Community Care today launched its annual violence against social care staff survey, which tracks the extent of violence and abuse social workers and social care staff face in their work.
The short anonymous survey aims to shine a light on the risks faced by social workers and social care workers when they are doing their job.
Last year we found that nine out of 10 social workers and social care staff had been abused, threatened with violence or assaulted and discovered that the risk of violence is just as high in the office as in service user’s homes.
We also heard shocking stories of the violence workers have faced and found that local authorities are still not recording and addressing these incidents properly.
We want to know whether the situation is improving or getting worse and find out how violence or the threat of violence is affecting you so that we can once again make sure that this issue does not go ignored.
The results of the survey together with the latest figures on violence against social workers and social care staff gathered from local authorities will be published later this year.
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Need to take statistics re trigger points also gender. Without the information then how can a plausible strategy be put in place as one will inform the other but information sharing essential to safeguarding as well as providing managed situations on basis of likelihood. No one likes being abused and people lash out I suspect because they don’t have enough control over their lives.
Surely it’s expected some time and part of the job. I am retired, but in the past often was asked to see a particular client as his (or her) social worker had difficulty in facing aggression.
Of course it is to be expected that those who lives are marginalised, might struggle to maintain a level of control in difficult interactions however what think should not be tolerated, is the increasing level of violence that a number of social workers have experienced and continue to do so. I am also retired & spent many years in child protection and I recognised that parents would be angry and accepted this was part of the job. What I could not accept was threats to kill when a father threatened me with a shotgun; when another man brandished a gun at us in a DV visit; when two colleagues were held hostage by a parent with a knife. There has to be a limit to people being told that ‘it’s part of the job’…I can think of no other profession that would tolerate such abuse towards its workers.