How I wrecked several marriages in West Lothian

After I qualified as a social worker in 1975, I went to work with the West Lothian division of Lothian Regional Social Work Department. I was based in a team located in a crowded primary healthcare centre in the small town of Blackburn. Besides the town itself, the team covered a string of unappealing villages originally built for mineworkers but subsequently used to rehouse what we then called ‘problem families’. Blackburn itself was not short of problems. The town had expanded rapidly with Glasgow ‘overspill’, many of whom lived in poor-quality maisonettes with all-electric heating. The oil crisis had led to substantial increases in electricity prices, with a resulting spate of disconnections. Tenants in such circumstances bought cheap paraffin heaters, which in turn made their houses almost uninhabitable because of dampness. There was also the usual undercurrents of poverty, alcoholism, crime and domestic violence.

The social work team was as a result under considerable pressure. The team comprised a senior social worker, an occupational therapist, and four or five social workers, almost all of whom were recent graduates with limited experience of the kinds of lives lived by their clients. Some, including myself, had completed social work education, and were designated as ‘qualified’. But, at least in those days, our courses provided us with knowledge rather than skills. We were taught a mixture of social policy, human development and psychotherapy (called ‘casework’), and learnt about the problems of the different groups of clients we were due to encounter. In real life, we had little time to practice casework skills, and mainly acted as intermediaries between members of the public and the various official agencies with which they struggled to cope. I found this work suited my particular skills and was puzzled to find that some of my colleagues did not understand how social security was calculated or the rules regarding disconnection or eviction.  

The team, like most other social work organisations at the time, struggled to allocate scarce staff resources between clients with long-term difficulties and the daily influx of people who called at the office. The latter were termed ‘self-referrals’, and were dealt with by whichever  social worker was on ‘duty’ that day. My duty day was usually Monday, which meant that I had to deal with the consequences of the preceding weekend. One frequent consequence was a request for help from women who had been assaulted by their husbands. Violence was in all cases not a sudden or solitary act, but something sustained over several years, dating in some cases even before marriage (in those days it was normal for couples to marry before they lived together). Violence from husbands generally occurred at weekends and was associated with alcohol. Women’s expectations of their husbands were not always very high. One told me: “You don’t mind your husband knocking you about a bit, but it’s a bit much when he breaks your arm”.

There was an unspoken assumption in social work at that time that married couples should be helped to remain together. This was a bit like another social work assumption that young unmarried women could not cope with raising children and should be encouraged to place them for adoption. But this all coincided with the break-up of my own first marriage. When I realised what a blessed relief it was to free of wedded misery, I saw no point in helping others keep together and face daily violence. This view was supported by the determination of the women themselves: none asked for help in repairing their marriage. So I developed a set of measures to help battered wives split from their husbands. Almost all lived in council houses, so I advised them how to change the tenancy into their own name. I told them how to contact Social Security and the legal action they should take to confirm the custody of their children. None of the women I met needed to find a place in a refuge, although many years later I met several women who had fled to refuges when I did my research on homeless families.

I do not know what long-term effect my advice had on the women I met. None returned to the office or told me that they had returned to their abusive husbands. But I suspect that there were many more women in Blackburn who continued suffering from abuse that never managed to escape.