THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

Are we growing into a society that has changed from pointing bones to just pointing fingers?

The parents are to blame?

It was the Police and Justice system?

It all starts with our Social Security system?

Is it alienation, racism, bad jeans or just plain fucking boredom?

All of us have at some stage heard someone blame somebody else. But is it becoming endemic in our society? Is anybody accepting that they are the problem and then setting out to do something about it?

When you sit in Court the first defence is the adoption of the early onset of Alzheimer’s then move through the various social ills until the crime has been mitigated enough for innocence to be found or a reduction in possible sentence has been achieved.

Are these tactics being adopted by the general community? Have we seen so many Courtroom Drama’s on TV that we have begun to use the same tactics in our everyday life, regardless of the outcome, to protect our own backsides?

Be it called pride, ego, arrogance, self-importance or survival of the fittest if we are caught out cheating, stealing or failing to carry out our directed duties every time, and I include myself, will quickly jump to their own defence.

As ‘monkey see monkey do’ the chances that we are passing on these protective skills to our children and young people is extremely high. Children divorcing parents?

How often will I say ‘now be honest I can’t help you unless you are’ and then hear them, in some cases, come out with the most fanciful twaddle I have ever heard. One or two clients will come up with a series of events that would be better used in ‘animated cartoons’.

We know they are not always telling the truth but we should also realise that they are using the same protective skills as we adults have unwittingly taught them. Fortunately for us older and wiser workers we have managed to learn how to screen out the plausible impossible and can arrive at a situation somewhere between what the client wants and what we think they need ‘in their best interest’.

Feedback, that awful word which makes me think of physical regurgitation, between worker and client determines how best these decisions can be met. But we must be very careful to ensure that firstly, the client has the knowledge and ability to carry out the task, secondly that the end result will be a further advancement of the young person towards both personal and financial independence and finally ‘Is it legal?’

‘They don’t understand me’ is a common phrase of mine when trying to explain why very few people know what my job really is. 'That makes two of us, they don't understand me either'. That’s because the welfare sector is so caught up in models that something that doesn’t fit the mould. Then just when we begin to think we know what that model is it mutates into something else. Why? Because that’s where the gap is, how the care services see its role and what the client wants can be poles apart in interpretation.

So is the case with many of the young people who come to me for assistance, some agencies or individual workers have an idea of what they have to achieve and set out to bend and twist young people until they fit their mould. It took me two years in the job before I got the gut feeling of what my role was - do it the way the client sees best without all the contortions.

My job as a stand alone should have really been called WIP ‘The What-if Project’ for that is how I have developed this service to work with other agencies and our clients. Its not a case of what my service wants for them but what they want from my service.

The result of this has been a constant process of evolution to fit the project to the need rather than the other way around. My unique role was deliberately designed to be an enigmatic service so that the most disadvantaged of young people could meet their needs without having to fit to any particular model. My services have to become like its clients, unconditional access, flexible, twisting and turning according to the need that has to be met.

The end result should be that young people having used my service should never be able to declare when things go wrong, that ‘the devil made me do it’…………………….. Anyone for litigation?