Personal safety for social workers in child welfare

Social workers, particularly those in child welfare agencies face considerable risks to their personal safety.Unfortunately, many new social workers are not aware of these risks or how to prevent or manage them.This practicum explores this issue in several ways.It includes a comprehensive literature review, data about and from a Personal Safety Training Program that was designed for and delivered to social work students, a survey of front-line social workers at Winnipeg Child and Family Services and a survey of child welfare agencies throughout Canada.Although the actual number of serious physical assaults against social workers is quite low, there was a tremendous amount of support suggesting that this is a very relevant issue.Personal safety training programs seem to be quite effective in preparing social workers for the risks that they may face in the worlace as they can increase their awareness, knowledge, skills and confidence.Training programs, however, must not be used in isolation but rather part of a comprehensive safety plan.VI After the plans were made for the apprehension and placement of this teen, I left the off,rce in order to attend the funeral of a family friend.After the service, I returned to work to complete the apprehension.The teen's mother was opposed to the apprehension but agreed that we could stop at the home so that she could see her child and her child could collect some of her clothing and personal belongings.The mother had sounded completely reasonable on the telephone when these plans were made.When we attended to the home, I was surprised and completely unprepared for the mother's anger and hostility.She physically prevented her daughter from leaving the home and was verbally abusive and physically threatening towards me.Perhaps due to my inexperience and also because I had been emotionally drained from the earlier funeral service, I was unable to de-escalate and resolve the situation.Luckily for me, the woman called my offrce to complain to my supelvisor that I had no right to take her daughter.Through some good luck and quick thinking on the part of my supervisor and colleagues, a colleague was able to find out where I was and came to the home where she promptly defused the situation and the apprehension was completed without fuither incident.Approximately one year later,I was involved with another family (a mother and her pre- school son).My role was simply to ensure that the mother knew of appropriate resources as her son had been sexually assaulted by a third parry.The police were already involved in that investigation.'With no contrary information, it was assumed that there was no reason to believe that the mother was unable to ensure her son's safety.Before I was able to meet with the mother, the agency's after-hours unit had received a number of calls that the boy was unsafe due to the mother's drinking.These concerns could not be substantiated and the caller was believed not to be credible.One day, the caller called me directly again expressing his concem that the boy was unsafe due to the mother's drinking.I would have gone to her apartment on my own to check out the caller's concerns and inform the mother of resources but a colleague joined me as we were in the process of working on another case together at the same time.We were not prepared for what we found when we attended to the family's apartment.The door had been kicked in and there was blood and broken liquor bottles all over.The mother was extremely intoxicated while the boy watched television beside her.As we entered the apartment a friend of the mother's fled.We called police for assistance and knew that we had to apprehend the child.My plan was to wait for the police before proceeding with the apprehension but my colleague knew better.She began telling the mother that we were apprehending her son.The mother became upset and started fumbling with the telephone to call her lawyer.At this time, my colleague advised me to pick up the boy and we quickly fled the apartment.My colleague then explained and pointed out to me that we did not know if there was anyone else in the apartment, there had obviously been a lot of drinking and violence in the apartment, my client's friend may return perhaps with others and we did not know how long police would take to get there.She advised me that in those situations it is best to remove ourselves and children in need of protection as quickly as possible.Upon further consideration I knew that she had been right and later learned that it had taken the police several hours to attend to our call.In this situation, I was very fortunate to have had an experienced and skilled colleague with me.Much later They explain fuither that the practicum must be more than simply practical work experience or an apprenticeship, but rather must be carefully designed to enable the student to learn how to think and act as a professional social worker.The practicum or f,reld instructor is a professional social worker who is usually employed by the field placement agency and is responsible for assigning tasks, evaluating progress and ongoing day-to-day instruction.Among other things, the field instructor must match student skills, qualities, and potential with the services provided by the agency, and must protect the clients from the effors that could be made bv the student.In September of 1997 I became a f,reld instructor to a student in the BSW program at the U of M. I began to instruct another student in September of 1998.I found that these two students were much like I was as a new employee of WCFS.They were smart, hard working, and eager to please but also very naive about child welfare issues and the personal safety risks that they would face in the worlace.I took my responsibilities as a field instructor very seriously.I felt very responsible for the service that clients received, the students' learning experiences, and their personal safety.I was often criticized by my colleagues that I did too much with and for the students and that I simply should have let them'Jump" into the responsibilities of a child welfare worker.I did not feel that this approach was appropriate for a field instructor and would not be in the best interest of the student, clients or the agency.Through f,reld instruction, I found that if not for me in my role as field instructor, the students would not learn about the personal safety risks that they would face in child welfare work, or how to prevent or manage volatile situations.I began to think how unfortunate and potentially dangerous it was that students were not receiving formal training in this area.If I had not prioritized personal safety issues but taken my colleagues' laissez-faire approach to field instruction then the students may have been forced to learn on the job, like I and many others did.I began to feel that this was far too risky and serious of an issue to simply let students learn as they go.It was not fair to the students or the clients.The volatile situations that I described earlier were successfully completed without violence however there is no guarantee of this and social workers can and do get hurt on thejob.Perhaps challenged by the field instructor responsibilities, I could not help but think that there was more that the U of M BSW program and/or WCFS should do to prepare social work students for the personal safety risks they would face in the course of their work with WCFS.Feeling that I wanted to play a role in addressing this issue, I began fuither research into the personal safety of social workers and this practicum emerged.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.