A typical day for me consists of a home visit or school visit and office work and phone calls regarding case work—mostly it consists of juggling various tasks with a to-do list, upholding social work values and ethics in practice, and making sure to always be culturally sensitive in my work due to the diversity of our service users. I will describe part of one particular day from my placement to demonstrate the kind of cross-cultural barriers that might come up in our work.

My home visit for the day was for a ten-year-old boy, who is at home with his mother and youngest brother when I see him. The family has a history of domestic violence and trauma, and the boy has had behavioural outbursts at school that have led to him being on a reduced timetable. One of the problems identified by professionals working with this family is that mum’s way of dealing with the trauma has been to never discuss it and not allow her children to discuss it with anyone either, which might contribute to her son’s difficulty in managing his emotions since he hasn’t had an outlet. From my work with the family so far, I’ve gotten the feeling that culture probably has a lot to do with mum’s way of coping and responding to the trauma, so I’ve been respectful of this and not challenged it, also being sensitive that she herself might still be in recovery. My work has instead been child-centred, with play sessions to model positive behaviour for all family members or sometimes focused solely on the boy. This day I worked on a puzzle with the boy, but his little brother was having a tantrum so mum gave him an iPad to occupy him. While this didn’t seem the ideal method of parenting, she wanted to prevent him from disturbing our session and she also has very little time for herself with four children in total, three of whom have very high needs. So for this case I have been using empathy and cultural sensitivity to ‘pick my battles’ so to speak.

Written by Social Work Masters student on placement at MCFB, March 2019.