Choose Social Work: ‘They helped me escape the life I was living as a teenager’

As part of Community Care’s Choose Social Work campaign and to celebrate care leavers’ week, author and care leaver Jenny Molloy interviewed Ethan. Watch our video to hear some of Ethan’s story of his time in care, and the positive impact particular social workers had at a vulnerable time in his life.

In this 15-minute conversation, Ethan describes his experience of being taken into care at five years old. He reflects on that traumatic moment and what social workers might have been able to do differently.

He also shares his understanding as an adult of the choice social workers had to make about keeping him and his sister safe by taking them into foster care.

Ethan had the “longest period of stability” in his life, spending five and a half years in that foster placement. Aged 11, he started to be placed in children’s homes after his foster placement broke down. Ethan talks about the impact two important social workers, Jo and Patricia, had as he went into his teenage years, and the difference they made.

Ethan describes how Jo built his trust: “I’m sure the first few times [she visited], I’ve just said something horrible to her. But she just kept coming back, kept coming back.” She continued to come back and take “small steps” even though Ethan saw himself as “a pain”:

“I was not easy to be around. I was constantly causing problems… she was always picking me up from schools when I’d been fighting”.

Ethan says Jo saw that “the bad that was in me wasn’t all I was” and recognised his trauma. Likewise, her manager Patricia never made Ethan “feel small” about his behaviour and understood where it came from: “She would do what she could for me and encourage me and inspire me”. 

Together, Ethan says, Jo and Patricia “played a pivotal part in my escaping out of the life I was living as a teenager”.

Ethan’s ends the interview with words of advice for anyone thinking about choosing social work as a career.

Jenny Molloy proudly identifies as a care leaver and is the bestselling author of Hackney Child, Tainted Love and Neglected. She is a consultant and trainer in children’s services, and patron of the charity Trevi.