A beaten caseworker is a competent caseworker... not.

For the past seven weeks I have been in training as a Child Welfare caseworker. If the people in my program irritated me before, they are now occupying the first fifteen slots in my not much longer list of people who make me very angry, very regularly.

I do not come from a typical social work background. For one, I come from a middle-class (perhaps upper-middle...I'm not really sure) Jewish family. For another, I never had use for a caseworker myself while growing up. I have never been addicted to any substance, was never in foster care, have not been in a mental institution, and was never, ever, even once, hit by anyone in my family. Or anyone at all, for that matter. This, along with my ability to spell, punctuate correctly, use proper sentence structure, and understand subject-verb agreement, puts me in the nosebleed section of the game, if all the other social workers were actually playing ball. Actually, I probably stayed home from the game to pick my toe lint.

Social workers, at least the ones in my program, wear their milieu of social ills like a badge of honor, a woe-is-me flashing neon sign on their chests or oversized foreheads. Not only do most of our classes become a competition for whose life was the hardest, they become full disclosure group therapy sessions, which most of the professors, sadly enough, are only too happy to indulge. One of the few ways I comfort myself is by nicknaming the various students by their pronouncement they wear only too well. There's "Bipolar Billy," and of course, "Heroin Hannah." There's even a "Not-sure-what's-wrong-with-him-but-we've-been-told-it's-back-problems-but-we-think-it's-a-prescription-painkiller-addiction-but-at-any-rate-it-takes-him-five-minutes-to-get-a-sentence-out-and-he-disappears-halfway-through-every-semester Jim." You get the point.

Any mention of flaws in the foster care system and Foster Care Fanny has a story about the time her alcoholic foster father came home drunk and called her a hussy. Any mention of whether there is ever a past-tense for an addict and all the former (or current, if there can be no such thing as former) addicts pipe up menacingly. It's one thing to use your past to inform your current professional practice. It's quite another to practice informing other current professionals of your past. Constantly. To no benefit.

Some of the comments have not even the remotest relevance to social work at all. My all-time favorite was, "Yeah, um, I had a dream last night that I had a penis. What would Freud say about that?"
I also liked, "My little boy is three and he like to wear pink, n'at. My sister say he a queer."
Come on, that's not even a question.

In one of my classes last semester, we were having a "discussion" about whether it was acceptable to hit your children to discipline them. I hardly need to say that the battle lines were drawn and paralleled what people had experienced in their own childhood. For the most part, it was, "I was hit and I'm fine." It also turned into a "who was whupped the most and the hardest and the most frequently" contest. The shocking part, after getting over how many of my classmates had been hit, was that everyone was laughing about it, bonding over the commonalities of their corporal punishment. "Oh, when you see that look in their eye, and you just know they going for the paddle." "How about them belts with the extra large buckle so you know he mean business?" Everyone laughs appreciatively, apparently reminiscing about their last paddling.

We repeated a similar exercise that managed to remain much more on topic in our training. The trainer put up an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper on one wall, with the word, "OK" written boldly. On the opposite side, a paper stated, "Not OK." The trainer would read a statement and we had to stand near the paper that applied to our thoughts on it. One of the statements was, "hitting a two year old on the backside with a wooden spoon." Needless to say, I was in the minority, standing by the "not ok" sign. Each of us stated our opinion and why were standing where we were. Those who thought it was acceptable stated that you weren't actually hurting the child, just teaching him a lesson by hitting him. Two-year-olds, they reasoned, could not understand a verbal explanation of why what they did was wrong, so they needed the physical memory of being hit to remind them to not run out in the street (or whatever the offense was) again. I said that I believe there was never a necessity for physical punishment, and that, if the two-year-old could not understand a verbal explanation, he certainly would not be able to rationalize why he was being hit by a spoon, a half hour after running in the street. He would only come to fear the spoon and possibly, the parent.

The next day, we were being shown slides of various injuries caused by abuse and we were trying to guess what had caused the injury. For example, four small bruises together with a separate smaller mark a little farther away on the neck is probably a grab mark. With one mark, I guessed it was a belt, and was derided by a coworker for thinking so. She stated, with an air of one-who-has-been-hit, that it was, most definitely a paddle mark, and everyone laughed appreciatively. It turned out, she was right, and after the declaration by the instructor, she quite audibly stated, "Well, Tova wouldn't know. She wasn't even hit by a wooden spoon."

Looking back I should have responded to the white hot anger that surged up in me at this comment, but I did not. Many times, I have wanted to say something to this particular girl, because she manages to mutter a contradiction to every single comment I make in class. She purposely tries to show me up, especially after I receive praise from the instructor for being well-spoken, deep, or insightful. What she said was that I couldn't recognize an injury because I myself had not experienced it as a child, but what she was really saying was," Go back to Rhode Island. You don't belong here. You look wrong, you speak wrong, you act wrong. You're a know-it-all who is determined to show us all up, and you have money and you didn't have to work to get through school and you are also white and no one here likes you because you make us feel uncomfortable and you don't fit in."

And that can be a little hard to swallow as a social worker who is trying to be open-minded, non-judgmental, and all those other social work things they teach you early on. Well, bitch, I hate to tell you, but open-mindedness goes both ways, so stop hating me because I can form full sentences.