Hi Phillip!

Having read your comment I wondered if you could help me. Are you an independent social worker by any chance?

I am a third year Early Childhood Studies student looking for practicing independent social workers to complete a questionnaire for my dissertation! The dissertation is based upon the social workers perspective of how their learnt practice enables them to help maltreated children with feelings of shame. I am particularly interested in the correlation between early maltreatment and crime, looking at the emotion of shame as a mediator between the two! This is the basis for my research.

I noticed you commented on the areas that university courses are lacking, which is almost exactly what I am researching, but in relation to the emotions related to early maltreatment that have a tendency to significantly effect outcomes for children.

If you are an independent social worker and can offer your time to fill out one of my questionnaires that would be wonderful and so helpful! I will comment back with means of contact if you can.

Thank you for your time!

There is another level of pressure and stress, completely apolitical, that often neither body addresses – lived experience. Attempts in recent years to have survivors included at Board tables or engaged in committees with joint representation have mostly failed. Survivors, when listing barriers in society they face, frequently cite the social workers and other service providers as being as far removed from reality as the social workers might claim the research arm of academia is.

So even with achievements in the battle for the governments’ pennies, social justice activists fall short of reaching people who need assistance.

Further, the front line workers and organizations are so caught up in the political war of daily survival (over 300 turned away from full shelters in Canada EVERY night), that by necessity the majority of their work is reactive or crisis oriented. They are reduced to “putting out fires” instead of preventing the arsonists from starting them.

In our community, survivors are now working WITH the community at large, including as many collaborative efforts as possible with Violence Against Women sector front line representatives. We have some and are seeking more survivors, men, women, representation from marginalized people (youth, Elders, Immigrants, Aboriginals, Disabled persons, and LGBTQ). We are working with the educational institutions to put names and faces to that research angle. We are proactively educating and advocating through public awareness to PREVENT woman abuse.

Within the VAW sector, once very supportive of our efforts, we are now often shunned. Whether this is due to politics, jealousy or a lack of respect for the lived experience, or the fact that we invite men to worth WITH women as opposed to in silos, is unclear. We continue to focus on collaboration wherever we have the opportunity.

Interestingly enough, some of our members are academics or professional family therapists. Also interesting is the fact that as we have no source of funding at present, we are not bound by politics or bureaucracy. As a result, we have accomplished more in the year since we opened our doors to the community than in the previous five years treating woman abuse as a “women’s” issue.

In fact, we are working proactively to end domestic violence, have expanded our scope to include sexual assault and other forms of violence, and have reason to hope that we are actually making a difference by using combined resources of lived experience, academia, public or published statistics and research reports and front line experience.

However, most of all, our hope rests with the willing and able involvement and support from municipal governments, local MP’s and MPP’s, and, of course the residents and employers in our community.

There are many gaps to be bridged in all aspects of social justice. We encourage you to continue to bridge them for all the advantages collaboration can bring, to make your projects proactive in nature, and to engage people who have lived experience to share in all you do.

Help those of us who are survivors ensure that the trauma we survived is not in vain, and can be used to support others like us effectively. Thank you.

I agree with all of the replys to your article. Glad I am not alone in the struggles.

Couldn’t agree more.

It is the integration of theory and practice that is so crucially lacking in many areas of the university curriculum and, indeed, in a large percentage of the training courses on offer from many providers. There is a real, tangible space (void) between ‘awareness’ raising courses on the one hand and the research/academia of the universities.

That space is currently occupied by the practitioner struggling to put into practice what is disseminated and battling stress, high caseloads, low morale hot desking, little practical admin support, high turnover rates… noted here:

https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2017/02/23/15k-bonuses-sabbaticals-culture-change-council-fixing-social-worker-retention-crisis/

As this article notes, solutions need to be multi-faceted and innovative and must include high quality training that enables the practitioner to be able to ‘ground’ the reality of day to day practice with academia and legislation. There are some excellent AMHP courses that illustrate just what can be done and this way of teaching, based on realities of practice, should become the norm.

My employer did a deal with one of the local universities that led to them delivering a series of training days for every social worker in the authority. They were so far removed from relevant to our actual work that attendance quickly shrank to something only a tad over 50% of eligible staff.

It left me thinking the Unis have more to learn about the job they are meant to be preparing students for than most of them would care to admit – I’m sure there must be a connection between this and the emphasis / value reportedly placed on research (aka. hiding in academia) over preparation for practice (aka. teaching about the real job).

Please don’t get the impression I don’t value research, I also am a practitioner who manages to combine it with daily work and I also spent several years teaching & tutoring uni. students, I just want to see universities in closer touch with the world of work for which they are meant to prepare their students.

Failing that there’ll be no improvement in retention of new social workers who are fed on (important) theory about politics and idealised aspirations for social change and stuff like that but a paucity of skills for integrating those aspirations into the realities of the field of employment and for even surviving never mind thriving therein.