if you can't say where

I don't think anything is more disheartening and frustrating that talking with ignorant, poorly educated people. I take that back. When they put their ignorant, poorly educated children on the phone to talk to me, that's worse. That call was not the way to start off the day.

The past couple days in the car, I'm filled with that desire to just keep driving in the mornings. The light, the shape of the clouds, Tom Petty on the radio... all of it makes me want to go away.

chocolate pie

The real highlight of the day is that AC purchased my chocolate cream pie article. You can read it here, with many helpful instructions for the process. And I'm utterly mortified, as I just noticed a typo in it. Ack. Sadness.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/45801/chocolate_cream_pie.html

This is what I do

Let's start by saying that I will try to answer any questions you have about this post. I thought I might write here a bit about my job, because someone asked today and I know there are newer readers hanging around. I do post about my job on a regular basis, though I try to limit the number of horror stories I post because I know not everyone wants to know. Working in this place, one has to develop a very black sense of humor and I'm one of the first people to admit that most days my work does little to give me faith in humanity. I keep going to work, because I honestly do believe in what I'm doing and that my presence there makes a difference. For the record I have no formal education in social work. I ended up here because Stacy wanted to keep me from losing my mind at a job I hated, and I really needed health insurance.

I work at the statewide abuse hotline. We are a twenty four hour hotline that takes reports of abuse and/or neglect of children, the elderly and the disabled. Texas did it first, and created a model emulated by other states and even other countries. We take phone calls, faxes, letters and online reports from teachers, neighbors, doctors, police officers, parents, children, residents of state asylums, victims, perpetrators and anyone you could imagine. Each call, every fax is assessed by one of us. We ask questions about the most terrifying and intimate pieces of people's lives. We conduct interviews and evaluate the information based on risk assessment training we've received, the Texas Family Code and a number of resources. Everything that comes into our office is documented in our remarkably stable entry system. We triage, sending reports to local offices all over the state with recommendations for priority and allegation. We contact local offices for emergency assistance for police and hospitals. We look at abuse within families, or with caretakers. We assess standards violatons for licensed child care and foster homes, as well as any abuse that happens. We investigate abuse of residents at the state asylums for the mentally retarded and the insane. This is non-stop, every single day of the year. We do all this and more for less money than grade school teachers make.

This is a hard job. I won't kid you about that. Social work is rough work. I'm insulated because I don't have to come face to face with the victims or the accused. But I take anywhere from twelve to twenty calls a day, five days a week. there's constant pressure to get calls in, get them finished and go to the next one. The volume of what we hear makes up for the lack of face to face contact.

This is frequently a thankless job. I have lost count of the number of times someone has cursed at me, implied than I am inferior, told me I would bear the responsibility of someone's death, screamed at me or treated me like shit. I can count on my hands the number of people who ever thanked me. Child Protective Services especially has the bad rep, as if we're jack booted thugs of a fascist police state out to rip children away from parents for our godless government. I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say "what, does the kid have to die before you do anything?" or "CPS won't let me see my baby they are all liars." Every day I have to explain to people why something that is crappy doesn't necessarily mean it is child abuse. You can do some pretty heinous things to your kids and still not get a report.

The ones that really make me angry aren't the people who call for stupid shit, like stepmother doesn't do the fifteen year old's laundry (true caller), or the people who say mother is a dirty abusive whore but can't actually say how she hurts the children. The ones who make me angry are the ones who call, and tell you a story of abuse that absolutely needs investigation. But they won't give you any identifying or locating information, so you spend time pleading, cajoling, begging these people to give us some way to find these people. You want to scream at them, say the things callers normally say to you. You make it clear that we're always here, that we'll accept an anonymous report if that's the only way it can get to us, that we're open twenty four hours a day and please call back. I had a call that lasted for half an hour one night, and I was nearly sobbing by the end of it because I was so scared for this kid. After the parent hung up the phone without giving me anything, I walked into my supervisor's office and broke down while I begged her to trace the phone call and let me call the police in that city to try and find them.

One of the hardest things about this job is that we have no resolution on my end. I don't know how these cases end and we're sternly discouraged from poking around the system. It's very rare to know. I know how exactly two of my cases ended, only because they ended in the deaths of the victims. I don't know what happened to that kid after we traced the call and sent the cell phone number to the local police. I don't know, and sometimes it is hard.

I'm a fast worker. Because I'm fast with the typing and computer work, I can often spend more time on my calls than others. I have coworkers who are all business on the phone, and that's fine. We really need to just get the story and get out of there. But I think from a human standpoint, from a PR standpoint, from a standpoint of developing a working relationship with our callers that sometimes you have to take the time to talk with them. I sometimes spend a long time on the phone, playing telephone counselor. It's a little weird, because I have no social work background, no psychology background. But sometimes it is necessary. I sit there at my desk, staring at the stuffed Marshmallow Peeps my mother gave me, telling a sobbing woman on the other end of the line that she's done the right thing by calling and reaching out for help. Because I talk to so many different people, I have to be fluid. One call might be from a calm and collected nurse. The next one might be an angry and frightened parent, and then it might be a frazzled cop who needs a CPS worker right now. What works for one person won't work for all so one must always be ready to adjust, especially when dealing with mentally ill and mentally retarded callers who may be extra difficult to understand.

On these phones, we deal with every inventive and cruel way people torture others. I ask people for information that they might never say to anyone else in their lives. You haven't understood human misery until you have to ask a mother to repeat the graphic details of an outcry of sexual abuse that her four year old child made. You haven't understood human misery until you have an elderly person beg you for help to buy their heart medicine because they only get a pittance from social security and their crack using children stole their last ten dollars. In my job I've acquired more medical knowledge than I ever wanted to have, and now I can tell you what a stage IV bedsore going septic will look like, and how a spiral fracture in an infant is telling sign of physical abuse. I have to ask people things like "When you say she was touched 'down there' did you mean on her vagina, or on her buttocks?" (You would be surprised at the number of professionals who have trouble saying vagina, hah!)

I hear things on the phone that are the stuff of nightmares and therapy. For me, talking about it and exorcising those demons in the commiseration of coworkers and friends keeps me from going insane. I have to be careful though, because not everyone can handle these stories or the resulting black humor. I work every day at seperating my calls from myself so that I'm not dragged down. I force myself to find ways to remind myself that not everything is a mess. I have to remember the decent parents I know, the decent people I know.

It has to be about the life you save, and not the ones you lose. I have to hang onto to knowing that sometimes this phone call and this work is going to make the difference. Because everything we deal with has the potential to be a life and death call, and you have to be ready for that. Someone has to do it.