in England in the 1980s and 1990s. I will never forget the power and emotion of being behind the screen with my colleagues and the mother of a 16-year- old young woman, as we witnessed Steve talking with her daughter and husband about the possibility of the daughter returning to the family home from residential care, having retracted her allegations of sexual abuse by her father, having not been believed by her mam, or supported by the police investigation. Calmly and warmly, he enabled the cycle of grooming and abuse slowly to emerge. The intensification grew and grew until the family system was perturbed and the homeostasis was irreversibly shifted. The ear-shattering scream from her mother as she realised her daughter had been telling the truth, from behind the mirror, was heard by everyone in the building. Steve had skilfully bumped the system and we witnessed it jump as the mother burst into the therapy room threw her arms around her daughter and apologised for not knowing or believing. She told her husband of twenty years that he had to pack his bags and move out of the family home as her daughter was moving back in. Everyone was in tears apart from Steve and the father. I am crying and feeling the emotions again as I type this. Steve also set up and led a unique


family therapy team, which we established in the centre of Bransholme in Hull, which was the largest council housing estate in Europe. We worked in a tiny community centre placed between the largest comprehensive school in England, the local shopping centre, the estate police station and the roughest pub on the estate. We called it MAFT, multi-agency family therapy team. To be “Mafted” in Hull jargon means to be scruffy or dirty. Steve’s expertise, reputation, charisma and charm enabled six agencies, the NSPCC, Barnardos, social services, health, National Children’s Home and probation, to allow us to offer family therapy in the most difficult context with the most difficult presenting difficulties for families presented to our agencies. It wasn’t dirty, but we did the work that others did not


want to and we did it so well, with Steve’s guidance and expertise, that agencies, courts and families themselves began to refer to the MAFT team directly, rather than through our agencies. Around the same time, our charities


and employers, the NSPCC and Barnardos, were facing budget deficits, job cuts and reductions in the services we offered. The 1989 Children Act was emerging and marked a sea change, with increased possibility of agencies working with families in crisis in partnership, and doing things with them rather than to them, through investigation and assessment. We hatched a cunning plan and convinced Humberside Social Services to give us £20,000 (£100,00 in today’s money) to provide training for their workforce. We delivered a programme entitled “The Children Act: Philosophy and values into practice”. It was a trojan horse and could have been called systemic thinking and practice within social work. We inf luenced a generation of social-care staff and introduced them to circularity, curiousity, neutrality, self-ref lexivity, hypothesising, positive engagement, collaboration, genograms, life cycles, timelines, networking, intergenerational patterns, strengths-based and solution- focused practices and more. This was more than twenty years before the Munro report, the modernising social work agenda, or CYP-IAPT. The money generated prevented cuts to our services. Steve was a visionary, an innovator


and a rebel. He appeared to do all this without angst, haste or sweat. He always had ideas, techniques, positions, or strategies to offer. Utility and achieving change were always the focus of his work. He was extremely modest, engaging and hugely popular. He would say that there can be little or no change without proper connection and engagement. He was more concerned with first than second-order change, which he believed would take care of itself. Change in action would lead to change in thinking and feeling. He had strong structural and strategic roots. I realise in writing this that we


only actually worked together for five


years. We both decided to move back to statutory front-line social work and applied for the same job, to lead and chair child protection conferences and processes. Steve rightly got the job, which led to him staying and ending his career in Hull. After the job interview Steve told me not to worry, it wasn’t serious, there would be other jobs and opportunities. He was right, as he usually was. Steve went on to inspire a further generation of multi-agency and multi-professional child protection and safeguarding practitioners. A friend, Pete, who worked for the police as a senior family liaison and child protection officer, would often tell me that his colleagues in the Humberside police force held Steve in the highest regard. They always hoped that he would be chairing their conferences or dealing with their cases, as would the families and other professionals he offered hope and ways forward to in the most difficult circumstances. In one such case conference, where


a particularly upset and domestically aggressive parent was in attendance, members of the conference gave their individual accounts of how things were going. Generally, this was none too positive. Steve turned to this parent to ask what they wished to say. They stood up, slapping the table loudly and shouting, “I did your effing anger- management course, what more do you effing want?” To which Steve replied, “Our money back, I guess!” Wendy, his widow, reminded me that at home Steve could be like one of his favourite TV characters, the wise and mysterious Master Po, who rarely spoke in the 1970s Kung Fu TV series. This ability to stay silent and inscrutable came in handy during another case conference when a concerned social worker, talking of a mother’s difficulties relating to attachment and attunement with her children, who were in care, said “They do not even like having their photo taken with their mam during contact visits home”. Steve asked if this was because their mam had a prosthetic leg and they may be discomforted by this. “No, it ’s because she insists that the family dog


34


Context 170, August 2020


The situation is hopeless but not serious: A tribute to Steve Bennett


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