Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- one Introduction
- two Re-imagining child protection in the context of re-imagining welfare
- three We need to talk about ethics
- four Developing research mindedness in learning cultures
- five Towards a just culture: designing humane social work organisations
- six Getting on and getting by: living with poverty
- seven Thinking afresh about relationships: men, women, parents and services
- eight Tainted love: how dangerous families became troubled
- nine Conclusions
- References
- Index
seven - Thinking afresh about relationships: men, women, parents and services
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- one Introduction
- two Re-imagining child protection in the context of re-imagining welfare
- three We need to talk about ethics
- four Developing research mindedness in learning cultures
- five Towards a just culture: designing humane social work organisations
- six Getting on and getting by: living with poverty
- seven Thinking afresh about relationships: men, women, parents and services
- eight Tainted love: how dangerous families became troubled
- nine Conclusions
- References
- Index
Summary
When we try, especially at times of pain and crisis, to penetrate the mystery of another mind, we are inclined to picture it as being, not a shadowy mass of contradictions like our own, but a casket containing entities which are clear-cut and definite but hidden. (Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince)
The student went swimming in the river one day with his girlfriend, a fellow student. She was athletic, but he was a very poor swimmer. … She was madly in love with him and tactfully swam as slowly as he did. But when their swim was coming to an end, she wanted to give her athletic instincts a few moments’ free rein and headed for the opposite bank at a rapid crawl. The student made an effort to swim faster and swallowed water. Feeling humbled, his physical inferiority laid bare. … Wounded and humiliated, he felt an irresistible desire to hit her … and then he slapped her face. … Love's absolute is actually a desire for absolute identity: the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a permanent source of the great torment we call litost. (Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
Introduction
It is our contention in this chapter that the vocabularies with which social workers in children's services describe relationships have become impoverished. This is a point we have alluded to elsewhere in this book, but here we develop it further. Their motivations for ‘choices’ made are described as both clear and also suspicious and deliberately hidden. They are failing to put their children's needs before their own. They are choosing to stay with a violent partner. If they are men they are useless or dangerous, or both. We argue here that it is time to resurrect the intensity and the subtle shading of relational life, only by feeling and expressing the ‘shadowy mess of contradictions’, the feelings of shame and rage, the terror about abandonment that we can hope to have proper conversations, to learn about and improve the lives of adults and crucially to keep children safe.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Re-imagining Child ProtectionTowards Humane Social Work with Families, pp. 113 - 130Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2014
- 1
- Cited by