What’s love got to do with it?
Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 6 April, 2023
Despite its ubiquity in our common culture, love is a word that social workers seem reluctant to use in relation to safeguarding children. In fact, it might be argued that ‘love’ and ‘safeguarding’ belong to entirely different, even conflicting, discourses.
Love belongs to the personal domain, the informal world of family and friends where feelings and values hold sway rather than facts and evidence. Safeguarding, by contrast, belongs to the impersonal, bureaucratic domain, presided over by the statutory authorities, where human rights are the ultimate arbiter. In short, love is about passion rather than professionalism.
Some 15 years ago, I was asked to give a talk to the then Christian Child Care Forum under the heading ‘Love and Safeguarding’. Preparing for this talk I decided to do some very rudimentary - and not very scientific - research on my personal computer (this was in the days before the widespread use of cloud storage and when everything in my home office was backed up locally).
I used the internal search facility on my PC to find all the files I could containing the word ‘love’. The results were surprising and enlightening. The majority of files where love cropped up were personal correspondence, like letters and emails. The next most popular location was music files, after that were children’s stories and sermon notes.
In the professional/work related files, there were just a couple of articles (both from the faith sector) that gave the word a mention, as well as a training video for adoptive parents with the rather dispiriting title ‘Love is not enough’.
Imagine my surprise then, when reading the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, to find ‘loving relationships’ being given pride of place in the review’s ambition to promote a “once in a generation reset” of the children’s social care system.
In his introduction Josh McAlister, the review’s chair, says: “What we need is a system that provides intensive help to families in crisis, acts decisively in response to abuse, unlocks the potential of wider family networks to raise children, puts lifelong loving relationships at the heart of the care system and lays the foundations for a good life for those who have been in care.”
The government response is even more enthusiastic in engaging in love language, foregrounding the word in the title of its consultation document, ‘Children's social care: Stable Homes, Built on Love’.
As ever with public policy, the devil is in the detail and a cursory reading of the review reveals little that is new. Indeed, if love is about actions rather than words, then the widely publicised disappointment expressed within the sector about the gaping funding deficit is entirely understandable, given the scope of the review’s ambition.
The warm words about family help, early intervention, support for kinship carers are welcome, as is the ambition to intervene decisively and in a timely fashion, in order to protect children at risk of abuse. But this delicate balance between family support and protective interventions is not easily achieved, as evidenced by each consecutive administration within my lifetime.
However, love is a powerful concept and social workers have not always been shy of using it - both in theory and in practice - to help understand how relationships work. John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, in their groundbreaking work on attachment, provided a robust theoretical framework that informed early iterations of psychodynamic social work. Attachment theory was a way of understanding how relationships develop, not just in early infancy but throughout life, and this understanding could be utilised in working therapeutically with service users as well as in assessment.
The criticism that this approach was too narrowly focused on individual psychology and conveniently ignores the social construction of service user lives, has been the consensus for the majority of my professional lifetime.
Maybe now is the time for a rethink. A conversation, within the social work profession, about how these different discourses might challenge and enrich one another is long overdue. The question Eddie O’Hara raised in a recent PSW article, ‘Is it OK to hug?’ is part of a bigger question, ‘What’s love got to do with it?’
An integrated approach to practice which brings together the personal and the professional, the psychological and the sociological, protection from harm with promotion of wellbeing, is, perhaps, part of the answer.
Bill Stone is a social work consultant