Child Protection and World Day for Safety and Health at Work
April 28, 2008
Today, Monday, 28 April 2008, is World Day for Safety and Health at Work; an international campaign to promote safe, healthy, and decent work. Occupational health and safety is a real concern for individual workers, advocacy groups and many employers. While easy to understand the need for occupational health and safety in developing and under developed countries, our seemingly sophisticated and advanced work practices often leave much to be desired. Work can indeed be a hazardous place at times.
Child protection focused workers (statutory and non statutory) face daily occupational hazards: abuse of children and systemic abuse of families. With a high propensity toward compassion fatigue and burn out, occupational health and safety should become an ingrained part of our daily work life. It is not just the job of an employer to keep workers safe though, but the responsibility of each of us to keep ourselves safe and protected from the psychological and emotional effects of dealing with the ongoing stress of caring.
The Cost of Caring is also known as Secondary Traumatic Stress, Compassion Fatigue, and Vicarious Traumatisation. While it is not “burn out”, the cost of caring does often lead to burn out. For many front line workers in the social sciences, the impact of working with high-risk children and families is left unaddressed and unacknowledged. Therefore, employers run the risk of having legal and class action taken against them for breaches of occupational health and safety. Flipped on its head though, employers may counter such claims with knowledge that individual employees did not actively participate in their own self care and child protection preservation plan.
Encouraging staff to look after themselves and to remain active in full community life, is our managerial responsibility when working in a sector that does not traditionally retain workers long term. However, it is not up to managers alone - workers also need to stop participating in their own self-care oppression and stay active in managing their own work/life balance.
If you are a worker in the field, do you have a child protection preservation plan? What do you do that keeps you sane and balanced?
There is no better way to combat secondary traumatic stress than to take good care of your physical and mental health.
YOU (not just your supervisor) can take better care of yourself while at work.
• Take a break during the workday;
• Make quiet time to complete tasks;
• Set limits with your clients and colleagues and diversifying the tasks in your workload can be very helpful;
• Learning to say “no!” is another way of managing stress both at work and in your personal life;
• Learn to read yourself;
• Reflect, reflect, reflect;
• Engage with your work team rather than disengage;
• If you find that you are overwhelmed, set clear boundaries and allow yourself the space and, if possible, time to recover.
• Asking for help also reduces stress.Engage in Healthy/Healing Activities
Engaging in activities that are good for you is essential. You are in control of how you treat yourself. The list below includes things you have heard before and inherently know, but as “helpers” we often forget.
• Eat right. Put down the bag of chips and pick up an apple. Drink less caffeine and more water.
• Exercise regularly. Exercise is a stress reliever. Even if the only exercise you have time for is walking around the parking lot at lunch – try it. You will be amazed at how much better it makes you feel. (It also gets you out of the office, away from the computer, fax, etc.)
• Get enough sleep. Your body needs sleep to recover so that you are better able to handle the stress of a new day.
• Practice relaxation techniques. You know them – deep breathing, visual imagery. We often help our clients find ways to relax. Believe it or not, they’ll work for you too!
• Spend time with friends. “A true friend is someone who is there for you when they would rather be someplace else” Len Wein. Being with people you like and who care about and respect you is a great stress reliever. Allow yourself to enjoy the company of others instead of focusing only on work and work issues.
What are you going to do for yourself today, World Day for Safety and Health at Work? I am going to be time rich rather than time poor (always on the run with no time for reflection). I am going to go for a walk around the Botanic Gardens with my Social Work intern. Feeding our souls by visiting a place of great natural beauty is a reminder that not all the world is an abusive black and that sometimes being surrounded by beauty is what helps our learning fall into place.
Related article: World Day for Safety and Health at Work
Comments
4 Responses to “Child Protection and World Day for Safety and Health at Work”
Got something to say about the above post or child safety in general?
Copyright © 2007 
Megan
I agree with all you say but there doesn’t seem to be much about the obligations of the employer towards frontline workers. Many of your recommendations focus on individual workers. Do employers support the initiatives that you list? Will employers reduce the workload or provide more flexible hours or additional leave entitlements for workers to better cope with the work environment?
I remember that in 2007 a New South Wales rape crisis centre received an OHS award for its management systems in this area. Is there a child protection service who is looking at the systemic pressures on workers in your industry?
Hi Kevin
lovely to have you here.
My experience with the sector is mixed - some organisations, agencies and managers bend over back wards to ensure worker safety while others are so burnt out themselves that they do not appear to care much. On the whole though, certainly in the NGO field, self care and external supervision is valued.
Work loads in our sector are astronomical - but new workers continue to take the over heavy load on. From a systemic point of view, there is much to be done and I am not aware of a single child protection service that is addressing those structural barriers. Peak Care has done some marvelous research and been in support of mentoring roles for CP workers.
My work history is in the sexual assault sector - when I first started no worker was employed for more than 28 hrs per week….at the time I didn’t understand why. Now I think it was a god send!
I went for my walk around the gardens, have committed to turning the computer off at 6pm and decided to do a fun TAFE course. Today, I have made a firm decision to change my work place safety (my stress). I now work in the private sector but best practice is my mandate - I refuse to be mandated to by the seducing words of economic rationalism (work harder = more income). I want to continue working in my industry so I am more than willing to look after my, and my colleagues, safety at work.
Thanks for all you do Kevin.
Hi Kevin,
Do you know that according to the Association for the Enforcement of Child Support, over $41 billion is owed to thirty million children in the United States in child support. Child support is quite a touchy topic in the U.S. and non-payment of child support has led to many parents and children getting poor or living below the poverty line.
It’s kind of like the oxygen mask in the aeroplane - You have to help yourself first in order the be able to help those around you.
Thanks for the reminder Megan - I hope you had a fabulous walk