Scottish Catholic Observer

WHEN I was a young lad, my parents used to have a very popular tabloid newspaper delivered to the house every morning.

I was a voracious wee reader. My parents had encouraged the habit and I remember lying in the hall in my pyjamas and skimming the newspaper from cover to cover before anyone else in the house had even clapped a bleary eye on the front page of that day’s edition.

Eventually my mother, in a fine and admirable show of parenting, started making sure she got to the paper first and ripped out any story which she thought would disturb my developing male mind.

It was many years before I could put much meaning to some of the words I had found floating in isolated headlines. Words like ‘steamy,’ ‘torrid’ or ‘raunchy.’

I am a bigger lad now. These days though, even without my mother hovering around ripping out newspaper stories, I have cultivated for myself a very deep aversion to certain news coverage.

As a social worker working in the field of child protection it often feels like a survival skill.

Media coverage of social work tends to focus on the negative outcomes and extreme circumstances.

I accept there is a reason for this. Most people understand that children are the most vulnerable members of society, and are rightfully horrified to hear of instances of abuse or neglect.

I would like for more of the general public to appreciate just how much effort is expended by the everyday social worker to prevent the tragedies which, all too often it seems, bring shock and dismay to all right-minded people.

For an experienced social worker, straightforward cruelty and neglect are usually fairly obvious to spot.

Even the immediate circumstantial causes of the neglect or abuse, substance abuse or domestic violence for example, tend to jump out during the course of an investigation.

In serious cases a case conference can be held at which a clear plan can be constructed to highlight the need for change and address this in whatever the focal areas may be.

The plan may well turn out to be less effective than hoped for but there is a certain security for   all involved when this stage is reached.

Often the most emotionally difficult cases for me are the cases where there is just something not quite right about a family’s response to our concerns.

There have been many occasions when something on the edge of perception, too nebulous to be worth escalating the level of social work involvement or enacting legal measures to protect the children concerned, has eaten away at me in ways I find difficult to describe.

When I reflect on those cases I can see that they are mostly cases where the damage has been emotional, hidden from view until some catalyst brings the truth to the surface.

During one of my difficult periods I remember waking my wife in the middle of the night by the noise I was making doing press-ups to release some of the stress I was under at work.

I make a funny sight doing that I can promise you. I was off work at the time and had been woken by nightmares of what might have been happening in the home of a family recently added to my caseload due to fairly minor concerns.

When I returned to work only a few days later the case had been escalated in priority and a child protection investigation was underway.

Aside from being quite a barmy activity, my own experience of doing press-ups in the middle of the night would not lead me to recommend the exercise as a long-term strategy for dealing with stress. This is where being a Catholic has helped.

Like most Catholics perhaps, I struggle with prayer sometimes. Something which helped me immensely was finding out about a method of prayer known as the examen.

The examen, often referred to as the Ignatian examen or daily examen, is a prayer popularised by the Jesuits on the recommendation of one of their founders, St Ignatius of Loyola.

The prayer begins by thanking God for any blessings received during the day. As a father myself I often don’t have far to look for these.

Second I ask for grace to know my sins and rid myself of them. As a father myself, I often don’t have too far to look for these either.

The third, and most difficult, part is to review my day hour by hour.

Fourth is to ask pardon for the day’s sins and fifth is to resolve, with God’s grace, not to repeat those sins the next day.

I think the authentically Catholic attitude of self-examination and repentance is the perfect remedy for the nagging doubt and self-recrimination which often causes burnout in social work profession.

I would recommend the examen not only to social workers and other stressed professionals but to everyone who feels they need to re-enervate their prayer life. In 1 Corinthians 13, St Paul describes the qualities of true self-sacrificial love all Christians are called to embody: “Love is patient, love is kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way, it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.”

The above passage is most familiar from the liturgy at many weddings. I can’t help seeing the qualities of a good social worker in there too.

The honest and diligent work of many of my social worker colleagues across the country, Catholic, Protestant, atheist, Muslim or other, put the love spoken of by St Paul into action on a regular basis.

The joy of love may not be easily observable in many of the families I work with but in their work with children and families across Scotland, I like to think that social workers are doing their bit to rekindle that joy where its absence has been felt most.

Michael MacIntosh is a pseudonym.