Appropriate and inappropriate relationships: David’s story

David and me

With the support of my employer, I maintained a relationship with a young person when he moved from residential care into throughcare services. I will call this young person David. I had worked closely with David for a number of years and watched him grow, develop and flourish into a confident, lovely, yet incredibly vulnerable young person. During the time I was the allocated keyworker for David, my colleagues and I as a ‘corporate’ family, encouraged, supported and allowed him to create a secure base with us. David needed to feel lovable and worthy of our time without it being deemed ‘inappropriate’, and within the therapeutic environment promoted within my workplace this was able to happen. David had no protective family members; his father’s whereabouts was unknown, and his mother had passed away. When it came to the time for David to move on, myself and a colleague, Anne, David’s throughcare worker sought to fulfil our ‘corporate parent’ responsibility and maintain what was an important relationship for David.

Before doing so I accessed the Good Practice Guide to Keeping in Touch jointly produced by The Bryn Melyn Group Foundation, The Charterhouse Group, The National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care and Voice. This guide

offers a framework for considering a range of professional and personal perspectives to enable staff and carers to feel confident about keeping in touch with a young person they have got to know through their work. It aims to provide reassurance that what they are doing is for the benefit of the child and young person.

The guide discusses the fact that residential workers and foster carers can get very mixed message about keeping in touch once professional relationships end but also highlights that these relationships can also be essential lifelines.

Initially, after moving on, David would contact us because he missed us. Myself and Anne would visit him, take him for lunch or a coffee and have a general ‘catch up’. David began to realise that we valued him and that we would give up our time to meet him for no other reason than that we wanted to.

David would also contact us in a crisis or when he needed support or advice. For example, when he needed to move from one homeless hostel to another and had no one to help him, or when he needed to open a bank account and did not know where to start. He would also contact us when he was under the influence and crying about missing his mum and contemplated ending his own life. We learned that David really did have no one else he felt he could ask for help and David learned that, as other care standards advocate, he could trust us, we were reliable, we were going to empower and respect him.

David shared that it had taken him a significant number of years to begin to accept that his own family do not have the capacity to provide him with the care and support that he now recognises he needed as a child and continues to need as a young adult. Over the years, also with the support of David’s throughcare worker, he established positive relationships with my parents, who took on an almost mentoring role. He has also met my gran, siblings and is recognised by the family dog. During the same conversation as discussed above David spoke about now feeling supported, respected, loved and cared for by my family, a family he feels part of. He discussed now having ambition, respect for himself, a sense of identity and belonging, a belief that he can achieve and a confidence that he has something of value to contribute to society that can be traced to the impact of these relationships.

However, regardless of the fact that I made a commitment to this young person and displayed what I feel was the moral courage to ‘go with’ my feelings, value the relationship we had built and embrace the body of theoretical evidence that advocates such practice, an ‘anonymous allegation’ was made to the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) about my ‘inappropriate’ relationship with David.

As you can imagine, I was distraught at receiving notification of this allegation. The initial letter discussed possible consequences if misconduct was found, such as removal from the SSSC register. I have always been extremely conscientious in my work, so having my suitability to practise questioned was terrifying. Over the next two years I received three letters from the SSSC, the final letter advising that no further action would be taken against me.

It is important to highlight that during this investigation I was fully supported by my employer, no restriction was placed on my ability to practise. Yet, though the outcome was in my favour, the investigation process was extremely difficult, had a massive impact on my personal and work life, and left me feeling extremely vulnerable. Two years for them to reach this conclusion was an inordinate and unjustifiable time to live with the pressure of such an investigation hanging over me. I also felt that I was given the task of disproving any wrong doing, disproving that my relationship with David was anything other than a healthy one, without having anyone to access for support, advice or guidance. Although, I was relieved to hear that no misconduct was found, even now, any correspondence I receive from the SSSC such as annual renewal, newsletters, general emails evoke irrational feelings of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. This saddens me, as I have worked hard to get to where I am and I want to feel proud to be a member of a regulated profession and confident that the regulatory body would support and guide me as I progressed in my career.

A consequence of my experience, and more importantly, of having my practice scrutinised and my ability to continue working in my profession questioned, was that I reduced the contact I had with David over this period. David is now twenty years of age and is unaware of this investigation, but has on occasion made reference to the fact that he ‘missed me’ and ‘didn’t hear from [me] as much as [he] used to’. This has caused me immense guilt, as my care, support and if I’m being brave and honest, love, has on occasion provided David with an essential lifeline. Although theoretical, policy and political discussion is invaluable and essential to the development of practice the most powerful statement for me came from David during a recent conversation: ‘When you think about family sometimes blood isn’t thicker than water….who’d have thought you would still be around after all this time’.

I am proud to have been part of David’s journey so far but am saddened that someone viewed that investment as inappropriate and that this allegation was given credence by the SSSC, despite the fact that, in any rational system, what I was doing ought to have been considered to be good professional practice.

Discussion

All of this leads me to conclude that much of what the SSSC might say about supporting relationships is empty rhetoric. The kind of practice it encourages through processes of the sort I encountered is borne out of suspicion and fear rather than care. The wider problem is that, in this legalistic world, when regulation is ‘handed to people who are asked to know nothing of … practice, a lacuna is created. In such a case no reason, no body of knowledge, no evidence, no discrete idea or philosophy underpins the “system” of regulation’ (Haney, 2012, p.9). This was certainly my experience.

Moreover, the SSSC’s position on matters of conduct flies in the face of the direction of the literature on professionalism. It reflects a particular technical/rational way of thinking, which privileges a legalistic and instrumental understanding of practice and which Bondi, Carr, Clark, and Clegg (2011) argue, is inappropriate for people professions. The approach is also inimical to the emerging literature on relational social work, which suggests that ‘adherence to professional guidelines can restrict the potential for connection and paradoxically, this may limit the effectiveness of our contribution to the client’s desired change’ (Alexander & Grant, 2009, p.6). So, we are left in the position whereby the body responsible for upholding professional standards seems to know little of the core tenets of the profession it seeks to regulate and cares less for those who work in it. What place love in a regulated world?