Exploring Child Welfare Practice with Parents who use Substances - with Angela Endicott

Angela Endicott discusses her research exploring the epistemic injustice around child welfare practice with parents who use substances. 

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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.

Martin: Hello and welcome to this episode of The Exchange Podcast. I'm Martin Elliott. And I'm joined today by Dr. Angela Endicott. And the focus of this, discussion is around substance use and substance misuse, within the context of children and families who come into contact with children's services. The discussion is based around Angela's PhD and I'll get her to explain that.

So Angela, welcome and thanks for coming along. I wondered if you wanted to just quickly say a bit about yourself and your background and how you came to do the study that you did. 

Angela: Well, I'll give it a go. So I qualified as a social worker in 2010 , worked within children's services and adult services until the point I left, which was 2017 to begin, three plus one PhD that was funded by the Child Welfares Inequality Project.

I chose to look at substance use, within the context of children's services interventions, mainly because that was the vast majority of my career was working in that area and I had interest in it, and I’d seen a lot of areas that I wanted to look at further from that more removed academic, perspective.

So I decided to do an ethnography. It was based in one local authority within South Wales. The original intention was to do six months ethnography out in the field, which would've been split up between three locality teams in children's services and one specialist adult substance use team. Unfortunately smack in the middle of that the pandemic hit and we entered lockdown for the first time, so we quickly had to readjust. So I decided that I would use the data from the first three months, which was really rich data and a lot of data but it was mainly focused on observing professionals practice and accounts from social workers and where I had intended to speak in more depth with families, I hadn't managed to achieve that and I hadn't managed to speak to the social workers from the adult drug and alcohol team.

So I undertook a series of remote interviews which initially I was worried would be problematic in terms of the type of things I was asking parents to speak to me about were inevitably going to be quite tough to recount over the phone to somebody that you'd never met before, but actually transpired that that wasn't an issue at all, and it was pretty easy to build rapport pretty quickly, and parents seemed to be quite comfortable and recounted like in depth traumatic stories with little issue.

So yeah, so I then used the data and looked at it, used the lens of epidemic injustice, which I'll give a brief explanation of in a minute, and then broke that down into different areas to look at child welfare practice within social work with families who are identified as using substances. So the theoretical lens, which sounds quite complex, was epistemic injustice and it isn't massively used within social work, academia.

But it has started to gain traction and there are some emerging works and emerging kind of expert academics within the area. But essentially epistemic injustice is kind of made up of two distinct areas. I say distinct, they overlap. One of those is testimonial injustice, and that's about the credibility that we give people when they speak.

So how much we choose to believe the way in which we take their speech and hermeneutical injustice, which is about that kind of wider knowledge production and whose knowledge is treated as expert knowledge and who holds the power within those areas. So yeah, that was the lens I used. 

Martin: Okay. That's, and like you say, we'll return to some of this to unpick it a bit more 'cause some of that stuff around the lens that you used, I think we'll unpick a bit more. But I think for a lot of listeners, the interesting bit will be the sort of then trying to pick some of the sort of examples that you came across, 

Angela: Mm-hmm.

Martin: that sort of illustrate those things in day-to-day practice with families. I suppose the other thing that's worth saying is that obviously you've done this at a time where I think, and it's quite a timely study in, in as much as there's been over probably the last decade, there's been a lot of focus on things like the toxic trio type discussions around children coming into the care system, being driven by substance use issues, domestic abuse or parental mental health problems. And I suppose there's also that sort of policy backdrop of things like the hidden harms report. So I wondered if briefly you could sort of touch on that 'cause I think this is, - part of the interest in getting you to come and talk about this today was because I think it's a really current issue and it's not gonna go away. It's gonna be an issue that, maintains for a long period, I think. So I wondered if you could say a little bit about, about that sort of the backdrop to you doing it. 

Angela: Mm-hmm. So I suppose when I did my placements on my social work masters, one of them was with a family support team that were working with families that were involved in child protection services, but they were, they weren't a statutory team. So they went in and they supported and I found the area really interesting and that's kind of the spark of where it started. I then looked into it for my thesis for that master's and looked at how professionals experienced working in that area. And I found the whole area fascinating because unlike kind of mental health or disabilities or domestic abuse even, the volume of academic research out there was almost non-existent in terms of drug and alcohol use within social work practice, which again, because it's so commonplace now, like the world that I entered when I came into social work, it was a huge problem. It was rare that you go through a day in any team where you weren't hearing about drug alcohol use or parental substance misuse and all those kind of buzzwords.

And because it's quite a niche, recent history, it was quite easy to delve into, well, how have we come here? Because it's really only with the publication of the Hidden Harm report. But yeah, that report almost ignited, a fire around that area and what we'd seen was suddenly this kind of hidden population, which- I use the word probably because of the hidden harm, because they weren't hidden.

It was always there. There was always problems with drug and alcohol, the social workers on the ground were dealing with day in, day out, but there wasn't so much focus on it and it didn't shape policy or drive policy. So suddenly Hidden Harm Report hits, it gets massive attention and it kind of sets fire to that academic area.

And suddenly we've got like academics really enthusiastic to go and research this and then we start to see these terms like parental substance misuse, hidden harm, they all start to enter that kind of social work vocabulary and you hear them and you continue to hear them now. And then there's the associated ones, like the toxic trio, which is that kind of fore granted belief in social work that if you have a family who has domestic abuse, mental health issues and substance misuse issues, that the sum of those parts is greater, that the actual impact is, a lot worse on that child than just one of those at a time. And there has been lots of focus on that area and actually within recent years that's really been questioned, like the beliefs that we've neatly assigned to that term have been questioned and put under the microscope. But I don't think that's quite hit practice. And I suppose that's where I landed on substance misuse was it was really interesting to read all the research, but often what was in the research was not mirroring what I was experiencing in practice.

So you would have quite simplistic concepts, really like hidden harm or parental substance misuse. But there was a weight given to them that there was just an automatic association with bad parenting, potential harm to children, or actual harm to children. And it, for me, on the ground, it just wasn't that simple and I didn't see that representation in academic work.

I didn't see the kind of messier realities. And in kind of the few years before I decided to do the PhD, that focus on poverty, that focus on inequalities was really coming to the fore and we were getting much, much, much more information on the ground about actually, we need to start looking at poverty.

You know, it's in pretty much all of the cases that we're working with. You know, why aren't we looking at it? And I think that kind of term elephant in the room had hit practice. We knew what people were talking about when they were saying that, but what I didn't see was any real exploration of that side when you combine the kind of poverty, the inequalities with substance misuse where you were starting to see it with domestic abuse, you were starting to see it with mental health issues. I didn't see that represented in the research that I was looking at, and that was kind of my entry into that area, and I think it, it is starting to be looked at, but I think it's still quite a way behind other areas like domestic abuse, like disabilities, like mental health.

I don't think there's the same focus around substance misuse and given that there's a disproportionate representation of parents where that's identified as a parental factor. So when you look at the stats for intervention at children looked after child protection, that more serious end of intervention, you're talking about considerable subpopulations that have been identified there as using substances.

But actually when you go down to the lower levels of involvement, families that are on care and support plans, it's a lot less. It's, I think, and this is a couple of years ago, but I think it was about 20% in care and support, but then you were seeing between 30 and 40% in child protection and children looked after.

So like I say, it was disproportionately at the most serious end of interventions. It didn't seem to be the focus of how these factors were playing together, how substance misuse was interacting with that like poverty element with the inequality element. 

Martin: Okay. I mean, one of the things for me is, and I think it's been interesting as we've talked, both of us have sort of flipped the language that we've used in terms of talking about.

Substance use, substance misuse, problematic substance misuse. Is there something around that as well in terms of, are we talking about a system that treats any sort of use of any sort of substance as problematic? 

Angela: Yeah. 

Martin: And the sort of definition or difficulties around, well, when does that become a risk?

What level? And, you know, so if there is those sorts of issues, is it entirely something where somebody has to be completely abstinent or where do we draw the line? And I think some of that is reflected in the language we use. Would that be fair enough, do you think? 

Angela: It's a hundred percent.

And exactly what I looked at and found in the data was that actually on the ground, day-to-day within children's services, the term was parental substance misuse. It didn't matter if the parent was just having one spliff in the evening, or if the parent was flat out on heroin using 10 bags a day.

The term used for that was the same. And the problem with that is the connotations that come with it. So you've got professionals and groups of professionals that meet quite regularly when you know children's services are involved, be that, whether it's caring support meetings, children looked after meetings or child protection conferences.

The children's services representative, normally the social worker within this is seen as the expert. Their knowledge is privileged when they sit and they do generally sit- you have the chair of a conference and that is normally somebody that's qualified through social work, so it might not be that family's, social worker, but they are a social worker by profession. And then to the right or left, you have the social worker and that knowledge at the head of the table is seen as the expert knowledge and there's a deference given to it. So if the social work report says there's substance misuse in this family, and like one of the phrases that I found all of the time was like parental substance misuse poses a risk to name of the child, parent substance misuse is a risk to themselves. It's a risk, risk, risk, risk. All of the language is risk adverse. And again, like I said, that's tended to be whether it was a spliff like cannabis or whether it was heroin, which obvious, obviously they have very, very different impacts on people's ability, ability to manage their daily life, ability to parent and it's so nuanced and they're just two drugs and you've got alcohol, you've got so many drugs out there, but there's these kind of blanket terms that negate any nuance. You're just looking at, it's substance misuse. And again, the misuse, and I rarely say it now, is something that really like, it gets my back up because after spending a decade out there working with families, a lot of the families aren't misusing, like if you have a glass of wine in the evening, do you think you're misusing alcohol?

No. People will say, oh, I have a glass to relax or enjoy it, but actually you are using it for its effects, and that is exactly what the families we work with use it for, the effects. And just the intricacies of how people use it, that story needs to be heard. It needs to be listened to. We need to have curiosity about that when we're working with the family.

And we need to go in with an open mind that they might just be telling us the truth, which often, unfortunately, because of the way that everything's stacked before a family even walks through the doors of a building or before your first visit, you have your own opinion in your head of what you're dealing with.

And they're based often on the things that we are taught in our courses, during our practice placements. We're taught things like toxic trio. So we're newly qualified, we're out in the ground and we're like, oh my god, there's drug use, there's mental health issues, there's domestic abuse, and you're going in there and you are risk adverse.

You already have in your mind, and not from a bad place, i'm not saying that social workers are doing this intentionally, but the system sets us up to walk into houses like that, it sets us up to look at things in a very risk adverse way, and within substance use, some of the most common unproblematised concepts and tools that we use, like when you look at them, the evidence isn't there for them.

If you pull them apart, there's no research to back up what we're going out there and saying, like one of the biggest parts of my research was looking at the use of. Drug and alcohol, hair strand testing, and it's just mind blowing, like this is used at an increasing frequency out there in child protection.

And again, just not disproportionately for the use of testing, but it is at the higher end, the consequences are bigger. You know what I mean? You're talking about when families have reached child protection, when they've reached that stage where a child is looking at coming into care and we see this use and it's unproblematic, or certainly my experience and my data, seen it as unproblematic through the professionals. So through social workers, even drug and alcohol social workers didn't see a problem with the use of it. If anything, they seen it as positive. So they seen it was either gonna do one or two things. It was gonna evidence that there was drug use and therefore straight away, we can correlate that with harm to the child and that makes our jobs easier. We can put them on the register, we can take them out of their home, or they were selling it as, oh, well it's an opportunity for the parents to prove themselves. But again, that was almost approached through that, 'but if they don't or if they are using in the background, we'll be able to catch them out'. So that was social worker's opinion on testing, but then you spoke to the parents and it was just trauma. It was just, such a different view of it. It was the accuracy of it. It was the fact that nobody really considered the damage that it was doing to the people that they were carrying out these drug and home alcohol tests on, you know what I mean?

They were like, the standard hair strand test generally takes three to four clumps of hair, so they shave it at the base and they're quite large clumps. They're quite obvious. Men, in my experience, have an easier job of hiding that 'cause they'll often just do a complete shave all over and within a week or two, there's no evidence of it. For women, that's very different. You're talking about women with long hair, often dyed. The minute that you come into that testing journey, you're told do not dye your hair because that will affect the results. So you've then got women who for, and these tests can go on for a period of a year, two years, depending on what's going on for the child.

So for two years they're told, don't dye your hair and that's, it's- and it can sound quite like really top level, oh god, is that what the issue is? But it is an issue because that's that person then has to exist within their community. They often have like big bald patches on the back of their head, which, and they described it as this in like my interviews with parents.

It's like an actual branding where people can see, you know, they can see that you're missing clumps your hair, and they'll automatically, because of the nature of the communities that they're in, it's not uncommon. So people in that community know damn well. 

Martin: Yeah.

Angela: They know if you're missing clumps of hair, it's probably not from a girly fight in the club on Friday night.

It's probably because you're involved with children's services and you're being tested. So it's almost like that branding. And with the parents, they struggled to find the words to explain how invasive it was. And there was one woman that likened it to a pelvic exam when she was pregnant. She said, I can vividly remember having to get a pelvic exam when I was pregnant and the shame of it and feeling dirty.

And she said it was like that. That's what that felt like. That whole process felt like that. So they could find words within that kind of area, within the drug and alcohol testing area, there isn't that narrative. You know what I mean? There's not those words formed around it. Like, if you go into like domestic abuse, like terms like sexual assault, there, there's words for the phenomenon within that.

Martin: Mm. 

Angela: Because that language has been created to describe experiences. But what I found was there wasn't necessarily that ready-made language, but people were readily able to compare it to quite traumatic events. 

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Martin: And I think, certainly my perception is that over recent years there's been an increasing use of these sorts of tests, particularly in the court arena, but then we don't, we don't actually collect data on any of that, so we don't know whether it's something that's growing in prominence.

And I suppose the other thing is, that there's arguments for saying that these tests aren't without their own problems. I'm sure you can give us a couple of examples where there have been examples of where these tests have been shown to be inaccurate. 

Angela: Yeah. 

Martin: And yet we are making, potentially making quite big decisions on children's lives and families' lives based on using these tests.

So I, I dunno whether you wanted to just touch on some of the more problematic element of just on face value saying we use these tests and it's a good thing because it allows, it's part of evidencing whether families are complying or not. 

Angela: Yeah, definitely. And I think part of my research, when I could see, and I was sensitized to it before ever doing the research, I knew that these were problematic, just on the ground, working with families, we would often see test results that did not match what we truly believed was going on with individuals. So, you'd have somebody, they confessed to you because they knew that it was all gonna come out in the test. So you'd suddenly have last minute confessions on the ground.

Martin: Yeah.

Angela: Where people were like, oh my god, I better tell you now, you know, I went out, I used this amount of MDMA, I had cocaine, I had this, that, because they were convinced that the following week you were gonna get the test results, so they were kind of, trying to jump in front of that, and then the test results would come back with no such thing and they'd be hands in head going, why did I tell you all of that?

Martin: Yeah.

Angela: Because now I have to deal. And I think that was reflected in what I found when I did my data collection and in the field is actually, social workers didn't have quite the understanding of what a test told them. They took it as a black and white endorsement: this person is using drugs and then they give them levels, so when you get your report back from the company, which there's no monitoring systems in place, we have no regulations there.

There's a couple of companies that we use that have become the preferred brands, that have tailored their services to children's services because it is, my guess, would be quite a source of income for them. You walk into social work offices and you will see that there are pens, there are like sticky notes, there are pads that they're writing on, they're all branded with these companies logos.

Martin: Right.

Angela: So it's there, and you can see it if you're looking for it, but social workers wouldn't have the understanding of what that level tells them. So you get a report back and it'll say the use is low, moderate, chronic, and that's simplifying it, but that's essentially what it will tell you.

Now, chronic excessive for alcohol use equates to equivalent of about four cans a day. So I'm not saying that it's healthy to drink four cans a day. I'm not advocating for anybody continuing with that and saying that there won't be repercussions, but the repercussions will often be for you physically, financially. What I would say is that, that wasn't the understanding of a lot of the social workers that I came across. There was particularly one social worker who is an agency social worker in one of the teams that I observed, she was 25 years in practice, and she came in and she was very agitated and upset because she'd had a drug report back, and it was that the person that she was working with was a chronic, excessive user of alcohol.

And she came over to me because she knew my background was drug and alcohol. And she said, what does that mean? And I said, well, it's about equivalent to like, it's about 52 units a day. So slice that up, whatever way you want to. It's a couple of really big binges, or it's a few bottles of wine or four cans a day, whatever way you want to chop it up.

It's about 52 units. It's above the recommended allowance of what you should drink. She was like, oh, that's ridiculous, like I could drink that in a heavy weekend with the girls, and I was like, yeah, but that is what chronic excessive is. You need to understand the levels. And she was like, but this 'cause what she was doing was trying to discharge a care order, and she really wanted this to happen because the father had done incredibly well.

He was taking really good care of the kid. She had no concerns, no problems, and was putting through for the dissolving of this care order. But she knew that when she brought this to the panel that would have to look at it, the minute that they seen chronic excessive, it was not gonna be an easy job to get that care order discharged.

And she was so frustrated by this, which is fine, but arguable that after 25 years in practice, after using testing all through her practice, because she was agency, she was always working high level cases where there's much more chance of coming into contact with it. She had no understanding of what that meant, like how many decisions, how many opinions had she given weighted on the fact of these reports, when actually she had no understanding of what that meant.

And then there was a kind of inaccuracies. So again, heard a lot of that from the drug and alcohol team. Heard none of it from social workers in the child protection teams. But I did hear it from the drug and alcohol, social workers. They were saying, oh, often they're not that accurate. And again, as I said, my own practice reflects that.

But there was a couple of examples within my field work that were, women had confessed to certain drug use, so say cannabis use, the tests had come back and there was evidence to say that their reported use was exactly what came back in the test. So moderate levels, a joint or two per night and that matched what they had said.

But that there was also evidence of cocaine, MDMA, all these other drugs, and they were adamant they had not used these. And one of the examples came from reading, public law proceedings meetings. So that kind of pre court meeting. And the woman had a solicitor with her and the solicitor said, my client is denying this completely.

She has admitted to this drug use, but she denies what is on this test, and she's convinced it's been a sweat transfer from her own research, she has discovered that you can test positive from sweat transfer. So her partner is a heavy user, hence all the domestic abuse, hence the relationship breakdown, hence our involvement.

And she believes that it's sweat transfer from him that had her test like that. It was just completely dismissed and shut down, even though the solicitor said, I have, there is precedent for this. I've seen this in other cases it, there is truth to this. And again, completely shut down.

And then I did an interview with a lady that nearly had her two children removed on the back of a similar result, where tests came back and it showed MDMA and cocaine. She had denied it. They said, you're not being honest. This all be disguise compliance. The tests tell us the truth. And it's that element of it.

It's the element where, we actually don't know very much about the ins and outs of testing, especially in practice. Arguably, even at a policy level, we're not doing anything. We're not regulating it. We're not saying who the companies that are trustworthy are like, if you look to Canada, they had the mother risk scandal where they found that loads of decisions that have been made in a family court that were partially or majority based on drug test results. They found that two years of those tests had been completely inaccurate because of problems with the testing company, 

Martin: Right. 

Angela: So how many children there? And it was a huge scandal in Canada because for two years they had been making decisions for families based on complete unreliable testing.

And that just doesn't seem to have touched the rest of the world, as in there doesn't still seem to be any focus on, what circumstances are we using these in, what's our reasoning for using them? Like, are we just trying to prove that people are using? Because if you can't see that evidence with your eyes and your practice, arguably then it's non-evidence anymore.

If you can't evidence harm and neglect to that child, then just because you have a piece of paper that says somebody is drinking the equivalent of four cans a day, does that make them a bad parent? 

Martin: Yeah. Yeah. No. So it is that thing about, I think a little while back you, you'd said about that sort of label of substance misuse, but actually it's going from that sort of statement to actually evidencing, and that has an impact on this person's parenting by doing the following things rather than just saying, this person uses substances and that's a bad thing and therefore we should act because like you say, we will know and do go home on a Friday night and say, I've had a rubbish week, i'm going to demolish a bottle of wine. Yeah, no, I, I think, like I say, I think it's a fascinating area and I think it is something that deserves to be unpicked more than it is, given the reliance now on doing these tests and the way that feeds into things like court processes.

In a couple of the examples you gave you talked about where people had said things and that those things were then refuted and it was sort of, well, that's not true 'cause we have this test and that. So going back to that sort of, at the beginning we talked about that sort of epistemic injustice lens that you've used.

I know from the little bit I do know about it, that there is the ideas of taking people's testimony, taking people's knowledge of their own situation, and that being either distorted or smothered or silenced and that having an impact on how we work with families. I wondered if you could say a little bit more about what those things are.

Angela: Yeah. 

Martin: And how they play out in the relationships that social workers do or don't have with the families that they work with. 

Angela: I suppose the starting point is that it's kind of systematic and endemic. So when you start to unpick, when you use that kind of lens of looking at whose word are we trusting?

When we start to look at different forums, different types of practice, whether that be home visits or official meetings, when you start to really look at where's the knowledge coming from, first off, so what's shaping the way that we hear people's testimony? What's shaping how we believe people, and often what shapes how we believe people are those terms, that hidden harm, that substance misuse, it lays the groundwork basically for a woman or a man to come into and sit down in a room, and the minute that they start to speak, there's something in your head because you have your knowledge, your expert professional knowledge.

So that's the starting point of it, but there's so many different elements to that because what we do in practice has become increasingly professionalized and increasingly directed, shaped, and dictated by the state. You know what I mean? So you have your legal obligations, once a child is on a child protection register, you need to visit them, you know?

So a lot of what we do is dictate it, and it's dictated by social work standards, regulations. The problem with that is that increasing professionalization and kind of that- 'cause lately, well within probably the last 10 years we've had that move to research and evidence. They're the buzzwords now, we need to get people that are, good with research, good with evidence, and the research and the evidence comes from academics.

And let's be honest, the vast majority of academics are middle class, you know what I mean? They may once upon a time have come from a working class background, but, and there's arguments and I realize that statement might be quite inflammatory towards a lot of people that believe that, if you've grown up working class, then you are working class for the rest of your life.

And I acknowledge that. I'm not disputing it, but what I am saying is that how we judge people's parenting is shaped by how we are parenting and the messages from society. So what I'm saying is it's coming from all angles. The way that we look at this person walks through the door, the first thing we do is go 'mother'.

And it is, sometimes it's father, but that's less common. So I'm just going to, for simplicity, say it's mother. And that's what we see walking through a door. We don't say woman, we don't say person from a certain geographical area. The first thing we do is we say mother, because that's her role in the room, and rightly so, 'cause that's where we're intervening,

it's because of parenting. But because we do that, we miss that bigger picture, the intersectionality of where that person is coming from and what tends to happen is everything from that point onward is viewed through the first lens as mother, but then the realities are, we're working, majority of people we're working with are from the lowest socioeconomic positioning within this country.

So we're then going 'poverty'. There's all of the negative associations with poverty will then influence how we look at people. And there's vast bits of my thesis that looks at that kind of judging, the othering language, that kind of backstage in the social work office, hearing people say, oh, the 'poverty family', or that 'druggie', you know, and again, rewind 10 years and go and observe me in an office, I don't think I was amazing either. I probably did use language like that, but what I did have before I went to observe people is a break. I had two, three years where I had nothing to do with social work because I was in academia, I took some maternity leave and I had a break and I suddenly reentered social work world, and I looked around and went, oh my god, like, what is this? You sit in an office, people have quite negative connotations of the families that they're working with, and then every kind of place that you look at is different, but same, like when you walk into a child protection conference, it's probably most vividly there.

So, oh, we work with families, this is a process of being done with you. You haven't got a report to put in front of you as a shield, you haven't got expert knowledge, even though this is your life we're talking about. So arguably, you are the expert. You haven't got expert knowledge of health and development.

You don't know the best things, you know what I mean? They're not given a vote, you can sit through a conference and you can say, we're working with you, and this is a collaboration with the family, but it's not, you don't get a vote. 

Martin: No. 

Angela: Everybody sits around at the end, they judge you and they say, well, actually, we substantiate that there is either harm or potential for harm here.

And on you can't, you can bring your words, but we've dismissed it. We've dismissed it through our tools, we've dismissed it through our concept, be that drug and alcohol test, be that parental misuse, substance misuse, be that child development. You haven't brought your child for the vaccinations.

You are neglectful. The parents don't get the chance to properly argue that they find their words twisted, put back on them. I remember a guy sitting there and the accusation was, you are making your children homeless by staying in the home because they cannot return there because of your mental health issues and the domestic abuse.

And he was like, but look, that's not the intention of what I'm doing. I am not leaving the house because if I leave the house, I'm intentionally homeless and therefore I have nowhere to live and I have no guarantee of a bed. And they were like, no, we've got homelessness services. The minute you do that, you'll be picked up by these lovely services you'll be given a bed, you'll be fine. And he was trying to argue, but every time he'd argue, they'd just turn it and twist it and say, well, you're making your children intentionally homeless, and it didn't matter how hard he argued, and that was at a child protection conference. And then 10 days later, core group meeting, and he had done what they'd asked.

He'd walked away from that meeting and felt that he had no other option but to leave the family home so that the children could return. He did that and he was homeless. And they were like, but it's your fault. You have to go to the housing agencies. And he was like, no. I've gone to the housing agencies.

They have told me that they have no places within our county, so I have to travel to the next city, which is gonna cost me 10 pounds travel wise, but also I have experience, as he had stated in the original meeting, he had experienced homelessness. He knew what hostels were. He knew that his mental health would be affected.

He knew that he would do more drugs. He knew that he would put himself at more risk. He knew all those things. In the core group, it was almost like they were dumbfounded by it. They didn't wanna accept that actually they're wrong. What they thought was gonna happen did not happen. And they just silenced it.

They were like, but the important thing here today is that you've made the decision to leave the home so that the children are no longer homeless. And it was the most bizarre thing to watch because it was like, he has just poured his heart out. He has said that everything has come true that you said wouldn't, and you've just, you've neatly shut it down and went, well done. Congratulations. 

Martin: Yeah. 

Angela: And then after this, he presented more and more aggressive. And I spoke to him and he said, listen my life is awful now, i'm sleeping on couches, I'm sleeping in garden sheds, I walk the town at night because I have nowhere to go. And he said, I try and speak to them and yes, I'm emotional, but I'm emotional because I've given up where I'm living and I also still don't see my children. And he was like, but then they see that as aggressiveness and that makes them think that I'm on drugs. And he was caught in this vicious cycle where everything he did, whatever turn he made, got distorted or it got shut down and silenced.

And I think he was a really good example of how the systems do that. It's not necessarily the individual workers within it, but our systems are designed to privilege knowledge from professionals. That knowledge is produced further and further away from the actual ground and that is problematic.

If people with lived experience don't have a seat at the table when we are designing and implementing these policies and interventions, then there will be no justice. You can't have justice if you're not listening to the people that you're gonna go and work with. And I think that was kind of my summing up of everything that I'd seen is that until we give epistemic injustice a proper place at the table, until we give fairness of knowledge and that knowledge production to the people that we work with, then we will continue in the same vein as we have forever with social work, we intervene, we intervene, we intervene more and more and more and more. And our rates of child neglect, our rates of children coming into the care system on child protection, they continue to grow. That doesn't make sense. 

Martin: Yeah.

Angela: If we are investing more, if we are intervening more, if we are researching more, why are we not seeing a drop in the amount of cases that we are having to intervene in? Why is it the same families repeatedly coming through the system? 'cause we're, what we're doing isn't working because the knowledge production is flawed.

And our practice is flawed because we don't do that with the people that we're looking to intervene with.

Martin: And I think that's a really strong message on which to end. Thank you ever so much for coming in and talking about your work today. It's been really interesting and hopefully our listeners will find it really interesting too.

Angela: Thank you. 

Martin: So thanks very much. 

Angela: Thanks. 

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 works 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