Reflections from the Child Advocacy Law Clinic, first round

In working with clients within the realm of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic, I have encountered some previously unforeseen challenges in my capacity as the social worker, given that I am now on a team with law students. As we are working with families who have negative associations with social workers—understandably so, as Child Protective Service workers and Department of Human Service investigators are threatening their family’s integrity by removing their children and often moving for termination of their right to parent—it has been an interesting task to try and work around the wariness these clients have of yet another social worker intruding into their lives. If there is already stigma, misunderstanding and distrust of social workers among working class folks due to the negative associations with treatment for mental illness, for these families who have had their lives invaded, it is all the more understandable that they are reticent to speak with anyone on our legal team. Despite this recognition, it is occasionally frustrating and at times tedious to try and reach out to clients who are disinclined to interact with us already, and ask them to trust me enough to tell me what has been going on in their lives, even if it is to their legal advantage to work with all of us.

It can be very difficult not to automatically default to a sense that I as a worker know better than they do, and that I’m trying to make their lives better; this approach is exactly the same mentality that DHS too frequently takes with families such as our clients’, and in order to truly ally with our clients, it is imperative that the social workers in clinics such as ours not fall into that hubris trap. I, like many others doing social work, am coming from a desire to promote social justice and better working family systems; having client families who are potentially broken enough to have been reported to Child Protective Services offers a significant challenge to my desire to work with families holistically. Our wish is to always have families who are able to be repaired, but the alleged damage we encounter with severe neglect or child abuse cases conflicts with this desire, and we are tempted to choose sides, such that our legal team may be advocating the legal dissolution of the family system. I have needed to approach several of my clients with active humility, recognizing that they know their family situation, their lives, and their stories better than we ever will, in all its complexity. It is our jobs as their advocates to work hard to foster a trusting and working relationship with our clients, such that we may be in the best position to work with and for them, rather than assuming we know what is best for their lives, as too many of our professional colleagues do. This means accepting that it may be in the best interest of the most vulnerable members of the family to be court-removed from their birth families, even though I know from a developmental standpoint that any legal action, including continuing the status quo without intervention, will result in further trauma and pain for the family members.

I have had to set aside some significant initial prejudices in more than one case, because with a mentality that I somehow know “better”, I will never be able to align with a client in a way which is truly respectful or open to understanding the intricacies of their lives. There is always more to a human story than can be captured by a court report or allegations, and my goal as a social worker in a legal team is to look for the complexities in each case which have informed the actors’ decisions for good or ill, that I can work to humanize their story for a harsh system. This has required me, in the instance of one of our lawyers guardian ad litem cases, to set for myself the task of actively trying to find something likeable about a client mother who’s failure to protect, at least superficially, exposed her daughter to sexual abuse at the hands of her partner. Rather than make follow my initial assumptions based upon the court report, however, I have been working to reserve judgment on her inaction and the treatment of her daughter as it is portrayed on paper until I interact with her in person more, and try to better understand the circumstances of her life and the case. Only by doing this am I ever going to be an asset to a legal team working for clients in a family court system; if I allow my prejudices and initial impressions to overwhelm my ability to engage with clients in a way which provides a richer understanding of their world, then I have the potential to be as detrimental to their lives as the DHS workers who give them pause in interacting with social workers in the first place. Recognizing this, I have tried hard, despite intermittent frustrations, to continue to engage clients who are leery of working with me and our team, elicited stories regardless of my initial impressions to look for what my biases may have caused me to miss, and continue to seek avenues to get the most comprehensive understanding of my clients’ stories as I can. These steps are the best way, under less than optimal client conditions, that I know to overcome prejudices and serve my client well.