Citation
Penhale, B. and Flynn, M. (2017), "Editorial", The Journal of Adult Protection, Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 49-52. https://doi.org/10.1108/JAP-03-2017-0005
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited
Welcome to the second issue of 2017. Despite the relatively early point in the year when this is being written there is already a wide range of newsworthy items to mention that have links to and implications for the field of adult safeguarding.
There is a lot to be said for being sorry. During January, Rolls Royce apologised unreservedly for having paid millions in bribes to middlemen, for over three decades, in order to win contracts and secure orders in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Russia, Nigeria and China. The Serious Fraud Office entered into a Deferred Prosecution Agreement of £497.25 m, plus interest, and the SFO’s costs of £13 m, plus agreements with the USA and Brazil – resulting in a total of approximately £671 m. On the upside, the investigation into the conduct of individuals continues with the prospect of criminal prosecutions being initiated[1]. If the company does not break the agreement it will not be prosecuted. We wonder if the controlling minds at Rolls Royce during the relevant period will ever get around to explaining their conduct.
Meanwhile, 45 former Directors of Social Services wrote to The Guardian newspaper to express their concerns about the underfunding of adult social care services; that is, around £4.2 bn has been taken from local authority budgets over the last five years[2]. In the piece they note: “Some 500,000 people are abused every year while cuts are being made in safeguarding provision […] We don’t need further reviews and promises”.
Those of us of a certain age will remember “Kincora” – a children’s home for boys in Belfast. The historical abuse inquiry led by Sir Anthony Hart[3] has determined that in Northern Ireland, between 1922 and 1995, there were systemic failings in most of the 22 institutions and homes it examined – rendering children and young people exposed to brutality, sexual assaults, rapes – and disbelief – most particularly that of the religious orders, many of whom were responsible for these institutions. The inquiry states that the Catholic hierarchy ignored warnings about the serial paedophile Fr. Brendan Smyth and that at least 29 boys were sexually assaulted at Kincora. The latter home was run by paedophiles. Three senior staff, William McGrath, Raymond Semple and Joseph Mains were imprisoned for their offences in 1981.
Bringing victims and perpetrators together is more than a riveting experiment in restorative steps towards justice. Remember the Rwandan genocide of 1994 in which 800,000 people were killed? The Prison Fellowship Rwanda is a non-profit organisation that identifies people and families in need of housing, regardless of their actions in the genocide[4]. Reconciliation Villages only accept those people who are known to have killed and who have asked for forgiveness. Some former killers live alongside people whose families they killed. It is a deeply humane means of healing after unimaginable trauma – looking after livestock together, growing food in cooperatives and sharing a bank account to pay for their health insurance. As villager Aloyse Mutiribambe noted: “[…] political will helps to make things happen, but it is us, the people, who were most deeply affected, so it must also be us who change things for the better[5]”.
Crude nationalism is here with a vengeance. As Gary Younge observed: “Trump campaigned in graffiti – the profane scrawls of a mindless vandal – and to go by his inaugural address, may yet govern in tweets – the impulsive, abbreviated interventions of a narcissist[6]”. Dissent, discord and disquiet have pervaded the President’s first weeks in office. The sequelae include women’s marches, organised activism and high levels of disbelief concerning his appointments, as well as satire and online derision. Thank heavens for the status quo because there is welcome and growing acknowledgement that ultimately, it will be the President’s deeds that will curtail his value-free and incoherent ambition.
Jill Saward was a campaigner against sexual assault. She hit headlines during 1986 as the victim of gang rape and a vicar’s daughter. The trial judge, Sir John Leonard stated that her trauma “had not been so great” – an observation which “he later regretted”. A significant legacy arising from her death was the removal (largely due to her actions), of the shame, which is so inappropriately attached to women who have been raped[7]. Her recent death, at a relatively young age, leaves us reflecting on the long-term consequences of trauma and abuse and the links to early mortality.
In February the Local Government Association warned that poor sex education was creating an STI “timebomb[8]”. And a leading public school has had to defend its role in covering up physical assaults at “summer camps” for heck’s sake! British QC John Smyth is associated with “horrific beatings” at Christian summer camps, appropriately known as “bash camps”. Since his assaults were not reported to the police, John Smyth carried on assaulting boys. He now lives in Zimbabwe where he has set up Christian camps for teenage boys[9].
Also in February we learned that there are impressive pushbacks against racism and, specifically, the fear of Muslims. A Syrian family sponsored during 2015 by Fort McMurray in Canada[10] benefited from the fact that there were citizens who had themselves been forced to evacuate their homes due to disasters. As Pastor Doug Doyle noted, “People began to see themselves as displaced people, as refugees in a sense, who got so welcomed and cared for by the cities they ended up in […] it created the re-evaluation of how you respond to people who have been displaced through no fault of their own[11]”.
Finally, for your homework – make a point of seeing Hidden Figures, a film about a team of super-brilliant African-American women mathematicians who served a vital role in NASA during the early years of the US space programme. It is an immersion into the reality of segregation where the women had to prove their worth and even the daily indignities and animosities they endured were invisible to the majority of white employees. Here in the UK, we wonder how Oxford University Press can defend the “diversity deficit” of its biography dictionary[12].
This second issue of the year sees the inclusion of four papers focussing on different aspects of the safeguarding agenda. Our first paper, by Michael Preston-Shoot (University of Bedford) is a further paper on self-neglect, an area that he and colleagues have been specialising in for some time now, as regular readers of the journal will know. This paper considers further issues relating to Safeguarding Adults Reviews and Self-Neglect, updating the core data set that Michael (and colleagues) have established in the absence of any national database, with recently completed reviews. The paper also explores the extent to which the reviews analysed for this paper can improve the quality of adult safeguarding practice. One of the key points from the paper is that there is a need for review findings and recommendations, and the associated analysis, to take into account the influence of national contexts in relation to the issue. The paper also contains some useful points about the potential for reviews to transform both policy and practice in adult safeguarding.
The second paper, by Ann Anka and colleagues (from the University of East Anglia) is based on a presentation given at one of the ESRC Seminar Series events (referred to in previous editorials) and concerns issues relating to social work interventions with adults who are involved in hoarding behaviours. An evaluative research study of interventions within adult social care was undertaken in one local authority area and the paper reports specifically on the data that were obtained about social work in relation to hoarding.
The overall study was designed to evaluate a model of practice with a timed intervention consisting of intensive meetings with adult service users for up to 24 weeks in order to prevent and delay the need for care and support. A mixed-methods design, including interviews with service users, social workers, managers and key stakeholders was used, including analyses of costings of staff time and service users’ goals. Social workers used strengths, relationship-based and outcome-focussed approaches in their work. Differing techniques were used by social workers to engage, achieve change and assess effectiveness with service users. Such techniques included use of photographs to enable a service user to map and assess their own progress over time, encouraging hoarders to declutter and to reclaim their living space. The time that social workers spent with service users was valued, as was the way that they were treated with sensitivity and respect. Although the findings cannot really be generalised (given that this was in one local authority only), the paper provides some useful insights into work in this difficult area.
The following paper but Sarah Lonbay and Toby Brandon (of Northumbria University) concerns the use of Advocacy within Adult Safeguarding. The paper presents findings relating to the potential benefits of advocacy in supporting more active involvement of older people in adult safeguarding processes. Advocates and social workers that had had experience of working with older people through safeguarding processes in two local authorities were included in the study and in-depth interviews were undertaken with the participants. Although a key limitation of this research is that as a PhD study it was not possible to include older people who had been through safeguarding processes as participants in the study, some useful findings emerged. Factors that enable (or indeed hinder) the inclusion of advocacy support within safeguarding were identified and relevant implications for policy and practice are discussed. This paper should be a useful addition for those authorities that are trying to increase involvement of advocates within safeguarding processes.
Our final paper of this issue is by Susan Benbow and Paul Kingston (of the University of Chester). The paper relates to concerns about risk and abuse raised by people living with dementia and carers of people with dementia. Individuals raised such concerns spontaneously during a study that explored the wider impact of the production of narratives on individuals with living with a dementia, carers of people with dementia and couples where one partner was living with dementia. From the interviews that were held with 35 people, spontaneous concerns about risk and abuse were recorded and the paper reports on a secondary analysis specifically of this data. In the narrative interviews that were undertaken, participants often raised concerns about risk, abuse and exploitation. These concerns covered a wide variety of areas, that included driving; risk of falls; safety in the home or outdoors; finances and financial vulnerabilities; risk to the person with dementia from other people; risk to other people from the person with dementia; potential or actual police incidents and situations of neglect. People with dementia and caregivers were prepared to talk about, and importantly, to raise issues relating to risk and/or abuse when given the opportunity to do so. If issues concerning risk, abuse and dementia are to be tackled in health and social care practice it is important for professionals to explore and understand both concerns and experiences from the perspectives of the individuals involved. The paper is therefore a useful contribution in drawing such issues, derived from evidence gained in the study, to our attention. This is particularly relevant in relation to safeguarding issues for people with dementia.
We hope that you will enjoy this issue of the journal and will find items relevant to your sphere of interest(s). For those people who may be interested, the next seminar in the ESRC series on safeguarding will be held at the University of Bedford in mid-May (18th). Further details about the seminar, including booking arrangements can be obtained from Alison Brammer of Keele University, who is the co-ordinator for the series.
If anyone is interested in writing potential contributions to the journal and wishes to discuss this, or ideas before doing so, please do contact one of the Editors for further discussion about this. As ever, our contact details can be found on the inside of the journal cover.