Interviewee
Dr Martin Smith, Team Manager, Buckinghamshire Social Services Emergency Duty Team, Bucks, UK
Article
Smith, M. (2007) Smoke without fire? Social workers' fears of threats and accusations. Journal of Social Work Practice, 21(3):323-35
Summary
Fear of assault was found to be the top fear for social workers, followed by fear of death, losing control and being disapproved of respectively. For IPP-SHR Podcasts Michael Bouwman spoke with Dr Martin Smith about the fears social workers face every day in their working lives. Discussed was the notion that the perceived threat is just as serious as an attack; the building up of the expectation of the threat, and the consequences of being over-fearful and emphasising the threat can be greater than the threat itself. Martin noted that in such cases, an ordinary exchange can impinge on a worker's confidence and can be a catalyst for the onset of extreme fear, reducing the person into a non-person. Good supervision and support can help workers identify the fear spectrum and act before it impacts negatively on them.
Transcript
Michael Bouwman: I’m Michael Bouwman and today I’m introducing Dr Martin Smith, who is the Team Manager of Buckinghamshire Social Services Emergency Duty Team in the United Kingdom, about his paper, ‘Smoke without fire? Social workers' fears of threats and accusations’, which is published in the Journal of Social Work Practice. Our congratulations on your work, would you set the stage for our listeners by defining the term ‘threat’ and talk about the categories of social workers’ fear that you’ve documented in your qualitative research study.
Martin Smith: Certainly, the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a threat as a: ‘declaration of intention to punish or hurt’. Because it was a declaration of intention, a threat is only stated a level of a threat, means that nothing’s happened, it’s constitutes an intention which may or may not be carried out. For the purposes of my research I interviewed 60 social workers and 12 councillors, and I just asked them to describe an experience of fear in their work. And essentially it came to four categories: fear of assault was, way and above, the top fear; fear of death was the second fear; and then fear of losing control, being overwhelmed and breaking down, and fear of being disapproved of or rejected by their managers.
Michael Bouwman: And you mentioned the notion that perceived threats should be treated as seriously as actual attacks. Could you elaborate on that idea?
Martin Smith: Actually, I think we have more to fear from what we perceive than what actually happens. And this is a point that can be seen across different aspects of culture. For example: the renowned horror writer Stephen King mentions this in terms of horror stories and horror films, where the emphasis is, on the first part of the film, building up the expectation of threat or concern. There’s an expression in the altonement which says, “we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Somebody in my research came out with this expression saying, “the threats were real,” and that I found very interesting because as we’ve established, a threat in itself is nothing, but, this person’s saying the threat’s were real. What she’s saying is she’s giving the threat the reality.
Michael Bouwman: Yes, in your paper you balance that perspective by arguing that social workers should not be over fearful, because their own un-thought through and uncontained fears can bring about adverse consequences that would not happen were it possible to contain them. Would you elaborate on that argument and provide some examples from practice.
Martin Smith: Again coming back to how things work in horror films, we’re sort of used to seeing people trying to escape something, but their very attempts to escape actually take them further and further into the thing they’re trying to escape from. If our minds are filled with what might go wrong, what might happen to us, we haven’t really got the space that we need to pay attention to important details regarding some other important thing; we’re going to miss them. Now I’ve got particular examples from my research. So, this was from a female worker, she described a man she was working with, I’m quoting from her now, “A man was being verbally abusive, he was pointing his finger effing and blinding. I wanted his child to be examined, I was afraid that he would make complaints about me, I was afraid of the reaction of management if he did. I was afraid he was going to hit me or something worse - kill me. It was intensely difficult for several weeks, he was a violent man with a criminal record. I would dream of the family threatening me. I began to dream the man was following me, he held me prisoner at knife point and he stabs me. I’m more frightened when I’m in my work office than I am when I’m out visiting people. The people who deal with complaints haven’t got a clue about we’re doing; it’s got worse recently. I’m happier when I’m visiting clients even that difficult one, compared to the fear that I feel in the office.”
Michael Bouwman: You focus on two specific perceived threats in your article, firstly, the fears of losing control, being overwhelmed and breaking down, and, secondly the fears of being disapproved of or rejected by managers. Would you describe these particular fears with examples from your research?
Martin Smith: We’ve seen, from that quote I’ve just given you, what starts as like a kind of ordinary exchange then kind of gains momentum to the point where the workers confidence is undermined to the point that she feels in danger of breaking down. There was another respondent from my research who gave an example from his area in Northern Ireland, where he was threatened by somebody. The man thought the social worker had threatened to remove his children, although he hadn’t, and the man was known to be in a paramilitary organisation, he’d been involved in a murder that was two avenues away from where the man lived, and he said, “it made a significant impact on me. It was like the bottom had dropped out of your world.” This use of ‘your world’ was very interesting because a number of people did that in the research, it was as if the fear gets too close, so instead of it being, the bottom had dropped out of my world, which is what you were saying, he actually phrases it, the bottom had dropped out of your world. They want to talk about the fear, but they also want to distance themselves from it. [Quote continues] “I shared it with my wife; I was concerned for any possible danger to her or my young family. Even though there was only a nought point one percent chance of anything happening, I needed to share it with her. I was aware of altering my routes, being more aware of my personal safety, I became more vigilant and security conscious, I avoided going to the road where the man resides in case I may come to his mind. I needed to remove my name from the hospital records that said I was to be contacted and replaced this with contact the office instead.” Now I think that’s a very crucial statement which has kind of meaning beyond what it says, in terms of identity. This is the extreme of fear that it kind of reduces the person into a non-person, it’s replaced with the anonymous office. Although what I got was pretty harrowing accounts from people, all the people I spoke to were still in work. The ones with the real stories to tell would be the ones who hadn’t been able to return to work as a result of their fears, who had lost control to the extent of being out of a job. The second fear, about being disapproved of and rejected by managers, this is illustrated by complaints procedures and how people know that they can use complaints against workers as a way of undermining them. This is another quote: “I came back to dictate my notes from a difficult visit to a client’s mother who shrieked at me down the phone, saying I’d broken confidentiality and she was going to lodge a complaint against me, which she did. I did experience a real sense of fear about what was being confronted; the fear of being confronted by my manager was something that had impinged on my practice. A real, somehow genuine fear, going over in my minds eyes – what did I say? What did I do? It was a primitive fear about being accused at some very simple level of having done something bad.” Soon as she said this, this reminded me of the opening sentence of Kafka’s, The Trial: somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K because without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
Michael Bouwman: And lastly Martin, what are the practice implications of your work?
Martin Smith: It really did surprise me how powerfully fears of threats and accusations featured in this research. After a while I realised that it was really sort of tied in with the business of complaints, which I think has really gained momentum in recent years. But I thought that physical assault would be much more likely to appear, and so what this has shown me actually is, how much of a preoccupation it is for social workers, particularly, the fear of being threatened and accused. And I think crucially this applied sort of generally to my research but, for all of us there’s a need to get a balance when we’re kind of responding to fear. There is a marvellous book by Gavin De Becker called The Gift of Fear, and what he’s saying is that, essentially fear, since time began, in human beings and animals, that it’s essential function is to protect. Its essential function is to ensure survival, because if people don’t have fear then they pretty soon end up seriously hurt or dead. There’s an extent to which fear is helpful to us. But if you carry on along the continuum, it can become paralysing and people can die as a result of their fear, as I have mentioned earlier in this interview. So, I think in an ideal world we kind of choose the optimum point on that continuum, where by we’re helped by the gift of fear. For a realistic helpful fear that helps to ensure caution, good practice and survival has got to be good for us. But carried too far the fears will be paralysing, tongue tying and mind stopping, and prevent reason thought and appropriate action. So for the individual worker confronted by fear my findings to my research would suggest to them that they’re really going to be helped to weigh up both, to try and appreciate both ends of the continuum and place themselves somewhere in the middle. In an ideal world they’d have good supervision and good support from their agency and their organisation, that will help them in this process. Unfortunately, as was evident from my research, often the organisation itself is regarded as punitive and punishing, and indeed, for some extent , almost like a poisonous bureaucracy, and here again we come back to Kafka; so that the organisation, far from being helpful, is unhelpful. Ideally, for me, it would be the worker recognising the ideal point along the continuum, being helped to recognise that by a supervisor, and in turn is helped to recognise that via supportive and understanding organisation.
Michael Bouwman: Fantastic, well many thanks for talking with us today Martin.
Martin Smith: OK
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