Strategies for Work with Involuntary Clients

In 2017 Monash University Social Work Department and the University of Minnesota's Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare, sponsored an international conference entitled Effective Strategies for Working with Involuntary Clients at the Monash University Prato Centre in Italy. This international gathering stimulated a rich exchange of perspectives, philosophies, and research about involuntary clients. That conference also served as a springboard for this special issue of Australian Social Work (ASW).

Interest in work with involuntary clients emerged in the 1970s with Yelaja’s (1971) edited work, Authority and Social Work: Concept and Use. The question of whether productive relationships could occur where clients were not entirely voluntary and were experiencing some pressure was raised in Yelaja's work. Those concerns have been elaborated and articulated in Strategies for Work with Involuntary Clients (Rooney & Myrick, 2018) and developed into a research-based and tested approach in Working with Involuntary Clients (Trotter, 2015). These books have focused on practical guidelines for engaging involuntary clients. In doing so, they informed practice with involuntary clients beyond the authority vested in professional workers or their organisations, and the expectation of client compliance. The focus was on how to help involuntary clients even though they didn't want to be helped.

Definitions of involuntary clients can vary. We prefer to see the concept as a continuum. Rather than view social work clients as either voluntary or involuntary they can be seen as falling somewhere along a continuum between voluntary and involuntary. Clients in child protection and in corrections are at one end of the continuum. The article by Baidawi (2020) explores the issues related to children in two involuntary systems, child welfare and criminal justice in Australia. These clients would be seen as at the involuntary end of the continuum because they were court ordered to receive services and would be likely to suffer penalties if they failed to comply with the expectations of the services. The article by Trotter, Evans, and Baidawi (2020) reports on a project that offered a series of family work sessions to young people in youth justice. The clients were involuntary because they were court ordered to receive services from youth justice; however, the family work was only offered if the young person and their family members agreed to be involved. They were under some pressure to be involved because it was presented to them as beneficial and as a method of reducing recidivism. They can be seen as somewhere on the continuum between voluntary and involuntary. The service they received was not fully voluntary and not fully involuntary. Similarly, in other fields such as domestic violence, perpetrators are sometimes court ordered to services but are also sometimes pressured by family members and others to seek out services on a voluntary basis.

The traditional social work courses that the editors of this special issue undertook, more years ago than we care to admit, assumed that clients chose to see their social workers. This was despite the fact that many, if not most, social work graduates went on to work in child protection or corrections or other settings where clients were involuntary. However, today more and more social work courses and research projects around the world are based on an understanding that much of social work practice involves working with people who are involuntary or fall somewhere along the involuntary–voluntary continuum.

The contributions in this special issue of ASW explore work with involuntary clients in an international context, in a range of disciplines and settings. The international nature of our contributions reflects the increasing interest around the world in the role played by social workers in working with involuntary clients. The international nature of the interest in involuntary clients was reflected in the interest in our conference in Italy, many international conferences, and publications, including the multiple translations of texts such as Working with Involuntary Clients (Trotter, 2015). It is also reflected in the articles in this special issue.

These articles grapple with two key issues in particular. First how do social workers and others who work with involuntary clients deal with the need to work with clients’ goals when often the worker's or the organisation's goals are different from those of the clients. The second issue that is highlighted by some of the articles relates to the gap between what we know about what works and the practices of many agencies that work with involuntary clients.

An important social work value is to start where the client is and to work with the client's goals. However, this may be difficult in work with involuntary clients. For example, in youth justice a young person may prefer to use illegal drugs, to mix with other young offenders, or to not attend school. Yet the social worker may have goals for the client to reduce drug use, mix less with procriminal peers, and reduce truancy. Similarly, domestic violence perpetrators may be committed to rationalisations for their violent behaviour, whereas their social workers may wish to challenge these rationalisations. Drug users may choose a lifestyle that involves continued drug use whereas a social worker may not see this as realistic. In child welfare, often the goal of parents is to keep their children at home, whereas a social worker may feel that the ongoing risks at home are too great. Similarly, mental health clients may have goals that their social workers see as unrealistic.

The articles in this special issue suggest that a common organisational response to the discrepancies in goals between social workers and clients is to dispense with the goals of the client and to work with goals set by organisations and social workers. This leads to social workers challenging the presenting behaviours of clients rather than helping them deal with the issues that the clients believe are important to them. The various contributions to this special issue discuss more effective ways of working with involuntary clients, ways that focus on client goals rather than organisational and social workers’ goals. For example, the article by Trotter et al. (2020) on working with families of young offenders, argues for working with the client's view of the issues and clients’ goals with social workers carefully and gently challenging procriminal comments and actions. Often the workers found that the presenting problems of drug use, offending, or truancy would subside as family relationships improved, even though these issues may not have been specifically dealt with in the family work sessions. Baidawi (2020) refers to police responses to inappropriate behaviour of young people in residential care and suggests a more appropriate response would be family work or strengthening care systems. Chovanec (2020) writes about workers helping perpetrators of domestic violence to go beyond the notion of accepting responsibility for their actions to helping perpetrators to build empathy and social skills. Liu, Chui, Deng, and Li (2020) and Smith (2020) emphasise the importance of relationships in helping people to change. Maylea et al. (2020) discuss the importance of person-led human rights-based advocacy.

A second theme that runs through the articles in this special issue is the gap between academic and theoretical knowledge about what works in social work with involuntary clients and the practice of the agencies that deliver services to those clients. For example, we see poor practice in the form of excessive focus on risk assessment at the expense of interventions, setting goals for, rather than with clients, and social workers challenging presenting behaviours rather than focusing on social worker–client relationships and empathy. The articles highlight many specific examples of good practice but often they are isolated rather than business as usual.

However, there is increasing evidence that social work direct practice skills lead to good outcomes for clients. These skills are set out in numerous texts, including books by the guest editors of this special issue, referred to earlier. They include starting where the client is, social worker–client shared understandings about purpose, problem solving based on client's goals, modelling by social workers of behaviours they are seeking in their clients, focus on strengths rather than deficits, careful and respectful challenging of irrational or antisocial thinking, and client–social worker relationships characterised by empathy and appropriate boundary setting. For example, there is evidence that when social workers working with young offenders demonstrate the use of these skills in supervision and in work with families, the offenders commit on average about 30% fewer offences. The social workers and clients also express high levels of satisfaction with the intervention. Yet youth justice services continue to provide services with high re-offending rates, which the research suggests show minimal benefit for offenders. For every positive intervention there is a poor one (Trotter, 2015). Service as usual is a long way from best practice. Similar situations are seen in work with involuntary clients in child welfare and mental health.

Recent times have seen the increasing interest in evidence-based practice. Politicians, administrators, managers, and practitioners in the human services and academics talk about the need to base their practice on evidence. By this they usually mean that practice should be supported by research and their programs and interventions should be subject to evaluation. However, this interest in evidence-based practice seems to have meant little in terms of translating research outcomes into practice. Unfortunately, some of the practices that are justified by use of the evidence-based label have very mixed support in the research. A good example of this can be seen in recent series of books published by a group of academic social workers. Three books in the Beyond the Risk Paradigm series Criminal Justice, Child Protection, and Mental Health Policy and Practice, respectively, were published in 2016 and 2017. The books discuss how the evidence-based concept of risk assessment has overwhelmed the delivery of social work services at the expense of direct interventions. There is certainly evidence that high risk clients may benefit more than low risk clients from interventions and that risk assessment profiles and protocols may assist in identifying high risk individuals. However, in practice these profiles are often poorly completed, they add little to self-evident assessments based on factors such as age and prior history, they support a focus on risk factors rather than strengths, and their completion consumes so much time that there is little opportunity for social workers to help clients with their issues.

This remains in our view the greatest challenge facing social work academics and theoreticians. We know a lot about what works but we know less about how to translate this knowledge into practice and how to use the current interest in evidence-based practice to encourage practices that actually help our clients. This special issue hopefully makes a contribution towards this end.