The Trust Between The Social Worker And Children
Social workers are trained skilled professionals that promote human rights and wellbeing. They use a range of legal and social work knowledge to build relationships with service users to help solve their problems and bring positive change to their lives. Social work is a varied, demanding and very rewarding occupation (BSAW, 2019).
Social workers work with communities, adults, children and families often tackling issues such as poverty, social exclusion, a lack of housing, crime and abuse. They often specialise in a specific field of work, for example working with adults with disabilities or mental health problems, or safeguarding children. They can work for local authorities, health organisations including the NHS, voluntary organisations, charities, and private businesses. (BSAW, 2021) A social worker's duties that set them apart from other groups in human services can include but are not limited to, investigations of child abuse allegations, and supervising children In the care of the local authority (Thompson. N, 2005).
As a collaborative profession, social workers work alongside other agencies and organisations such as the police, health visitors, local authority departments, schools and the probation service. Social workers must use the same skills they use with clients to make strong collaborative relationships with other professionals. By doing this they work together to gain a full overview of a service users situation, for example, a child protection panel could be used to achieve this.
Social work is one of the caring or helping professions, but alongside this a social worker has elements of social control. Care vs control is a dual responsibility, an example of this is cases where children are believed to need protection from abuse, the social worker has to balance the need to ensure the child's safety with the risk of breaking up families unnecessarily through over intrusive interventions. A very careful judgement has to be made about whether and how to intervene, if a child is removed from home the social worker may be criticised for breaking up the family. However, if the child is left at home the social worker may be criticised for failing to protect the child. The media reinforce this damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
Social work has unfortunately developed a very poor media image, especially within the newspapers who portray them in a very negative way. The most popular myth about social workers is that they are all child snatchers when actually the desired result is to keep families together whenever possible. Not only does this sometimes affect the social worker by possibly having an impact on their morale, but it mainly affects the service users by giving them a lack of faith in the social worker which in turn causes a reluctance to engage or deter them from seeking out help in the fear that their children might be removed.
