Social Workers’ Anxieties and Needs

Abstract

Although child abuse creates anxieties for all workers it is local authority social workers who must feel the greatest pressure. Not only do they carry legal responsibility, both short and long term, for the children they investigate but they have also increasingly borne the brunt of hostile and unsympathetic media and a society which is confused about the kind of service it wants for its children. Anxiety, then, is the constant companion of the local authority social worker. The 1978 DHSS study noted this in social worker responses which conveyed a strong sense of individual worry about cases (Parsloe et al., 1978, p. 322).