear based on this study. Indeed, future researchers would be cautioned not to infer such a conclusion from similar sorts of studies. Second, a number of possible subsequent studies sound promising. Future research of a phenomenological type in this area may be well given to case studies, as well as in-depth interviews with very small samples. As mentioned in the limitations section, more time to carefully analyze, perhaps in dialogue with the participants, the experience of triggering and countertransference in child protection workers would likely prove illuminating. In addition, a correlational study pertaining to the (apparently connected) variables of various experiences of childhood maltreatment in relation to presently experienced triggers may be in order. Finally, research inclusive of formative adult experiences, as well as present-day personal experiences in reference to professional practice would be interesting avenues for exploration. 210 Chapter Seven: Conclusion Personal Sketch IV I debated including a final, personal narrative in this document because of the delicate nature of its subject matter. As mentioned in the preceding personal sketches, this project was founded on both my own story and the stories of many other child protection workers who witnessed in themselves a phenomenon of experiencing the past via the present; of being subject to powerful memories and emotions seemingly summoned by exposure to like events in the course of our work. Oftentimes, we have noticed that in the presence of a “selfish mother,” an “angry dad” or a child who bears a striking contextual resemblance to our past self, our minds inadvertently call forth some banished memory or repressed emotion. This can be an uncomfortable experience, especially when it occurs in a setting that demands professionalism, clear-headedness, and unconditional positive regard. A few years ago, a child protection colleague of mine took her own life. I will not pretend to suggest that I know all of the reasons why. What I do know is that she said she had been burdened for some time by disillusionment in her work. She also had a big heart for people and selflessly preferred to hear the stories of others above telling her own. She told me once that she too often takes on the emotional pain of her families. Much to my regret, I did not ask how I could support her in this. I often wonder if her death could have been prevented if only our field had an effective means of identifying and addressing emotional trauma, cumulative stress, and mental un-wellness in its child protection workers. 211 I have included these personal sketches so that my biases might be made known to the reader, but also because they provide evidence for the profound need of governments, social service agencies, schools of social work, and individual child protection workers to take deliberate steps to mitigate the harm that predictably arises when one’s personal concerns and troubles interface with the difficult work of child protection. The Mandate for Worker Safety in Child Welfare Child protection workers strive to intervene professionally in the lives of families in a multitude of ways in order to meet their mandate for service: to improve the lives of children in line with their best interests. Child protection workers are generally very competent in this role, but they are also human beings and therefore vulnerable to emotional and psychological harm in the course of their work. The research question considered the ways in which a sample of child protection workers experienced and interpreted childhood memories in light of their child protection practice. One simple answer is that they experienced those memories in typically human ways. That is, their humanity became apparent in that those memories, often traumatic and painful, permeated the ways in which they thought about their work, their families, and their helping roles. These workers, after all, are not machines, but rather fall subject to the life maladies that befall every person. Yet it might be suggested that the vast social service systems developed to provide child protective services to the public do not fully recognize this humanity. Born of modernism and corporatism, influenced by neoliberalism, and therefore affected by 212 managerialism, struggling child protection workers are often treated as cogs of steel or components of computerized case management systems rather than human beings of flesh and blood. Ironically, it is often those whose vocation it is to promote human health and well-being who suffer by virtue of their participation in the social work field. It should be noted that the research participants had their own agendas for involvement in this study. Some simply wanted to tell their story. Most wanted to express their needs as child protection workers. Nearly all carefully complained about heavy caseloads, frustrations with management, and a lack of resources. Most had weathered horrific kinds of abuse and neglect and some still bore the scars of this, whether physical or psychological. Yet for each participant, their altruism was readily apparent. Each was driven by an overwhelming concern for the well-being of children, typically informed and inspired by their own life-stories. As such, these workers ought to be honoured and recognized. However more than this, they deserve to be protected and tended to as they perform this difficult work. In the same way that construction workers are mandated to wear hard hats and steel-toed boots, child protection workers should be provided with tools to provide for their emotional and psychological safety. In the same way that police officers undergo mandated high-quality counselling and sometimes special leave after taking a life in the course of their work, child protection workers ought to be provided with a plethora of services and benefits to promote and restore their emotional and psychological health after traumatic interactions with families. The larger effect of such compassionate enhancements would be improved service delivery to families and greater well-being among service providers. 213 Finally, I have also been called upon to reflect on my own research and its effect on me. On a personal level, I found the participant interviews to be profoundly moving. I found myself sharing tears with many of the participants. Perhaps ironically, it could be said that I was both moved and triggered by their stories whenever those stories resembled my own. That idea is certainly in keeping with the overarching theme of the study: that one’s experience in the here-and-now is inescapably linked to the memories of the past. This time of personal reflection led to a final and profound question about my research. I contend that child protection workers often pursue the profession in an attempt to find healing from and to assign meaning to their past suffering. Yet could the same be said about me with regard to this research? Did I in fact pursue my course of doctoral research based on an unconscious attempt to recover from or somehow salvage my own travails within the child welfare profession? While the answer is not entirely clear to me at this point, I cannot deny what is fully conscious to me: I have witnessed repeated instances of utter disillusionment, despair, demise within many of my colleagues. It is a tragic irony to me that those who journey into the profession to rescue others are themselves dashed upon the rocks. 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(Under what conditions?). 2a What are the client narratives that ‘trigger” memories? 3. How does the worker respond to those memories? OR 3 (What specific effects does this traumatic memory have on the worker – psychological, psychodynamic, physiological etc.?) 4. Do worker’s childhood traumatic memories influence their subjective sense of well-being at work? 5. In what specific ways do worker’s childhood memories influence their practice? Interview Questions 1. Can you tell me about yourself and what led you to become a child protection worker? 2. Can you tell me about the work you do? 246 Prompt: Is there anything on a personal level that makes this work meaningful for you? Is there anything about the work that you find difficult or frustrating? Can you tell me about some of the emotions you feel while doing this work? 3. Can you tell me about a time when memories of your own childhood came up for you in practice? Prompt: Can you give me an example of this? What was the memory? What was the client situation or practice context? What were you thinking about as you went through it? What effect do you think it had on you? Any effect on your practice? How did you make sense of it? 247 Appendix B: Recruiting Flyer “Social Workers, Memories, and Practice” Would you like to share your experience? Are you a child protection social worker working as a family service or intake worker? Are you open to sharing about your work experiences as well as some of your own childhood memories? If so, you are invited to take part in an interview about your experiences. ● Participate in an interview lasting 1-1.5 hours ● Tell us about what your work is like in child protection ● Share experiences of your childhood and how they relate to what you do now ● Contribute to the understanding of policy makers, educators, and other professionals regarding the issues you face ● Participation is completely voluntary and anonymous The study is led by Dr. Brian Rasmussen, Associate Professor at UBCO School of Social Work, and Sean St. Jean, MSW, Ph.D. Candidate at UBCO College of Graduate Studies To find out more, please contact Sean St. Jean at sean.st.jean@alumni.ubc.ca or at (604) 367-6101 248 Appendix C: Consent Form Research Participant Consent Form In What Ways Do Social Workers Experience, and Make Sense of, Their Own Childhood Memories in the Context of Their Child Protection Practice? Who is conducting the study? Principal Investigator: Dr. Brian Rasmussen, UBCO School of Social Work, (250) 807-8743 Co-Investigator: Sean St. Jean, MSW, Ph.D. Candidate, UBCO College of Graduate Studies, (604) 367-6101 This research is conducted as a doctoral degree requirement and will contribute toward the production of a doctoral thesis. This thesis will be accessible by the public. Why should you take part in this study? You have been invited to take part as a participant because we want to learn more about the ways in which child protection social workers experience and make sense of their own childhood memories, especially within the context of their own social work practice. The study will use in-person interviews with 8-10 child protection social workers to get information about their memories, how they feel about those memories, and how those memories surface for them as they go about their work. How is the study conducted? If you choose to participate, we will conduct a single interview with you that will take between one and one and a half hours. It will be in a private location that we have mutually agreed upon. We will ask you some questions about your current work in child protection, about your childhood memories, and about your feelings related to your work and your childhood memories. We will be seeking descriptions of each, as well as your interpretation of what those mean. 249 The interview will be audio recorded with a digital recorder. How will the study results be reported? The results of this study will be reported in a graduate thesis and may also be published in journal articles and books. If you would like a copy of the results of the study, please provide your email address here: _________________________. If you would like to discuss the results of the study, you may call the Co-Investigator, Sean St. Jean, MSW, at (604) 367-6101. Is there any way being in this study could be bad for you? We do not think that there is anything in this study that could harm you or be bad for you. Some of the questions we ask may seem sensitive or personal or could cause some emotional discomfort. You do not have to answer any question if you do not want to. There is some social and economic risk to you. The Okanagan contains a relatively small population of child protection social workers and therefore failure to adequately prevent identifying information from being released could lead to some social and employment consequences. We will address this by carefully vetting all transcripts and other documents to ensure that all of your identifying information, including descriptions of unique scenarios, are rendered anonymous. There is more information about how we will protect your identity below. Please let the Co-Investigator know if you have any concerns. Can I withdraw from the study? You may choose to withdraw from the study, even after your interview has been concluded. This means that if you withdraw consent we will not publish any information we received from you and will destroy all our records of our work with you. After the thesis is published, it will be impossible to destroy the anonymous information you provided because that information will have been distributed. However if you request it, we will destroy all of your other information such as this consent form, the interview transcripts, and any anonymized quotes you have provided. What are the benefits of participating in this study? This study has been designed to help us to understand what it is like when child protection workers’ own childhood memories come up for them in their work. This may lead to new insights that contribute to improved support, interventions, and working conditions, that make the child protection work environment better for you and others in your field. All participants will be entered into a draw for a $100 gift card to a local spa. 250 How will your identity be protected? Your identity will not be disclosed to any party, and will be kept confidential. MCFD will not know that you participated in this study. All documents and audio recordings will be identified only by a code number and will be kept in a locked filing cabinet at UBC Okanagan. Subjects will not be identified by name in any reports of the completed study. After the study is finished, your information will be held for in the same locked cabinet for five years after the publication of the doctoral thesis in accordance with Policy 85 on Scholarly Integrity. The thesis will be available for you and others to read on cIRcle. Information that discloses your identity will not be released without your consent unless required by law. At any point in the study, if you reveal that there has been an incident that involves abuse and/or neglect of a child or an elderly person (or that there is a risk of such occurring) please be advised that the researcher must, by law, report this information to the appropriate authorities. Who can you contact if you have questions about this study? If you have any questions or concerns about what we are asking of you, please contact the study leader or the study staff. The names and telephone numbers are listed at the top of the first page of this form. Who can you contact if you have complaints or concerns about the study? If you have any concerns or complaints about your rights as a research participant and/or your experiences while participating in this study, contact the Research Participant Complaint Line in the UBC Office of Research Ethics toll free at 1-877-822-8598 or the UBC Okanagan Research Services Office at 250-807-8832. It is also possible to contact the Research Complaint Line by email (RSIL@ors.ubc.ca). Taking part in this study is entirely up to you. You have the right to refuse to participate in this study. If you decide to take part, you may choose to pull out of the study at any time without giving a reason and without any negative impact on you. Your signature below indicates that you have received a copy of this consent form for your own records. Your signature indicates that you consent to participate in this study. 251 ____________________________________________________ Participant Signature Date ____________________________________________________ Printed Name of the Participant signing above
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Today in light of yesterday : a phenomenological study of child protection workers’ vocational experiences as informed by memories of childhood
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