Skid, what has changed in the counseling/social worker culture that has made this so? I assume it corresponds to the overall pussification and neurotiificaion of America, but would be interested to get your take.
It's the "I am a victim" syndrome. Rather than accept responsibility, the blame must be placed on someone else. That plus the fact that there are tilecrawlers that agree that someone with deep pockets ought to be the "responsible" party.
"Child neglect" is so broad and ambiguous that you could, if you had a cold, be found guilty if you breathed in the same room as a kid. "Abuse" OTOH requires not just an injury but an injury of a specific minimum degree.
The other part is that social work/counseling no longer even bothers to try to fix what is wrong. All that takes place is (most often) going through the motions of "doing something", and when they can't get away with that the fallback is to give up and find the easiest way of makig the problem no longer exist - with kids it's to remove them and put them in foster care and then walk away from everything. The law says that efforts must be made to reintegrate the family and to return the kids to their parents' home. Written goals must be submitted to the juvenile court for approval and then periodic monitoring (reports submitted).
All that matters nowadays is that the goals are written and signed off on, and that they periodic reports are submitted. If a goal is not accomplished it is the fault of some other person at some other agency/company and the most you might be able to do is terminate the contract - except they are the only game in town because the welfare system rigged it that way.
Goals I have seen are both meaningless and impossible to measure, let alone attain. Those goals also involve sending the "client" to somebody else. When I was in the business I was the primary provider for almost all services and counseling for all my cases (usual load was 75). I referred to outside for things like medical care (they would not let me practice medicine without a license, the fools!). Kids who needed tutoring to catch up? If I had to frog-march the parents into the school to request after-school assistance I did it. Kids need halfway decent clothes? I made life hell for them until the parents went down to the clothing closet and handed over the voucher with my name on it. Parent needed a job but had no way to get to one? The most I would do, besides badgering them mercilessly, was to take them down to the church that ran a transportation ministry so they could ask for help - and then hounded them on payday about how much money goes towards eventually buying a car.
Back then I realized it and never had any qualms about it - I was acting as their parent. And a very demanding parent, too. That's because most of them had never been parented so had no idea of how to parent their kids.
For the parents who beat their kids? It did not matter so much why they stopped, which seems to be the goal these days. My goal was for it to stop, and then maybe to address issues of why that was the preferred means of dealing with whatever they were dealing with. But doing that was all gravy - getting the hitting stopped was the meat.
When kids and parents could not safely stay together my first choice was to get the parent to leave. If that was not possible (and I had a lot of ways to persuade them to consider doing so that are no longer legal or socially appropriate
) I'd try to find a relative or family friend that would take the kids. Only if there were still problems with the "offending" parent did I seek legal custody of the kids - again a stick in my bag of sticks to either prod the parent or tie a carrot to in order to entice them in the direction I wanted them to go. I had my own foster homes - others in the agency could use them but had to get approval from the director. Why? Because those foster parents worked their asses off trying to make up for years of bad or nonexistent parenting and I did not want them worn out with kids/families that almost anybody could deal with. Also, all but one of "my" foster homes were specially trained to deal with kids who had been sexually abused or seriously injured by their parent(s) - I needed to have the rooms available.
If you are not catching it, I freely admit I was a know-it-all dictator. But the thing is I would stack my record up against anybody else's - numbers of kids who were no longer abused/neglected, numbers of parents who learned what kids needed socially and emotionally and were able to provide those things, and most importantly of all the numbers of kids who grew up and did not perpetuate the cycle. All of those were to me much more important than the numbers of kids graduating high school or more necessary, being able to hold a job that paid enough so they wrre not a leech on the taxpayers.
Going back to goals - many times the only goal I could get the parents to agree to* was the goal of the welfare man not coiming out any more. It was in the steps we agreed on* that needed to be taken to achieve that goal where all the magic happened.
I also cultivated a close professional relationship with the judge in the juvenile court. I became an advisor he could trust, and fed him options to pick from instead of leaving him hanging with a report of how things were no better after X months. He repaid that by taking pains to "suggest" to the domestic relations lawyers that appeared in his court that I might be helpful - to the point that a divorce mediation service was set up several years before the state got their fingers in that pie. They got paid a little less but were not tearing out their hair. I got paid (always good). And families walked away a little bit less bitter or maybe even happy.
And in order to accomplish all that I needed to work
with the families where and when they were available - not demand that they miss a day of work just to see my bright and shining face. That meant working nights - and sometimes weekends. After a lengthy "discussion" I got approval from the agency director for "unusual" working hours (but I had to document that I was putting in 40 per week and no overtime just because it was outside normal office hours). I also needed to get approval from my family, which turned out to be easier. They saw daddy's job of "helping people" as being important - and besides I could do some chores during the day that might otherwise not get done. I also got to be with the Former Daughter before and after school.
Today it's not a calling. It's just a job and the people in the families that compose the caseloads are just widgets. It's also that caseloads have multiplied because of all the CYAing to make sure
you are not sued. (If somebody else gets sued it's no skin off your nose.) There's much less time, and even less inclination, to put forth the effort any more. Also, there is much less sense of commuity that can be marshalled to help deal with problems. So we end up with widgets.
One final comment: Yes, I am bragging about what I did. I was not driven by the fact that I came from a dysfunctional family - heck, if we were dysfunctional that would have been magnitudes or order better than what we were. But that did not enter into the picture for me. I simply saw something I was good at - $diety knows why - and that I actually enjoyed doing it. It helps when you get up to be looking forward to what the day will bring. It was not a calling. It was just something I enjoyed doing.
Hard for folks to say that these days.
stay safe.
