My career as a social worker began in Birmingham Social Services Department, just after the department had been formed in the early 1970s. I was then an ‘unqualified social worker’, and eventually left after only a year to train for my qualification. But that one year gave me a bookshelf of memories of how some of the more bizarre members of society behave, of the distress and suffering caused by misfortune, disability and mental illness, and of how organisations of well-meaning people can add to this suffering.
The most skilled social workers in the Area 8 team of Birmingham Social Services Department had been inherited from the former Children’s Department of the local authority. They were involved in two sorts of work: fostering and adoption; and child protection. The social workers took great care in assessing the suitability of prospective foster parents and adoptive parents, and placing children with the most appropriate family. Adoption in those days usually meant placing newborn babies with married couples who wanted children but were unable to have them. Where did the babies come from? As far as I could work out, a constant supply of babies for adoption were produced by unmarried teenage girls. Even in the early 1970s, there was a general assumption that teenage girls would be unable to support illegitimate children. They were therefore encouraged to spend time in a ‘mother and baby home’, from which they emerged having given birth but without their baby. Television programmes like ‘Long Lost Families’ show the long-term distress suffered by many of these women, now in their sixties.
Older children in the care of the local authority were usually placed with foster parents, in children’s homes, or, if they had committed offences, in residential ‘approved schools’. Many Roman Catholic children went to the nearby Father Hudson’s children’s home in Coleshill, a large orphanage-type building, where they were sexually and physically abused by a team of priests and nuns. The social workers in my team regarded the home as strict, but would have been outraged to learn of the abuse inflicted on the children in its care. The department at that time was in the process of moving residential care for children into smaller homes and making greater use of fostercare. Father Hudson’s home eventually closed in 1988 and the building was destroyed by an arsonist in June 2013.
Services for disabled people in the Area 8 team were mainly provided by occupational therapists and unqualified social workers. They faced the usual problem of front-line staff in public services - insufficient funds to provide the services to which people are supposed to be entitled. The most important of these services were the aids and adaptations for people with physical disabilities. These were rationed by waiting-list, modified for some clients who were regarded as having priority need. In a few cases, modification could work in the opposite direction. One client I remember was of working age but had suffered an industrial injury which had damaged his back. He was intelligent and assertive, and put forward a series of requests for adaptations that were more comprehensive and expensive than the department was used to paying for. This caused great resentment, particularly for my senior social worker, who began to block his requests and even argued that he was demonstrating an obsessional behaviour that endangered the welfare of his child.
The social work team, for all its faults, did try hard to match their response to their perception of their client’s needs. They were ‘person-centred’ in the grotesque phrase now used in public services. But this was not true of all public agencies. One of the worst was the artificial limb and appliance centre (ALAC), which was at that time part of central government. I was allocated a case of an elderly couple in which the husband needed to use a wheelchair, in which his wife pushed him to the shops. She was finding this increasingly difficult, and so I applied to the ALAC to supply one of their new powered wheelchairs designed to make pushing easier. However, this turned out to be faulty and could only move at running pace. The ALAC were unwilling to modify the wheelchair, or even admit that it was faulty. At the time I left the social services department, they had approached my senior social worker to determine how to get the wife categorised as mentally-incapable of operating the wheelchair.
These two clients were examples of ‘irritating victims’, or people who, wilfully or unwittingly, fail to conform to the expected behaviour of the clients of a government or local government department and thereby become subject to retaliation. I do not know how their story ended, but some irritating victims of government departments can endure years of persecution. One example is Omar Mahmoud Othman, a Palestinian who was granted asylum with his family by the Home Office in 1994 on the grounds of religious persecution. The Home Office may have regarded him as a potential line of communication to extreme jidhadist groups, but this changed after the events of 11 September 2001. Governments in the USA, the UK and elsewhere then fell into a great fear, stripping away the legal protections of citizens and identifying all Muslims as potential terrorists. On the basis of hearsay, the British government decided Omar was a ‘terrorist mastermind’. There was no evidence against him that would survive a criminal prosecution, and so in 2002 the Home Office imprisoned him without trial and began proceedings to have him deported. However, Omar gained the support of various human rights lawyers who exploited the incompetence of the Home Office, and the original deportation was dragged through endless courts before it finally succeeded in 2013.
Throughout this period, no evidence was ever presented in court about Omar’s alleged involvement in terrorism. This is probably because his real offence was to have deeply irritated the Home Office and thereby became the subject of prolonged persecution. Another factor, however, was that Omar looked the part of a terrorist, as envisaged by the media pantomime. He had lost a hand and instead had a rather menacing hook. His wife wore the conventional head to toe black clothes of the ultra-orthodox Muslim woman. Omar is of course usually known now as ‘Abu Qatada’. He has been demonised. Time will tell who the real demons are.
See also The curse of the generic
The most skilled social workers in the Area 8 team of Birmingham Social Services Department had been inherited from the former Children’s Department of the local authority. They were involved in two sorts of work: fostering and adoption; and child protection. The social workers took great care in assessing the suitability of prospective foster parents and adoptive parents, and placing children with the most appropriate family. Adoption in those days usually meant placing newborn babies with married couples who wanted children but were unable to have them. Where did the babies come from? As far as I could work out, a constant supply of babies for adoption were produced by unmarried teenage girls. Even in the early 1970s, there was a general assumption that teenage girls would be unable to support illegitimate children. They were therefore encouraged to spend time in a ‘mother and baby home’, from which they emerged having given birth but without their baby. Television programmes like ‘Long Lost Families’ show the long-term distress suffered by many of these women, now in their sixties.
Older children in the care of the local authority were usually placed with foster parents, in children’s homes, or, if they had committed offences, in residential ‘approved schools’. Many Roman Catholic children went to the nearby Father Hudson’s children’s home in Coleshill, a large orphanage-type building, where they were sexually and physically abused by a team of priests and nuns. The social workers in my team regarded the home as strict, but would have been outraged to learn of the abuse inflicted on the children in its care. The department at that time was in the process of moving residential care for children into smaller homes and making greater use of fostercare. Father Hudson’s home eventually closed in 1988 and the building was destroyed by an arsonist in June 2013.
Services for disabled people in the Area 8 team were mainly provided by occupational therapists and unqualified social workers. They faced the usual problem of front-line staff in public services - insufficient funds to provide the services to which people are supposed to be entitled. The most important of these services were the aids and adaptations for people with physical disabilities. These were rationed by waiting-list, modified for some clients who were regarded as having priority need. In a few cases, modification could work in the opposite direction. One client I remember was of working age but had suffered an industrial injury which had damaged his back. He was intelligent and assertive, and put forward a series of requests for adaptations that were more comprehensive and expensive than the department was used to paying for. This caused great resentment, particularly for my senior social worker, who began to block his requests and even argued that he was demonstrating an obsessional behaviour that endangered the welfare of his child.
The social work team, for all its faults, did try hard to match their response to their perception of their client’s needs. They were ‘person-centred’ in the grotesque phrase now used in public services. But this was not true of all public agencies. One of the worst was the artificial limb and appliance centre (ALAC), which was at that time part of central government. I was allocated a case of an elderly couple in which the husband needed to use a wheelchair, in which his wife pushed him to the shops. She was finding this increasingly difficult, and so I applied to the ALAC to supply one of their new powered wheelchairs designed to make pushing easier. However, this turned out to be faulty and could only move at running pace. The ALAC were unwilling to modify the wheelchair, or even admit that it was faulty. At the time I left the social services department, they had approached my senior social worker to determine how to get the wife categorised as mentally-incapable of operating the wheelchair.
These two clients were examples of ‘irritating victims’, or people who, wilfully or unwittingly, fail to conform to the expected behaviour of the clients of a government or local government department and thereby become subject to retaliation. I do not know how their story ended, but some irritating victims of government departments can endure years of persecution. One example is Omar Mahmoud Othman, a Palestinian who was granted asylum with his family by the Home Office in 1994 on the grounds of religious persecution. The Home Office may have regarded him as a potential line of communication to extreme jidhadist groups, but this changed after the events of 11 September 2001. Governments in the USA, the UK and elsewhere then fell into a great fear, stripping away the legal protections of citizens and identifying all Muslims as potential terrorists. On the basis of hearsay, the British government decided Omar was a ‘terrorist mastermind’. There was no evidence against him that would survive a criminal prosecution, and so in 2002 the Home Office imprisoned him without trial and began proceedings to have him deported. However, Omar gained the support of various human rights lawyers who exploited the incompetence of the Home Office, and the original deportation was dragged through endless courts before it finally succeeded in 2013.
Throughout this period, no evidence was ever presented in court about Omar’s alleged involvement in terrorism. This is probably because his real offence was to have deeply irritated the Home Office and thereby became the subject of prolonged persecution. Another factor, however, was that Omar looked the part of a terrorist, as envisaged by the media pantomime. He had lost a hand and instead had a rather menacing hook. His wife wore the conventional head to toe black clothes of the ultra-orthodox Muslim woman. Omar is of course usually known now as ‘Abu Qatada’. He has been demonised. Time will tell who the real demons are.
See also The curse of the generic
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