Harry: "I'm Harry Harrison, I'm a child
protection social worker."
Interviewer: "Harry you've been a social worker
for many years, during your career you did actually take a break
from the profession for a while, but you decided to return, what
was it that drew you back into social work?"
Harry: "Well the straight answer is, I missed
it, I missed it too much, I missed the challenge, I missed the
excitement and most of all I missed the people."
Interviewer: "And what makes the work so
special."
Harry: "It's exciting, it's different every
day, it's full of laughter."
Interviewer: "So you obviously find social work
incredibly rewarding, can you give us a favourite example?"
Harry: "One which moved me at the time and it
just always makes me think about why the job's worthwhile when I
think about it. It's about a six year old. This six year old was in
a primary school and one of the professional child psychiatrist
doctors was trying to deal with the fact that this child was pretty
much climbing the walls, was not able to learn at all. Was driving
the teacher to distraction and nowadays we'd probably say he had
ADHD or something like that. And as social workers we were asked to
look and see if there was anything we could find out about this and
we noticed that when he was brought to school, he was brought to
school by his grandmother, who looked after him. He was kind of
pushed into the room, and we were wondering about that and thinking
what's going on here, he's turned up at school, well presented,
lunch box is fine, well turned out, what seems to be the
problem?
The conclusion we came to was that maybe, just maybe, he wasn't
getting the kind of care that he needed, the kind of emotional
care, maybe he wasn't being loved. Now it was a tricky decision, a
really tricky decision but we decided to take it to child
protection on the basis that he was being emotionally harmed.
That's a really difficult decision to take, because usually you'd
have to have all kinds of serious reports, but the moment we said
we were going to do that, his grandmother said, "well if that's
what you think, you can 'effin have him" which was kind of
surprising and put us back a bit. But pretty much the same day the
boy's uncle turned up and said "I've always wanted to look after
this little boy, took the boy home and with our support, looked
after him and within a month that child was learning, smiling and
happy. And I think the message from that for us was that social
work is about feelings, its about people it's about relationships,
most of all it's about affection that children need. And it just
showed what a difference it can make to a child to have
affection."
Interviewer: "That's an amazing story Harry,
thank you for sharing that with us. Are there any other reasons why
you decided to work in child protection?"
Harry: "I like it, it's a real challenge. I
mean it can be done really well and you never stop learning. You
can't do it if you believe that people beneath it all are capable
of being cruel, you just can't do it. Because you then have to
believe that people have to be managed and policed if you like.
People think it's about hurt and pain and all sorts of unthinkable
things, but it's not. It's about feelings, relationships and it's
about finding what it is that makes it work in families, because
although children do get hurt by people in their own families, that
doesn't mean the rest of the family is in any way bad. It doesn't
mean that you can't find someone in the family who can help out.
And child protection is such a challenge that whoever you're
working with, wherever you're working, for the most part, people
are on your side. It's not what you read in the papers, but that's
kind of out there on the edge. We don't think about that, what we
think about is doing a good job with the children."
Interviewer: "Have you ever thought about doing
anything else?"
Harry: "I've thought about it. I've thought
about being a teacher, being a scientist, being a writer, I'd like
to be a skipper on a sailboat. I've done all sorts of efforts on a
bad day to think what else could I do. But this is what I like
doing."
Interviewer: "I understand that you've got
plans to write a drama, what's that going to be about?"
Harry: "That's my project this summer. I got
fed up with films about social workers working in overcast, grey
streets with rain and miserable people. It's not really like that,
it's exciting, it's different every day, it's full of laughter as
well as tears sometimes you know. And I think that it would make an
excellent story."
You may also be interested in an interactive resource produced
by the Open University exploring a day in the life of a social
worker:
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/body-mind/social-care/social-work/try-day-the-life-social-worker