There are few jobs out there where nearly every moment of the day is an urgent situation… where a little life relies on your decision-making and your response. In part four of our series on public service professionals throughout Becker County, we introduce a group of women who are on the front lines of child abuse. Social workers They come in by phone calls, emails, faxes, in person, mail - they’re complaints about possible child maltreatment in Becker County. “We’ll get four, five, six calls an hour,” said Michelle Johnson, a family assessment case man-ager, who currently has 39 kids on her caseload alone. The intake workers in children and family services are like the dispatchers of the department, each responding to anywhere from eight to 10 reports daily. When they do, they have the intense task of screening them for which complaints will be investigated and which ones won’t. “We have screening guidelines,” said Chantel Purrier, who does intake and child welfare. “There are categories… physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, emotional abuse, and we take the allegations in the report and try to match them up with the maltreatment guideline.” Those guidelines must be followed according to law to ensure peoples’ rights aren’t being violated. “Can you imagine a world where somebody gets mad at their neighbor for throwing trash in their yard, they call us and say ‘Hey, I know they’re smoking meth in there, and there’s kids in the home,’ and we go storming in?” said Nicole LeDoux, who has been a social worker for 15 years in Becker County. “We need concrete information before we go in and interfere in somebody’s life.” These guidelines can be helpful making decisions that fall in the gray area. “It’s almost all gray, though,” added LeDoux, who says those same guidelines can also be extremely frustrating to social workers who have suspicions, but not enough to legally act on. “Our No. 1 concern in every single call is, is a child’s safety at risk, and so it’s sometimes frustrating when you feel there’s something going on that you’d like to help with but you just don’t have the ability to move forward with it at that point,” said LeDoux. “We still look into things very closely, though, because we don’t want to be making the wrong call,” added Purrier. “This could be a child’s life in our hands.”
And those hands are always busy trying to pin down the truth. Ex-spouses call on each other, angry family members tell conflicting stories, and speculation can fly. Real abuse and false accusations lie together in the same pile of complaints. “So we have to decide if action does need to be taken, and if so, at what level and at what speed,” said LeDoux, who can only laugh when asked if the job is stressful. “Pretty much everything we do at all times is urgent all the time every day,” said LeDoux, “and you’re just re-categorizing which is most urgent at this moment.” These social workers know that no matter what they do, somebody will not be happy with the decision they’ve made. Some will call it too aggressive, others will believe they’re not doing enough. Attempting to walk that fine line every single day with every single case is their goal. This walk isn’t exclusive to weekdays either. Even when they leave the office, they are on-call 24-7. “We might try to plan something for a certain time, but it usually doesn’t shake out that way because you can’t plan when child abuse happens, and we never know what our response will have to be,” said LeDoux. But these social workers say there is a reason their department is called “children and family services” - it is about attempting to preserve a family whenever possible. They say despite how some may perceive them, they are not people who are just trying to take children out of their homes. “We know that these kids are being parented by parents who probably have been in the same position; they’ve been hurt, and they’re doing the best they can,” said Social Worker Joni Wohlwend. “We know we are working with the parent, too, and we know that children want to stay in their homes.” This means these social workers are also engaged in helping parents through programs designed to get rid of the obstacles that may be preventing them from being good parents. “It’s a privilege to be allowed into these people’s lives and their homes and to be able to employ services for them so that they can make their homes better,” said Johnson. “A lot of them have been socialized; their families function like this by default because it’s all they know, and you have to honor that to gain the relationship to even be able to help… and it takes a little while.” For these social workers, immediate results and obvious gratitude doesn’t happen often. Personal satisfaction on a job well done is often maintained from within and with the help of each other. “And then every once in a while you will meet up with somebody years down the line who will say, ‘Hey, I heard you; what you did made a difference in my life,’” said LeDoux. While some jobs only describe what a person does, being a social worker is one of the rare ones that describe who you are. It is relentless, and the job, sadly enough, is never completed. It’s a thought that can be depressing for these workers. “Who wants to hear all day long about a child not getting enough food or them being hurt by somebody that’s supposed to love them? Nobody wants to hear that,” said LeDoux. “but when you get kids that come back to tell you how well they’re doing, and you can really tell they’re in a better place than when you met them, that’s what keeps you going through.” The long nights, the hard days - it’s a sacrifice these professionals are personally ready to make for the job they love. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Wohlwend, “because I can’t think of one thing more important than keeping kids safe.” Tweets by @DLNewspapersThere are few jobs out there where nearly every moment of the day is an urgent situation… where a little life relies on your decision-making and your response.In part four of our series on public service professionals throughout Becker County, we introduce a group of women who are on the front lines of child abuse.Social workersThey come in by phone calls, emails, faxes, in person, mail - they’re complaints about possible child maltreatment in Becker County.“We’ll get four, five, six calls an hour,” said Michelle Johnson, a family assessment case man-ager, who currently has 39 kids on her caseload alone.The intake workers in children and family services are like the dispatchers of the department, each responding to anywhere from eight to 10 reports daily.When they do, they have the intense task of screening them for which complaints will be investigated and which ones won’t.“We have screening guidelines,” said Chantel Purrier, who does intake and child welfare. “There are categories… physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, emotional abuse, and we take the allegations in the report and try to match them up with the maltreatment guideline.”Those guidelines must be followed according to law to ensure peoples’ rights aren’t being violated.“Can you imagine a world where somebody gets mad at their neighbor for throwing trash in their yard, they call us and say ‘Hey, I know they’re smoking meth in there, and there’s kids in the home,’ and we go storming in?” said Nicole LeDoux, who has been a social worker for 15 years in Becker County. “We need concrete information before we go in and interfere in somebody’s life.”These guidelines can be helpful making decisions that fall in the gray area.“It’s almost all gray, though,” added LeDoux, who says those same guidelines can also be extremely frustrating to social workers who have suspicions, but not enough to legally act on.“Our No. 1 concern in every single call is, is a child’s safety at risk, and so it’s sometimes frustrating when you feel there’s something going on that you’d like to help with but you just don’t have the ability to move forward with it at that point,” said LeDoux.“We still look into things very closely, though, because we don’t want to be making the wrong call,” added Purrier. “This could be a child’s life in our hands.”
And those hands are always busy trying to pin down the truth.Ex-spouses call on each other, angry family members tell conflicting stories, and speculation can fly. Real abuse and false accusations lie together in the same pile of complaints.“So we have to decide if action does need to be taken, and if so, at what level and at what speed,” said LeDoux, who can only laugh when asked if the job is stressful.“Pretty much everything we do at all times is urgent all the time every day,” said LeDoux, “and you’re just re-categorizing which is most urgent at this moment.”These social workers know that no matter what they do, somebody will not be happy with the decision they’ve made. Some will call it too aggressive, others will believe they’re not doing enough.Attempting to walk that fine line every single day with every single case is their goal. This walk isn’t exclusive to weekdays either. Even when they leave the office, they are on-call 24-7.“We might try to plan something for a certain time, but it usually doesn’t shake out that way because you can’t plan when child abuse happens, and we never know what our response will have to be,” said LeDoux.But these social workers say there is a reason their department is called “children and family services” - it is about attempting to preserve a family whenever possible. They say despite how some may perceive them, they are not people who are just trying to take children out of their homes.“We know that these kids are being parented by parents who probably have been in the same position; they’ve been hurt, and they’re doing the best they can,” said Social Worker Joni Wohlwend. “We know we are working with the parent, too, and we know that children want to stay in their homes.”This means these social workers are also engaged in helping parents through programs designed to get rid of the obstacles that may be preventing them from being good parents.“It’s a privilege to be allowed into these people’s lives and their homes and to be able to employ services for them so that they can make their homes better,” said Johnson. “A lot of them have been socialized; their families function like this by default because it’s all they know, and you have to honor that to gain the relationship to even be able to help… and it takes a little while.”For these social workers, immediate results and obvious gratitude doesn’t happen often. Personal satisfaction on a job well done is often maintained from within and with the help of each other.“And then every once in a while you will meet up with somebody years down the line who will say, ‘Hey, I heard you; what you did made a difference in my life,’” said LeDoux.While some jobs only describe what a person does, being a social worker is one of the rare ones that describe who you are. It is relentless, and the job, sadly enough, is never completed. It’s a thought that can be depressing for these workers.“Who wants to hear all day long about a child not getting enough food or them being hurt by somebody that’s supposed to love them? Nobody wants to hear that,” said LeDoux. “but when you get kids that come back to tell you how well they’re doing, and you can really tell they’re in a better place than when you met them, that’s what keeps you going through.”The long nights, the hard days - it’s a sacrifice these professionals are personally ready to make for the job they love.“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Wohlwend, “because I can’t think of one thing more important than keeping kids safe.”Tweets by @DLNewspapers
