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.

Caught in the door of the law

I've been lost in action for the past week. Caught in the door of the law.

Let me explain. I've recently had to do an assignment for uni, and being the good little Westerner I am, wanted to make it something (as Pooh Bear would say) Useful-ish and Somewhat Helpful.

So rather than pursing topics of particular interest to me, I asked those in the know to nominate a topic that needed some advocacy. Basically free consultancy for the region.

My topic: reducing the impact of motor driver's suspensions and disqualification, by court order and fines enforcement, on rates of secondary offending and ultimately imprisonment.

Having got my topic, and indulging in a moment of lost confidence, I went back and asked for the #2 priority. Appeals of decisions of the magistrates courts by the DPP. That wasn't much more confidence building. So I sighed deeply and being a very good Eeyore (now) decided to Commit to the Task at Hand.

And as it turned out, the topic wasn't half interesting. It was pretty damn fascinating. Did you know that Western Australia has the highest rate of imprisonment of Aboriginal people in Australia? More than 26.5 times that of non-Indigenous people in the State. That's extreme.

Of Aboriginal prisoners, approximately half are in prison for driving offences, including offences that stem from having their licence suspended because they have defaulted on fines.

Fines like failing to vote in the last election. Failing to hand in number plates on a car after it ceases to be registered. Failing to transfer a vehicle registration. Failing to wear seatbelts.

Rego: employer. Licence & car seat: cashed up employees

Of the Aboriginal women in prison, approximately 3/4 are in prison for offences related to driving and fines suspension.

The Chief Justice of WA has called this issue the 'revolving door' of justice for Aboriginal people. 

And as happens, those with the least capacity to pay and the most need to drive fall foul of the law. Penalised by the system, and how it chooses (or not) to exercise discretion.

Fundamentally, just because a policy or a law makes sense in metropolitan Perth and the south-east, that does not make it substantively fair when it applies to a tiny number of people in remote communities.

The obligation should be on governments and departments to explore systemic alternatives. Yet report after report, parliamentary debate after debate, shows knowledge of the problem but a commitment only to drilling down to more effective means of enabling payment. Not re-assessing the system.

It couldn't possible be the system at fault. Could it?

What is a community?

Such an easy question to answer ... or is it? I sometimes struggle with this idea of community, as it seems like many view the idea of an Aboriginal community in static or stereotypical ways.

For example, well it's a group of Aboriginal people all from the same area who speak the same language (isn't it?) Or it's [insert name] Community, you know, about [kilometres] from [town].

It's not. And it is.

Just as I might identify as 'Australian' when I'm in England, or 'country NSW born and bred' when I'm in Canberra, what is my own sense of community identity shifts according to who I'm with and where I am. So yes, sometimes people will say they are from Warburton, or sometimes from the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, or sometimes Central Desert, but it shifts according to context.

Blackstone Community - from office up to the store

The really interesting thing though, is how the community works when it's just a conversation about what's happening in one place. What does it mean when we're thinking just about one community, like Warburton or Blackstone?

One of the early things I learnt about work out here is that communities are really collections of families sitting around the one bore (so to speak). As traditional life shifted to contemporary settled life, places developed in ways that gave the impression of just one set of related mob, but really it is more complex.

Family comes first. Family is the abiding connector. So when outsiders say "the community should sit down and talk about this", what does that mean? Very little. The community is a collection of families. And like any collection of individuals, they will face all the usual struggles of meeting, sharing, agreeing and deciding what to do next that any of us face in small communities all across Australia (suburbs, communities of interests, little regional towns).

Somehow, people assume that because community members are tied together by language, culture, remoteness etc, there is somehow a magical additional layer of cohesiveness and collective decision-making. There are culturally informed ways of sitting down and trying to nut things out, but there are exactly the same challenges in doing that as there would be anywhere else.

Karrku Community (now abandoned) playground

Yet, when things go wrong in Aboriginal communities, in ways we don't ask of mainstream Australian communities, "the community" need to sort it out. Ta da.

It's not that simple. It can't be that simple.

Really, we are united by our similarity more than our diversity!

Complacency is not an option

I try to avoid being political in this blog.

At times, however, neutrality is not an option. This is one of those times.

I am filled with a visceral sense of latent injustice. It almost feels like I can touch it, even though I cannot see it clearly. Injustice that arises not from a lack of good intent, or even good deeds, but from systemic powerlessness and enormous gulfs in understanding.

I believe that a powerful response to the challenge of cross-cultural communication is humility. Simple openness to learn and understand, guided by the person you are talking with. For all that people say about talking with Aboriginal people, protocols to observe or facts to know, I go by the simplest of maxims. Openness. Honesty. Willingness to learn.

As soon as someone sets him or herself up as an expert, as soon as someone establishes rules inside his or her own head for how to act, problems arise. Those rules, that 'expert' knowledge, is based on understanding the world from a particular perspective. So deeply informed by our experiences in mainstream Western society as to be almost invisible.

We're taught to critically analyse this in social work studies. But is it truly possible to be critically self-aware on a daily basis, in every action and interaction? Especially when surrounded (in the main) by people and systems deeply embedded in the dominant culture. Even when I am daily surrounded by a minority culture, I find it hard to maintain that quality. What hope for those who are not so challenged at every turn?

Aboriginal people live in a world where they are marginalised and discriminated against. Their culture and language is devalued, misunderstood, or ignored. In this space, room opens up for enormous injustices. For people to feel unable to express themselves. To feel unable to be understood. To feel powerless to right wrongs. To be without hope.

Abuse does occur. But so does injustice, and perhaps more frequently so.

So, I have this to guide my daily actions: the more I know, the less I know. The more I need to trust others who know more than I. The more humble I need to be.

Perhaps humility is the antidote to injustice? Complacency is not an option.