'When I started, we'd be involved with a family for years': David Howe on four decades in social work

This article is part of a series of profiles of key figures who have shaped social work over the past five decades, to mark Community Care’s 50th anniversary. Previous interviewees include June Thoburn, Eileen Munro and Herbert Laming.

Since the 1970s, David Howe has been an influential figure in social work research, particularly in the areas of child abuse and neglect.

In 1995, his book Attachment theory in social work practice introduced the concept of attachment to a new audience of social workers.

He has also been one of the leading researchers and voices around the role of emotional intelligence and empathy in child protection interventions, having written books like The emotionally intelligent social worker and Empathy on the subject.

Despite retiring in 2010, his extensive body of work on social work theory, child abuse, neglect and adoption continues to be a cornerstone in social work education.

Reflecting on his 40-year career, Howe spoke to Community Care about the cost of increasing caseloads, the relevance of attachment theory, and the importance of understanding parents’ worldviews.

You started in social work around the same time as Community Care was launched, in the early 1970s. What are your memories from that time?

There was no regular magazine specifically for social workers back then. It also coincided with a time when, under the Seebohm report’s recommendation, in 1971 all social work services were combined into social services departments. I went from being a childcare officer working with children and families to a generic social worker.

We were excited and nervous about the change. Having to work with people you’d never worked with before - it was a whole new world. It was interesting, stimulating and different.

Then a few years later, I remember a colleague brought this new magazine, called Community Care, into the office and it was solely for and about social workers.

People thought it was fantastic. It wasn’t just talking about our profession but also confirming and consolidating it. It gave it legitimacy and a profile, which hadn’t been strong up to that point.

As an academic, how do you think social work education has evolved over the past decades?

I don't think it’s changed massively - the basic content remains roughly the same. The biggest change has been social work courses having to deal with the more bureaucratic nature of social work these days.

Once the idea of targets was introduced in social work, with thresholds and requirements, it distorted practice. People’s caseloads rising massively has been a big factor as well.

If you have to work with bigger caseloads, that affects what you can and can't do, usually for the worst.

Higher caseloads mean shorter and less personalised involvements."

When you go into practice, the reality can be rather different to the more idealised content of the training course. That can distress people. What they’d like to do isn’t what they can do because the department has all sorts of constraints and limitations of time, money, agenda and resources. And that can hit you hard.

You’ve done extensive research into a social worker’s role within the child protection process. How have you seen thinking and practice evolve over your career?

Well, I haven’t been in touch with the sector for a while [Howe retired in 2010]. But if you cut resources, then you haven't got the time to get an intelligent understanding of cases, particularly where there is neglect and abuse.

This is a very difficult field to work in. It can be fraught; there are children's lives at stake.

You’ve got all sorts of issues that you've got to untangle and the shorter the time you’ve got, the worse it becomes. I think the separation between assessments and working with a case long-term is a bad idea.

I hear of multiple workers working the same case. So families and clients have no idea from one week to the next who will be visiting. You can’t work in this area unless you have some continuity of the relationship.

The same worker should work on the same case for as long as it takes."

When I started in the children's department, we could be involved with a family for years. Sometimes there wasn’t an end until the children grew into adulthood!

If you had a long-term relationship and you knew the family, you could assess the risk much more accurately.

What is the most important thing social workers should do when working with families?

Everything I’ve written boils down to, if the family feels like you are trying to understand them and their point of view, the more trust and less resistance you have from them. The less resistance you have from them, the less dangerous they are for their children and the more responsive they become.

Something I used to teach and write about is: you have to do with the parent what you want the parent to do with the child. If I understand you and what makes you behave the way that you do, and you get what I do and the way that I work, then we can connect.

 

Similarly, if I get them to understand their child, they become more available psychologically and mentally for their child, and the child develops a more thoughtful, reflective and integrated personality.

But you can't do [this] without time and resources to allow you to build the kind of relationship that makes a child safer. Instead, you have short-term, slightly more aggressive interventions. That doesn’t help the parent connect with their child’s mind. The parent-child relationship remains more stressful.

Based on your research, how does attachment theory play a role within social work?

I wrote the book Attachment theory for social work practice in 1995, based on pioneering thinking and research within psychology. I wanted to make it accessible to social workers and was lucky enough to get hundreds of requests to give lectures and training and partake in conferences.

Any young mammal has to know where to go in times of danger, usually the parent or the attachment figure. Young, vulnerable babies over time recognise that when they feel tired or hungry or hurt, the place of safety is mum and dad.

The attachment figure, the mum or dad in this case, protects, soothes and comforts.

As they begin to make that connection in the safety of the relationship, the child learns about their own fear, their own reaction to it. These are critical experiences through which children learn to develop psychologically, particularly about the world of other people.

The most common question a young child will ask is why. Why did that man do that? You don’t just see behaviour, you want to understand the psychological state that caused it. So within the concept of a secure attachment relationship, parents begin to help their child recognise and understand the psychology behind behaviour.

If you were in a relationship with a parent who doesn't do that with you because they're a drug addict, abusive, neglectful or drunk, then you don't get that explanation. So you don’t develop a psychological understanding of the world of people. Not understanding the world of people and relationships is stressful."

The quality of early attachment relationships affects so much of the psychological development of children.

One clarification that I have to make to social workers is that children attach to parents; parents don’t attach to children. Attachment is about the vulnerable and the weak looking for safety from the protective and strong. Attachment behaviour occurs at times of distress, fear or anxiety.

When a child’s life is stressful, their attachment system is switched on. When it is switched on, you don't have time to play and explore and be curious because you’re too busy trying to keep safe.

However, I'm bound to say some social workers get attachment theory wrong and misuse it.

In what way?

There’s a particular concept called disorganised attachment. It’s often associated with domestic abuse and neglect cases and the dynamics of it get misunderstood – I won’t get into the reasons why.

Often social workers, and even academics who write about it, misunderstand it and use it for the wrong reason and to the wrong end, particularly in court work, which makes me very cross.

Too many people think that an abused child must be showing disorganised attachment, or that disorganised attachment means there is an abused child. It’s not as simple as that. It can be misleading, it can lead you to make the wrong recommendations and decisions.

What is your hope for the future of social work?

That it continues. It just needs more resources, more time, and more space. That preventative work is given more emphasis. That more time and resources mean better social worker-service user relationships, better understandings, less stress and safer practices.

The irony is that, if you spend more – on early years provision, more practitioners, youth services -  you’ll actually save money, because across the board and over the lifespan there will be fewer people making big demands on public services.