From Fact to Fiction

I've been a child protection social worker most of my life. Apart from three decades of front-line practice, I've done research on the subject, written lots of books and hundreds of articles about it, and taught and trained students in universities and colleges both in this country and abroad.

I've just written a novel The Verdi Solution that has a strong child protection component in it. When I was contacting some old friends and telling them about this, one remarked: 'I thought you'd been writing novels all your life!' I actually thought that was funny and very complimentary. It meant that my books on child protection had at least been well read, which you can’t say about every textbook.

But she had a point. I have never written a textbook which didn’t to some extent rely on fiction, the fiction of others as well as my own. That’s not because I felt the need to ‘invent things’, but, more importantly, because fiction is a helluvalot more effective in drawing readers into the text, and persuading them that the writer understands the complexities and suffering of the clients being described. Textbooks don’t always do that.

Social Workers, writers-in-waiting.

Every social worker I know wants to write a novel. They’re keen to tell the world about all the characters they’ve encountered; all the weirdos, the perverts, the abusers, the phonies, the jokers, the aggressors, the bullies, the liars, the cowards, the layabouts, the parasites….and that’s just their social work colleagues they’re thinking about! Their clients are something else again! (I jest of course!)

There are few jobs which provide as much opportunity to observer human nature in all its frailty and vulnerability as social work. Many social workers choose to write about what they see. I'm not talking about their official case-recordings and reports - they've got to do those whether they like writing or not, and do them soon. No, I'm thinking of another time, in another place, when social workers might want to reflect and write differently, about the drama, passion and aggression they often encounter.

I've been doing that for decades. Initially, I never believed that I could publish such material, but the more I looked at existing social work literature, the more convinced I became that there was a huge discrepancy between the dry, official, unemotional language and description of textbooks, and the experiences of clients for whom, ultimately, textbooks are written.

This led me to an experiment in textbook writing. I decided that the first chapter of each of my textbooks should be written more as fiction than fact. The chapter would be based upon real people and events that would be heavily anonymised, but the fictional style of writing would enable readers to explore with greater honesty and precision the feelings and vulnerabilities of the characters described. There were two objectives: firstly, to convey all the drama, conflict and suffering endured by these characters; secondly, to confront the student with the true nature and the dimensions of the challenges they would face. This would enable him or her to immediately empathise, and feel confident that the author (me), whatever flaws and failings my writing might reveal, was not wholly ensconced in a bureaucratic or ivory tower, divorced from the harsh realities of front-line social work practice.

For example, in my first book Crisis Intervention in Social Services, I described in the first chapter how a mother reacted when I told her I was visiting her home in response to a child abuse referral concerning her five-year-old son:

Mrs Walker yelled out. She charged in and out of the room repeatedly, yelling abuse at me, yet with a terrified look in her eye. She had…..the loudest piercing voice that quickly rendered Playtime inaudible, and had the two younger children scrambling to their feet and rushing to her side in utter panic. 'Mammy! Mammy! What's wrong…? What's that man doing mammy?' they screamed, as they clutched her waist and stared petrified at me.

However untextbook-like this kind of writing appears, and whatever flaws it may have, it very quickly revealed to the reader a much greater flaw in training. Social work students never had the opportunity to consider such scenarios, nor the challenges they posed, nor the skills and tactics required to extricate oneself from them. What do you do in this situation? What do you do in respect of the mother, the children, and your investigation about alleged child abuse?

So, that’s how it all began. The pattern was set. Instead of a typically predictable first chapter that focussed on the history of the subject and current research, I tried to draw readers into an emotional and psychological vortex of drama, passion and violence, which, when all is said and done, was merely the reality of nearly every day practice. It was a useful basis upon which to contemplate writing a novel.