MY FIRST DATE WITH A SOCIAL WORKER O
n our very first date, Greg told me that he was a social worker. Imagine the scene: meeting your date for the first time at your favourite café or restaurant, and then being thrown the curveball of discovering they’re a social worker. When I first met Greg, back in 2016, I was just 22, fresh out of uni and in my first marketing job for a publishing house. I wasn’t remotely familiar with the profession of a social worker. All of my knowledge up to that point came from ignorant societal misconceptions, which had led to a feeling of mistrust. FIVE YEARS ON, I’M ASTOUNDED AS I REFLECT ON THE HARSH AND UNJUST ASSUMPTIONS I MADE ON OUR FIRST LUNCH-DATE TOGETHER. For as little as I knew about social workers, it’s only now that I can truly see how I’d been influenced by the snippets I’d seen in the media.
Being completely oblivious to the realities of this profession, the first image that sprang to mind upon hearing the words social worker, was of a middle-aged lady wearing a Harris tweed skirt and jacket. (Picture the social worker from Mindhunter; the one who spends the entirety of S2E5 penetratively hounding the family in an effort to find any evidence of neglect or wrongdoing, in order to be able to tick the items on her checklist.) What you will never ever hear, in any such TV show, film, or news item, is about all the overtime, or emotional investment, or the wide range of skills that social workers need to possess and develop in order to support the integrity of families, and ensure children’s safety. Nobody talks about the level of emotional intelligence and resilience required by those I now call heroes. Many times, however, I have seen newspaper articles talking about how the ‘department’ separated a poor mother from her child, about how the ‘system’ is to blame, and about how this or that social worker has been criticised for this or that, etc. 13
IT’S TRULY HURTFUL TO SEE THAT, NOT ONLY IS THIS STEREOTYPE NOT BEING CHALLENGED, IT CONTINUES TO BE PERPETUATED. I once thought that same way, with my limited scope. And then I met Greg. And suddenly I found myself sitting in a café, in front of a cute, handsome, well-spoken man with warm deep eyes, a gentle smile and spot-on sense of humour, who so clearly didn’t fit into the idea I had in my mind, based on what I’d read and seen so far. So I opened my mind and listened, and the more I heard and saw, as we continued to explore our lives together, the more ashamed I felt of how ignorant I had been. I’m stunned by how far the idea of a social worker - the one presented to the general public - is from reality. That initial meeting in an East Midland café was over five years ago, and Greg and I are now engaged, and planning our wedding, as soon as travel restrictions allow our families to meet. Thank goodness I was wise enough to push away my ignorance, and see the wonderful social worker in front of me.
