Openly, slowly, as humanly as possible

I was enormously privileged recently to win the WA Social Worker of the Year 2012, Rural & Remote Practitioner. On the night, as advised, I had a speech prepared 'just in case'. After winning the award I nervously pulled it out, realising I just might need to actually deliver it.

On the Award night, with Professor Susan Young (nominator)

Although I didn't win the overall award (and warm congratulations to Michelle Charlton who did!), I nevertheless felt a pang of disappointment that I had not had the chance to say what was so important to me about the work I do.

A few days later, I was due to deliver a short talk about my work at the Signs of Safety Gathering 2012, which draws together child protection practitioners from Australia and internationally to discuss this practice framework. With some modifications hastily prepared, I incorporated my main points from the undelivered speech. Here is the speech which I delivered at the conference:

Yuwa, yini Sophie-nga. My name is Sophie Staughton. I am a community child protection worker based in the remote Aboriginal community of Blackstone. The community I live in is just over 120 kilometres west of the border between Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory. Truly, the heart of the central desert of Australia. 

I live and work in the Ngaanyatjarra communities, where there is a very strong connection to country. Similarly, there is a very strong value on keeping kids safe and 'growing them up' well. 

One of the key lessons I have learned in the six years I have lived and work in this region, which is particularly true for child protection context, is that unless there is a genuine closeness and friendliness established between the department and community members, it can be impossible to leap the cultural divide between us. Aboriginal, non-Aboriginal. 

The Department for Child Protection is a Western institution, and we work in a Western legal and organisational context. In order to do our work well, therefore, we need to build relationships with community members and remain open to constantly challenging our own cultural worldviews. Self-reflection is absolutely critical to good practice. 

What does this mean, however? 'Building relationships'. At the heart, it is our ability to connect on a human level. This is not 'engagement'; it's more real than that. 

While you will all be familiar with what we do in child protection, I'd like to tell you the more important story about how we do the work.

The Department has four community child protection workers based in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, one youth and family support worker, a field officer and a recently created project officer position. For the Ngaanyatjarra people of the central desert, these positions are relatively new. The first two workers to permanently live in the region only came in the last seven years. 

Our work has a strong focus on developmental ways of working to build community safety. This is not a common approach in child protection, but critical to effective work with Aboriginal communities. The core of developmental approaches is working with community strengths, where families and communities are at, and on their initiatives to improve child safety and wellbeing. 

Like any community, Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal, it isn't always easy to know what will work. We are all feeling our way, together. 

This developmental framework sits very well with the Signs of Safety approach used in the Department, which is also strengths-based but operates more on an individual and family basis in mainstream child protection work. When we do need to work intensively with particular families and children on the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, we have been creative in adapting the Signs of Safety framework to our practice. 

One of the main things we do in our work, however, is invest time in getting to know the families. It will take many visits for family members to feel that we have a genuine interest in them and their family. 

Essentially, it requires that we drop the 'professional veneer' and be you, me, us, together trying to sort through the challenges we see before us. Sometimes, often, we see different things, and this needs time to work out too. 

Time is of the essence, but it is time slowed down 

Too often, community members have seen the 'passing parade' of service providers drive in, talk briefly (often making little sense in their need to be heard) and then drive off. Never to be seen again. 

We turn up, again and again. We also sometimes have to come with a hard message, explaining where we might need to act if there are not changes. Explaining 'whitefella' law, if that is what is needed. It is about being honest, straight up, plain and direct in our language. No high English, no assumptions. 

Signs of Safety meetings happen wherever they need to, wherever the families are. Most often, it is on the verandah of a community house. Sometimes it is on the side of the road in the middle of the vast outback. Sometimes it is on neutral territory, like the front lawn of our office. In my experience, the meetings are least effective when they happen in a room with a whiteboard.

One of the challenges I have found in talking about Signs of Safety is that some of the tools do not resonate culturally. Out of the experience of trying to use 'Three Houses', which did not help the conversations, I created a new tool. {And Andrew [Turnell], I saw you looking at this earlier... it's copyright!}

This tool uses a road, with a fire in the centre. The road metaphor resonates with remote community life and traditional planning of the yiwarra (road) ahead. It also enables a discussion about what is 'behind' the family, as Aboriginal families in the central desert are reluctant to talk about the past. It's finished. 

Unlike the Western tradition, where fire is associated with passion, lack of control or even fear, in remote Aboriginal communities, the fire is a traditional symbol of strength and security. Talking around the fire is a positive experience, often associated with food and nurturing. It is a symbol of family life, and as such it helps us to draw out family strengths and focus on the positives that are in the life of every family. 

The use of this new tool is very much in its early stages, but it has been helpful to date as another way to help families, us, to talk about what happened, what is good now and what needs to happen next.

The more we invest in these ways of engaging with Aboriginal community members, as slowly and openly as possible, on their own terms as much as possible, as human-ly as possible (moving past our fear in how to start that conversation), the greater the chance we have of doing justice to the children of these families.