Enough! Seeing Things from the Other Side.

Enough!  Seeing things from the other person's point of view and realising that they are also human & are just trying to do the best they can with what they have been given.

This painting is another one that goes off the beaten track as it is my first truly surrealistic piece.  I have always had a real fascination for surrealistic art, Dali has always been a firm favourite of mine, I love the symbolism & hidden messages that I see and I have always wanted to paint surrealistic art myself.  I have had a few ideas, which have been shelved for the time being but something significant happened to a friend of mine that finally got me truly inspired and I want to relate her story & explain the painting.

Many years ago, before I moved to France I worked in Social Services as a PA for the Children and Families Division.  I worked through an Agency & had six different part-time jobs in various departments, so I saw life & the work that was being undertaken from the bottom-up & top-down.

It was here I met a good friend.  She is kind, practical, with a huge heart and very loyal, a little bossy at times but very gifted at many things.  At that time, she was a Family Worker & had been working in this area of work for over 20 years.  A Family Worker tends to work with the families that need help or assistance in some way.  She assesses parenting capacity and uses family therapy skills to discover what is needed & what she can do to help each individual family.  She liaises with social workers and other members of the social team or other departments in Social Services and provides assistance for both parents and children.  She also helps assess the situation in the home & although her work is preventative, she sometimes has to assess whether the child is at risk and whether the family needs to be referred to the Child Protection team or if the child needs to go into emergency foster care whilst the situation is being resolved.   I worked with her over 12 years ago & in the intervening years, many things have changed in social work but what I will say is this lady was the right person for this line of work, she was empathetic and genuinely cared about the people she worked with, her work was intuitive & people-based, rather than paper-work  or financially based.  

As a child in the 1970's I remember the fear of the social worker visiting your house and "taking you away".  My parents never spoke of Social Services, but I can recall that this was one of the horror stories that we were told at school by our teachers, which frightened us all witless & ensured we all behaved ourselves.  Nobody ever really explained that in general you wouldn't get a social worker banging on your door anyway, so this fear stayed in the background of my mind until I worked in Social Services myself and saw things for myself.

What I saw changed my views considerably.  I came across a team that worked well together across the area - despite any differences they might have.  I met people who genuinely cared and would get really very stressed if things were not going in the right direction for the families involved, especially the children.  In some teams, they dealt with the assessments & some of the reports on individuals that I typed up were utterly heart-rending & were worse once the Child Protection Team were involved.  I cannot repeat details and would not but some of the cases still haunt me all these years on.  I also saw the conditions that the staff had to work under, the risks that were posed to themselves, from nits to scabies, from a room full of smoke from cannabis such as skunk to hypodermic needles lying on the floor where a baby crawled, from clutter & dirt to absolute filth and rats & from threats to actual physical violence, the social work team saw it all and were accustomed to more things than their education prepared them for.

My friend had not trained as a social worker, although many referred to her because of her vast knowledge.  She has dyslexia & Social Services were not prepared to pay for assistance for her.  The test alone went from £250 & so she found my services very handy because I am rather good at deciphering what she was saying.  She was happy in her job as a family worker although sometimes the stresses of the work got to her, she managed to cope better than most.  

However, there came a day a few years back that Social services in that area was totally restructured.  At the time, my friend was in hospital for a minor operation & had other other things going on in her personal life.  She received the forms, but groggy due to the medication and her ongoing personal circumstances meant that when she read the forms, they were not self-explanatory.  She put down her choices for what she would like to do and for some very obscure reason ended up with her third choice, which was something she had not done before and was front line work, the job description is as follows:

Family Engagement Worker.

Staff to work on the front line of Social Services gathering background  information from parents, school, doctor or hospital, nursery,  housing &  CAMHS (Children & Adolescent Mental Health Services).  All information put onto a  assessment form. Once assessment form completed, worker to arrange family meetings at 6-weekly intervals and record all this on the computer system.  Staff to fill  other additional forms regarding each case.  Once forms completed, processed & recorded onto the computer system, staff to create a weekly summary of  work progress  and visit.  This does not have to be done every week, but the primary visit has to take place within 24 hours of the original incident.  In addition, staff to cover duty reception once a week for the duration of the day.  Any calls that come in regarding the families already known  or any new family which require attention to be dealt with, up to and including the  removal of children, all of which would require recording on that day on paper, this would then have to be recorded onto the computer system.  It is obligatory for all staff to  be involved in and attend training  & staff meetings, this includes  staff systemic discussion & personal supervision. 

This summary was written by my friend, as you can see it is nothing like what she had just spent the last 30 odd years doing so it was a shock to her to be given her third choice but this wasn't the best bit.  The structure re-haul meant that nobody under management had admin staff, so all paperwork, reports, reception duties, etc were to be undertaken by the staff.  Therefore, my friend who worked part-time at 24 hours a week, & who had 19 - 25 children on her books to work with, had to do all of the admin work and as there are only so many hours in the day it was not all getting done.  Now onto the painting. 

 

Enough! - Trac Davies©

Some people that have seen this have said that on some level they can relate to this painting.  It is about the stresses and strains that pull us apart & we all have to endure in our daily lives; but I shall explain it from my friend's point of view  because many people do not really know what the social work team have to do and what they put up with. 

Although this painting is not of my friend it is indicative of someone who works in the field of social work.  The neck is strained because of the amount of contorting a person has to do to see, hear & understand all.  In addition, sometimes staff do have to put their necks on the line & the pressure this puts on a person is enormous & deeply affects the health of any one individual.   The head is bald indicative that the person has torn his or her hair out in sheer frustration, not only to do with any one case but the processes that go on and also the politics.  Office politics in social services are rife, there are many decent people there that want to do much for others but there is always at least one person in any office who are in the job for their own ends & these people do not care who they trample on their way up the "corporate ladder", client or colleague.  These are the people that do social services no favours thus adding extra strain onto the already over-pressured staff. 

The hands that pull on the mouth of this person distort the lips into a sharp downward curve, this depicts the unhappiness that is felt because of the stresses of the job.  The feminine hand was my friend's manager, who micro-managed her whole team beyond endurance.  Many people left this team because of this behaviour & because they could no longer bear the stress of being deskilled and diminished in the workplace.  The other hand is that of both other professional or of adult clients, who demanded her attention.  The child's hand also pulls and pulls most fiercely because it is the children that are felt the most.  The christening bracelet had dropped and stretched the arm into a cage, where the parents are trapped.  having children is a wonderful joyous event but when circumstance go against you, this event can become joyless and you can feel trapped in parenthood.  So here, these parents for whatever reasons have felt trapped by their baby or child, they look longingly out of the "cage" but they do not stand together and are facing opposite directions either trying to find a way out or a solution. 

Both ears are long from the effort of having to listen to everyone and have been pinned back with a tack and there is a old fashioned telephone and a smart phone earring with a mouth situated on the lobes.  You have to have your ears pinned back for ALL information at all times & so this part of the painting has been depicted as thus.  The mouths are all female because they are the ones that tend to do most of the talking & have more trust in the process.  The chin has been pulled down  by telephonic cable attached to a red phone with an egg and talking sperm at the bottom of the painting.  There is a red  fingerprint on the egg and a mouth on the sperm talking into a red telephone - red because of the urgency and danger that goes with these conversations.  Also, a lot of cases that are dealt with are historical, events repeat time and time again so before a child is born, they may well take the same steps as their parents and grandparents and indeed a manager once told me that she was now working with 3 & 4th generation families and the mistakes just kept getting repeated with each generation.  This is what is so disheartening to people working in social services thus pulling the chin down, that whatever preventative steps they take to help the children and families in need, many families never leave the abuse cycles that they live in & have been born into.

The nose has also been distorted, one nostril by a tightrope, my friend felt she was walking  tightrope everyday with her manager and some of the cases she was involved in as well.  The other nostril has been pulled by money, not only the need to earn but also by budget-cuts.  There is no money in this service now, hence why most admin staff have been cut.  There are teams that do not have a permanent office, they hot desk in whatever office they can find, there has been no permanence and so money has been a huge overwhelming factor in whatever has been dictated in so many people's lives, not only on the social team but also the resources available for the families they work with.

The hook that pulls at tears at the skin, thus making it bleed on the other side to that of the baby's hand is that of the pain that is left with dealing in cases that involve severe abuse.  Dealing with these cases can tear into you and many empathise to the point where the pain of the situation is felt.  I have portrayed this as a hook because it often comes from the most surprising of places & catches you out.  It comes out of nowhere but once it is known about, it pulls and tears at your heartstrings & the stress & pain of this shown on your face.

the vision of this person has been distorted because on one eye a family in need pull at the vision as if in a tug-of-war and on the other eye you have a social worker, a manager, a policeman & a judge.  The vision can be distorted with so many people pulling at what you have observed & it is necessary to have a  clear-sighted head at all times.  The policeman and judge are at the back of this tug-of-war because they are not always involved in every case & so join the team as and when they are needed, of course these people could be just as well a doctor or teacher or another professional that is involved with any particular case.

At the top of the painting, the sky is orange to depict the rising sun, The dawning of a situation whether for good or bad always occurs.  The head retains all conversations as the mouth depicts on the top & there is also a tack here, pinning the top of the head up, stretching the brain to accommodate all that has & is been said and what is discovered and already known about.  As the forehead is always related to the brain, it was what had to be kept in mind with each individual case & all of these things pull at both brain & attention.  

There is the amount of paperwork produced, some which was unnecessary.  A book that was a lifetime's worth of knowledge also has to be kept in mind but it is pinned shut until  it is needed.  The scales relates to the justice system.  They are on fire because sometimes, despite all efforts and best intentions mistakes are made and justice is not done & sometimes tragedies occur because there are always those that somehow slip through the net.  
The figure on the swing with long white hair depicts the freedom of childhood & their pure energy.  It also depicts what had to be observed and KNOWN so that a child's freedom is right and just and not in any way abused.  The woman with the fiery hair is a woman that has undergone abuse, she sits perched right on the edge because often in this line of work adults come along that sometimes need to be talked away from the edge and helped down into the better reality because the pain of abuse burns very brightly and can take over a person's life.  

A door appears black and white, as many things do but is actually in shades of grey.  This head had to open these doors of knowledge to enter the real ones, nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors, not even people that work closely with a family can know everything.   However, what has to be taken into account as this door opens, is that there are children behind it, painting their world into existence with sticky finger-prints on the walls & by their presence alone and they are the most important people to help of all. 

Finally there are the tears, these I have left last because it needs to be said that many people that work within Social Services are feeling this way and the tears are pain, frustration, stress and hurt as each and every person that cares feels pulls apart & betrayed by the system they work in & that means the whole system is actually close to collapse.

 

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Trac Davies - Artist ©