How Social Work Pioneers Set Out to Take Over Families

Though they will never admit it because of childish anti-Americanism, one of the parents of modern social work is the influence of reforming protestantism in the United States. In the late nineteenth century, opponents of child labour combined with believers in 'scientific' court processes to establish the right of the state to reform families and to take children away. An invaluable chapter in Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism makes the points for me, and I want to acknowledge it in this post.

For instance, I found this quote from Sophonisba P. Breckenridge--not a Marx Brothers character but a 'social reformer' and an honourable woman by many lights--the other day.

To the competent parent all aid should be given; but to the degraded parent, no concessions should be made....

Breckenridge was one of a number of reformers who wanted to 'socialise' workingmen and their children rather than allow them to become class-conscious or, for that matter, catholic. By the mid-1920s, prison reformer Miriam Van Waters was arguing that the state had

an obligation to protect children not merely against broken homes which bred crime but against parents whose treatment resulted in a crippled or warped personality

It isn't that far from that mentality, aided by science, to the apparent view of Tony Blair that 'problem' children should be tracked from the womb. Van Waters eventually despaired at the 'incurable loyalty of children to unworthy adults' rather than the state. Some social workers decided to move on not just from establishing secret courts that snatched children and 'reeducated' them, but to the state education of parents;

It is the most astonishing thing that mother love has been found by science inherently dangerous, and some [mothers] grow panicky as they let the significance of the new teaching sink into their thoughts...[new teaching should enable parents to convey the] blessing of freedom from emotional bondage to parents....

The above quote is from the Social work pioneers Ernest and Gladys Groves.

And so on, and so forth. The British contributions to this sort of thing seem to consist largely of a highly damaging addition of powerful, locally protected bureaucracy with a lower middle class fetish for disguised, class-conscious eugenics. That written, this Vermont webpage suggests how Atlantic the project was.

The ultimate effect in England and Wales has been to establish in social workers' minds the ideas that it is meet and just to engineer the family to fit their own preconceptions. The family law system has also become one in which hearsay cannot apply, courts meet in secret, rules of evidence are out the window and what the state says generally goes; a very model for the creeping imprisonment of each and every one of us within the state as citizens.

The highly unlikely pairing of Camilla Cavendish and The Exile have been running separate but linked campaigns lately pointing this all out. They also draw attention, as separate bloggers, to how the system fails so frequently. Occasionally, social work disasters become public, but the tide of human misery and class-oppression represented by the efforts of that 'industrial sector' is legion. I think that it always will fail frequently because the state is no satisfactory psychological substitute for families and never will be.

This society needs to reestablish families. Before anyone says it, I am uninterested in some chilling attempt to return to the nuclear family. Children need love and role models and can get this from extended groups, from single parents and from unconventional parents. It is the state that, given its record, has no right to say that it can automatically provide that love, or that it knows how to give it.

So--my fourth proposal of the Reentree this September, after school vouchers, more prisons and public ownership is quite simple. Lets ask ourselves, as a society, if the whole structure of social work and family law is not misconceived. We can begin in that by asking ourselves how many social workers we should disemploy.