What if we all refused to be
victims? What if we could organize our lives so we could not be
victimized? Regardless of how much a pipedream this is, for now
imagine a world in which victimization just didn’t happen to you or
to your family, friends, neighbors, and community. Assault, rape,
burglary, and the like would become obsolete. Instead, our social
service system (schools, churches, police, juvenile probation,
treatment centers, after-school programs, and so on) would train each
of us to live together in peace and harmony.
This
vision may seem unrealistic, but the information is available to
achieve this world. It would require an individual commitment of
refusing to be victims of any crime, along with the support of society
and its institutions to give folks the training to actually pull it
off. In achieving this goal, collateral issues do need addressing.
Perhaps the most insidious problem is this: if we did live in a
society without vicitmization, how many people would have lost their
jobs?
Police,
judges, lawyers, corrections, probation, social workers, and all their
support staff – these folks and more would be unemployed. Solving
social problems is not a growth industry. Effective social programs
reduce the need for social programs. Good psychotherapists
theoretically work themselves out of a job. Indeed, it’s one of the
paradoxes of their education. They go into these fields with the ideal
outcome of needing a new career.
From
a bureaucratic point-of-view, then, effective social policy is
suicide. Social services, as bureaucracies, have no incentive to “fix” the problems they
deal with. Unlike all other industries—construction, manufacturing,
and the service industries—where solving problems is how business is
built, solving the social ills of society would put social services
out of business. The “teen problem” is yet another symptom of this
institutionalized inefficiency. We continue to “study” the
problem, as if we haven’t been studying it since man began walking
upright. Teens need to be apprenticed to adults to learn adult skills.
They do not do well corralled together with their peer groups.
To
be blunt, the social service system—the bureaucracies we have—is
broken beyond repair, because its agenda is counter-productive to the
counselor goal of working oneself out of a job. Bureaucracies, by
definition, want to expand. Therefore, they are at total
cross-purposes with the counselors each bureaucracy employs.
Consequently, we need to scrap social services as it’s currently
constructed and build an infrastructure grounded in prevention and
backed up with rehabilitation. How this program would look is not too
hard to determine. Researchers have long known what works in preparing
a human being for adulthood, for example. We just aren’t doing it in
an integrated way.
Well,
we’re half doing it. The folks down in the trenches—the police,
judges, correction officers, probation officers, social workers,
teachers and counselorss—are following the logic of working
themselves out of a job. They clear their caseloads and make sure, as
best they can, those clients never come back because their lives are
now working. Bureaucrats, however, are always looking for ways to keep
clients coming back, and it’s that disconnect between the
bureaucrats and the field workers that is the problem.
I
asked a friend of mine to detail how her work-day went. She answered
in this way: “[When I was
working at a treatment center], it was assessment to counseling to
group to family group to massive paperwork documenting per all the
federal, state, and Medicaid standards. I didn't sleep in after an
11-hour day at work. I was in at 8:45 a.m. and home at 7:30 p.m. and a
single parent to four kids.
“At DJJ [Division of Juvenile
Justice, as a juvenile probation officer], I carried a caseload of 60
formal and roughly 20+ informal clients (the Policy and Procedure
standard was 12 cases—period.) All were on-going cases that required
work—whether paperwork, telephonic, field or in-office supervision,
agency supervisions, in-court or court paperwork, meetings, treatment
team meetings, presentations, et al. It was hit the floor running and
don't stop until the day was over. Each morning presented new
challenges because we never knew what we were walking in on. Careful
scheduling means nothing when five kids are arrested overnight and
must all have petitions written, parents, victims, witnesses, court
and attorneys notified, and all the other related footwork done within
24 hours for mandatory arraignments. The other work doesn't go away.
Taking time off was great until you had to return to work. The job
didn't ever stop if you weren't there.”
I’m
quoting her to make it clear I’m not upset with the folks down in
the trenches: the juvenile probation officers, police, judges,
magistrates, social workers, and so on. They are, for the most part,
doing a terrific job under the most adverse of circumstances. I have a
problem with the agencies they work for, particularly the government
agencies. As I said above, these agencies are designed to fail at the
counselor ideal—work oneself out of a job. And it’s not conscious;
they are merely doing what bureaucrats do: maintaining their
bureaucracies. But what they do constitues a failure of vision of what
social services could be. Once we correct this failure, we will have
the foundation for a victim-free world.
Bruce
Bibee
is a counselor in private practice. He is also the master-instructor
of the Kung-Fu San Soo Center in Anchorage. You can reach him at:
562-1242.
