"We're not professionals when it comes to dogs" with Denise Turner

Jeremy Dixon interviews Denise Turner about the complex issues of dealing with dogs within social care work, and her recent article "We're not professionals when it comes to dogs". 

You can read Denise's article here: https://academic.oup.com/bjsw/article/55/5/2464/8090589

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[00:00:00] ExChange Wales: Welcome to the Exchange Wales podcast, a series that explores research and practice sharing, evidence and care experience to build better social care in Wales and beyond.

[00:00:19] Jeremy Dixon: Hello, welcome to the Exchange Podcast. My name is Jeremy Dixon and I'm based at Cardiff University and I am part of Exchange. And today I'm joined by Professor Denise Turner. Denise is a professor of social work at the University of Hertfordshire, and she's going to talk to us today about a recent article she's written about dogs.

And Denise, welcome to the podcast. 

[00:00:45] Denise Turner: Thank you very much, Jeremy. Good to be here. Thank you for inviting me. 

[00:00:49] Jeremy Dixon: So the article that you've written is in the British Journal of Social Work. It's called, "We're not professionals when it comes to dogs: social work encounters with dogs and their implications for education and practice."

So can you tell us a little bit to start with about what your background is? Were you a child social worker by background or an adult social worker, or a bit of both?

[00:01:09] Denise Turner: A bit of both actually. Yeah. So I did my social work qualification a long time ago now. And I worked initially in child protection.

So I worked in a children's team back at the time that they were called patch teams. So that's how long ago it was. And I've subsequently worked in mental health. I worked with sex offenders for a while. And my most recent practice role was in a hospice back about nearly 10 years ago now.

But I've worked in higher education now for about 15 years in different roles, different social work roles. So yeah, so I've got a mix of practice experience and more recently being in the higher education sector. 

[00:01:57] Jeremy Dixon: Yeah. So that's quite a variety of things you've done.

[00:01:59] Denise Turner: I have, yes. 

[00:02:00] Jeremy Dixon: So it gives you a good overview of what social work is like. So the article that you published came to my attention actually through looking at the British Association of Social Work Magazine. It was on their front cover. 

[00:02:13] Denise Turner: It was, yes. 

[00:02:15] Jeremy Dixon: And I think it said, it had the headline "friend or foe" or something like that.

And it just made me wonder, why you had this focus on dogs to begin with. So what was your motivation for writing about it? Because as you say in your article, it isn't written about a huge amount. 

[00:02:33] Denise Turner: That's a good question. So lots of different sort of routes that, that all came together.

One is that I did used to be a practicing social worker myself. I remember from my days of practice that there were lots of stories told about dogs. I encountered quite a lot of dogs myself and have my own stories. Social workers would tell those stories almost as funny anecdotes, really. And that's still the case, I think that's, if you are social workers, they'll all have their kind of amusing anecdotes about dogs. So that, that bit, my own kind of practice experience. But then I've also had a lot of experience of fostering and having my own rescue dogs. 

So I've had a quite a lot of experience with dogs that might be deemed as sort of more difficult or reactive. And my daughter, in fact is a dog behaviourist. So there's lots of, lots of kind of knowledge and information about dogs that have been in my family. And then the focus really that led to the research came through doing a skills day at my previous institution. So you will know social work students have to do a certain amount of skills days in addition to their placements and we did a skills day on dogs, and the students initially said why are we doing this? It's got no relevance. This is going to be a waste of our time. And then after the session said, oh, that's one of the best sessions that we've had, and it, all of those things together really made me look at what is there around on what happens when social workers encounter dogs in their practice.

And when I looked, there wasn't really anything. No research at all. And I guess that got me quite interested because social work's a bit, social workers quite often are surveyed to death on various different things and there wasn't anything on this. And I suppose lastly, since the pandemic I've done quite a lot of work around aspects of social workers' wellbeing. I work part-time now as a professor of social work and part-time as a psychotherapist, so I'm quite interested in the wellbeing aspects and this is an aspect of social workers' wellbeing that hasn't been looked at all.

[00:04:53] Jeremy Dixon: Yeah. 

[00:04:53] Denise Turner: All those different aspects, if that makes sense, Jeremy. 

[00:04:56] Jeremy Dixon: Sure. Yeah. No, that's really interesting. And one of the things you talk about in the beginning of the article is I suppose, different perceptions of dogs. And I guess if we think about what types of things appear in the British press, you do get either very good or very bad accounts of dogs and not so much in between.

So you tend to get these articles talking about British people's love of dogs, but then you get these very dangerous dog stories where you almost feel like there's a kind of moral panic going on about particularly breeds of dogs from time to time, like Rottweilers or other breeds, which are deemed to be dangerous.

And yeah it's interesting isn't it, I suppose how that feeds into people's beliefs. What were you, in regard to the Dangerous Dogs Act, can you tell us a bit about what that says and how that maybe affects social work practice? 

[00:05:46] Denise Turner: It's, the dangerous dog, that's interesting because it makes it an offense to be in charge of an out of control dog, basically in any place, and that includes the private residence.

So that's interesting for social workers because if they are bitten on a home visit, then actually technically the person that they're visiting could be charged under the Dangerous Dogs Act. And of course that has all sorts of implications for social work because social workers might have spent months, years building up a relationship with the family.

And they're not going to want that family to then be charged under, the Dangerous Dogs Act. Far from it actually, so much social work now is relationship based practice, relationship building. That's the kind of legal aspect of it. And equally, I interviewed social workers in my research, some of whom had been bitten, and there was a reluctance to follow that up. Both on the part of the social worker themselves, but also the local authority and also the police actually, because we know that policing is, massively under the cosh. 

[00:06:56] Jeremy Dixon: Yeah. 

[00:06:57] Denise Turner: Under resourced. So again, there's all sorts of quite nuanced aspects to this. I just wanted to add to what you were talking about that I think most people who work in the dog behavioural field, and that's an unregulated field itself, would also argue that there's no such thing as a dangerous dog, actually. That it's a dog who is biting is doing that quite often as a last resort because of other issues that might be going on with it.

So it, it might be hungry, it might be in pain. It might be very anxious. And I suppose that relates to the Dangerous Dogs Act as well, because what social workers in my research said to me is that if they were very anxious around the dog, then that was likely to be picked up by the dog and may make the dog more anxious.

So it's a really complex area actually. 

[00:07:46] Jeremy Dixon: Yeah. So if you tell us a bit about your research could you tell us about what kind of questions that you have? What were you setting to find out when you started off? 

[00:07:55] Denise Turner: I mainly wanted to find out what social workers were saying really, because as I said before, this is an area that very much lacks research.

And again, I said this before you, if you scratch a social worker, you'll get a narrative about a dog. So what I wanted to find out in - this was just a pilot piece of research, and I'm looking to follow that up with a larger study- but what I wanted to find out in the pilot was how much interest there was in it partly, and there was quite a lot of interest for a very small pilot. And then what social workers were saying what narratives were coming through from social workers. What kind of information and knowledge exchange had they had about dogs, if any, during their kind of initial qualifying and also in their CPD and what did they think if anything needed to happen around their encounters with dogs. Did they think this was a training issue? Did they think it was a policy issue? So really just to map and explore the area. 

[00:08:57] Jeremy Dixon: And it is, although you said it's a pilot study, which is essentially, I suppose the first step you might take in a research process and then maybe broaden out or do something bigger.

It was still relatively large in a sense. I think you did 43 surveys and 13 interviews, so 

[00:09:12] Denise Turner: Yeah, we- 

[00:09:13] Jeremy Dixon: it wasn't tiny. 

[00:09:14] Denise Turner: No it wasn't. It was shared fairly in a fairly sort of low key way. It was shared initially through the Principal Social Workers Network, and then there was an article in community care, which had the link to the survey, and you are right, 43 social workers came forward and that wasn't a small number actually, they had to give up their time, precious time to do the survey, so I was quite interested in that in itself, and I did ask people why did you, I followed the survey up with 13 interviews that I did with people that had answered the survey, and I asked them all, why did you give up your time to do this?

And all the social workers said, because this is such a big issue actually in social work and it's not taken seriously. So I was thanking people for giving up their time and they were thanking me for doing the research. They were saying no, thank you, this is really important and we're so glad that you're doing this research.

And that in itself, I suppose was very interesting, 'cause I don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting 43 people to come forward. 

[00:10:16] Jeremy Dixon: Because sometimes it can be really hard to get people to 

[00:10:19] Denise Turner: Yeah. You get eight if you're lucky. Yeah. 

[00:10:22] Jeremy Dixon: So the first question you asked was what provision, if any, educates social work students and practitioners on how to assess dog behaviour and minimise risk?

So I wonder, did you find that there was any kind of resources out there or not? 

[00:10:37] Denise Turner: No. Pretty much everybody said no to that. Yeah. There was nothing in initial social work education. And again, that's, it's difficult isn't it? Because all of human life is in social work. So it is generic.

It has to be generic to some extent. But I think the skills day, which is where we did this training, or I prefer to think of it as a sort of knowledge exchange thing, that was the perfect fit for that. So the answer was no. Some social workers said that, they thought training was very important and they really needed it either as part of the pre-qualifying or as part of CPD post qualifying.

Other people did say that they, and I very much understood this, that they were a bit worried that if training was provided, it would almost be like a tick box where you've had the training now, so if you get bitten, it's your fault. 

[00:11:30] Jeremy Dixon: Yeah. 

[00:11:30] Denise Turner: Because we've provided the training. So there was quite a drive amongst the social workers that I interviewed for this to be a policy issue for, so for it to be something that perhaps Social England as the regulator starts to think about maybe having some key guidelines included as a kind of policy issue. And that was interesting too. I think for me, the most important bit is that we start to have conversations about this and that it is taken seriously as an issue.

[00:12:00] Jeremy Dixon: Yeah. 

[00:12:00] Denise Turner: And not just a kind of humorous anecdote. 

[00:12:03] Jeremy Dixon: Yeah. 

[00:12:04] Denise Turner: Really. 

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[00:12:19] Jeremy Dixon: I'm gonna come back to the policy issue a bit in a moment actually 'cause I'm quite interested in, what people might have been asking for. But before I do, I just want to come back to your sort of last point, 'cause you were saying that there's a tendency for people to talk about it in anecdotal terms and maybe talk about the kind of funny stories or the horror stories perhaps, but when you were asking people to talk about the kind of whole scope of their experience, what kind of stories were people coming up with? What kind of issues were raised? 

[00:12:49] Denise Turner: I think that the humorous bit almost does link to what people were saying, the, the title of the article is, you read it out at the beginning, the "We are not professionals when it comes to dogs" was a quote from somebody that I interviewed and that's what they said. We are just not professionals where it comes to dogs. So we have all these guidelines, all these different things that we're meant to do, and then there's dogs. There were various things people, some of the social workers that were in the research had been bitten.

Somebody had been bitten twice. One social worker in particular that I interviewed had been bitten incredibly badly and by a dog that she knew very well, the dog that she'd seen over, over a year, in the course of visits- she was in hospital. She had to have surgery because of the dog bite.

Other people talked about, there was a sort of a bit of a, are you a dog lover or aren't you a dog lover? And some of the people that designated themselves as dog lovers did talk about, actually, they thought that could be more of a risk to them because actually they might be so comfortable with dogs that may not, you know, that may not be safe.

Social workers that were scared of dogs also said that could be a risk because the dog could pick up on it, and also they couldn't focus on the purpose of the visit. And it's not always as simple as saying, can you put your dog away? There was one social worker who did ask the family to put their dog away and the family made a formal complaint because the dog was part of the family, and they said that she'd been disrespectful to part of their family.

So again, it's very complex. There were other social workers who had, some were phobic, a bit phobic around dogs, others had health allergies. One social worker that I interviewed who said that she was really quite allergic to dogs and I asked her, do you, have you asked your employers about that?

She said, oh, no, I just cope with it by myself. I go home and I wash my face. And then there were, cultural issues as well. Religious and cultural issues that came up around contact with dogs from people with particular faith groups. So various things. And I suppose the last thing is, and again, I didn't know that much about this with social workers that were working in fostering and adoption who were being asked to go out and do dog assessments. So literally assessments on the dog. Is it safe to have this dog in the house? And by and large, that assessment was made through asking the owners, and the owners would say it is a safe dog, we've got children. Again, there was, there was a dominance of social workers working in fostering and adoption in the research, and that's because they were so anxious and worried about what they were being asked to do. 

[00:15:30] Jeremy Dixon: Okay. 

[00:15:30] Denise Turner: So lots of different things, many of which were unexpected actually.

[00:15:35] Jeremy Dixon: Yeah. So you talked about some quite worrying accounts of people being bitten or having bad experiences. So was that a common experience, do you think about people seeing dogs as a particular risk or was it just with a few of the people you talked to? Did you get a sense of whether most people worried about that or whether it was maybe a more of a side issue?

[00:15:55] Denise Turner: I think everybody, and like you said, there were 43 respondents, so everyone that responded to the research did so for a reason, basically. So I think, and lots of the people would make it very clear, " I'm a dog lover myself, but-" so I don't think any of it was a side issue, no. I think that- but it, I suppose what was interesting for me was that it wasn't just about dog aggression, actually.

You might think that people were talking about being worried about risk of aggression, and there were people of course, who were, and who had in fact, been on the receiving end of dog aggression. But there were all these other things around, as I've said, phobias, liking dogs too much, the cultural and religious issues, all of that. 

[00:16:40] Jeremy Dixon: Yeah. 

[00:16:40] Denise Turner: So they, so it was very complex and I think, the kind of the guideline, very simplistic guideline about "can you just ask people to put their dogs in the kitchen" or whatever, isn't always as easy as that. And particularly, where you might be working- I had social workers that were working in frontline child protection, who often, of course, make unannounced visits. They have to, they're required to do that, so that's going to up the ante even more if you're making an unannounced visit and there's a dog in the home, and then you are saying "can you please remove your dog?"

[00:17:12] Jeremy Dixon: Yeah. 

[00:17:13] Denise Turner: That, that's, and it's very common for dogs to pick up on stress and anxiety as well, and then raises their kind of thresholds. 

[00:17:23] Jeremy Dixon: Sure. So it sounds like it's quite dominant theme from the social workers in the study in terms of worrying about the risk of harm from dogs.

And I wonder, as you were talking about those different scenarios, did people come up with maybe good practice kind of principles or things they'd learned about how to manage that issue in a more positive way? 

[00:17:43] Denise Turner: Yes, they did. Lots of, some people talked about dogs being very good relationship builders, which I think is I important and I think it's important for me to say that this research isn't about demonising dogs, not in any way.

It's really about, how can we help the dogs and the social workers and the people that social workers are working with? So there was some focus on, it's a great relationship builder. If you go into a home and somebody's got a dog and you like dogs and you can talk to them about their dog, that will put people at ease.

Some social workers talked about a system called the Hazard Warning Database, where people were meant to enter onto the database if there was a dog in the house where there'd been a previous incident. And then social workers were meant to check that database before they went on visits. But for all sorts of reasons that wasn't routinely done.

A lot of time pressure and people forgot to do it or they didn't check it, or they might not want to have preconceived notions before they went into a house. 

[00:18:43] Jeremy Dixon: Yeah. 

[00:18:43] Denise Turner: But that facility was there and yeah, I think that was about it really. Very much the focus on how dogs could be a great relationship builder and something that would really help you make a kind of bond with a family or with people in a family.

[00:19:00] Jeremy Dixon: Sure. And coming back to an earlier point you made, you were talking about social workers asking for more policy to be written about it. Did you get a sense about what kind of things that they would want specifically? What, I mean was there a kind of steer about what they would be looking for or was that-

[00:19:17] Denise Turner: Yeah, there was some suggestions made.

Yeah, I think some of it almost, not quite, but it almost fell into sort of parts- social workers that were saying we really need training and knowledge and information. And then social workers that were saying we have to be a little bit cautious to training for the reasons that I was talking about before.

We don't want this to become another tick box. And then it's something to blame us if some, if we have an incident with the dog, then it's our fault because we didn't, attend the training or listen closely enough to the training. But I think those social workers that were talking about policy, were talking about partly having conversations like this so that it's taken seriously at a policy level, guidelines, working quite closely with people in the dog behavioural field to understand dogs so that there are some guidelines, for example, around dog behaviour.

Just understanding that if a dog's wagging its tail, it doesn't necessarily mean that actually it's pleased to see you. If you think a dog's smiling, it's not. 

[00:20:16] Jeremy Dixon: Yeah. 

[00:20:16] Denise Turner: Because we answer for more sized dogs as well, so we can think, oh look, it's licking, its lips, it's hungry, and actually that isn't the case.

So just having some sort of basic kind of knowledge around what a dog might be communicating. Some people talked about, actually it would be very useful to have almost a kind of retained dog expert who could work across counties so that if they had any particular worries or whatever they could go and consult that person.

And that was particularly the case, as I've talked about before, for fostering and adoption social workers who were being asked, can you go out and assess this dog? And some of them said to me no, I can't, I don't know how to, it wasn't in my training and I'm not a dog behaviourist. So you know that was a suggestion made by a couple of them that actually it would be really helpful to have somebody they could just go to and say, look, this is what this dog's doing- what do you think? So various different things. And then I suppose the kind of knowledge exchange bit goes back to what I was talking about at the beginning, just having these conversations so that social workers who've been bitten or who've had difficult encounters with dogs may think that it's just them, and they don't know that it's happened to other people. And then there did seem also from some of the people that I interviewed to be- some work that perhaps needs joint work that perhaps needed doing with the police because where people have been bitten, the police weren't really following this up and the social workers felt quite upset, understandably, about this.

So maybe some joint working there as well. And probably the implications for other professionals who make home visits too. So there was quite a feeling from quite a few of the people that I interviewed that actually social workers are a bit dispensable. 

[00:22:08] Jeremy Dixon: Yeah. 

[00:22:08] Denise Turner: You know that, that post office workers, for example, that was used as an example, it's taken very seriously with post office workers and now even if you get like an Amazon delivery or something like that, you'll quite often get a message beforehand that says your order is arriving, in 15 minutes, please secure any household pets, and social workers were saying, no one cares about us. We just go in, we make unannounced visits, we do all of this and there's nothing no kind of guidelines. So I think all of that really was in that conversation around policy, but starting with having the conversations.

[00:22:43] Jeremy Dixon: Yeah. And it does sound like there's some really good ideas for specific training that can be done. I mean I would be very interested myself to know what signs and behaviours to look out for from dogs if you were doing a visit. 

[00:22:55] Denise Turner: Absolutely. Yeah. 

[00:22:56] Jeremy Dixon: I didn't getting any of that when I was doing training or being an approved mental health professional or any of those things, so that would all be really valuable.

[00:23:03] Denise Turner: We did some of that when we did the skills day that I was telling you about. We looked at dog language, we got people- we gave people pictures, the dog's doing different things and said, what do you think the dog is expressing here? And inevitably they got it wrong. And as part of taking this research forward, I'm also working with a dog behaviourist, hopefully who's developed a dog bite risk kind of tool to help people assess bite risk, which you know, would be very helpful in social work and social care. 

[00:23:33] Jeremy Dixon: Thanks ever so much for speaking to us today, Denise. It's been really interesting and if people want to hear more about your research, they can read the article in the British Journal of Social Work. I think it's available free, isn't it? 

[00:23:44] Denise Turner: It is, yeah. It's open access, yes. 

[00:23:46] Jeremy Dixon: Good. So we look forward to hearing more about your work and we hope it continues. So thanks again. 

[00:23:52] Denise Turner: Thank you. Thanks very much Jeremy. And can I just give a little thank you for inviting me? I just wanted to also say thank you so much to all the social workers who participated in that research.

They gave up their time to do it and I'm hugely grateful to them for that. So thanks. Thanks very much. 

[00:24:09] ExChange Wales: Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Exchange Wales podcast. At Exchange Wales, we connect researchers, practitioners, and people with lived experience to share evidence, practice, and insights that shape social care.

Our work spans children's and adult social care, and we're also exploring the growing role of artificial intelligence in the sector. If you'd like to learn more or get involved, please visit exchangewales.org.