CW: child abuse, homicide, suicide

I’ve been working in social services nearly twenty-five years, in a variety of roles, including health-related social services, sexual assault, and child welfare.  In that time, the faces came and went so frequently, it became hard to learn a new coworker’s name unless they came back for six months or more.  The pace is high and the grind, hard. 

I know people that won’t honestly answer a question regarding this type of employment in social settings.  I couldn’t lie, and so I answered honestly.  “I don’t know how you do it,” was the most common response, followed by, “I couldn’t, because I’d kill people.”  I’m glad they carry that self-awareness.  Sometimes, they would follow up with how awful ‘bad people are.’  What they never asked: what’s it like.  They certainly didn’t say, “tell me what’s good about the work.”

It’s true not everyone can work on the dark side of humanity.  Not everyone is equipped to witness horrors people enact upon each other, especially recounted after the fact, when there’s nothing that can be done to stop it.  Even worse, when they’re telling it to a cop and you still know nothing will be done about it.  Not everyone is willing to head out to work in the morning, possibly to witness people at their lowest point.  Not everyone is willing to find their presence on the doorstep reduces someone to tears, the worst day of that person’s life beginning with your arrival.

Early on, I worked with kids facing pregnancy.  Some were, some weren’t.  We figured it out.  I was with them through the learning and the what’s next.  I held their newborns and and winced internally when pre-teens with little hope for their own future told me their moms would be so proud of their pregnancy.  I had some regular calls with the child protective workers.

During the advocacy years, I can’t recall how many times the pager went off in the deep, dark of night.  The tone prompted me to roll from bed in order to return a call.  I had a name and number.  I was calling someone who had been sexually assaulted just hours ago, or who had awakened with nightmares from their childhood.  The frequency of those nighttime wakeups, without certainty that it would be a return call or the next six to ten hours with someone at the emergency room for evidence collection, caused an enduring startle at hearing a microwave finish the cook cycle.  Microwaves and pagers sound the same.  I left that work, burned out and on fire at the same time, and ended up, after a spell, in child welfare.

I recently moved on from sixteen years working for the state child welfare agency.  Over the decades, I did a lot of jobs, from knocking on doors in response to anonymous protective reports, to reviewing cases where children had died.  I worked with kinship families; those related to children who were entering custody, to see if they were able to care for the kids, and to support them if they were.  

Through these roles, I’ve entered hundreds of homes in dozens of communities, state-wide.  Sometimes I was knocking, uninvited.  Other days, the door was thrown wide, because I was there to evaluate whether they could safety care for their grandchild.  And sometimes, I visited the home through scene photos.  These were homes in my community, and sometimes further distant.  When you live in a state as small as Maine, eventually you will find yourself traveling through most locations for other reasons.

In the work, you meet people who are on hard times.  You see their stories with a broad, but flat view.  Some have had countless encounters with the state child welfare system that are recounted in yet another in-depth interviews. 

Sometimes, you get to know folks by going back twenty years, through a file review.  You judge your colleagues as you read their work, finding it’s easy to armchair quarterback when you already know the final score. 

Through all the years of child welfare work, it’s apparent that most parents, nearly all of them, really, genuinely desire to do the best for their kids.  There are many who lack the basic essentials to parent a child safely, despite the fact that they’re doing their best.  Despite the fact that they’re doing better than their parents did for them.  And you know that should you separate these parents from their children, you’re heaping the additional trauma of separation upon their already wounded souls.

Now that I’ve left the world of child welfare for more mundane pursuits, I find it doesn’t leave me.  I continue to drive down these roads and by these houses.  Sometimes, I’ve only been in a single room of a home, via photographs.  In those photos, sometimes, the weapon that inflicted the fatal wound is visible, as is a child who has suffered a brutal and violent death; sometimes by their own hand and others the hands of their caregivers.   I’ve stood at the place where it happened, seeing in my mind’s eye the events I’ve read about, realizing there was no one in earshot to hear the children’s cries.

Other roads have other stories.  On more than one occasion, happy, relative adoptions turned to tragedy.  More separation and loss for children whose grandparents have passed, victims of violence or disease.  We know that folks with a great deal of stress in their lives die sooner. Those grandparents carried a lot of stress.

Stress takes people you worked with as clients, and too frequently, people you worked with as colleagues.  Before I left child welfare, the supervisor who hired me was dead, as were two others for literally half the supervisors in the office at my time of hire.  Two close colleagues were deceased and several others I was not as close with.  Only one of these people was retired at the time of their death.  Many were working within hours of their passing.  They were all good people, trying to make the world easier for others.

The name of a homicide victim comes over the morning radio and you say, ‘son of bitch, he killed her.’  Later, at work, you discover it was someone else who committed this murder, and you experience a twinge of guilt that you blamed the wrong person (but that other name didn’t surprise you either) and you see the face of the victim, who you shared a coffee with in their kitchen.  On the evening news, a tearful, convicted parent is shown, as a reporter recounts the crime, the trial outcome, and that an attorney has appealed the murder conviction.  You know far too much about the case to entertain the notion that parent should be anywhere other than jail; the photos and reports fresh in your mind.

It’s fascinating what the public chooses to have outrage about.  Infants die in droves and no one gets excited.  Kids are killing themselves by the handful, and no one asks what was going on at home.  Wholly foreseeable and preventable fatal accidents are written off as fate.  Public outrage is reserved for children roughly five to ten years of age who are beaten to death, oblivious to the evidence that even an infant can remember who abused them, that abuse takes many forms, or that youth suicide is driven by desperation. Once kids are in their teen years, the broader community has no umbrage to hold for them.

There are roads you avoid.  Houses where you examine the gardens across the street as you pass.  These are the toll roads, and they nick a piece every time the social workers travel them. 

The next time you see a news report of a child,  beaten to death by a caregiver, and you feel the urge to lynch the child welfare workers involved because you think they failed, take a breath and sit back.  They work in an impossible system.  And they’re already tearing themselves apart, while their colleagues also tear them apart, and management looks to lay blame at their feet.  The politicians are concerned, but stay at arms length, measuring what will play best in the next election.  They’ll hold a commission and it’s clear the don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, but someone is going to pay.

As you laud first responders and essential personnel, know that child welfare workers are both, but also neither.  They are invisible, but also society’s scape goats, not for what’s happened, but for failing to keep the painful realities of humanity hidden.  No one is asking them about the scars they bear or the colleagues they’ve buried.  No one wants to know what they do.  Tomorrow, they will be up and at it again, finding new toll roads, and ponying up the fee.