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Integral Child Protection
by Anita Floris

Prologue

When God created land he forgot a bit.

Then, when the ancestors of the Dutch arrived, they looked around, found that they couldn’t keep their feet dry, decided that wouldn’t do, built a dike and subsequently pumped the water out. And there it was, Holland.

And these were the Middle Ages, way before the industrial revolution, there was no aristocracy to speak of, no industry, no wealth or riches, the only ones able to build dikes were stubborn poor people determined to protect themselves. Cultural life of the middle ages happened in far away places, like Spain and Italy. No one else really cared a whole lot about the swampy lands in this delta. The Romans never even took the trouble to occupy it; their rule stopped just a bit over what is now the German-Dutch border.

So, the only way the Dutch could pull this off, was by sticking together and get at it till the work was done. Anyway, the sea did not distinguish between rich or poor; when it flooded, it flooded. Individually families could construct some sort of hill (a ‘terp’) and build their house on top, but then still most of the cattle would drown and the land would be useless for agriculture.

This resulted in the first form of government. They monitored the dikes and the water and decided when and where extra work was to be done to uphold the dikes. ‘A caring and serving government’ is there to secure the inhabitants so that no disasters happen. And so should all governing be. Even with the more sophisticated available ways and methods to govern, deep down the Dutch still feel like this.

The trust and demand on the serving and protecting government is endless. When the Dutch can tell water where to go, there is no reason to expect anything less form any other form of government or authority.

Speaking in terms of Spiral Dynamics: It is not that the Dutch are so liberal or democratic or advanced in their thinking that green became such a dominant colour in our society; it is just that so many of these values were already so well known and deeply rooted in society. The Dutch were just waiting for the right time to come along, to really bring this to life.

Up till this point it is all still very amusing. However, it stops being funny when police start finding dead children in hidden places and discover that their families were under supervision of child protection agencies who failed to prevent tragedy from happening. Soon news programs featured item after item with outraged comments about the failing child protection system.

There was a half decayed head of a little girl that was found at the coast of the biggest lake of the Netherlands. She could not be connected to children reported missing. For months she was headline news and no one came forward claiming her to be their daughter. Police showed a clay model of how she might have looked. Then finally a genitor of a school called the police that she might be the girl that suddenly disappeared and after the summer did not come back. She was killed and cut to pieces by her mother and her new partner, who fled the country with the girl's little sister.

Later in another family tragedy a raging father set the house of his ex-wife and her children on fire, killing five of them. This family had been under supervision of child protection services.

Police officers spot a car driving in the middle of the night in a lonely part of the area, they get suspicious. In the trunk of the couple’s car they find the corpse of their four year old daughter. Another family that had been under supervision of child protection services.

The inspection investigates, an individual social worker brought to trial for manslaughter, and new approaches emerge.

What if we look at the new approach of child protection through AQAL eyes?

How it is organized now and how did we get here?

So let’s focus first on the lower right quadrant of the AQAL theory.

Traditionally churches and later other humanitarian organisations founded orphanages and agencies for child protection. Since the beginning of last century all these agencies were fully financed and supervised by government. Apart from a few psychologists in private practice, there are hardly any facilities to be found that operate outside the system. The two main agencies are the Council for Youth Protection and BJZ (bureau of youth care). The Council investigates complaints, gives advice to the judge to make a ruling to force parents to accept help. As soon as the judged has ruled, BJZ is called in to execute that ruling. A social worker is assigned to a family and he monitors the changes that need to be made, sets up a plan in dialogue with the family. He also has the authority given to him by the court to take more definite measures (like placing the child in other facilities). These are the agencies I will mainly refer to when I speak about child protection.

The other section of BJZ consists of a myriad of different types of supportive programs like ‘video-home-training’ and ‘families first’ (many programs have been imported from the USA and usually keep their English names). These programs can be imposed on a family by a social worker, or they might be called on by families looking voluntarily for help.

Then there are many institutions for residential care, ranging from foster care to juvenile penitentiary facilities. They play an important part in the whole system. I don’t always include them when I speak about ‘child protection’ in this article, but I believe that the context will make clear whether I speak about the whole section or only the main service of BJZ.

In the nineties a new law for youth care gave juvenile court a new status. In any other court a judge rules only on the charges put before them, then applies the law. To be impartial was a significant part of that role -- except in juvenile court. There the judge actively took sides and decided on what to do with the child. The judge could investigate treatment and could set a task for the social worker to follow, like ruling that the child be placed in such and such an institution. The advantage of the judge playing this role in the system was that the social worker could hide behind the ruling of the judge, claiming it was not his decision.

The judge is now an impartial element in the system that can monitor the process lead by BJZ. Also, how would someone, who has studied law, be more equipped to decide the path to take, than the child psychologist or the ortho-pegagogue employed by BJZ? The role of the distant difficult decision making should have been taken over by a supervisor (manager or ortho-pegagogue) of BJZ. This has not been evaluated, nor has this aspect of decision making ever come up in the discussion.

There has been some discussion by some parties about bringing back this role of the judge again. I doubt a court judge would ever be brought to trial for having made the wrong ruling, in hindsight.

The outcry in the ’80’s and ’90’s also resulted in budget cuts for most residential care facilities. A policy referred to as:‘as-as-as’ (as short as possible, as light as possible, as close to home as possible) had to replace the rash outplacement in far away facilities in rural environments, that did not teach the child how to live in their city communities. Treatment within the home or in foster care was cheaper. Many of the new policies were seen as budget cuts (the eighties were economically bleak years in the Netherlands).

After two decades of budget cuts, residential care facilities don’t have enough beds, and waiting lists grow. Instead some children are placed in prisons, where at least they don’t have the chance to keep running away or cause more problems for themselves or their surroundings.

When rigorous decisions have to be made we often see a separation in roles. One officer handles the direct contact; another one is kept away from public eye and makes the decisions. I see two reasons for this; the first is that it safeguards those who are in direct contact with clients, giving them the opportunity to hide behind the decision maker. It also safeguards the decision maker from angry retaliations. The second is that when in close contact it is sometimes difficult to make the hard decisions, it is easier to be tough when the case is presented on paper.

The caseload of social workers from BJZ agencies lowered gradually from 42 to 24, which it is now.

Now, let’s have a look at the corresponding Lower Left Quadrant. As said before there is a strong tendency in the Netherlands to regard upon authority as a serving body within society. An authority not capable of averting disaster is not worth staying in power. When BJZ is not doing its duty why spend tax money?

Before the sixties social work in general had a more paternalistic tenor. That ranged from teaching rural inhabitants in how to live in a city dwelling (some social workers working for social housing companies cannot return to this way of welfare work, but their stories suggest that this need might still be there) to taking over the task to bring up children. Children needed to become proper citizens of society. No need to say that after pluralism kicked in in the sixties, such patriarchal attitudes were banned and first of all among social and welfare workers.

More over, the emphasis on democracy and ‘mondigheid’ (the ability to express your opinion and stand up for yourself) was spread widely. In the eighties the first generation that was brought up with these values became adults. The first stories of children taken from their parents’ care became public. Talk shows loved having them, their sad stories of five child shelters and three failed foster families painted a grim portray of what child protection had to offer. Perhaps their parents were not really capable of bringing them up, but had the high-handed intervention of child services been any better? The only variation in this tune were the stories of women that had been sexually abused by family members and no one who had taken notice, least of all child protection services.

The worst family was still better than the best residential care facility. At least here the sense of ‘belonging to a family no matter what’ would not have been distorted, something that no institution could substitute. And foster families only if, by some stroke of luck there had been a click right away. Otherwise there was misery in the form of sexual abuse, foster family struck by terminal disease or other mishaps that broke down their resilience, forcing them to give up their foster child.

This resulted in the before mentioned change of role of the judge in juvenile court and in budget cuts and the ‘as-as-as’ policies (sounds so different in English!).

There was a sense of tolerance for the downside of these insights. Tolerance was a characteristic that all Dutch seemed to have, should have, thought they had.

Until Pim Fortuyn.

Since 6th of May of 2002 things have changed. Pim Fortuyn was the first politician since Willem de Zwijger in 1584, who was murdered. It was the unthinkable. He was a politician who had put his finger right on the sore spots of a post-modern society, with its emphasis on a pluralist, egalitarian, anti-authoritative approach. He had caused a lot of disturbance among politicians, who mostly saw him as a rightwing fascist (he protested hotly against that) but were completely alarmed to see how many people in our society supported him, and expressed feelings of having been excluded by national politics until Fortuyn worded their worries and thoughts. With tolerance out of fashion, it created more room for narcissism.

“Waiting lists? Impossible, we have a right to treatment and have that now. For free, of course.” No special treatment for the rich and famous, everyone expects first class treatment and right now.

Tolerance is no longer seen as a positive trait that the Dutch used to be known for, it is seen as an attitude that has gone too far. It is not only the child protection branch that is being scrutinized; also the treatment of offenders with psychiatric illnesses is under pressure. Their treatment included a process of rehabilitation with weekend leave, sometimes supervised, sometimes unsupervised. Every crime committed now during any such leaves is hotly debated, where before this was seen as unforeseen incidents that were unavoidable.

Suddenly tolerance, which always had been an unquestionable Dutch characteristic was no longer that self evident. Of course immigrants already new that Dutch tolerance is not meant to embrace the unknown, it is meant to keep the unknown at a distance. ‘Do what you must in the privacy of your own home and don’t bother anyone else with it’.

Obvious to the outsider, it is new to the Dutch. If the answer is not tolerance what is it?

This is the answer! Or is it?

In the light of the latest incidents the frenzy in the media (still continues) has brought about investigations and changes in policies.

Interestingly the option raised in the sixties, that social revolution would abate problems created by capitalist society that excluded groups of people (LR), is no longer of any value. To solve problems within a family system the focus lies on learning parenting skills or individual anger management. All the trust is placed now in a new method and implementation by BJZ. All responsibility lies with the individual social worker managing the case. No changes at macro level, solely at meso and micro levels.

So far we have mainly looked at macro level: governmental policies and studies, lets follow it now to the meso level, where these studies translate into policies for BJZ and at micro level, where the social worker will carry it out.

The studies have resulted in reports: ‘Better Protected’ and ‘Children First’ and a new Plan: ‘the Delta plan’. Here again the Dutch refer to water management. The original Delta plan (post WW II) resulted in the Delta works, an extensive project to build dikes and other new systems, to protect the lowest parts of the Netherlands from sea floods. Since then no major sea floods have occurred. And since then the term is used to name a plan that will definitely solve a complicated problem, once and for all. So there, problem solved! A Deltaplan, we can not go wrong!

The first changes are already visible. The caseload of the social worker will go down. From 24 to 15. Instead of visiting the homes once every month he is expected to be there perhaps several times a week: Less time behind the computer, more with the families.

In the agency at which I work, we formed a committee to prepare the implementation of these new methods. Apart from me there were two other middle management officers, several social workers and a sector manager on the committee. We were aided by two outside professionals. During the first session we were told that the new method is based now on a new paradigm. This announcement was followed by a respectful silence. I have read Wilber’s work, I know about paradigms. The lack of response suggests that the term really has no meaning to anyone else.

A change of paradigm, so proudly proclaimed, does not reassure me at all. Paradigms, once rich in meaning, intention, practice, ‘begeisterd’ (= soul put into it) felt and lived, seem to get diluted and starved into empty tasks and things that have to be done, ordered by far away managers. Since I started studying for my career in welfare work, I have seen several paradigm changes. They never solved all the problems.

What is the new paradigm this time? People! The needs of the children come first! Not the needs of the parents, not the needs of the agency, or any one else’s.

The new method will lead the social worker to define in dialogue with the family what the ‘points of concern are’. Then he or she will define what happens in that family system in terms of how it affects the development of the child. The whole situation is brought back to the perspective of the child. For example, the drug addiction of the parent is only a problem when the result is that the parent is too stoned to prepare dinner or bring the child to bed in time. The goal to be achieved is not ‘the parent has kicked his drug addiction’, but would sound something like: ‘Stephen’s days are predictable and stable, with three regular meals at set times of the day’. (Goals concerning going to school, and personal hygiene, might be added.)

Every professional who feels the need to say anything about the latest developments all stress the point that the needs of the children should have priority. Why were the needs of the children not better served?

And why am I not relieved when the new method says it does this?

The new method seems to be based on assumptions that I question. It is assumed that needs of the parents have come before that of the child, resulting in leaving children in the care of dangerous parents.

It also assumes that a new paradigm, resulting in a new form a social worker has to fill in, will do the trick. I believe that history shows that in the past decades social workers have not been able to argue why a child needed to be returned to the parent, or not be taken away from the home. A badly understood and thus diluted paradigm and a warning sign that any new paradigm needs to be fully understood for it to be effective.

In my opinion the reluctance to place children away from their parents might be due to:

* The lack of results from residential care, and the ability to provide children with a stable place to grow up once taken away from their parents. While at the same time assuring to somehow enable a child to have a deeply rooted sense of belongingness. (with all the bonding and lack of it, the loyalty problems that come with it)
* The need to separate the role of ‘decisionmaker’ from the role of the executive worker. Inside or outside BJZ?
* The lack of insight in what healthy and unhealthy expressions of the different layers are, especially in parenting skills.

None of these are addressed by the Delta method.

The Delta method lowers the caseload of the social worker (from 24 to 15 cases).

It wants to lessen the time a social worker spends behind the computer and have the social worker spending more actual time with the families concerned.

It forces the social worker to define precisely how the child’s development is endangered.

Talking about the skills of a social worker we have arrived in the upper right quadrant.

Clearly a social worker might be held personally responsible for the death of a child placed under her supervision. Individual skills have become more important than ever.

Preferably a social worker can predict the future, as crystal ball gazing is not in any curriculum yet, most agencies look for a method to score the risks that is simple and quickly done, so that gut feelings can be more substantiated.

She would then write a report and a plan in which she weaves together her skills, her observations, her insights, her obligation to explicitly clarify what she has done so a colleague can take over at any time and to be transparent in her work for her employer. At the same time her writing ought to be in simple language, so her clients can understand and follow her guidelines as to what behaviour is expected. So far only a few social workers have made use of the written plan as a tool. Those who do are enthusiastic about it.

The newly proposed method places high emphasis on semantics. How do we word precisely what behaviour we want to see? The way it is right now, I notice that most social workers have problems wording goals in a precise way. I come across a goal like: ‘Ahmed is no longer aggressive’, too often. If Ahmed would know how not to be aggressive, he’d do it by now. To be able to word exactly what behaviour we do want to see, we need to know what it is exactly that he does. Does he verbally abuse people around him, specific groups of people or just everyone he meets? Does he enter into physical fight, with weapons? Does he defend himself, or has he a problem with authority? All these instances might require different behaviour. That seems to be difficult enough. First describe the situation, then how it affects the child, then describe the wanted behaviour and by lining out how to achieve the goal, describe the desired behaviour from the parent.

Although language has always been a tool of social workers, non-verbal communication has always been just as important. The ability to establish rapport with the client is not just done with words. (Would subtle-body language be a separate area of training at some point in the future?) The spoken word has to be congruent with the interior world of the speaker in order to do so she needs the ability of reflection and transparency.

Appropriate behaviour, verbal communication skills have always taken an important place in the training of social workers. Maybe also because the preliminary training, (primary school and high school) mainly focused on theoretical skills and learning from books. Social work training puts practical and communication skills in a more prominent position. The development of the use of language as a craft has never had any priority at all. I doubt the training in the new method will be any better (that would be só amber!)

There is one more concern that I want to point out. Although I can see the advantages of defining problematic situations in terms of endangered development of the child, I also see new blind spots arising. It is easy to translate any situation in terms of needs of a child. In complicated situations, many different parties who have their own needs and expectations, often contradictory, use terms of ‘needs of the child’ to make their point, knowing that this terminology scores best in juvenile court. This new method provides nothing to assist a social worker to explicitly point out what the different needs and wishes of all the parties involved are. I have no doubt that this will backfire at some point.

One of the aims of the reduction in the caseload is for the social worker to spend more time doing practical work with the families. Social workers are generally not specialized in practical ‘upbringing skills’. To model effective parenting skills they usually bring in other specialists, and these would better be found among residential care workers (usually as highly trained as social workers in the Netherlands). I have reservations about expecting these skills from social workers, they are not specialists in this area. However, having more time might help clearing the mind, and looking into neglected areas.

Social workers would probably love to spend less time behind the computer. But all activities need to be monitored and measured, according to other ‘new policies’. The new forms don’t look like they will take less time. Time will tell.

This leads us to the upper left quadrant, what is what motivates an individual social worker?

I don’t believe that a social worker is motivated to work in child protection because they are thrilled about writing a report that makes all the difference. Nor does any of the administrative work have any appeal to most workers.

It is interpersonal interest that drives most people to become a social worker. Motivation stems from wanting to make a difference in the lives of people, a desire to connect and bring about connection. At different levels.

This motivation might be driven by a desire to have an emptiness filled, to satisfy the need of belonging.

A social worker might find himself to be ‘the one that knows’ and that feels good. Telling others what to do, having control. Others are supposed to follow her lead.

Or it might not be that personal, there is a desire to lead people to do the right thing, to differentiate between right and wrong, have wrongs put right and make other see what that difference is.

A social worker might be driven by a feeling of solidarity with people from the same background, different backgrounds, the notion that we are all human with rights and needs. A social worker might want to show that he really does not judge and no one should, perhaps even that problems do not occur because of individual failure, but is due to the way society is structured.

The worldview of a social worker colours the way he looks.

At this point we really can no longer put off the necessity to bring in a method to look more closely at levels of development.

Levels of development

One of the most intriguing things that the integral theory showed me was the dynamics between the center of gravity of the individual, the family, and society. It clarified a major difficulty I faced in doing my job.

Families from Somalia who have fled to the Netherlands find themselves at a loss as to how to keep their children in check. In Somalia boys might be left to their own devices at the age of twelve, because the surrounding neighbourhood, the police, the school take over disciplinary tasks, or keep the parents informed. But in the Netherlands neither police nor teachers are allowed to use violence, nor are older people entitled to respect or obedience just because of their age. Children are expected to take responsibility for their own actions and have internalized rules (or a conscience) that guides their behaviour. But fifteen year old Ibrahim who was out of control did not agree at all with my observation that Dutch boys only seemed to have more freedom, but were also expected to take on more responsibility. He felt that these boys were paid more attention to, and received more guidance and help with school and homework. He felt he had to do too much on his own.

In red parenting the authority is unquestioned, structure in life is established by the authoritative parent (not by tradition and not by rules), however impulsive that might be. In blue (amber) parenting children are taught to obey the rules. Once the rules are clear it doesn’t matter so much whether there is an authority figure there to see. This transition in itself is difficult enough to detect, but then green parenting pretends to not have any rules at all. So children from healthy green parents seem to pick up right behaviour in a miraculous way. There are no explicit rules and yet in healthy green families children grow up as responsible citizens.

The Dutch believe in negotiating, but sixteen year old Daniella - a refugee from a West-African country heavily in civil war - believes that she does three weekends what the adults want her to do and then she gets her turn and she does everything she wants. She ran away from the remnant of her family who do not believe in kids having any say in what they do. The authority of her foster mother (her cousin) is undisputed, Daniella had no say in anything and was not allowed to go out or see boys. The sheer fact that there is such a thing as a shelter for run-away kids undermines the unquestionable authority of her family, and Daniella has no clue as to how to take responsibility for her own choices.

The skills and capacities that are needed in a green society are covered up because green pretends not to have any rules (which it does, implicitly) or structure (which it does, implicitly) as if any and all behaviour is acceptable. How does anyone from a different worldview and a culture that reflected that worldview, make sense of that?

Something irretrievable happens to a red-structured family when green methods are introduced to their children. Some of these methods will help the children fit into their surrounding society. Some of it will undoubtedly disrupt family structures.

An outline of what society demands in terms of social skills is mostly restricted to skills referring to being assertive, expressing opinions, feeling good about one’s self. Child protection is in dire need of clear insights in the dynamics between the development of the individual (that of the parent, the child and the social worker) the family system and society.

That would take more than just an article. Currently I am working on outlining the development of parenting skills. It leads me to defining the differences between life phases versus developmental stages and the dynamics between these macro meso and micro levels.

Sources:

Don Beck, Chris Cowan ; ‘Spiral dynamics’ 1996

Ken Wilber; ‘Boomeritis’ 2002

Ken Wilber; Integral Spirituality’

Lea Dasberg; ‘Grootbrengen door klein houden’ 1979

Rita Kohnstamm; ‘Kleine ontwikkelingspsychologie’ 2002

Geert Hofstede; ‘Allemaal anders denkenden’ (eng. Title: ‘Cultures and organizations’) 2004

Colin White & Laurie Boucke ‘The undutchables’; 2005

Committee ‘Wetgeving voor de aanpassing van kinderbeschermingswetgeving’ (adjustments for childprotection laws) of the department of justice; ‘Kinderen eerst’ 2006

Committee of the department of justice: ‘policy for an effective and efficient youth protection’ ; ‘Beter Beschermd’ 2004/2005