Advocacy Blog

Advocacy for criminal court proceedings

2007-03-19T21:24:00.000Z

I was in Leeds Crown Court recently, on very short notice unfortunately. Luckily I managed to get some last minute legal advice that made me completely change the hurried approach I'd prepared and which I think is worth passing on to other advocates.

Background: I've written about this man before, in the post a different way of thinking, and although he doesn't fit into the usual categories for advocacy I think there is a clear need for supporting him. Also it seems that if he doesn't get the right support he's very likely to end up needlessly back in prison which will ruin all the positive progress he's made over the last nine months and cost the taxpayers a fortune. The other update for those who remember the original post is that I finally managed to help him into signing a tenancy agreement for a bedsit on the last Friday before Christmas, which was a huge relief for me as well as him.

Advocacy: I'll call the man T for the sake of argument. My work with T has centred around the fact that whenever he talks to professionals, mainly housing related with me until now, he never seems to be able to keep his facts straight, he is very sugestible, and he often seems to try to say what he thinks they want to hear (which quite often isn't what they actually want to hear).

When I first saw him the night before he was due in court it seemed that he had never had a chance to put his point across properly, either to the police or his solicitor. I have plenty of experience of helping him to get his facts straight, and my first approach was to help him to make a proper statement of events. This was wrong.

Not only was it wrong, according to the legal advice I got at 11pm that night, but it was so wrong that it's worth putting in bold type and writing about on this blog. The problems are:

T had already been interviewed by the police
although he had no solicitor at the time (a very foolish error) and he felt as if he had not been able to say clearly what happened, those interview notes constitute a legal statment before the court
any new statement will be compared to the existing statement:

inconsistencies may lead the court to doubt all of T's statements
new evidence may be found in the statements that could incriminate him further

statements in any supporting letter may lead to an advocate being called as a witness for the prosecution (my friend told me of a well meaning social worker that this had happened to)
any suggestion that an advocate helped T to make up a believable story could lead to charges of perverting the course of justice against the advocate

I was strongly advised to delete the parts of my letter that consisted of statements of the events and to instead concentrate on explaining from a detached professional perspective why I am working with T and what his needs and vulnerabilities are.

Additionally when I met T's barrister the next day he advised me that with this particular judge my letter would be worth nothing if it didn't start with a statement of my professional qualifications and competencies to be writing the letter. The court probably places greater emphasis on traditional professional qualifications than I do, but I think that statements of the number of years experience working with this sort of client, position of responsibility within your organisation or in your work history, etc. are a good start.

Court: The other piece of advice I was given was to go to court with T and help him speak to his barrister and solicitor. This was very important as it turned out, although with such late notice I had initially been reluctant to rearrange my plans.

When the barrister first arrived and I asked if I could have a word he initially looked as if he could not possibly be interested in talking to me, but we found a small room. He told me that he would only consent to talk to me because he wasn't T's proper barrister, he was only standing in for the pleading hearing. He also seemed amused to hear that I was T's advocate (that was surely his job?) and needed an explanation of the role of an independent advocate despite the fact that he said he was a mental health specialist.

The next thing he asked me was if I had discussed the material facts of the case with T or if I had given him any advice about how to plead. I foolishly told him the truth, that I was working with T because he had communication difficulties and I had initially been asked to listen to his version of events. Luckily of course as an advocate I certainly hadn't been giving any advice, and especially not on the tricky area of pleas. He immediately told me in no uncertain terms that he felt I was compromising myself in the eyes of the court by even admitting to listening to T's story (as I was supposed to be an independent professional working on other aspects of his life). Actually I think I probably could have argued this point in court, at least I hope so, depending on the attitude of the presiding judge. It is worth knowing in advance that this is tricky ground that must be carefully negotiated however.

Finally, amongst various stories of how experienced he was as a barrister and how things had changed over the years and what he knew about breaking arms with sticks from other work that he did, he did listen to some of the things T had to say. I was able to prompt T at various times to tell the barrister what his story was about a couple of the charges, and there was a productive discussion. Not your ideal discussion, but compared to the liklihood that without my presence there probably would have been little or no discussion, well worth the time and travel. T came out of this meeting without much hope, sure in fact that the barrister was going to stitch him up, and it's hard to say really, and from an advocacy perspective this was disappointing (although probably understandable because the barrister went of on so many long tangents talking to me between my attempts to divert him to listen to T, and T couldn't really understand, or wouldn't listen, to these tangents, that the whole thing seemed much more negative to him).

The outcome: When we got into the court finally our barrister had been having a conference with the prosecution who had agreed to drop one of the charges. The barrister had been motivated enough by our communication to try a bit harder on the other counts as well and he picked out some discrepancies in the police and witness statements which the judge took a dim view of, although he gave the prosecution some leeway in gathering additional evidence. T pleaded guilty to the most minor charge and not guilty to the other. I can't help feeling that the police and/or the prosecution combined these three charges for alleged incidents that occurred on separate dates six months apart so that it was more likely to get a guilty plea for one of them, but maybe I'm not supposed to speculate in that way. My job will be to provide mitigating evidence and stress the work we are doing to get him back into society when the final sentencing is made.

The dropped charge: I think it is worth telling the story of the dropped charge, and I think that I may legitimately do so now it has been dropped. T was drinking in a park when two men walked past smoking cigarettes. He asked for a cigarette and they said they had none, but he thought they were lying and he threatened them. He says now this was drunken bravado (not in those words) and didn't mean anything, but he said he was later questioned about threatening them with a knife. This was an hour or so later when he was in a Chinese take away, and says he felt so aggrieved about being questioned about a knife that he spotted a wheel brace in the take away and made up a story about having that just so the police would investigate more properly. They promptly charged him with possession of an offensive weapon, namely the wheel brace, and as far as he can tell did no further investigation, at least not in the direction he wanted them to go in.

This is bizarre to me, firstly that someone would invent an incriminating story so that a more serious charge would be investigated and dropped, and secondly that the police would charge someone with possesion of an offensive weapon that belonged to a take away a mile and an hour from an alleged incident. Anyway there were enough holes in the evidence for the charge to be dropped. And in fact this is more evidence of T's different way of thinking and is just why he needs an advocate.

Two complaints

2007-02-07T23:41:00.000Z

A few things came together recently to inspire this post...

- my last piece of advocacy work at the end of last year for someone
- the reply which began by refuting some comments I'd made
- the new coordinators comment that she wished it was possible to write letters like the one I'd written (it was my last piece of work after all)
- and another advocate's very true comment... (and I paraphrase:)

'Often when an advocate comes in to support somone with a complaint they end up going to meetings that aren't manged very well. Then the advocate often feels aggrieved that procedures haven't been followed and you immediately get two complaints. The problem is we can't complain about what we see, we can only support our partner/client who often doesn't pick out the subtleties of bad practice...'

Two complaints: one from the partner, one from the advocate. Where does the advocate's complaint go? Isn't this a potentially useful complaint (or bit of feedback) from a 'fellow professional'? Sadly if we do try to express it we get attacked, at least here in Wakefield and I'm sure in many other areas too. Despite all the rhetoric of senior managers welcoming complaints, there's still a long way to go.

Advocates not against mental health reform

2007-02-07T23:30:00.000Z

I heard that a government minister (probably some months ago now) made a barbed comment at a meeting of advocates that suggested the government thought the advocacy movement was somehow responsible for scuppering the Mental Health Bill.

This seems amazing and unlikely to me. This is mainly because I don't think we have this sort of power. Also because advocates were finally due to get some recognition and support from the bill.

Of course some of us did join in the many voices that said the proposals for locking more people up were unrealistic and unproductive (or whatever was said).

The idea that the advocacy movement was in any way responsible for the bill's failure must be pure paranoia on the governments part however. Now I'm sure this little blog won't have any influence, but if there's any ministers or special advisors or senior civil servants reading this (and if not, why not?) then DON'T BLAME US please...

Threats to advocacy funding

2007-02-06T09:08:00.000Z

I was at a meeting last week when the question of funding came up. We went round the table and a variety of worrying stories were told. I haven't been very well since then and my memory may not be fully accurate, but here is a brief précis:

There were several stories of local projects losing out to bigger players during the recent IMCA tendering;
There was a rumour that a solicitor's firm had won one of the IMCA tenders;
One local advocacy scheme was simply told that they would have to start delivering IMCA locally but there would be no extra money available and the new IMCA cases would have to be prioritised over existing clients;
Three local authorities seem to have recently done an audit of local advocacy provision. Not very much was known about this but at least two of them have since been ringing around wondering what to do with the results... Let's hope they don't do anything drastic;

In Wakefield we've also had a couple of cases recently of 'advocacy' jobs being advertised that aren't advocacy. It seems people are picking up on the buzz surrounding advocacy but not bothering to find out what it really is, so for example there is an advertisement for an advocacy worker to support child victims of domestic violence, but the job description is all about assessment and knowledge of legislation and working to tight deadlines, and to be honest I don't have much faith in this particular part of the Council.

I don't know if this is also being replicated around the country, but I fear it will lead to a further dilution of advocacy and the understanding of advocacy.

Just at the moment when there is a good feeling that advocacy is rising up in people's consciousness, do we already need to beware of trouble ahead?

Controversy on the blog

2007-01-26T10:45:00.000Z

Someone has left a distressed comment on the post about self-healing systems. I've replied, appropriately I hope, but I feel like adding a couple of extra comments here.

1. Re-reading the bit that caused the distress I can see why, and in some ways I regret that I didn't write that bit more carefully. At the same time I've set myself some rules for this blog, and one of the main ones is that I write quickly and I don't go over and edit stuff. This runs the risk of me making mistakes occasionally and even upsetting people, but I think the advantages outweigh this (and it was only a tiny part of a long post that caused the upset - do read the whole thing if you follow the link). (Also many of the concerns of the commenter could have been allayed if they'd read some of the other posts, it does look like they only read the one post and didn't see any of my many comments on professionalism, my post on advocacy and therapy, or other reflections on practice and ethics.)

2. This blog is not about my professional practice, it's about testing the boundaries, it's about challenging myself first of all to reflect further on issues I encounter, and then challenging my readers - but mainly in positive ways by offering other unusual sorts of ideas that may fit in with advocacy practice or may be something to avoid.

3. As such, and this is my main point, I want to be challenged. This anonymous commenter has given me a chance to repair an error and think again about an old post. I like comments, questions, emails, suggestions, etc. I've said this several times before, but I've got plenty of readers and not many responses. A blog is potentially very one-sided, but it doesn't need to be, and you can help... (but please leave some sort of name so I can reply properly and follow your comments on other posts)

Thanks
:-)

Professionalism, stealth, and Sun Tzu

2007-01-11T10:15:00.000Z

I know sometimes my posts get a bit long and rambling, and while I maintain that that is a vital part of my exposition (my practice, my methodology, my ethics) I do also accept that I need to try to offer some more bite-size chunks as well...

I've been discussing my thoughts about professionalism (hidden in the review of christmas and Street Angels) with a few people over the last couple of days and I've come to another couple of conclusions. Firstly that it could more simply be described as 'friendly professionalism' (if that's not a bit too cheesy for you), rather than 'stealth', which has its own advantages. At the very least I think most people can see the value friendliness has in aiding communication and this perspective can help us adapt our practice in different ways and give us new understandings of our physical and social environment (and the post about accessible computing is similarly about adapting to new technology).

Another friend immediately started quoting lots of classic Chinese and Japanese texts to me and I'm afraid I've forgotten most of them except Sun Tzu's The Art of War. I did remember a lot of the context though, gleaned from various places. The art of war is stealth (broadly) - you conquer your enemy without their even realising it - and the characterisation of stealth by Sun Tzu has found many other applications. Mark mentioned that people work with a good leader automatically (and I would add comfortably) and don't even question the leadership because it just makes sense. This approach has found applications in many fields over the last 2500 years, and it could be interesting to write something about The Art of Advocacy... (if anyone's got any ideas get in touch).

Accessible computing

2007-01-10T19:15:00.000Z

Periodically I write about Free Software (also known as FLOSS or FOSS): this is important in terms of accessibility to all and is closely linked in to openly published standards. From an ethical perspective, an advocacy perspective, and a community perspective I find the free software movement interesting to keep up with and a useful comparison to similar developments in advocacy and society.

I think it's particularly important for people to know a little bit about this at the moment as some worrying as well as some positive changes are taking place which may have a big impact on our use of computers over the coming years.

First of all, let's be bold:

Free software will benefit disabled computer users.
OK at the moment the software isn't up to scratch, but over time free software is likely to be the fastest and most flexible way to respond to the diverse needs of differently disabled people. A more positive (if a bit technical) story is here, but see below why we need to support these developments. I also expect that Linux (the free operating system) in its embedded form running phones, TV decoders and washing machines is also being used for various tools and machines disabled people use.

Free software will benefit the poor.
This is more directly obvious, but it is particularly important if we consider the growing poverty gap and the effect of people not being able to afford computers or the legal software to run on them. Microsoft at the moment is threatening much tougher action against people who copy cds or dvds, download music, or use pirated software. These actions are going to affect a lot of people and cost a lot of money, and it will disbar many poor people who become even more cut off from society. Of course there are projects like the $100 laptop to 'revolutionise the way we educate the world's children', amongst many other benefits.

Free software promotes accessibility.
Despite the fact that it's free, the most important meaning of 'free as in free software' is that it's accessible. For the developer that means you can open it up and see how it works, but it also has other important implications for the rest of us. One important example is the Open Document Format (ODF). This was ratified by the International Standards Organisation as the first international standard for office documents. Many governments and large organisations are transferring to this standard (check the links in my earlier post), and they are transferring largely because of the accessibility features of the software and the opportunities it offers to build effective and appropriate services around them. Other important accessibility developments include systems for archiving and retrieval of information, user involvement and collaboration in the new Web 2.0 (blogs, MySpace, Wikis, photo and file sharing sites, del.icio.us, etc), network and server operation and maintenance, and the posibility of reusing and recycling old hardware more productively amongst others.

Free software is built around a principle of community.
This is very important. Proprietary (non-free) software is owned and marketed for a profit by corporations who primarily want to make money. Most end users of computers just want to get by in life ok, have some fun, avoid too many problems. Quite a few people like to avoid problems by sitting in front of a computer and making themselves busy (or entertained or whatever). After a while you meet others like you and you start to communicate, to work or play together. Out of this has evolved an enormous resource of software and support that is involving more and more people every day. Helping each other out feels good, contributing to something which other people are going to use and appreciate feels good, and many people are able to make a living or at least keep themselves sane by working on free software projects. It is instructive to compare the experiences of these communities to the different sorts of communities we often work with, and they provide some hope (if you're selective).

Free software is the future.
I don't mean that in a grand way, more like I would say that we have to continue as advocates to support disempowered people to speak out and make their lives better... Free software, like advocacy, is something I think it's important to speak out for. It's available now for most of us, and getting easier to use. See the links at the end of this post.

-----

And now the dark side!
Microsoft revolutionised computing with Windows in kind of the same way that Oppenheimer revolutionised war with the atom bomb. Things are certainly different and we have certainly developed a lot, but was it all a good thing in retrospect? I could go on for ages about the history of Microsoft but I won't, just remember the anti-monopoly ruling that was made against them by the European Court (which they pretty much flaunted as far as I can tell, see this Guardian article and just search google for many more examples).

Now Windows Vista is upon us and the situation is getting far worse. I was catching up on a few tech blogs this evening and it looks like there will be some big upsets in store in the near future (you may not even want to run a new computer).

I started on the blog of a moderator for the Ubuntu forums who said there is no escape from Vista, it's going to shake the world. This is complemented by this slightly more readable and comprehensive post which explains it's all about digital rights management (DRM).

Then I was reading various sites about OOXML, Microsoft's competitor standard to Open Document Format, which seems to be designed to confuse people into not using open source while providing a completely inappropriate alternative. Bob Sutor is Vice President, Open Source and Standards, of IBM, a company that has done a lot for open source and revitalised its once flagging business partly as a result. He provides a couple of shocking summary links to information about the impossibility of implementing MS's huge standard and the fact that MS has already released proprietary extensions that will maintain their monopoly.

-----

There's a lot more than that, but the key thing as advocates or nurses or social workers or whoever you are reading my blog is that open source really is accessible and nice, and is destined to become rapidly more so over the next few years.

This is a very interesting time because many IT industry specialists are saying that the free software movement is now a viable alternative to Microsoft based set-ups, and now Microsoft, by releasing Vista in such a controlled and expensive form, could well be shooting themselves in the foot and helping us to move more quickly along the path to freedom and collaboration.

I personally have been using almost entirely free software for almost two years now. I have an old computer (2001) running very happily and playing DVDs much better than Windows ever managed as well as being able to do almost everything else I want. I've also got various other advantages from even my marginal involvement in the community, and I've paid them back in kind here and there.

The following open source software works and is free and easily if you have a broadband connection (and you can get hold of it in other ways if you need to), so make a start soon:

Ubuntu Linux - alternative to Windows, works similarly, community driven and beginner friendly

OpenOffice.org - word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, database, drawing, etc - more than an alternative to MS Office

Firefox - faster, more secure, community-driven web browser
Thunderbird - the email client from the same developers

There are literally thousands of programs, and many more in development. These are the main needs and you can start using some of them straight away - and do check out the Ubuntu Live CD...

Christmas and Street Angels reflections

2007-01-09T19:55:00.000Z

This started as a reply to Kez Lama's post on the subject, but became too long and I felt in the end it would be inappropriate to post as a comment. I also wanted to be able to post these reflections here as they were interesting to write and are relevant to this blog. It's also relevant to my earlier post about Street Angels.

It's really about professionalism in different contexts, and about trust, so it should make sense:

From an anti-capitalist and anti-christian perspective, but as someone who is dedicated to different experiences of community and sees ritual and ceremony as important parts of life, christmas is a strange time.

I had a similarly communal and voluntary experience, and I've enjoyed many christmases with various diverse groups of people over the years. This year I spent the day with Urban Space again. I really felt I spent the day with lots of old friends, and they really are friends, even though I've met most of them 'professionally' through their lack of capacity to deal with problems in their life and their involvement with local services and support groups. The great thing was its unpretentiousness. Everyone just seemed to feel free to be themselves, and happy to be together talking and having fun.

I also enjoyed being a Street Angels volunteer, meeting other volunteers, talking to people in the streets, joking about Ru and the Bishop going into Wildcats, and seeing that we clearly provided a useful service that should continue. It was interesting to be in the city centre at that time of night but not being out, as it were. I usually like to think I'm quite aware of what's going on around me when I'm out (I've had a few lapses), but wearing that huge fluorescent yellow coat, coupled with our responsibility to be observant and learn how to blend in and operate effectively still impressed a new perspective on me. I think the main observation I made was that life on Westgate is actually much more safe and enjoyable than I expected. I'm not so sure about the music policies generally, but I'm much more likely to go out in Wakefield after this experience (and avoid the hassle of travelling to Leeds).

I think my conclusion as I write this is that perhaps we should understand professionalism as a sort of stealth movement... That if we are professional enough at our work then the 'professionalism' should become invisible, disappear: whoever we are working with will feel comfortable, should see us as just another (albeit friendly) person, and feel that it's worth their while talking to us; the more familiar barriers of professionalism, often including a mixture of suits and formal clothing, jargon and other formal language, potentially multiple caveats about what we do, who we are, confidentiality and when we break it, complaints procedures, equal opportunities policies, etc., and other more personal barriers like never accepting a cup of tea, not liking dogs or being vegetarian — all these other professional barriers should disappear. Then our dislike of dogs is dealt with professionally and unobtrusively and no one even notices, we will be able to sense when it would be appropriate for our client's comfort to accept a cup of tea from them, and we will be able to slip in the necessary bits about confidentiality exactly at the right time so it's not too mechanical and can be listened to and understood... Maybe we can't get there yet, but it seems to be a reasonable direction to try to head in.

Now is the time to reflect on the experiences of Street Angels, to think about how we worked, what worked, where the gaps or problems are, and how we respond to all this and prepare to start again. I'm sure you and I are not the only people to recognise the specific role Street Angels volunteers found themselves in, and I feel there is an opportunity to capitalise (if I can use that word) on this experience by encouraging volunteers to 'blend in', to be able to give professional support when required, but to make the people they are working with feel comfortable with whatever support we're giving them.

The other thing that comes with this approach is trust. Blending in requires intuition and flexibility, and people will practice it in different ways that suit them, but trying to regulate this in formal procedures doesn't really work. I don't really see this as a big problem though, as we already have a pretty good team of reliable people and we know we can work together. There are various points for discussion, and I think the idea at this stage is to have another Sunday afternoon gathering soon where we can all share feedback and start to plan for the future. Hopefully we can find a way to build on this experience and support and develop our good practice rather than impose too many procedures and expectations that may only serve to create more unhelpful barriers before the people we're trying to work with.

I can't finish without saying something more about trust. Many people say we are living in a less and less trusting society, I don't know if this is true but it certainly seems trust is an attitude that is sorely missing. I see it in the police, who spend so much time being lied to they hardly know anything else and rarely seem able to trust people; in benefits agency and job centre plus staff who are under pressure to stamp out benefit fraud; from mental health professionals who are constantly doing risk assessments; from social workers who think advocates are going to complain and make their lives a misery; from service users who are so used to the veil of objective professionalism and the repeated disappointments over the years that anger often comes out instead of trust... the list goes on.

The sad response to the lack of trust today is often to add more layers of bureaucracy and professional and moral policing to try to cover for the lack of trust, but surely it's obvious that not trusting people breeds distrust and untrustworthiness. On the other hand trusting someone almost always helps to make them feel at ease, and the more responsibilities you trust them with the greater their chance of growing in confidence and skill. Once you trust people, management becomes a collective process of observation, feedback and analysis that provides its own safeguard and lets project coordinators identify issues and resolve them.

Hopefully Street Angels will be able to continue to capitalise on its trust in people and get back out on the streets as an effective and satisfying experience for everyone.

An advocate's winter menu

2007-01-07T23:37:00.000Z

I've just spent a thoroughly enjoyable day cooking, something I should do more of really. I do regularly cook for myself, almost always from fresh ingredients, and I try to be good to the environment as well as my body (although I do have quite a few bad habits...).

Anyway today's food was a bit special and unusual, and hopefully I will be able to make your mouth water as you read about what we ate:

Celery and celeriac soup: put in very big chunks into a casserole with stock and some extra flavourings and baked for 4 hours on a very low heat before being roughly blended - very tasty cooked slow like that!
Stoved jerusalem artichokes with walnuts, almonds and cashews
Braised red cabbage with anise, cardomom, cloves, juniper berries, cinnamon, and lemon
Steamed broccoli tossed in Tamari sauce with toasted sesame seeds
Baked sweet potatoes
Organic italian brown rice

I actually had a very abstemious christmas because I've been feeling a bit poor and unemployed, but this was an absolute feast and thoroughly delicious. The fact that I cooked everything (except the rice and broccoli) so slowly and in advance and then reheated it when we were ready to eat made it even more full of flavour.

Hopefully this marks the beginning of a year of doing more entertaining and experimenting with more delicious flavours...

Bon apetit!

Advocacy principles

2007-01-07T23:21:00.000Z

In my post about relationships yesterday I mentioned the benefits of advocacy approaches that are needed to be able to form successful trusting relationships. I actually referred to some old unfinished work I did on producing some quality standards for advocacy in Wakefield, and I thought I should actually remember on this blog the eight principles I set out then:

Empowerment
Loyalty and tenacity
Inclusion and respect
Effective communication
Independence
Sustainability
Quality
Advocacy dilemmas

These are based on the principles set out in the Advocacy2000 Principles and Standards document, and they take into account various things including the Advocacy Charter and Rick Henderson and Mike Pochin's book (much better than the Advocacy Charter).

I won't add any more commentary here or I could end up going on for ages. The full (draft) standards are available on the Advocacy Action website here and there are various comments in and around the standards.

For now, I just found it nice and refreshing to see the principles again, and you can make of them what you will...

Relationships

2007-01-07T01:24:00.000Z

I agreed in an article for Planet Advocacy (March 2005, pp.10-11) that advocacy was all about 'relationships, drama and expression'.

It's not really possible to pick out one of these terms and stress it above the others, but I do want to say a few words about relationships at this point. I'm talking about 'professional' relationships between advocate and partner, and I'm also thinking about other types of professional relationship (e.g. doctor-patient, etc.). I also wonder what we can learn from our experiences of all kinds of relationships (including with friends or children say), although sexual relationships are far more complicated and I'm not thinking about them here.

Firstly we do form some kind of relationship as soon as we meet someone. Sometimes we immediately find ourselves in some kind of conflict, occasionally we seem to have a meeting of minds, but mostly there is an initial period of getting to know each other. Whatever, if we are engaging or communicating with someone, there is a relationship.

Very often today as soon as we start to think about relationships in a professional context alarm bells start to ring: there have been so many scandals and abuses of trust that professional relationships are clearly prescribed and objectified - in particular they must be objective and dispassionate.

I think this is the wrong place to start: I've already argued that we need to protect vulnerable people from objectivity, and surely a working relationship should be about identifying some shared goals first of all, and, as advocates know well, this is often irreconcilable with having a dispassionate and objective relationship (where a 'person' inevitably becomes known as a 'client'...)

On the contrary, advocacy has a history of being partial, of being on the side of the partner: the primary goal is to form a relationship of mutual understanding and trust. This is very important as it's the only way to get to be able to really communicate with someone. It's very hard to break through the barriers of distrust and suspicion that many service users harbour, and we need all the benefits of independence and sympathy, loyalty and tenacity, inclusion and respect to be able to support people properly. Yes, boundaries need to be clear, but they come after (or at least during) the informal negotiations about trust.

All I'm going to do in this post is to open up and question the role and type of relationships. They certainly form a key part of advocacy practice, yet I think their role and the way we work with them is far more complicated than most people have acknowledged in writing about advocacy.

Food for thought hopefully...?

Publish, publish, publish!

2007-01-07T00:57:00.000Z

This is a post for my next blog really, but I'll write a draft as a sounding board here...

There are several starting points for this idea:

Organisations seem to be very wary of publishing things (maybe becasue they are scared of being judged, or losing out somehow commercially?)
This blog is an opportunity for me to publish snippets of half-formed ideas, or bits and pieces that may or may not be useful - this is a very interesting sort of opportunity, and I think it's valuable to be able to do this. I would like to see a place where many people could collaborate in a similar way (probably more consensual). One example I thought of is prison advocacy: it would be good if there was a webspace where anyone could publish ideas about this (however vague), find others who are interested, and over time develop a collaborative resource out of the ideas. Very different format from this blog, but quite open and unpressured still. Subjects in this space would be wide ranging, but easy to find.
The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community are an interesting model. The alternative is proprietary software where companies like Microsoft protect their intellectual property and charge a lot of money for the software. FOSS developers share the intellectual property and give it away for free, but at the same time they solve problems and improve things as a community, and they make money in other ways, e.g. from selling support (services) instead of software (products).
Advocacy can benefit from this model by recognising, for example, that if we shared good practice and published our policies, that many more people could benefit from good quality advocacy, and well-run projects would still have a good chance of winning contracts and remaining sustainable.

I suppose it's the glass half empty or half full situation. I find it a bit sad that a lot of organisations who work with people who are entitled to social care are so careful about publishing things and sharing them. I think we could create an opportunity for shring good practice in many common areas, celebrating different approaches to our work side by side, and opening up new areas which aren't written about (or at least published) because they're too new or exploratory...

I'm still going to be thinking and writing about this in the next few weeks, in amongst hopefully more direct material about advocacy.

Keep on skanking

2007-01-06T23:58:00.000Z

Hey hey. 2007 is moving on already, and I've been busy doing things I want to blog about and not having time to write (actually I've got two quite long drafts from the last week, but haven't been able to finish them).

At the same time, I'm managing to get a bit of consistency back with my posting, and this seems to be rewarded with more hits and more returning visitors: nothing amazing, but gratifying just the same, and also some positive comments. In return I feel like I need to be keeping people satisfied with new content...

Skanking means moving to me, but with a bit of flava. I'm looking forward to getting back to dancing next week, and our teacher always wants us to ‘ben' up’: keep on moving, but not in too straight a line, not with a straight back at all...

This blog is about dancing a similar bent-back dance, while circling vaguely and persistently around a centre known as advocacy. In some ways this crazy bent up dance of advocacy keeps on tempting me in different directions. I'm thinking at the moment of trying to sort this out and create some alternative spaces that would be more appropiate for those sorts of thoughts, other kinds of dances. One of these alternative spaces at the moment would be more experimental and philosophical (based on visctrix.net), and one would be more strict, accessible and sensible (the advocacy community site).

Hopefully that will leave this for more focusing on advocacy in a quirky and independent way. I've had a good conversation tonight about upsetting people: my friend thought that although she loves me, maybe I upset people unnecessarily. In the end we agreed that there are some people who I should be free to go on upsetting: this is partly the necessary sacrifice (for me) to be able to work successfully with and gain the trust and understanding of vulnerable people and others I already know and work with; and it's partly to avoid the grey area where I could try not to offend anyone and end up completely bland and with nothing interesting to say.

So I think this blog will stay a personal space for me to try some challenging ideas and remain philosophical, but I'll try to be a bit more focused on advocacy in the future. I would also like to make it a more integral part of my work and be able to devote some core time to it instead of mainly writing late at night when I'm tired. That should also give me more chance to write responses to publications of various types (not just the videos I mentioned in my plans for 2007). Finally for now, this will be more of a sounding board for ideas that may be written more carefully and inclusively in other places.

I hope this makes sense... the key is to keep posting I guess, but in the meantime any comments or thoughts or any sort of feedback will be appreciated :-)

Quick 7-step stress management technique

2007-01-02T13:40:00.000Z

It would be nice to think that everyone is feeling relaxed after the recent holidays, but the sad fact is that all the expectations around christmas, coupled with all the over induldgence, often makes it quite stressful.

Maybe the advice I was sent by email last year could be helpful:

Picture yourself near a stream.

Birds are softly chirping in the cool mountain air.

No one but you knows your secret place.

You are in total seclusion from the hectic place called "the world".

The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall fills the air with a cascade of serenity.

The water is crystal clear.

You can easily make out the face of the person you're holding under it...

Hopefully you'll already be feeling in a better mood, and I do think there's a place for these sorts of meditations, although to be honest I think the cure for stress is probably best found in other ways... ;-)

A new web resource for advocacy?

2006-12-30T17:06:00.000Z

So at about 8 o'clock last night I wrote about my wish to explore social networking and content management systems, and at about 11 o'clock some guy I met at a party said he thought Joomla was the best option out there, he liked my ideas, and he could offer some free space to start to try them out on... Maybe it's a good time for wishes...

I've spent a bit of time exploring Joomla today, and it has just won the Packt Open Source CMS Award (click on logo for link) as well as winning the UK LinuxWorld Best Linux/Open Source Project for the second year running. I was aware of the two runners up, Drupal and Plone, and I've also been looking at some of the also rans, most notably MediaWiki (a different type of CMS really, so not in the running). So far most of my attention has been on MediaWiki and Plone, although I knew Drupal needed to be looked into more carefully. Various examples of what I'm interested in include the townx blog (using Drupal, more than just a blog), Wikipedia of course (using MediaWiki), Schoolforge-UK (also MediaWiki), the Ubuntu Wiki (based on the MoinMoinWiki), the Free Software Foundation website (based on Plone again) and finally the Sheffield Social Forum Wiki which gives a good idea of how a community can be organised through a wiki.

I must say that so far I like the aesthetics of Plone and MediaWiki best, and I look forward to being shown that this can be emulated successfully in Joomla. I also think that it will be important for lots of people to be able to contribute to page content easily and quickly - and to feel like they want to! (like a wiki). [Edit 1/1/07 - looks like this shouldn't be a problem.]

First I need to get together some kind of spec for a website and start discussing this with people, and we'll see if Joomla can deliver...

Watch this space.

Things to do in 2007

2006-12-29T20:13:00.000Z

Experience shows me I shouldn't be writing this - I usually do best when I sit down and write something spontaneously. I also want this blog to be pretty spontaneous - I'm not writing carefully thought out essays, just thought-provoking thoughts...

Anyway, there are a few things that I began writing and never finished, and a few things that I want to write about, and a few related things I want to do, and before I go out tonight I think I'm going to jot some of them down here.

Get a job. More about that later (any offers gratefully received).

Get some funding for Advocacy Action. It has loads of potential, but with no funding it's not going to achieve much.

I want to write something about risk management. I've started twice already but each time it's got too serious for a blog post. So I should work on a risk management policy, and blog about that perhaps. Something for the resources section of the Advocacy Action website.

I also want to work on an Engagement Protocol, hopefully for all the advocacy projects in Wakefield although maybe they would each have to negotiate individual agreements with the Council and PCT. I will probably blog about engagement protocols, their use and value, and the difference between them and things like quality standards. This will hopefully help me to get my head around what I want to include in the protocol I write.

I want to do a survey of advocacy related videos on YouTube and Google Video. I've found a couple of interesting ones, but most of the results you get from searching are related to political advocacy, and some of the others are quite dire. I need to set aside a day sometime for doing this.

I want to add some films to these online video sites. A friend of mine is interested in doing some video work with me, and I feel that the advocacy community should start making use of some of the opportunities offered by these Web 2.0 sites.

I did suggest at the NAN conference last November that one way of helping such a dispersed organisation get moving would be to develop more of a web presence. I will look at the various social networking sites like Ning and Elgg and the sort of 'community-based project management' sites like Basecamp from 37signals (and many others). Then I will try to work out how these resources could be used to support and develop our advocacy community. I need to do this by the end of January for the next NAN meeting.

I'm going to be a podcast host, all being well. I've had the invitation, it may end up being NSFW, but I may let people know if it happens.

I've got to finish off my posts about visctrix sometime.

I'm going to read Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (review, download electronic copy). I got it just after it came out in paperback in 2001 and never got around to reading it. I may even read Negri's The Savage Anomaly and develop my knowledge of Spinoza's ethics which I borrow from.

At the end of the day though, just keep coming back to the blog to see what's going on.

A cancer amongst charities

2006-12-22T21:05:00.000Z

Last night in the pub we were approached by an ageing woman wearing a cowboy hat and a waistcoat covered with badges. As if that wasn't enough to scare us away, she then thrust a collecting tin in our direction and asked for donations to Cancer Research (or whatever it's called these days).

Now I think it's rude to just ignore these people, so while my foolish friends all put their hands in their pockets I explained that I never supported cancer charities and maybe she should consider collecting for some smaller local charities instead (like those represented around the table).

It turns out she's been doing the rounds of the local cities week-in week-out for years. She did Wakefield, Barnsley and Huddersfield one week, and Sheffield and Doncaster the other, one evening in each city. She claimed to have raised £140,000.

While I can only admire her dedication and persistence in some ways, at the end of the day I find this sort of practice both perverse and divisive. I've decided to use this strong language – maybe a bit stronger than I really need to, but it does serve to emphasise the point in a way that needs to be done occasionally.

So here I get the chance to explain myself in a bit more detail:

OK so I've spent ten years working with vulnerable and disadvantaged people, but I put the emphasis on working with them, and I think that charities need to get away from the patronising approach to helping the needy.
Really being a charity is a tax choice. If you are a registered charity (or you have charitable status in whatever way) it means you enjoy certain tax breaks. Yes, it also means that you agree to follow charity law, including limiting your work to certain areas and not making a profit, but at the end of the day you agree to do this so you can enjoy the tax breaks.
Cancer charities spend a lot of money on expensive laboratories, highly paid researchers, and glossy marketing. The people we are supposed to be working with are rarely in sight, except maybe as guinea-pigs. I support hands-on, grounded charities that are working directly with people and with volunteers and who see the value in cheaply photocopied annual reports or newsletters.
The big headline charities are getting more public donations and more Government contracts (see this article from 2003, no time now to search for anything more recent). This is at the expense of smaller charities and other voluntary sector organisations.
I don't really support street collecting, or its close relative TV campaigns. It's not all bad, but I'm not trying to give a balanced view right now. It's very easy to put 2p or £10 in a charity box, or even ring up and give £100 from your debit card, but you have very little connection with the result - it's just a feel-good thing really (and that's assuming it wasn't 2p just so the girl you're trying to impress doesn't think you're tight...)
In terms of cancer in particular there seem to be some very ironic competing urges in Government policy. Yes they are finally moving towards banning smoking, after many years campaigning, but they are still only taking small steps in this direction, and what about all the other environmental hazards that seem to increase our risk of cancer:

holidays in the sun...
destroying the ozone layer in our cheap planes on the way there...
all sorts of other pollution in air and water from commerce and industry
additives in foods
pesticides and herbicides (on food and in the cotton in our clothes)
powerful detergents and all sorts of other chemicals in our homes, offices, and in the streets
prescription drugs
and many others

There may be other issues, but that will do for now. Basically if you want to support charitable activities the best thing you can give is your time, your energy, and a bit of your human self. In most of the work I've been involved in, people are most grateful for a bit of human contact and respect, someone to talk to, someone to bring a bit of happiness and involvement into their life, something that will enable them to feel as if they've been able to make a contribution to something. I don't think these big laboratories and research projects will ever have as big an impact, and I'm quite happy to continue to give a bit of lip to the collectors who are out harassing me on my nights out.

Don't write everything...

2006-12-21T18:12:00.000Z

More christmas drinks...

I met a social worker from another town. Seems like she challenges expected practice. Had a nice chat with her...

One thing that stuck out. She was asked to do a social circumstances report for a MHRT with about 3 days notice. On her first visit to the patient she decided he was too sedated to engage properly, she told staff she would come back the next day and she hoped his medication would allow her to talk to him properly. This didn't happen - his meds were still too high, and she couldn't get the information she needed from him.

The report she wrote was therefore very brief. It mainly said that she had been unable to get sufficient information to be more comprehensive. She then came under some pressure to explain why she hadn't gone into full detail (although she had explained this in the report).

It struck me that very often people are expected to deliver comprehensive reports, but also very often it is difficult to be so comprehensive. Social workers and psychiatrists and others use their professional experience and judgement to fill in the gaps, which is of course what they're trained and paid to do. The problem is twofold: that this gap-filling process is fraught with difficulty (it's hard enough to assess how people are, let alone guess what fits in the gaps); and the second problem is that whatever is written could well be referred to for years after.

These two small problems combine into one big problem: the guesses people make with the best of intentions then become the 'truth' that can dog the patient for years to come.

What a good idea then to produce a minimalist report that leaves gaps where there are gaps - at least there are fewer chances of making mistakes that could affect people for years...

Another way of saying what I'm trying to say: when we work with people with mental health problems, in fact whoever we're working with, there are bound to be gaps in our understanding and assessment of them... what we need to do is acknowledge these gaps and let them be reflected in our reports, instead of trying to be comprehensive and ending up misrepresenting people.

A resolution for 2007? Shorter reports, more gaps?

The road to success - don't be an advocate

2006-12-21T18:04:00.000Z

Just had a quick christmas drink with someone in the pub, and they admitted that the reason they were being more successful in their job was because they'd finally realised that they shouldn't always try so hard to be an advocate...

Maybe everyone thinks this, but I do still believe the Wakefield is a more difficult place than many to be a proper advocate. The fact is that politics is still so important, sometimes it seems like you get better results if you play the game. So you sacrifice advocacy for results...

My friend thinks there will be a backlash against the increasing professionalisation of advocacy, and that projects like his, like IMCAs, etc, will eventually be rejected by the common people who want a 'proper' advocate who is going to try to make their voice heard rather than just try to get the result they want.

I think this is a challenge many of us are facing, in various ways...

Cool Yule

2006-12-20T18:07:00.000Z

Tomorrow is the shortest day of the year, celebrated as Yule in the old Celtic calendar.

This solstice was well known a long time before people developed instruments to measure this sort of thing. People were aware of it because they were aware of the changes in the seasons and the wider world around them. From tomorrow the days start getting lighter and the nights start getting shorter.

When the 'pagan' celebrations were taken over and lost by things like christmas, we lost.

I hope you can enjoy some sort of celebration tomorrow - have a cool yule!

I'll also wish you a happy new year, and all the best for 2007.

(Although actually the Celts celebrated new year at the Spring Equinox, 21st March, when the daylight becomes longer than the night. This is also the New Year in Iran, Afghanistan, and the Kurdish lands amongst other places, known as Newroz.)

Internet Explorer still not working

2006-12-16T13:16:00.000Z

N.B. Now fixed, 20 December. Thanks to Christine - see comments.

I wrote a post some time back about the benefits of Firefox (a far better way of browsing the web).

I am shocked and disappointed to find that this new blog, based on a new standard Blogger template, doesn't display properly in either IE6 or the new IE7.

The banner at the top is orange, the title Advocacy Blog is a link, and the photo of lichen from Moel Siabod should neatly fill up just the subtitle row with the text showing up neatly on top of it (no white background).

IE just doesn't work.

Now I think Blogger must have some responsibility for this - I'd expect them with their expertise to be able to create templates that work in IE.

On the other hand all web designers know that IE is notoriously difficult to make pages work in, especially if you're interested in accessibility and standards compliance.

So to all you IE users, please switch to Firefox so you can see this post in the way that it's intended. (Feedback from any Safari (Mac) users would also be welcome here.)

Self-healing systems

2006-12-14T00:34:00.000Z

[End of post edited 16/12]
When we think of cybernetics we usually think of bits of machines being incorporated into people, but this is an error caused by film and other media. It's actually a useful idea for patients in psychiatric hospitals and many other people too...

Cybernetics is really about self-managing systems. It comes from the Greek Κυβερνήτης (kubernites - meaning steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder; the same root as government).

A very simple example of a cybernetic system is a bathtub. You turn the taps on and go to make a cup of tea or iron some clothes. There's plenty of space to hold the water most of the time, but the space is limited. If you are distracted by whatever else you're doing, there is a safety mechanism: the overflow. When the water level gets too high, it starts to escape down the overflow. This is self-managing in a way - you don't need to intervene in order for the overflow to start to work - it works when a predefined critical point has been reached.

In a way this example is oversimple: it almost fails to be cybernetic because it is only a very primitive loop (and the taps fill the bath up quicker than the overflow can empty the excess water, so it does overflow eventually anyway. There are more impressive examples from many fields, but I think this one reflects nicely on the fragility of the cybernetic system that is the human body.

Which brings me to my experiences in psychiatric hospitals, and out in the community for that matter. Quite a few years ago now I read some of Carl Jung's writings. While I liked these quite a lot, I always felt that he was just missing some of the context of what he was thinking about and I never bothered remembering sources or doing anything too 'academic' with what I was reading.

Despite this I now find myself regularly recalling an idea I certainly read in Jung's work, though I can't find a direct source tonight. I talk about this to people and it seems to help (but I don't go into the detail I'm mentioning in this post).

What Jung said was that as we live our lives we develop 'habits' (this may be my term, but I know he was a fan of Bergson too) to deal with situations we come across regularly. So we go to work and we have quite a small range of different things we need to deal with, and at root there is only one thing we need to do - 'our job'. There is a similar situation at home and in the other places we go to regularly.

I don't have space to go into it in detail here if you haven't come across the idea before, but many people have observed and commented on the role of habit in our lives. In many ways we let the habits get on with themselves so we can concentrate on the more interesting things in our lives.

The problem comes because the world around us is constantly changing, and over time the habits we developed to be able to cope with the world usually begin to fall out of sync with the changes around us. The fact that we don't pay much attention to our habits makes this even more of a problem: we do things automatically because in the past they've helped us to live, but now as our automatic, habitual actions begin to cause us problems we remain blind to the cause as we're not paying attention to those parts of our life.

So we find ourselves increasingly having problems that are distressing because we can't understand them - they even seem irrational and unjust. The natural self-healing process that then comes into play often characterised as depression, although it can appear in slightly different ways or be given other labels. The point is that even if our conscious mind can't see what's happening to us, our subconscious can feel it and does react. The subconscious reaction is not particularly directed or understandable (my earlier post on the space not enclosed by words is relevant here in a way) but it takes the familiar form of a 'turning-in-on-oneself'.

The outward affects of this 'turning-in-on-oneself' are a tiredness, a difficulty in engaging with people or things, a slowing down. Eventually the conscious thought processes that define us as individuals can become so broken down that strange and unruly elements of our subconscious are regularly coming through into our consciousness. Sometimes these incursions of the unconscious are distressing and unpleasant, but some of them are much more positive. The key that Jung discovered is to engage with them. This is one element of his work that became a foundation for the various practices of psychotherapy that we find today. We can engage in them through journal-keeping (or other forms of writing), through drawing or painting, or through a range of other expressive practices.

Eventually, after the body has been shut down sufficiently to break the bad habits that have been constraining it, the idea is that we will be able to begin to go in new directions, begin to learn new approaches to dealing the world, techniques that will hopefully become habits that are more appropriate to today's world.

OK, so I said I don't go into that sort of detail. I suppose the main thing is the idea of habits, those habits getting out of sync, and then our bodies shutting down so that we can have a new start. This is a positive way of thinking about mental distress that seems to be sadly lacking in some institutions (as far as I can tell from what the patients say to me).

[added bit:] The question is, how can this be used, especially from the more non-interventionist stance of an advocate. Clearly it would be wrong to go and start talking to all our new clients about this idea: the main thing is to get people to speak out, and it's important that we concentrate on listening at first. I think it's more about putting things into context, especially after we've known people for a while. Advocacy isn't all about listening, it's more proactive than that, we set goals and develop action plans, and in between we need to care about the relationship we have with our partners. This relationship needs to be empowering, and it seems to me that helping people to find a context where their 'illness' can become more of a 'healing process' can help to give a little more hope to their situations. [end edit]

A more extreme example: when a very ill patient talked about his medication killing him, and wanting to die anyway but not by being poisoned by doctors, I talked about these ideas very productively with him. I explained the idea that mental illness was a self-healing process, that it could be seen as a 'little death' - a death of the old to make way for a renewal, and that these feelings of dying were a natural part of the process. I even went so far as to suggest that in a way the meds needed to make him feel like they were making him die, as they were trying to help him along and speed up this process of (partial) death and rebirth (though I think this is probably taking the analogy a bit far). N.B. Please see the distressed comment and my reply below.

I hope that some people who read this may get some insight, that this may ring a bell or touch a cord of recognition inside you. If that does happen then you'll find your own way of using the idea in your practice.

This is not advocacy in its pure form. I struggled with doing this sort of thing at times, and I do it sparingly. I do think it's relevant to engage with people in a wider and deeper context as an advocate than would happen if we simply did our jobs. Of course citizen advocates and others have known and practiced this for ages, and perhaps it's because my recent role has been as a professional/case work advocate in a very formal setting. I did also touch on these issues in my earlier post about advocacy and therapy.

I'm going to publish this without even proofreading as it's getting late. I hope it's come out ok.

A4A Forum

2006-12-12T12:30:00.000Z

I've linked to this already in the external links section down on the left, but it's worth adding in a separate post.

While this blog is about advocacy, it's still quite quirky and personal. I am trying to stir up thought, and even controversy. I do think that this will gradually have the effect of developing a resource that people can hopefully use.

The Action for Advocacy Forum on the other hand is a much more serious and accessible place where some similar discussions are being had. I try to contribute to it as well (though I had quite a lull after I started this blog). Last night I added my bit to a discussion on confidentiality in advocacy practice, I've also added some thoughts about conflict of interest policies and independence, a case around reporting abuse (also covered under the confidentiality post), and various other things.

The great thing about the forum though is that there are loads of people, and it's attached to a prominent and vital organisation (A4A). There are currently 110 members and 288 articles about a wide range of subjects.

The one frustrating thing for me on the site is that the discussions and contributions are usually quite short. I personally don't think any important question can be answered without at least 1000 words (!) and I was writing too much there so I made this blog for my verbal excesses. On the other hand, these are busy advocates contributing to the forum, and the articles and responses are far more approachable than this blog for many people.

Anyway, if you haven't already, go there and contribute. The A4A forum is another important resource for advocacy.

Getting the house in order

2006-12-11T23:17:00.000Z

Or rather the Home Office...

All I could do was laugh when I read that

"The Home Office does not have adequate controls to reconcile the payroll and personnel records to determine exact staff numbers."
The Guardian, 11/12/06

I think the laughter was more out of fear than real mirth, but it seems deeply ironic that the body behind all these sudden withdrawals and demands for reassessment of incapacity benefit and disablility allowance is in itself in such dizzy disarray.

Either the Home Office should immediately suspend all funding to itself for six months and force each employee to complete a 29,000 page questionnaire; or alternatively it should develop a monitoring system that more properly reflects the new professional standards that the government is clearly so keen on embracing.

Spam Shakespeare

2006-12-11T22:27:00.000Z

If we sat a load of spammers in front of computers, gave them drip-feeds and catheters so they had no need to go anywhere, eventually, the story goes, they would spam us all with Shakespeare (if we haven't all ripped out our internet connections in terror before then...)

Actually sometimes I find we're not so far from that already. I get quite a lot of spam that appears to be made up of sentences gleaned from various web pages and then cut up and reorganised. I don't know which websites they use, some seem quite literary, some pretty trashy, some boringly technical, presumably none too high profile.

I remember the first time I got one I thought it was very strange and interesting. It was very short, had no links or images, and I spent a while wondering whether it came from a real person or was an attempt to get me to confirm my email address. In the end I waited, and sure enough more started to come in. Now I don't usually bother looking at them, but this one today reminded me of that first moment... There are too many of these really, and I've deleted a lot, but take any bit on its own and see if you can make any sense of it, it's quite an amusing distraction (these lot would have enjoyed it at least).

Together firmly mandates outcome determined upcoming wishes problem. Cia, married, arrested escapes kills. Handles seventytwo, traffic while consumes sixteen.

Playing isnt, fun, debut earlier.

Again, illuminate job guides talking printed. Zealot generally turn down speaking those? Join book club australia categories arts childrens literature.

Moonraker bernard lee spoof cut cast crew bondrobert.

Locate outside must mind when assessing benefits proposed affect.

Defying, sounded, cool drag solid progressed slow fake hookey.

New look

2006-12-08T21:38:00.000Z

So I finally got the invitation to upgrade to Blogger Beta, and ended up going the whole hog and setting up a completely new design and colour scheme!

I hope it works. I'll try out the colours for a while and may revert, but as for the layout I think this is a big improvement, especially the new Archives, the bigger text, and the fact that most of your screen should be used (plus IE users will be able to see the sidebar now hopefully).

I also like the new labels which should help people find their way around a bit better (once I've added appropriate labels to all the posts that is...)

I've managed to sort out a couple of niggling little problems so far. I even created a new class in the css so I could format my name (that's hard-core programming for me!). The fact that the blog title is not aligned with the sidebar text is an ongoing annoyance though.

Let me know what you think.

Xmas list

2006-12-06T22:46:00.000Z

Not that I believe in this sort of thing really, but take a look at this for an inspiring list (and I own none of them yet!)

The Atlas Arkhive

:-)

Street Angels in Wakefield

2006-12-06T22:33:00.000Z

I was part of an interesting experiment last weekend, volunteering to be a Street Angel on their first weekend in Wakefield city centre.

As Street Angels we try to offer a safety net for people who become vulnerable, mainly around the main clubbing area at the top of Westgate, but also potentially as far as Henry Boons or Kirkgate and the bus station. We met all sorts of different people, but we expect our main focus to be people who have become vulnerable after too much alcohol. We go out on Friday and Saturday nights between 9pm and 3am in teams of three or four, and we have a base in the Westmoreland Centre that offers a safe place where people can come to get warm, have some water or a hot drink if they need it, and we hopefully work with them to make sure they can get home safely.

It was an experiment because it's the beginning of a pilot scheme that will run until New Year's Eve, that's 12 nights over the next five weeks. The project was initially proposed by the Wakefield District Partnership's Sustainability Advisory Group. Trying to show that their work wasn't all about Fairtrade and recycling, they were looking for a practical project that could make a real difference with a low investment through partnership working.

The model was provided by the Street Angels project in Halifax, set up last year. They have provided a lot of support and information to the Wakefield pilot, including their name. Other partners include Wakefield MDC, West Yorkshire Police, Wakefield Churches Together, Wakefield Cathedral, and Urban Space, together with numerous individuals (this isn't an official blog, just my observations, so sorry to whoever I've missed out). There are already 40 volunteers and we hope to get a few more over the coming weeks.

It's an interesting project to be a part of, butI'm beginning to feel a bit like I'm writing a travel brochure... I think it gives a good background, but what happened on the night though?

Well, apparently, we saved three arrests (I think), two of which would also have meant that a police officer would have had to take the person to A&E and wait until they were discharged back to the cells - all using up valuable time they could be using on the streets. We also helped about half a dozen others. One young woman was eventually taken home by the police and her father rang us later to thank us for our help. Another man was picked up by his mother. Both of them had suffered minor cuts to their faces and were in a state where it took over half an hour to get them to shelter initially and then over an hour each before they were taken safely home. In both cases if we hadn't been able to help then the police would have ended up arresting them, something no one wants to happen.

We also seem to have made a good impression on the Nightlife Marshalls which is useful because they seem to be the main calming and managing influence on the City Centre. We in return were very impressed by them, and they also seem to have an important caring role, offering first aid and managing taxi queues as well as being able to respond rapidly to any incidents along Westgate. The Nightlife Marshalls also work very closely with the doormen who also offered us a warm welcome as we started to discover our place in the night-time economy of Wakefield.

It was a nice quiet weekend, and the rain held off until about 2am on the second night. Friday in particular gave us very little work and was a good opportunity to get a feel for the role before the hard work really sets in nearer Christmas. Starting at 9pm we do a briefing and then go to a Police briefing with the Nightlife Marshalls. We have radios linked into the CCTV system which is also used by the Police and the Nightlife Marshalls - these were used to call us to the help of various people through the weekend, and can also track people who are identified as a risk as they move through town.

The easy start on Friday was useful as on Saturday night things were much busier. We got the last woman safely in a taxi at about 3.05 and all felt as if we'd done a good night. Quite a few people stopped and talked to us and a lot of people must have seen the papers because they were recognising us and shouting out Street Angels. There was a small amount of vaguely abusive comments, 'you look like twats' being most common, but it had a fair amount of truth to it, so I could only laugh - nothing threatening.

I'm going on a bit here, but it's my blog and I'll ramble if I want to.

So to ramble on to something maybe a bit more relevant to an advocacy blog, I'm wondering about the links and differences between the experiences.

The thing that stood out for me is that rambling drunk people don't hang around for the supportive empowering approach we take such trouble to practice. I was reminded more of the mountain rescue man who once shouted questions at me to say my name, what day it was, where I was, etc, etc, insistently for ages to stop me from falling asleep. That's another story, but I did find myself suddenly being forced to give orders: Stop; You Don't Know Where You're Going; You Have To Get Some Help. I managed to get his consent to this before I commanded: Come With Us Now. It worked. I don't think I'll be changing my career though.

In fact the delicate matter of gaining consent, and not being offended at any abuse hurled at you in the process, was important on the night too. Understandably when people have just fallen down drunk, their body takes over and most of their attention is focused on calming their churning stomachs and spinning heads. They probably don't want some unknown person in a massive flourescent yellow coat to come and ask if they're ok or want a coffee. The speech that then emerges is instinctive and obscene, but usually amounts to 'leave me alone'. I personally think it's very important to leave people alone when they're in that mood. In fact things can change very quickly in situations like these, so if we come back in 5 minutes we may get a better reception, but one good thing about Street Angels is that we have time to watch and work with people. There's no need to get an instant answer as we can continue to observe from a respectful distance and offer assistance when it's more appropriate later (or call in the professionals if necessary). The extra time we have helped us out with everyone we worked with over the weekend, and it's well worth using some of it to ensure we have the proper consent and agreement of people for us to help them.

Finally, many people have asked me how I can be involved in a project which appears to be so christian in it's orientation. I'll explain more of the background to this in the last post I'll write about visctrix on 'spirituality', but for now suffice it to say that despite (or perhaps because of) having been instrumental in the setting up of three charitable organisations, I have little time for the concept of christian charity. I think there are a lot of truths in the stereotypical images of christian 'do-gooders', and I think people can do a lot of damage through naïve efforts to 'help' others. I think there are a lot of 'blame' issues in christianity and the various christian doctrines, indeed christianity can effectively be called the first blame culture, and it has been well argued that this culture of blame has insidiously affected all the institutions of today's society. I don't think the humanists have grasped the problem really, let alone solved it, but I do think that person-centred and advocacy based approaches to working with people are a positive move away from what I would characterise as the more 'doctrinal' approaches to health and social care. I'm not sure if people will be able to follow my argument, I'm aware that I'm taking many short cuts in order to explain succinctly. This sort of effort is bound to failure, but it has its own rewards. For the more philosophically minded, references that spring to mind are Nietzsche and Foucault.

My reflections are going to get too metaphysical if I'm not careful, and I will try to explain the background to these suggestions a bit more sometime soon. To get more down to earth, while we do have a wide range of volunteers, because of the partnership approach and the origins of the project in a WDP advisory group, Wakefield Churches Together got involved early on and did a lot of advertising and recruiting for volunteers. It's also true that the Halifax Street Angels is run by the YMCA and has quite strong christian roots. And there are other issues that are not really worth the bother listing.

Given this background, what have I to say to the people who have questioned my involvement with Street Angels? At the end of the day I don't mind working with any individual people. It doesn't matter to me whether they're christian, muslim, drunk, sober, paranoid schizophrenic, disabled, from Iraq, or work as a police officer or social worker. I've met great people and insufferable people in each of these groups and I'm happy to work with many of them. What I think is important is that when we're working we don't impose our views on others. I have no intention of challenging people's beliefs while I'm working on this project, and I expect that they won't put me in a similarly difficult position. I do know that despite the cheesy name, this organisation does focus on the job of being a Street Angel, and throughout the meetings there have been no references to any christian practices or beliefs, except in the context of not imposing them on others.

I volunteered to be a Street Angel for two reasons. I've spent a lot of time out in the night-time economy over the years (and I've got quite a lot of time in me yet), and together with a few communication skills and a dose of common sense I think I can offer some support to the project. And I have been lucky enough to be hearing about the project since soon after its inception, and I think it will be a breath of fresh air for Wakefield and that it should hopefully inspire other people to find simple practical low cost initiatives that can really make a difference without the need to invest so heavily in capital and bureaucracy.

[Update 9/1/07 here.]

The right to advocacy

2006-12-04T16:22:00.000Z

I just read in someone's engagement protocol that ‘access to advocacy is a right to which service users are entitled.’

My immediate thought was that this must be wrong: where does it say in legislation that people have this right? And why are people now saying that IMCAs give some people the right to an advocate for the first time in England and Wales?

But then I realised that it was true in an important way, and that we should say it loudly and clearly.

People do have a right to the support of an advocate much of the time:

If someone arrives at a meeting with an advocate, they have a right to ask for the advocate to attend the meeting, and there is no law which prevents an advocate from attending most meetings (though they can be denied entry on a similar sort of ad hoc basis)
If someone wants to speak to an advocate they can, as long as they fit into the advocacy scheme's criteria
If someone asks an advocate to obtain information from an agency, and they fill in the appropriate form of authority, the advocate then has the same right as the person to access information about them

People may not have a statutory right to our support, but they do have these informal rights, and we can thus correctly say that people do have a right to advocacy support.

visctrix

2006-12-02T18:28:00.000Z

visctrix is an important name for me, and now seems the right time to say something about it. As I explained on my Wikipedia user space, a visctrix is a space of creation of bodily affects that cannot be put properly into our usual words or names. I use it as my email address and as my online identity, especially in web forums, ICQ and games.

This comes from the Latin viscera or visceral - relating to feelings, affecting the internal organs - and playfully mixed with the end of the word matrix which is Latin for womb (a space of creation).

This name was created about six years ago when I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to run a 'cultural studies of the internet' course in the Fine Art dept of Leeds University. It picked up on a range of themes that can be found explored both in internet based spaces, but also in various discourses around art and identity politics (I prefer the word ethics to politics).

It is a name that doesn't like the concept of naming, a name that is constantly, hopefully, in progress or transition. Right now I'm certainly in a process of transition, and this needs to be managed carefully somehow - the aim is to be able to sustain myself and to be able to create... Part of this is a re-evaluation of where I find myself and where I'm going - a process in itself that people often write about in journals, diaries, and today, blogs.

So I am going to try to remember and rethink what the name visctrix means to me. The aim is to bring together some of the previously sustaining pathways that are beginning to diverge and disappear, and to try to reinvigorate them. I do think that this will be relevant to readers as it's also another way of naming my approach to life and philosophy, and hence my work, my thinking about advocacy, and this blog.

1. The Name
It seems Plato bears a lot of responsibility for this one, which has dominated the way we think in the West. Many people, including myself, think that the Name (with a capital N, meaning that it is somehow special, and Known, and a sort of fixed thing) is damaging and restrictive. Writers and artists and mystics and all sorts of people who fall outside the mainstream economic system have instinctively realised this and used pseudonyms and false names throughout time. The Name comes from the tendency towards control, originally from the wish of various people in history to control power, money and knowledge, now prevalent as the managerial and bureaucractic system we're all so familiar with.

Three examples will be quite grounding and constructive here. The first is about Joanne Bloggs whose community care assessment identifies eligibility for substantial access to care services. Unfortunately Joanne presents as a very angry young woman, so angry in fact that services are beginning to be withdrawn or withheld. I'm sure most advocates have met some people in similar situations where social care professionals simply seem to have labelled them 'Joanne Bloggs' - meaning aggressive, demanding and difficult. Of course they are demanding and difficult because their lives are demanding and difficult, but 'Joanne Bloggs' is well documented and she just can't sit down quietly and gratefully accept the help we offer. Often, not documented, there is joanne, or jo, or josey, or... These others don't have capitals, and in some ways they may feel they're better off without all that paperwork and managerial pressure. Outside the realm of paperwork and benefits and housing they put a brave face on life, have a laugh with their friends if they have any, and work their way through various problems in between. But then people come along and call them Joanne (even if they say 'Jo'), and ask horrible questions, and don't seem to listen, and they get upset and angry, and then the police are called or they get sectioned and everything goes even further downhill. Joanne is a Name, jo is a person, and tomorrow jo could feel much more friendly and pleasant because the sun's out - if only you'd come for the assessment the next day...

The second example is something I touched on in my note about the NAN Conference. This is about the Name of Advocacy (if Advocacy is a proper Name, it gets a capital too). It's a constant question, not just of Rick's, about whether we should rename 'advocacy'. No one understands it, some say. It gets confused with legal advocacy. The definition is too long and unwieldy, or too short and imprecise. To define something is the same as to Name it - once it has a definition we Know what it is, it's somehow special, and it's kind of fixed. This is useful for the legislators and commissioners, even the managers and the trainers: we can give people rights to it, we can manage contracts, and we can construct advocates to do the work. Maybe that's enough reason for you - we have to live in the real world, and if that's the way to get more advocates what's the problem? I would say wait though. Think for a moment about the link between Joanne and advocacy. At the moment advocacy has no capital - it's still a fluid concept, and it's practised in different ways. Without a capital, advocacy is a bit like jo, slightly out of reach of the catogorising tendencies of some of the people we work with. At the same time we seem to be able to communicate better with jo and others like her than many professionals. It's a subtle prediction, but something I think many of us kind of feel in our bones (or our viscera), that if we move too far into the realms of Advocacy, everything will become more defined and controlled and we'll end up only being able to communicate on Joanne's level again just like all the other Names. I think it's also important to remember that most of the people like jo seem to cotton on to what advocacy is pretty quickly after they start working with a good advocate. They don't need paper definitions, they need feelings, and I think many advocates, and many other people too, also work very productively in this space: let's celebrate and protect this slight vagueness and stop talking about burying advocacy under the tyrrany of the name.

My final example is just a quickie. Of course Social Worker, Psychiatrist, Police are all names, all names which are used to limit, constrain and abuse ordinary jos and johns who are often trying to give something back to the world, who often do extraordinarily sensitive work, and who are not described in my examples above. We are stuck with this tyrrany in some ways, and stereotypes are always breeding other opposing stereotypes. I am just trying to indicate the positions we find ourselves in as advocates when we meet the clients of some of the less accomplished practitioners.

Now this has already got long enough for one post. The other things I wanted to write about are listed below (they will become links as I write them up, hopefully soon). Feedback welcome as always.

2. Creation
3. Communication and movement
4. Community
5. Spirituality

We can't help the social workers if they won't help themselves

2006-11-28T16:06:00.000Z

Quite a while ago now I was in a meeting with the Directorate of Social Services in Wakefield trying to persuade them to support Advocacy Action. It turned out later that they weren't having a good day, but since I wasn't asking for money at the time I had a relatively easy ride.

In fact the closest anyone got to challenging me was with the question ‘how are my social workers going to benefit from advocacy?’ The Director, bless her, told me I didn't need to answer that question: the point was, she said, that advocates help service users, not social workers.

I thought it was a good question though, and I insisted on saying that of course if people were supported to communicate more clearly it should be easier for everyone. Ok people may be more assertive or demanding, but at least they will explain their demands and their needs more clearly, and be less likely to resort to shouting or end up crying in despair.

In fact I probably take this further on many occasions as I actively try to empower nurses, care assistants and social workers to make decisions for themselves, adopt more person-centred approaches, and even feel they might be able to question their managers' decisions on occasion…

So it's been a long time since that conversation, and for various reasons I haven't had many opportunities to directly help any of his social workers, until now, and sadly so far is hasn't run as smoothly as I would have liked…

The first thing to point out is that I have managed to make a good impression on the Team Manager, his Senior Social Worker, and the Service Manager (as far as I can tell from their feedback). They have acknowledged that I have helped them to have much better conversations with the ‘service user’ (I'll fall into this jargon for confidentiality's sake).

I've also made a good impression on the service user and their family. They feel happy that their case has been much better described and documented over the last couple of months. We've been through some basic person-centred planning to help with the preparation for the community care assessment, and this has put things into perspective and brought out some issues that had not been discussed before. From their point of view the main problem is that I have been too trusting, and at the end of the day Family Services are still going to turn around and refuse to offer what they need. The sad bit is that last week they were proved to be right, and as we seemed to be near the top of the struggle to get proper services, now it feels as if the fall has been much harder.

It's not all over yet though, and it is worth noting at least a couple of problems that have occurred in my observations of Family Services. I will stress that I am writing this so that people may be able to see and understand these experiences, not in order to make any particular criticisms or complaints.

Problem 1 There's never been any negotiating.

I first became involved over a confusing and badly argued letter that said the ~~service user~~ person was not entitled to a service they'd received. When I went to the meeting that was arranged about the letter, the Manager said he was simply there to explain the letter (which he couldn't do anyway) and the decision had already been made so there was no room for negotiation. This amazed me, because by this time I'd got a lot of background information and the service seemed quite reasonable and in need of some compromise.

I had a discussion with a senior manager about the need for negotiation, which could well have got no further, but then last week, without any information or consultation or apparent consideration of the arguments that the use of this service had been reasonable and legitimate, there was another meeting where again there was no space for negotiation. This second meeting was the conclusion of the community care assessment, but there was no final paperwork, no care plan, and the only item on the agenda was basically that the service would not be offered again as it was too stressful.

Problem 2 Family Services complain that this person is argumentative and difficult…
…but then they back them into a position where they have made a decision and refuse to negotiate, so it's no wonder they become argumentative and difficult.

It’s even worse than this. They really do seem to have decided that it's impossible to communicate with this person. They complained to me that their partner is always butting in, and it's difficult for them to talk to the person directly: then they spent the entire first meeting addressing themselves to me instead of the service user. I sat there for some time looking at the person they were supposed to be talking to and they still didn't get the hint. At one point I suggested they should be talking directly to the person, and they looked at me as if I'd said something rude about their mother…

In fact throughout the several hours I've spent in meetings, every time the service user has become upset and raised their voice the social worker has basically ignored them and just seen the outburst as a barrier to explaining what they needed to explain, rather than a perspective that needs to be engaged with.

Problem 3 The service user has a history of complaining to the Director of Family Services, and to their MP — and getting services

I have been told from the outset that Family Services don't want this to happen, but bizarrely they never listened properly and never opened any spaces for negotiation. Then they said you can't have the services you want.

In between they seem to have ignored most of the material I have helped to provide them with through my direct work with the service user — evidence which if we do make a formal complaint will certainly help the service user to argue their case persuasively.

All of these factors really make a complaint likely. Looking back I can only assume that someone realised they made a mistake early on and has then entrenched and become determined not to admit it, but from my perspective this entrenchment is turning into a deepening black hole they are digging themselves into.

I have really tried to offer opportunities to the social worker that I've had most contact with to avoid this problem, but for whatever reason these opportunities haven't been taken.

Anyway, now I've warmed up with this anonymous blog post, I'm quite looking forward to writing in more gory detail to some senior person who will hopefully turn the decision over and help to make sense prevail. I'll try to put up an update when we get to the end.

Advocacy must be better value than advice

2006-11-20T21:10:00.000Z

Here's a thought that could put a bit of wind behind the sails of both advocacy and advice projects... [N.B. It is a rough and ready formulation, in keeping with this blog's character - it can be developed into a more polished argument if there is a demand.]

There was much said about the 'huge' cost of putting advocates in every local area: £7.5 million just for one each was mentioned, a cost almost equivalent to the entire IMCA budget; and if this was to be extended to a whole advocacy scheme the costs would rocket.

I can't help thinking about the costs of some of my local and not so local advice services though. The CAB is of course a fantastic organisation, and has many great advisors. It is also old, and established to the point where every town and city seems to feel the need to have sometimes several large buildings stuffed with advisors, administrators and managers. They also have outreach workers in many other local centres. I have no idea what the national total of all the CAB projects is alone, but I bet it costs at least a quarter of a million pounds per year to run the average district branch - and then there are all the other independent and Council run advice centres as well.

This is of course to be expected - the concept of going and getting advice from a qualified advice worker has been around for 60 years, and it was given a good boost in the post war growth of the 1950s and 60s. And we do all benefit from these services, not least because we send people there (or take them) as part of our work as (non-advice giving) advocates.

The question now has to be asked though, is all this expenditure really worth it, and should the advocacy sector be asking for a slice of the money? I have to say that although I refer people to the CAB and other local advice centres, I also constantly have discussions with other people about the lack of anywhere reliable to get advice - the queues are too long, the length of time spent per person is too short, and the basic mistakes made with people's DLA forms seem to be too frequent. We send people to advice centres because that is what is done - advocates cannot give advice, Council and NHS staff can't give advice, and we all make the only referral that is open to us in the circumstances.

I should note again, before I get flamed, that this is just a broad picture of advice and not what always happens. On the other hand though, in my 10 years of community work experience in West Yorkshire I've witnessed various feuds and battles going on within and between advice services, neighbouring branches of the CAB who wouldn't talk to each other, a chairman who verbally abused members at an AGM, and numerous threats to cut funding followed by desperate appeals and last minute reprieves as commissioners decide there is no alternative.

There are more important and relevant issues though. Firstly, noticing various scandals and disasters that have occurred over these 60 years of advice services, the legislators have created systems designed to ensure that certain quality standards are met. So now it takes an army of managers and administrators to ensure everything is done properly, it takes months to train people to use the knowledge systems and follow the right procedures, and it takes a long time to see each client, while the rest of the queue is left waiting.

The other thing, connected to all this legislation, and linked to developments in other fields along the lines of providing properly scientific and regulated services, is that advice has to be objective and correct. This is one of the reasons it takes so long to train people to deliver it, but also one of the main reasons that it fails to meet the needs of many of the most vulnerable people who need it.

I think advocates could make a good case for providing an equally essential service, in many ways better than the services I've been describing.

For a start, we have a much better chance of helping people to solve their problems because we place ourselves closer to the people and their problems. We still maintain boundaries, but the boundaries are different: we work with people's own wishes, needs and understandings; we don't try to impose 'best' or 'correct' approaches to solving problems; we go with people to meetings, and follow issues through with them to the end, we meet them in a variety of places but there's rarely a desk or a computer between us. There are many other points - these are the unique advantages of advocacy.

Secondly, we are much easier to train. There are still training issues of course, but we don't have to use complicated computer systems, we don't have to follow rigid procedures, and we don't have to develop a huge expert knowledge and be able to provide the 'right answers'. We do need to be able to communicate (very) effectively with people, and we need to understand that we are helping them to develop and follow their own agenda, without imposing our (or our culture's) idea of best interest or propriety.

All these factors of course mean massive savings: less training, smaller offices, less IT infrastructure, fewer procedures, cheaper insurance because professional indemnity is not such an issue.

There are also other advantages. We can work with many people who are simply not able to understand and follow through with the advice they are given, even if they are able to get to the advice centre. As yet we don't have the squabbling and back-biting of some advice services (also a terrible waste of money). And we are a relatively new phenomena, with proportionately more excitement and enthusiasm amongst our practitioners.

Is there anything I've missed out. I hope you agree that on the face of it advocacy would seem to offer significantly better value than advice. I think there are many more reasons that I haven't covered here, so please let me know your ideas and let's move into those old advice centres...

NAN conference 2006 - Brighton

2006-11-17T23:57:00.000Z

My main impression from the conference this year was that in some way the advocacy community has matured. At the same time there were lots of young and enthusiatic new advocates, often people who had simply seen the jobs advertised and gone for them, but nevertheless they were saying that they were now in the most inspiring and satisfying jobs they'd ever had...

The downside is that some people were still saying they couldn't explain their work to friends or family (or even some (local) government officials) and there is still an issue about what we do, but I don't think that is too big a problem. I like a certain amount of je ne sais quois in what we do, it increases richness and diversity as much as it may cause problems...

On this note, Rick Henderson did ask, somewhat rhetorically, if we should change the definition of advocacy. I almost got up and shouted YES. The definition that dominates all the A4A literature is the hopelessly ungainly and clearly committee devised*

"Advocacy is taking action to help people say what they want, secure their rights, represent their interests and obtain services they need. Advocates and advocacy schemes work in partnership with the people they support and take their side. Advocacy promotes social inclusion, equality and social justice."

My own definition is more like "Advocacy is about ensuring that people can make their voices heard." Although I've just noticed that the definition I published on the Advocacy Action website is a bit different... At least this is simple enough to be understood by the service users who are often being ignored, even if it doesn't meet everyone else's needs.

At the end of the day I was glad Rick's question was rhetorical, and I don't think the definition of advocacy needs to be changed in the way some people seemed to be suggesting. We need to embrace and champion our use of this word, for we do do something unique and special with it, and our organisations and our advocates have matured and become even more powerful and impressive, and our new recruits are being enthusiastic and empowered, and we were all inspired by yet another successful gathering of 170 advocates all being happy about what they do.

I'm already looking forward to next year...

___
* The approach developed in Rick and Mike Pochin's book was much better, and it was a shame A4A couldn't do something along those lines.

Thanks to all my returning readers

2006-10-26T20:16:00.000+01:00

Hello again

Yesterday 13 people came to view this blog, people from Scotland, England, Ireland, Canada, the US, Australia and France, one of whom has returned at least 17 times. The post about Being Non-Judgemental seems to be particularly popular.

Thank you to people for reading, and coming back, and waiting, and all the nice messages you've sent me. I feel privileged to get all this response, especially after I've published nothing for almost two months.

I am bursting with things to write, and should be publishing more soon. Hopefully these cold winter nights will give me some more incentive... Of course there's so much else to do too...

Anyway, this is my tentative start. The last three articles I wrote I must admit got a bit ambitious and were never finished, but we certainly do need this blog and more like it to write and think about and support advocacy in the UK.

So keep watching this space.

Thanks again,
Henry

At Chapeltown Carnival

2006-08-31T02:03:00.000+01:00

Me at Carnival 06
Originally uploaded by visctrix.

Thank you Suna for the photo (see her other photos here, or find other Leeds carnival photos on Flickr here). Congratulations to everyone who joined the Black and Dred (Harrison Bundey) troup - 71 of us on stage! - and everyone else who participated in the carnival - there were some fantastic costumes, though I didn't get to see much.

Congratulations also to Ruth who won best individual, and I'll give you another foot massage any time :-)

And to my readers: next year Leeds West Indian Carnival is 40 years old - it's the oldest Carnival in the UK - so come along, join in, dance and be happy...

The State of the Nation: Open Source in the UK

2006-08-25T22:46:00.000+01:00

I often encourage people to use more ethical Free and Open Source Software (FOSS, of FLOSS - including Libre) , and they ask me for more information.

I usually direct people to the OpenOffice.org website, and especially to the newsletter there (on Blogger). Most people mainly use computers for familiar office functions, and OpenOffice.org is a free community-developed alternative that offers many advantages to expensive proprietary solutions. The newsletter keeps track of developments and particularly of big migration successes.

There's also the Mozilla corporation, developers of Firefox (web browser) and Thunderbird (email client), and news sites like Slashdot ('news for nerds, stuff that matters' - you have been warned).

In fact from Slashdot I found this link from the Computer Business Review Online, The State of the Nation: Open Source in the UK. It may be dry reading for the uninitiated, but I think it is an interesting and quite accurate investigation of some important developments. Returning readers may have picked up my commitment to FOSS and know that this blog is produced entirely on FOSS. Despite the fact that Linux has just celebrated it's fifteen birthday however (today - happy birthday!) people are not very familiar with using it on home or office computers.

There is a good feeling of the beginnings of a big change though. Over all these years of steadily developing FOSS, including the operating systems that make it all work (like Linux), it seems the big private players have been merely tweaking and adding minor aesthetic enhancements to their sofware (and then of course charging a fortune for upgrades). It hasn't been all that difficult for the FOSS developers to catch up then (this isn't true in the games arena). Now more and more organisations and individuals are realising that the transition to FOSS isn't all that big a leap. This article explores the current state of use of FOSS, and the voluntary sector should take note.

Drawing the line on advice

2006-08-22T23:05:00.000+01:00

I haven't mentioned advice much on this blog (just in 4 or 5 posts). It's a bit of a tricky subject for advocates. I'd even go so far as to say that there's a bit of conflict there, although it's usually quite a friendly sort of conflict...

Certainly it's very common to see the statement, often in the middle of definitions of advocacy, that advocates don't give advice. I've always been at the forefront of arguing this point, partly because of the way I got into advocacy through more informal community work, and partly because of the way one local advice centre insisted that they did advocacy too, so there was no need for a separate advocacy scheme... Words fail me, almost.

Moving swiftly on, it is important that we differentiate our practice from advice work for at least two main reasons:

Advice work has become heavily regulated over the years. Now you need loads of training, loads of procedures, and loads of monitoring. Advocacy is, and needs to remain, simpler than this.
There's plenty of people out there wanting to hand out advice - proper regulated advice, professional opinion, or informal 'caring' advice. The problem is that the people who need advocacy can never get away from all the advice and begin to talk about what they really want. Advocacy needs to continue to support these voices.

On the other hand, despite the clear problems with falling into advice work, many people still find the separation from advice both difficult to understand, and difficult to do in practice. I've also recently had to admit coming across lots of situations where the line is a bit more blurred than I thought it was. Take these two examples:

Working with someone who has been in the care system for many years: they've expressed a problem, explored a range of options, could be on the brink of making a decision, but they still insist on taking your advice...
Or someone who just gets angry whenever they meet a professional: you can talk to them sensibly in private, but however much you plan together what to say, when it comes down to it they just lose control and ruin all their plans...

There are many more examples, but these are interesting because in the first example the advocate is being asked for advice against their will, and in the second example the advocate could easily get frustrated and want to impose more control than they would normally think reasonable.

There's at least a third general example too: when you are asked to do an independent check on a decision using a best-interests approach (especially in non-instructed advocacy, and what about if you want to bring a third option into the field?). I think this is the most problematic example, and it needs another post.

My conclusion when thinking about these issues and giving advice has to be pragmatic in the end: we should be able to work with people wherever possible, and we shouldn't let abstract principles get in the way unnecessarily. The first reason advocacy doesn't give advice is because it needs to remain simpler than the current state of advice work. For the same reason, we need to be able to identify for ourselves those boundary points where simplicity demands that we relent and start giving advice for a while.

Universal human needs

2006-08-21T10:05:00.000+01:00

I found this in a little book written by some management consultants. Not my usual reading matter, and not very well written, but some interesting things nonetheless.

The book is The Thin Book® of Naming Elephants. It was about how to raise issues in organisations that no one wants to talk about, and it was interesting (if a little obvious) to hear how badly this affects businesses as much as social services, the NHS, care providers. It was a little short on practical advice though.

Anyway, right on the last page it had this little gem. They talk about what they call the 'three universal human needs.' Casting aside any difficulties we may have with the terminology here, it was very refreshing to not see those tired old platitudes of food and shelter; and what came out instead, from these management consultants of all people, is certainly worth mentioning. They list:

Have a voice and be heard
Be viewed as essential to a group
Be seen as unique and exceptional

They also point to a couple of other alternative versions, including this:

A positive view of self
The desire to see oneself as competent
The need to experience coherence and continuity

As an advocate I'm really happy to see 'have a voice and be heard' at the top of the list, and also the 'desire to see oneself as competent' seems to me a key issue. At the end of the day I obviously have issues with both of these lists, but I think it's been well worth my time thinking about them in the joint contexts of people with learning disabilities and people in multinational corporations; or people using mental health services and say the workforce of a small local company...

I wonder if anyone would like to suggest a list in a similar vein that could be used more directly in an advocacy context, hopefully both for our partners and for the organisations we work in.

Just busy...

2006-07-25T22:22:00.000+01:00

I haven't been writing much here recently, but, dear reader(!), don't go away. I've just been busy and hot and doing other things. April and May were good months for writing for me, and I haven't forgotten all the beginnings I started and the promises to pick up on various themes.

This blog will keep on going. So do keep coming back and checking. And make comments - this is open to the world, and I would appreciate any input to spur me on to write more.

Thanks

Who's the victim?

2006-06-28T23:38:00.000+01:00

I keep on hearing calls for courts to be more focused on the victims of crime, and I agree completely - they shouldn't cause these victims even more suffering.

But who's the victim? I've come across a couple of cases recently that have put this question into perspective.

Firstly two people with severe learning disabilities and a high level of support have been having problems in their shared tenancy for quite a few months. Some plans to address the problem by moving one of them were dropped a while ago. Now one of them has attacked the other and all sorts of emergency procedures are being invoked. I'm not so interested in the details of the case, only that one of the two is currently in the classical position of the victim (of an assault), while the other therefore becomes a perpetrator.

Secondly a person I know with a high level of support needs, but not quite enough of the right kinds of problems to enable him to access certain key services immediately. As time goes on he is increasingly presenting with additional problems, and there are 'rumours' that these include a return to some of the violence that he has been involved in in the past. Violence again implies a perpetrator and a victim.

It's clear that the perpetrators of violence in both these cases are also victims. Like all the stories I'm trying to tell I don't think there's anything particularly unusual or newsworthy about these situations - similar things happen to hundreds or even thousands of people in the UK each week. I don't want to start accusing statutory services of neglect, because again I think this is in a way a violent approach to solving the problem, which often results in violent defensiveness and doesn't get anywhere.

What I would like to think about is that if we are to take a more person-centred approach to working with people in general, then we also need to take a person-centred approach to people who are violent towards others and to all the people who are victims of this violence. At the same time I think there are some natural developments towards taking a more holistic approach to our understanding and responses to violence.

Some examples of this would be:

protecting people who suffer from, say domestic violence or sexual crimes from the added violence that can come in the investigative and judicial processes that current legal systems still tend to impose (there are already many initiatives that address these issues, and they are linked to this agenda in diverse ways);
recognising that people who behave in violent ways are usually victims of violence and abuse themselves, that they may suffer from the multiple effects of poverty, or that they may well have low level mental health problems for example that would be amenable to community based approaches to support and rehabilitation (all sorts of people are doing this);
questioning the value of punitive approaches including imprisoning people or stigmatising them with criminal convictions and making it harder for them to find work or access other services;
supporting more informal preventative and community-based approaches to avoid reaching crisis situations, including recognising some of the violence still inherent in our education system and incorporating a more ethical and community based approach to teaching and education from an early age (see the Steiner schools for one approach to this);
recognising that violence means restricting action, that sometimes violence is necessary, but we should be able to see it for what it is, discuss it properly and act on our conclusions, including a recognition that bureaucratic processes are inherently violent and that while they are necessary in some ways we need to recognise this violence and develop more effective ways of dealing with it;
the list goes on...

Refugee week events

2006-06-19T23:27:00.000+01:00

The first event in Wakefield for this year's Refugee Week has just finished, and I ate and danced and helped clear up and still I'm home at a reasonable hour to blog, which is an added bonus.

It was the Iranian Cultural Celebration tonight, and there were a couple of live performances as well as DJs and lots of delicious food. First up on violin was a former member of the Iranian Philharmonic Orchestra (from the time of the Shah). There was a bit of a band going on here, but I sadly missed most of it as I ended up working the door. Later a different man with the same name played a saz I think (see pictures here) which is very similar to an instrument an old Turkish friend of mine used to play which he called a 'ballamer' (phonetically, approximately). In and around these performances the DJs kept the party dancing.

Later in the week we have a 'refugee day' event hosted by the local MP on Friday (invitation only) and an African Night in Wakefield Cathedral on Friday evening (free, just turn up). Then on Saturday, 6-10pm, there is a Kurdish Cultural Celebration in Lightwaves Leisure Centre again (ticket required, call RASA on 01924 368855).

Someone said to me that these events weren't very cohesive or didn't seem to promote integration: Iranian, African and Kurdish events on different nights...

I think there are two responses to this. First I can't help but remember the joint Eid/Xmas party I organised in 2003. This tried hard to combine all the cultures in Wakefield, and we had Iranian and Kurdish DJs, people came from many different countries including quite a few from Albania/Kosovo, and from different parts of Africa. As the finale we had a proper 5 piece African salsa band (afficionados may know that salsa originated in Africa - like 'all' music - and was transported to South America on the slave ships...). Anyway this band started playing, and 5 minutes later 146 people had left the room - and there were only 150 to start with. Even the African people, faced with this mass exodus, got up and walked out too.

Now I've personally always taken the approach that if some people are willing to go to the effort to perform for me, then I'll at least give them the courtesy of listening and then applauding their efforts (if not necessarily their musicianship or their taste). I learnt that night not to expect such polite conventions from refugee audiences.

There is in fact a whole article, to be carefully written, about racism and discrimination and refugees. Of course I know that there have been bitter conflicts in many parts of the world where refugees come from, and the memories of these conflicts and the deep seated prejudices that come with them are difficult to forget. They have also not had the advantages of the strenuous and focused anti-discrimination campaigns we have learnt from in the West over the last century (starting from women's suffrage, and moving through the American civil rights movement, etc). And finally, refugees tend not to discriminate against English people in my experience, but people with darker skin than them for example are more likely to lose out (along with their traditional enemies) in a movement that we can see being replicated around the world again and again.

I don't want to make any sweeping generalisations here, but I always half expected refugees who had fought for freedom and justice for people in their own societies to still be standing up for freedom and justice in their new lives in the UK, and I've usually been disappointed (although I love working with them anyway, and they're no more intolerant than many English people, just in different ways).

So all sorts of clarifying statements are rushing into my head, and I know what I've just written could be contentious, but with all that in mind I'd like to move swiftly on to the second response to the lack of cohesion/integration suggestion.

These people are living in the UK every day. Sure there are positive steps we can make towards integration, and we're taking them on many of these days: finding work, getting on ok at school, bringing our children up well, etc. All this needs integration. This is happening every day.

So why can't we, one or two days a year, have a day to celebrate native cultures? In fact I think it's imperative to do this: refugees need to do it for their mental health, to help them maintain their sense of identity and history, and to help their children understand their origins; and the rest of the population need occasional days like this to add a bit of colour and spice to their lives and relieve the exhausting boredom.

And who are we to say that these different cultural traditions should be celebrated within the confines of a single event, or that refugee week events should be concentrated on being more cohesive and on delivering the Government's integration agenda? In fact there were quite a few English people there tonight, quite a few Kurdish people, a chinese woman, and an African man (with a work permit of all things :-) ). There was integration here as well as cultural stimulation and mental tonics.

I'm looking forward to the next event - but you have to have an invitation to attend, so how integrational will that be...?

Friends in high places...

2006-06-13T17:36:00.000+01:00

...that's the side of a hill in Glasgow anyway (or the local department store).

Anyway Cartside is an interesting blog from a woman who works with refugees and languages and victims of human rights abuses. I particularly liked her descrption of the problems of getting funding, and I hope she finds a good resolution.

She linked to this blog a couple of weeks back in a post about refugee blogs, and I hope if she sees this that she'll find my thoughts on interpreters interesting.

Something to read for anyone who thinks the notes on resolving the police issues are too long...

Police issues resolved

2006-06-13T09:01:00.000+01:00

I had a positive meeting with representatives of the Police on Friday, together with key members of the Advocacy Action Committee. This stems from a post I wrote on this blog on 14 April which was removed shortly thereafter and replaced with this note.

Amongst other things this note says that the Police were threatening legal action, and it is now necessary to provide some clarification and closure to this issue. It was my intention to republish the post at this point as the information it contained is still valid (see below for how). For a variety of reasons however I have decided to just write a summary of events.

Four days after I started this blog I received an email about a young Kurdish man who came to a youth group in some distress saying he'd just spent the night in a police cell, he didn't know why, and he thought the officers had been racist. This was a reply from a colleague to a request I'd sent out for things to write about. I published the email with some identifying information removed and some background information to put in in context, then I emailed various key people working for the Police, the Asylum Team, the Community Cohesion Advisory Group of the local strategic partnership, and others. On the first working day I received two emails from a police officer which I published in a comment to the original post, with some disparaging remarks about their investigation.

On 20 April, two days later, a senior police officer contacted one of the Advocacy Action committee members and said they were very unhappy with the allegations contained in the post, and in particular with the fact that I'd named an individual officer. They additionally felt that the blog could be a risk to community safety, and requested for it to be removed and for an apology. This was done immediately, together with a number of other changes to clarify that the blog was my personal work and was not a project of Advocacy Action's.

-------

I just want to make some remarks at this point on the four areas of continuing relevance, community safety, complaints, and finally racism.

Continuing relevance
The Police have investigated the original story, and they are convinced that the allegations were unfounded. They can't find any evidence of an arrest or custody, and in fact the cells in the Police Station we identified were taken out of service years ago. There were also other discrepancies in the story, although it is true that the man's door was broken down in the course of an unconnected investigation.

I still have a different perspective on this issue, as do the other people who have spoken to the Kurdish man (he hasn't wanted to speak to the Police). I won't go into the objective details (see my post Protecting vulnerable people from objectivity) because I'm interested in a more person centred or community focused approach.

Firstly the man was upset when he arrived early at the youth group, and he was clearly upset about the police. This may not be a legal issue, and it may not be an issue for a formal complaint, but he is still upset about the police, and from a person-centered perspective this is an issue that deserves some attention. It's also important that he wasn't trying to gain anything from telling his story, apart from some kind of catharsis probably. He never wanted to make a complaint (I stressed this in the original post). He was simply upset and he told the youth workers what happened to help him calm down.

From a community perspective there are also important issues. I have heard that there have been several similar incidents already in the last few months, and not only the Kurdish community, but also the professionals who work with them are talking about this. Several other people have also come up to me from the English community and told me about similar things that have happened to them, and one person told me that when they tried to complain the police had no record of their detention. This is all circumstantial, and can't be verified, and I'm sorry if the police are upset for a moment about me writing this, but this is what the community are saying, to each other at least. This is not an insignificant issue, for the community or the police, but it seems to me that the lack of corroborable evidence makes it difficult for the police's systems and approaches to deal with.

Community Safety
As I have already mentioned, the police were concerned that the content of the blog could have an impact on community safety within and around the local Kurdish population. I listened to the police's concerns on Friday and I don't want to detract from them, but from the perspective of this blog devoted to ethics and communication this is another opportunity to explore and think about why I disagree with them.

The first thing I said was that I've been trying to encourage people in the refugee and asylum seeking community (and others) to complain if they have a grievance for years, almost completely without success. The reasons people don't want to complain are quite worrying really, certainly disempowering, and do lead to an already vulnerable group of people becoming even more vulnerable in some ways.

Basically people just don't want to rock the boat, they don't want to challenge authority in a way that might cause them more problems. People think that if they complain they might be beaten up, evicted from their properties, or even deported from the UK. I remember one story of illegal working came to light after a man asked for the £20 pounds he was owed for his 10hr shift, only to be beaten so badly and kicked down the stairs that he had to be hospitalised: in the face of this kind of threat which illegal immigrant is going to complain? Another occasion a man went with his brother-in-law (who is incidentally a Home Office registered interpreter based in another part of the country) to report a racist assault, but when his details didn't come up on the computer he was taken into custody for 5 hours while his immigration stutus was checked: the assault was never reported.

The other reason is that this is already what they expected pretty much. This is how they expect to be treated by the police, and it's much better than their own coutries where summary beatings are carried out with rifle butts. England generally is much better in many ways, or at least it's where they want to be at the moment, so they will work for £2 an hour, they will turn their backs on low level racism, they will accept the various trials that come their way. There is a mixed story here: many people like working with refugees because of their strength and humour in the face of adversity - some of them are role models for us all. On the other hand why should people suffer unnecessarily, especially when there are laws and social expectations of good practice that are meant to protect them?

Even today with my more distant relationship to the refugee community I hear quite a lot of stories going round. And the reaction of the community to this story of being detained overnight by the police? People aren't exactly indifferent, but they're not very impressed either, it doesn't seem like a surprising or serious matter to them.

I think this is the real community safety issue, and I'm sorry but I can't see anyone who might threaten community safety taking the time to read through this blog (although I wish they would, they might change their ways). How can we address these issues? The first thing has got to be being able to talk about what's going on, or to read about it, and certainly to think about it. There are lots of organisations who are actively working towards making our communities safer places to live, but this story, and this blog, suggests that there are some continuing issues that need to be looked at in a different way if we are going to effectively deal with them.

Complaints
No complaint was made in this case: neither the Kurdish man, the Police, nor I made a formal complaint. I've already said that Complaints are great, but the practice of them often is not, so in many ways I'm glad.

The Police do have a statutory complaints procedure providing initially for a local resolution of minor complaints, or through the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) for more serious matters.

I've been lucky to have been able to do quite a lot of thinking about complaints over the last nine months, and lucky that it's been in the context of a multi-agency group writing a code of practice. In the light of this experience, and knowing the issues with making complaints under other statutory procedures including that for Social Services and the NHS, I can't help thinking that the proper police procedure is still inadequate in some ways and for some situations.

The main problem is the unwelcoming bureaucracy: if we are going to encourage people to feel that complaints are great, we need to be more open and encouraging about the process, and we need to be going out of our way to support people to make more complaints. This system isn't very encouraging though, and as with many complaints procedures it is tiring and difficult for the complainants.

I also can't help thinking that while the police are very good at investigating crimes, the process of investigating a complaint is quite different, as are the potential outcomes and methods of redress for upheld complaints. I feel that the police culture and experience of investigating crimes is actually a barrier to the sympathetic handling of complaints. It would be interesting to do some research about this perhaps.

Racism
Racism is a very emotive word, and probably not something to put in a headline on a blog. Since these events I have written some thoughts about Racism and discrimination. Racism is a very important issue for me, and I have many friends who experience it at different levels. At the same time however I don't think we should be too upset by it - we need to talk about it and work against it and concentrate on moving on.

The Macpherson Report on the Stephen Lawrence Enquiry provides one positive step in this direction (see here for background), with this definition:

A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.

This definition takes us in two directions which is not all without problems, but while it opens up many more incidents to be counted officially as racist (a relief to the victims), it also takes the focus away from the perpetrator of an incident and away from the criminal law, placing it instead on perceptions and feelings.

In this way we can see that someone may act in a way that they think is positive, but which others may percieve as racist. The Macpherson definition allows a debate to go on around these borderline examples without undue pressure being exerted on those who would previously have been considered 'alleged criminals'. The analogy I tend to draw is with that state of 'marital bliss' where the loving husband (it can work in all sorts of combinations) offers help to his wife: he is just being nice; she thinks he's being patronising (or, why can't he offer to do some of the dirty jobs, or what's his ulterior motive, or...). The point is in this common situation between people who know each other well there can be and quite often are quite different interpretations placed on people's actions.

At least one of the officers on Friday was upset at my implication that police officers could act in a racist way without knowing it. This was seen as a slur on those officers' professional practice, but actually it was meant as a softener, a reminder that even if I agreed with the Kurdish man that police actions had been racist, it was those actions that were the problem, not the individual officers. It was also an indication that there was a learning opportunity here and I wasn't simply going to throw allegations around.

Conclusion
At the end of the meeting we discussed some ways that Advocacy Action could work with the police in future. Obviously I promised not to publish individual officers' names on my blog (although anyone is welcome to publish my name as I work in the community).

More positively we did think about some of the experiences with the police that the community are talking about, and how we can address these issues in a more proactive way.

We thought about developing some simple guidance for young refugees or asylum seekers who may have dealings with the police.

We agreed to pick up the phone more, talk to each other about any issues that come to our attention.

Some hopefully this debate will continue in more practical ways, and I am certainly feeling positive about this outcome.

Interpreters

2006-06-12T21:39:00.000+01:00

I've been working with interpreters on and off for six years now. These days what particularly interests me is the links between interpreting and advocacy - particularly as I try to support RASA Advocacy Project in its work with refugees. After all if advocacy is about getting your voice heard, then if English isn't your first language and you don't know the culture or systems you're working with, making your voice heard is an even more challenging task, and more needful and demanding of advocacy support.

There are lots of things to say about interpreting which I can't cover now, but my conclusion has been to use interpreters directly in my work as little as possible. I remember going to meet someone who was about to be evicted on the request of their Social Worker, because he ‘couldn't speak any English at all, and there was something else wrong with him - maybe learning difficulties’ (to paraphrase). I went without an interpreter, and even on that occasion I was able to communicate quite effectively with him. Less than a week later I was having conversations about world politics, migration, economics and art with him. A few weeks later, over a 4 hour conversation (admittedly a long time, but advocates need a long time), I got down the details of his asylum application more thoroughly than any of his previous Home Office interviewers or legal representatives.

This was a particularly vivid example, but it has often been replicated on a smaller scale. I think the key is trust, along with really listening - which requires engaging with the person I'm talking to. The trouble with using an interpreter is that many of the signals each of you is trying to send out can be lost in the translation. All the nuances of language which caring professionals learn to use to put people at ease are reduced to the simple mechanics of interpetation.

If we could train the people we need to communicate with to use interpreters effectively we could manage with this process: they would be interested enough, determined enough, and have the skills to ask all the questions they need to properly understand what we're saying. Unfortunately that isn't the case, and often this is compounded by various issues of the interpreter themselves (e.g. been in England for 20 years and can't actually remember their own language all that well, or from an antagonistic political group, or still bound up with the homophobia prevalent in their native culture, etc.).

Sometimes of course we need to tackle these issues and just make the interpreting process work, and in many jobs it's impractical to use any other method. I recently met a detained asylum seeker, but despite knowing his official broad ethnic origin I found it difficult to determine his actual language, and I was worried that his interpretation and other support needs weren't being met. He did have a 'qualified' and 'registered' interpreter working with him, an interpreter I know already from previous work, and I could have used him. Instead I found a volunteer from RASA.

The gamble paid off very nicely, as it turned out that the two men were almost neighbours in their home country and could communicate very well (unlike the interpreter it turns out, who is from another region and speaks a different dialect). My criteria for choosing this volunteer were quite different though. I wanted an 'ordinary' person with a modest, kind, open, quiet, relaxed and friendly manner; someone who knew the difficulties of the English welfare state, but didn't assume knowledge; someone who spoke enough English to communicate with me, not necessarily to pass exams; someone with experience of advocacy. My volunteer has never acted as an advocate, but I have been his advocate in the past so he knows what he needed to. I've also known him for two years now and he has kindly done other things for me in the past.

The meeting went well. Apparently this was the first time the asylum seeker had spent such a long time engaging with anyone. I got a good picture of his character. He did these little theatrical answers occasionally if I asked a question he didn't like. Much of the meeting went by without being interpreted for me, which was fine for the first session. I didn't get any advocacy goals, and I don't know whether the two will meet again, but I hope after a little reflection I will be asked to arrange another meeting, and anyway I know I can communicate more now that there is some trust and understanding developed.

I had an interesting conversation with the staff afterwards too. They said they could only use properly 'qualified' and 'registered' interpreters, and they couldn't involve my volunteer.

An interesting analogy came to me in that conversation, to do with research methodology. I've recently seen some very badly designed questionnaires going around, in fact questionnaires that seem primarily designed to be able to be analysed (you know the kind - each question has four alternative answers, or you give a number from 1 to 5, bad to good). It seemed to me that the sort of conversations interpreters get involved in are quite similar to these questionnaires: you get an answer, but it's just a summary, the best answer of an unsatisfactory selection.

There is another approach to doing research though, based on interviewing. This approach is much more broad, and the interviews can go in many different directions. It's useful of course to start with an idea of the information you want to get, but at the same time much more relevant learning can be gained in the spaces that are developed between the questions you plan to ask. Of course properly interpreting and evaluating the value of information you get from this process requires even more time and effort, but it seems to me this effort is worth it. My interpreter/volunteer was helping me to go through this process - and it seems completely possible to me for the police or psychiatrists or prison staff to take a similar approach, rather than persevere with registered but sometimes inappropriate professional interpreters.

And that goes for all the rest of us too.

Benefits for psychiatric patients

2006-06-08T11:48:00.000+01:00

There have been a few changes to the benefits of some of the patients where I work. This affects patients in Forensic units, and maybe others.

people on a section 45A or 47 are no longer entitled to benefits until their prison sentence expires
they will still get 'hospital pocket money' of £16.40 a week
other people who previously had their benefits cut after 52 weeks will have the full benefit reinstated

Full details are in the DoH circular Changes to benefit entitlements for patients transferred from prison to mental health units, 6 April 2006.

The end of the saga?

2006-06-07T17:12:00.000+01:00

I was in Leeds Magistrates' Court again today with Shaun [see previous posts here (1st), here, and here (latest)]. They dropped the case before we even went in, although they did make us wait for 20 mins first.

There are a few points that are worth mentioning I think: although this is a very inconsequential case, it does have some lessons and maybe point to some wider problems. I'm going to be very nit-picky here, but I think it's worth considering these subtle issues because they do make a difference to people going before the courts, even if not to the legal bureaucracy.

1. If we had got into the court, I wouldn't have been able to speak again. I was unhappy last time that I went to speak on Shaun's behalf, and the court official lied to me and I was prevented from speaking. In fact it wasn't that sort of hearing, but I would have understood and accepted this if I'd been told clearly what was going on - there was no need to lie to me.

Today I informed the court immediately that I had come as Shaun's character witness, and they did their job properly - they said the hearing was just to set a court date and to get details of any witnesses that would be called. This is certainly progress, but at the last hearing both Shaun and I were given the clear impression that today would be the actual hearing date - so it seemed to him that I'd needlessly wasted my time again. He didn't have any letter explaining what the purpose of today's hearing was.

2. I think this is fairly typical. I rarely go to Court myself, but I know a variety of people who do end up there more regularly, and I've certainly heard of people turning up to court date after court date only for it to be adjourned again. I can imagine this is particularly difficult for any witnesses who come out of work, ahng around for an hour or something, and then have to rearrange again.

3. It's not just us wasting time. That's two court dates already and who knows how much paperwork by the Police, the Court Service, the Crown Prosecution Service. For a faulty brake light. How much has this cost already?

4. We were told, after 20 mins, that Shaun's case had been looked at and the charges were being dropped. We could 'just go' and we wouldn't hear anything about it again. No letter, no receipt, just go away and forget about it. We couldn't help but compare this to two other things. Firstly when Shaun found out that this hearing was just to set a trial date, he asked if he needed to stay? He was told that if he didn't attend today a warrant would be made out for his arrest - serious stuff - he must stay and go into court. The other thing was his last court appearance when the Police forgot to record that he had produced his documents - what if the Court forget to record that they weren't going to pursue this brake-light case...?

5. Finally, Shaun was saying there's just no accountability for what happened. Five months ago he was stopped by a van-load of Police, falsely accused of drug-dealing, searched, and given a ticket for the minor unrelated issue of a faulty brake-light. Since then the Court Service and the CPS have been involved, the bureaucracy has run its course, and now they're just saying 'forget it all'. What about those police who originally stopped Shaun though? Will they learn of this? Do they think they did anything wrong? Are they sorry? Or will the CPS say 'wait a minute, this was a waste of time and money - we don't want this to happen again, so let's give the Police some feedback...'? It seems unlikely.

---

I'm sneaking this post into 'work time', although since I'm not getting paid that's probably not so relevant. Anyway one of my advocacy colleagues has just walked in and heard a bit of the story. His reaction? "I think at the very least Shaun is owed an apology for wasting his time."

I can't see that happening at all, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

A different way of thinking

2006-06-06T22:38:00.000+01:00

I'm doing a bit of work a the moment with a homeless man. I wasn't fully recovered from my recent illness perhaps (also why I've missed posting for the last 10 days), but yesterday things didn't run as smoothly as they did before.

There were two problems. Firstly he asked me to fill in a referral form, and I in turn asked him the questions I was being asked. These sorts of direct questions from someone else's referral form aren't the easiest of things to balance with an advocacy approach, and the half answers I was getting didn't seem to match very closely with the things I already half knew. I realised that I was straying into support worker territory, and it was strange, as an advocate, to try to fill in a referral form which was supposed to be from me, in my voice, when in fact I was trying to make this man's voice heard.

The second problem was that during the slightly bizarre form-filling exercise, someone from the Council called. Now we've been getting on quite well, and we appreciate the work we're each doing on this guy's behalf. But after a couple of minutes he starts telling me that the guy is not really credible. He tells me some information from a pre-sentencing report (I do have the authority to know this, and the guy's in the room with me consenting). The Council man is vaguely worried about our guy's credibility, and I can guess that his colleagues are more worried.

So the difficulty I'm having filling in this form is suddenly compounded by other people's vague worries, and I make the mistake of asking my guy directly: why are you being inconsistent and evasive (I didn't use those words, but that was the gist of it).

He then accuses me of accusing him of 'lying'. A hole has suddenly appeared in our relationship.

I don't think he's 'lying' as such. I think he's trying to communicate his need for somewhere to live. I think he's trying to navigate his way through a whole lot of confusing questions. I can see him rooting through scraps of paper that fall out of holes in his pockets or get wet and ruined or thrown away by mistake. These pieces of paper are so closely connected to his story in many ways: some of them contain concrete evidence to support his story, some of them just have phone numbers with no names or other random scraps of information that may or may not be useful or relevant. He tries to save them, to order them, to show some of them to people who might help him (while withholding others). On some wet nights he's lost the whole lot, and they can never be replaced.

The information in his head is very similar. I think he remembers different things at different times. He talks to all sorts of people and they all want different parts of the puzzle. They also interpret the information in all sorts of different ways. It's also true, though I don't want to stress this too much, that many of the people he talks to have a very different level of education, not to mention literacy. Maybe I should say that they think in different ways to him.

Then whenever his credibility or consistency is challenged, it's a challenge to him, to his sense of self. And when he is challenged in this way he defends himself, and he gets stressed and agitated, and then seems even less credible. It's a vicious circle.

At the end of the day this makes him even more vulnerable and in need of housing, but this very vulnerability is being misunderstood and used as an excuse not to offer him services.

May summary

2006-05-31T22:46:00.000+01:00

13,000 words in 26 posts in May, linked and summarised. There's some duplication in this list because it's not easy to categorise things, and also a lot more overlap between some sections than even the duplication suggests:

Advocacy:

Helping someone not to get angry - a practical advocacy intervention
No advocating for avocados - seriously, ban the verb 'to advocate'
Advocacy and therapy
Humility is not a passive state - but it is an important part of advocacy practice
Recipe for paranoia - for advocates to guard against
Being non-judgemental - another important skill
Being independent - how you can be, and how you can tell

Complaints:

Complaints are great

Ethics:

The boiling water principle - ethics is about economics too
An apology - sorry I gave money to a multinational oppressor
All work and no pay - partly about the problem of 'intellectual property' and some alternatives
Being non-judgemental - this links in very closely with an ethical approach
Ethics vs. morality - first proper description of my approach to ethics
Theory and practice - there is only practice - throw all theory books away!

Blog organisation and methodology:

Delivering the world from its exhausting boredom - a critical and clinical approach to the blog, and some juicy quotes
Ethics vs. morality - ethics is one of the key principles of this blog, and here's some ideas about how that is
Theory and practice - there is only practice - throw all theory books away!

State violence and discrimination:

Rather they convict me than abase myself - the continuing story of Shaun
The boiling water principle - we need to rethink economics if we're going to solve these problems
An apology - supermarkets are violent too
Recipe for paranoia - a problem for psychiatric units
Bullying and harassment of doctors - it's not all one way

Links, discoveries and other things:

"we all have an obligation to intervene" - from an interview with a Portuguese novelist
Welcome to the Mental Health Hotline - humour from the Mental Nurse
Bullying and harassment of doctors - from the 'work related blogs' blog
intueri: to contemplate - another medical blog, but very thoughtful and quite ethical

Creativity and literature:

A practical novel - Face by Benjamin Zephaniah

Spirituality and healing:

Happy Beltane - keeping in touch with the seasons and ourselves

Computers and IT:

Google good...? - some of the background to an increasingly powerful force in computing
Best viewed in Firefox - if your not using it, get this browser
Linux for human beings - this blog is written in the spirit of Ubuntu

Humour:

An apology
Welcome to the Mental Health Hotline - humour from the Mental Nurse
No advocating for avocados - seriously, ban the verb 'to advocate'

Others:

A practical novel

2006-05-30T22:44:00.000+01:00

I read an interesting book this weekend, Benjamin Zephaniah's first novel, Face. The reviews on Amazon are indicative: the first two say the book is real and fantastic, and the second two say it's simplistic and empty...

I think this disagreement is because it's a very practical book. It was dedicated to the Changing Faces charity, whose aim is to 'change the way we all see disfigurement', and Zephaniah seems to be targeting a specific audience of people who have come into contact with some sort of disfigurement (either themselves or through a friend or family member). The book is not really targeted at 'the good readers of literature' however, and this is where the latter two reviewers fall down.

One of these reviewers even suggests that Zephaniah should stick to poetry, which I think also manages to miss the point that his poetry is very practical too, and arguably no more 'literary' (in the egotistical and elitist sense) than the text of Face. I've seen Zephaniah perform a couple of times, I met him very briefly last year when my friend Shaun arranged for him to come and perform in Leeds, and I have the greatest respect for the guy. I hope he doesn't think I'm damning him with faint praise (he shouldn't, given the context of this blog) but I think what does it for me is the simplicity and directness of his poetry, and it's clear entertainment value, especially in performance.

There are no literary pretensions in this poetry (except in the eyes of some Amazon reviewers): the aim is to talk about politics in life stories that will make people laugh and cry and think and talk instead of just turning off. There is more debt to the (Afro-Caribbean) history of story-telling and entertaining than the modern experience of poetry. The literary elite may say that there needs to be more 'poetry', more space, more fluidity, more depth; but then the sort of talking they end up doing often does little to help the rest of us...

Face doesn't have these poetic niceties, but I'm very happy that I've read it, and I thought it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I see it, apart, obviously, from being a novel, almost as an extended case study. Martin, the main protagonist, obviously has a unique story just like anybody else, but he is real enough for many of us to believe in, and recognise in lots of ways. I see that the book is in some English curriculums, and I can certainly see it's pedagogical value. I think it would also be of value, not only to the specific target audience I've already mentioned, but to a wide range of people who suffer discrimination because of something about how they look.

I'm always looking out for good case studies, and I think we should encourage more books like Face. This isn't the sort of thing you could fit on half a side of A4, and neither is life. For many people we need to get longer case studies, but they need to be practical, and not too poetic.

Linux for human beings

2006-05-29T19:42:00.000+01:00

This weekend I upgraded to the latest verion of Ubuntu Linux. This was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, mainly because it was so easy, and secondly because things immediately worked even better. Little things like being able to watch videos and listen again to radio programmes on the BBC, and getting the most up-to-date version of OpenOffice.org.

Of course Linux is a free and more ethical alternative to MS Windows, and getting more and more attractive to ordinary computer users. I've been using it for a year now and I'm a happy penguin...

To see what all the fuss is about, click here:

Best viewed in Firefox

2006-05-29T19:37:00.000+01:00

Of course Firefox is one of the best web browsers. And Internet Explorer is one of the worst. The reasons?

Firefox is standards compliant, IE is not
Firefox is less vulnerable to security issues
Firefox has tabbed browsing and integrated search
and many other reasons (link 1, link 2)

Anyone trying to create standards compliant web sites knows the problems of IE particularly well - because they have to add extra code to make sure the pages display properly in IE.

Anyway, this blog isn't properly standards compliant, but it also hits a problem with IE. The sidebar for some reason ends up right at the bottom of the page. I've tried fiddling with this, and I know it worked once (so I've done something to break it). At the moment I can't fix it though, so if anyone has any suggestions I'd be grateful. [Update 16/12/06]

But basically,

:-)

Theory and practice

2006-05-25T23:49:00.000+01:00

For anyone who reads Maria's post (linked to below) I should say that although there are some terrible books and papers out there, and her assessment of Muller's piece was probably as ethically real as it appears from my quote, I always feel a bit uncomfortable when I read such negative experiences of reading.

This is for two reasons. Firstly I tend to think that any article that makes you that unhappy is probably not worth advertising. In fact it's not worth wasting any time over and I'm glad she didn't read it to the end. (This is contrary to the traditional 'wisdom' that we should study the mistakes of history so we can learn from them, and I'll write later about why it's necessary to oppose this latter view).

Secondly, there are also loads of great books and bits of writing out there. Much of this is written in extremis: Bataille called writing (amongst other things) the 'impossible': that which we are compelled to do, because of it's very impossibility: that is there's something that drives you to write, but it's outside the realm of the written word, but the words that come out seem to circle and begin to clarify this driving force. Like any force, this is creative. People have published great books from the world of academia and the world of psychology as much as from the world of mental illness or art or stories of life.

These books are people's practice, and I've been meaning for a while now to write something about theory and practice. I want to say that theory doesn't exist. By this I mean that the artificial distinction between practice and theory is both wrong and unnecessary. In other words theory shouldn't exist.

Now I find myself with a good example to explain this better. There are some writers who do amazing things for us. They come in all shapes and sizes, and again some of them write about ethics or psychoanalysis, while others write survivor stories or blogs. This is the writing, and this is what we should spend our time interacting with (and hopefully trying to do). On the other hand, sadly, there is theory. Our history and development have created it. Our teachers haven't always had faith in us: they've said, the original is too hard, read this secondary text which explains it. Quickly most books seemed to become books about books.

We get trapped in the game of mainly just absorbing and regurgitating knowledge that we forget to see and listen to the person in front of us. We really should forget all this garbage: it really is turning us grey.

Spend time reading and writing about proper writing, and about life, and things will keep on moving.

This is our practice - keep it up.

intueri: to contemplate

2006-05-25T23:18:00.000+01:00

This is an interesting blog. From a link from Mental Nurse again. Well written and creative and questioning ethics in an interesting way. The posts are even longer than mine, but still worth reading...

Here is a little snippet.

[This] was in relation to a (psychotic) patient becoming angry with Muller (the analyst) who ultimately yelled at him for reasons that were not entirely clear to him.

I don’t know—again, maybe it’s just me utilizing “primitive defense mechanisms”—but the above just sounds like he’s blaming the patient. “Yeah, it’s most probably your fault that you took what I said personally—I wasn’t persecuting you at all. You just can’t handle understanding yourself, but your ego structure is so weak that you need someone to understand it for you. I mean, yeah, perhaps the yelling thing happened because I was feeling anxious, but most probably it was your fault.”

That’s crap. Where is the empathy in that? The warmth? How about reframing the situation, just describing it for what it is? (There you go again, Maria, being all concrete.) How about: “Something about this interaction between us didn’t go well; maybe I was pushing too hard; maybe I didn’t communicate my ideas too well; maybe you misinterpreted what I said; maybe you misheard. I don’t know exactly why this happened, but I’d like for the interaction to proceed better. What can we do together so this doesn’t happen again?”

Complaints are great

2006-05-23T23:13:00.000+01:00

Am I mad? Well maybe a little hungry and sleep deprived... Anyway today I completed the 'final draft' of a code of practice for children and young people's complaints, and I think I've convinced myself that complaints really are great. Now all I need is a few other people with the same attitude.

Of course in practice people don't seem to deal with complaints very well:

they're often seen as threatening and horrible
people can respond extremely defensively
sometimes as soon as you mention a complaint senior managers get involved and it all becomes very bureaucratic (e.g. in the NHS I'm told)
in the end the whole experience is very painful for everyone

My personal experiences have been bittersweet. Several complaints have been made against me in the past, and they were usually quite painful experiences while they were being investigated. Powerful people have warned me not to defend myself or projects I cared about would suffer. I had to do a lot of extra work dealing with the complaints. Other people have been forced to get involved and do lots of extra work unnecessarily. There's the worry that something bad is going to happen at the end...

...then when it comes down to it, so far (touch wood), all the complaints have either been dropped (when I get a chance to have my say) or they've been turned around and the complainants have had to mend their ways. In practice I'm very careful and conscientious about my work, although my 'principled' approach does sometimes lead me into dangerous territory where my actions can be misunderstood (or people just jump to false assumptions).

Of course I have also learned good lessons myself in the process, but these lessons have often seemed to be despite the complaint, not because of it. What I mean is that I spent so much time carefully analysing what happened that I would be foolish not to be able to find some lessons, but usually the complaints are out of all proportion to the lesson, and the lesson is often more about avoiding complaints rather than mending alleged bad practice.

I've also had a couple of experiences recently where I haven't been complaining, but my requests or interventions have been taken as complaints. One recent request ended up on the desk of a very senior finance manager, who assured me my complaint would be responded to within 10 days. This sent shivers down my spine: I didn't want that sort of attention, and I could see all the middle managers dealing with the issue bristling with indignation that such a minor issue was causing all this fuss.

So despite all this, I think complaints are great? Yes, but to really realise how great they are we need much more of them, and we need to learn to deal with them more effectively.

Potentially some of the benefits of complaints:

they can help us to identify potential improvements to services
they are a form of 'customer feedback'
they are a form of mutual problem solving: people can express their frustrations and see some positive results
if they are handled well, they are empowering (because of the mutual problem solving aspect)
they break down the barriers between staff and 'clients'
they can show an organisation cares, beyond the fact of simply delivering a service, if they handle complaints well

Also of course, if complaints are properly handled, you avoid all the negative sides of current responses to complaints:

people won't be so upset by them
they shouldn't grow into such time-consuming bureaucratic messes
people will be able to work on them between individuals, and avoid involving too many others

So take a complaint today, and be nice about it - it may make you feel better...

Being independent...

2006-05-22T21:11:00.000+01:00

We talk about independent advocates, but what are they independent from? In fact we talk about being independent in lots of different contexts: sometimes the word actually means different things, but there's often some confusion if you ask someone to actually explain it...

Advocates have a good and simple way of explaining it. I don't think I can add anything to the published explanations - but who knows where they are...? So here goes:

'independent means free from conflicts of interest'

This is a special case of the sort of independent used in 'independent living' which means 'able to make your own choices'. The 'freedom from conflicts of interest' definition is aimed at professionals (paid or unpaid).

A conflict of interest is when one person is asking you to do one thing, but you also feel you should be doing something else. You may feel this conflict because of your own beliefs or morals or professional approach; you may expect your manager or colleague or friend to disapprove; or someone may have specifically given you a contradictory instruction.

What about some examples (based on advocacy practice):

you start working with a person with learning difficulties, and then their wife or brother or mother get involved too... who is making the decisions here?
your contract says you can only work for 4 hours with each client, but this person clearly (to you) needs more time
you are asked to support someone to make a complaint against a colleague
you go into a meeting with your partner, and since you've been an advocate for ten years now all the senior managers know you and greet you like a friend (your partner meanwhile is looking at you as if they're wondering who you really are after all...)
someone tells you that your partner may have all their problems solved if this great new project happens in about 4 weeks - but it's all hush hush at the moment and you can't say anything to anybody until it's officially announced...
you and a colleague have been working independently for a long time with two people in the same care home, then they have a fight and each want the other to move out
most of the funding for your project comes from the local authority, and most of your work is for people in local authority care
there's been a recent funding crisis and several new committee members have been recruited including a psychiatrist, a GP and a local councillor: they think the project needs to do much more effective recording of its work, but you think this will take away from the time you have to do advocacy (and your personal record is exemplary)

How can you avoid conflicts of interest?

make sure people understand what they are and when they can occur
clearly define the boundaries of your work
have a clear confidentiality policy (anything told to you is liable to be told to your advocacy partner)
develop working relationships with other local advocacy projects so they can take on work that possibly involves conflicts
get funding from a range of sources, and have clear clauses in your local authority or PCT contracts to safeguard you from potential conflicts
let people, especially senior managers, know that you will be rude to them when you're with an advocacy client (or at least seem to ignore them)
anyway, don't talk much to people who might cause a conflict, including managers, parents or other siblings, care staff, etc. (but be nice and don't cause different sorts of conflicts)

Ethics vs morality

2006-05-21T22:27:00.000+01:00

This blog is obviously about advocacy, but another constant underlying theme will be what I call ethics. It's ethics that got me into advocacy, and ethics that keeps me going. This needs some explanation.

Originally ethics comes from the Greek word ethos, meaning character, or way of living, and I want to recall this sense of the word when I use it. Morality came from similar roots (in Latin), but to me over the years even though both words have become confused, morality has become much more associated with an idea of 'moral law'.

In talking about ethics I want to remember both that it means our way of life, and to distinguish it from laws and rules.

How can you see this in the blog?

I will write about things like humility, independence, violence, etc. We need to think about these things rather than make rules about them; we need to explore how we use these ideas in our lives and in our working practices. These ideas and others like them are the ground where an ethical practice can grow.
We need to understand these ideas in terms of stories, and we will never learn their lessons in the real world unless our bodies experience some kind of incorporeal transformation (you may well have already gone through this, I'm not trying to preach). Learning a definition of humility as an objective fact is not going to be any use, and I won't present ideas in these terms.
Laws are relatively closed - they can be changed, but it's not easy to do. This blog will on the contrary try to remain especially open. It is published openly, and its contents are openly reusable. It is also published 'on the fly', without much editing, warts and all. I'm not trying at all to say everything, just to open up conversations. I will inevitably make mistakes and say things that I will clarify or correct later.
You will see an interplay between ethics, practice and methodology: these all mean basically the same thing, but in slightly different contexts. Ethics is more about the way we live our lives; practice is more about how we act, what we do; and methodology is more about planning, tactics and strategy.

Is this a new way of looking at ethics?

No. Firstly, having learnt from some books about this way of thinking about ethics, I've noticed that actually this really is the way many people live their lives. This is especially true of people who haven't been too much damaged by education, or people who have been excluded from normal society for one reason or another. I think many of my readers will recognise what I'm saying, it's not that strange.

Secondly, I'm not an academic, but I have found that this approach is similar to the work of some of the very early pre-Socratic Greek philosophers as well as later writers including Lucretius (Roman), the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Spinoza, Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, and people like Foucault and Deleuze and others more recently.

More down to earth, I recently saw a section in the Barefoot Doctor's Handbook for the Urban Warrior subtitled 'Morals make the moron' - this coming from a sort of modern Taoist perspective.

Being non-judgemental

2006-05-19T21:07:00.000+01:00

One of the things that attracts me to advocacy is the basically non-judgemental approach. We help people to make their voices heard: their own voices and their own wishes. We don't give advice, we try not to let our own feelings or beliefs get in the way of our work, we'll even help people to say things that we think are just wrong - in the hope, perhaps, that by effectively saying them they'll be able to get into a debate with other people that might help them develop more palatable aims.

I want to get away from some of the issues I've been dealing with recently, although there's some pretty good examples among these, especially among the acute psychiatric patients. Perhaps an interesting one is an example from Advocacy 2000's Key Ideas on Independent Advocacy:

An advocate works with a person wanting to be rehoused because they object to the ethnic origin of their neighbours. How can the advocate support this view without comprising the inclusive principles of advocacy?

It seems to me that today many people would be pretty judgemental about this one, and in fact I have spent so much time working with people on the receiving end of racial discrimination that I'm quite keen on these issues myself. On the other hand, this person has come to an advocacy project, so maybe things can turn out a little differently...

So the 'judgemental' people, quite possibly with the best intentions, may well say that 'we can't possibly help you express your racist views, that isn't a good reason to move, pull yourself together and learn to be less offensive.'

I would hope that most advocates would take a deep breath, combat their natural alarm bells, and start to ask this person some open questions to find out what really lies behind their basic question.

Now this is a difficult one, and I would support any advocate who felt they couldn't work with this person: we can try to find an alternative advocate (although if another person comes along later with a similar request I hope you wouldn't still find it so difficult).

The next thing I would hope is that through working with an advocate this person will develop some more clarity about their needs and wishes. I can imagine they've said this to quite a few people before they found an advocate, and I can imagine the housing officer, the police, the advice service, maybe even the social worker all getting quite offended and refusing to talk about the issue. The advocate talks though, and through this talking probably finds several other underlying issues that are translated into race discrimination through lack of communication skills. Talking to the advocate helps them to identify these issues more clearly, and sometimes talk about them, instead of the ethnicity of their neighbour.

Anyway I'm sure you can continue the argument from there. And to put this into the context of the not very ethnically diverse and mainly rural metropolitan district I currently live and work in, I have found myself supporting asylum seekers to be moved from almost entirely 'white' communities into more ethnically diverse areas, which I see as closely analagous to this example.

So this was an example of being non-judgemental. You will have noticed that the advocate took a deep breath just before they started work. This is because being non-judgemental in this way is an active process: it requires hard work and commitment. Like my recent post Humility is not a passive state, it is important to see that being non-judgemental is more than simply not doing something.

-------------------------

OK. So now we've established that, I also want to say something related but slightly different about being non-judgemental. This is about the sort of statements we make, and it is a move against the sort of political correctness which is slowly creeping through society, even though we reject the term as it was popularised in the States in the 1980's and 90's.

I have a friend who is fat. Occasionally she gets fed up with people who pussy-foot around the subject and feel embarrassed to say the word fat in her presence. Some people wouldn't even say the word when she was life-threateningly obese. She thinks they should grow up and get a life. There are also people who want to reclaim the words mad or crazy or dwarf or midget. Look at midget gems after all: they're pretty sweet, so why can't I be? (and believe you me, I can be...)

On the other hand my fat friend has knocked grown men out after inappropriate comments. She's easily able to tell the difference, and so are they (when they wake up). There are also boderline cases. I have a laugh with my friend and most of the time she appreciates it, but there have been occasions where I've upset her. This is partly to do with her health at that moment, but I don't want to make excuses.

The fact is that I need to strike a balance between speaking the truth and remaining sensitive. In the end this is an impossible task, but it is a task which I feel duty bound to attempt.

This is being non-judgemental: it is an impossible task, but if we are going to acheive it at all we can't simply go in one direction towards what we think is safety - that is judging safety to be better. If we spend too much time seeking safety though we just end up in that grey world that I have already said I am working against (see Delivering the world from its exhausting boredom).

Bullying and harassment of doctors

2006-05-19T17:32:00.000+01:00

From the Work related blogs and news blog:

instead of taking the view that bullying and harassment is the work of errant individuals, it is the context of the NHS that provides the main basis of analysis. This includes:

1) The training of doctors includes an ‘initiation rite’, justifying the bullying and harassment that is often a feature of the undergraduate medical culture.

2) Bullies are attracted to the caring and health professions by opportunities to exercise power over vulnerable patients and employees. It is viewed that this problem is not just confined to junior doctors, but senior doctors and consultants may be bullied by other consultants or senior managers.

3) The established culture of the medical profession is one that potentially perpetuates an environment of bullying and harassment, especially during training.

4) A culture of secrecy exists in the NHS which prevents people from speaking out and reporting bullying and harassment behaviour.

No wonder the standards af care can be so unpredictable, when the carers are spending half the time looking out for the bullies...

Recipe for paranoia

2006-05-19T08:40:00.000+01:00

I recently saw in the Education Guardian a description of how to make a staff member clinically depressed. It was too frighteningly true to reproduce here - I was left hoping that it wouldn't give anyone ideas...

It does strike me though, that there is a similar recipe for paranoia. There's no chance of an individual carrying out this plan fortunately. Actually it's more of an accidental recipe, and it depends on mental health systems rather than individual relationships. This is also a caricature (if you've read Delivering the world from its exhausting boredom) that is knowingly dramatic but seeks to bring together a set of images of reality in a familiar and useful form.

The first ingredient in this version of the recipe, although there could be many variations, is an admission to a psychiatric hospital. Imagine. You must be thinking you're in pretty deep shit when you wake up. You'll quite possibly be wondering why you got there and what's going to happen to you. The seeds are set for paranoia already: the uncertainty, the questions, the doubts.

Then you meet your consultant. She explains where you are and who she is. She tries to make you feel at ease: she just wants to find out how you are and what's going on, and she's there to help you. There's no rush, we've got 28 days to assess you. Despite all the words though, you feel there's something menacing about her: she seems a bit distant and machine-like, as if she's following some sort of instructions or procedure.

Around you there's all sorts of strange things going on, and you've also got to live with a whole load of other crazy people. Some of these will be nurses ;-) and they've each got their techniques and approaches for caring for you, some of which will probably be helpful. But there are so many things going on it's not easy to assess what's helpful at this stage, or how you should be conducting yourself. There will also be plenty of advice from your fellow patients, also somehow contradictory, and some of them could well be really paranoid...

Another thing that you could well be feeling at the moment is anger. There's a lot of anger in society today, and expressing your anger inappropriately can be one of the triggers to getting you into this sort of hospital. Even if you're not usually an angry person, it's quite possible that your developing sense of injustice is beginning to make you feel quite irate. And anger is a natural defensive reaction to feeling cornered and powerless.

Anyway, a week goes by. If you're on medication you're probably feeling pretty sick at this stage as your body adapts. You're hoping that your body will adapt and you'll feel better soon, but the evidence from your fellow patients is not too hopeful. Your consultant returns. There may only be one more meeting before your assessment period is over, although obviously nurses and social workers and other more junior doctors will also be involved in the process. She's still quite nice and reassuring and she's not going to jump too quickly to any diagnosis, but there is this one thing...

Now this one thing may be quite clear and relevant to everyone, especially if its a body under the stairs, but you're a more complex case, more borderline. The hospital, and especially the consultants, have a duty to carry out risk assessments as well as psychiatric assessments. This is the other key ingredient in this recipe. We all have some skeletons in our closet, we could have just split with our partner, our dog could have died, or we bought a golf club to mess about on the park. You've had a hard time recently, and you don't think that this one thing that they've picked up on is very relevant to the situation, but they seem to think it's much more important.

This is where we come back to the Guardian article. It's the small things after all that really trouble and disturb us. When we have family arguments we often find that the real issue is a really small misunderstanding, but these small misunderstandings can multiply remarkably. And the really upsetting thing is that it's so small it should be easy to resolve, but you still can't make each other understand...

If you're cruel you'll confound and disturb someone by causing small difficulties and changes, and then rebuke them remorselessly for their failures and inadequacies, thus causing mental distress. If you're caring for someone's mental health problem you probably don't want to do this at all, but it seems that the risk assessment compels you to enquire about that one thing, and your patient's anguished reaction of denial and avoidance rings alarm bells that force you to continue the questioning.

Finally, the diagnosis. They didn't want to tell you earlier because they thought it would upset you. You're showing symptoms of paranoia - and you'd better not argue because that'll only make it worse...

Everyone can help in this situation, and I look forward to a time when we won't need advocates, but in the meantime you'd better write down your local advocacy scheme's number somewhere handy.

Humility is not a passive state

2006-05-17T20:39:00.000+01:00

I've thought of several ways to write this, but I think to be true I need to preface my thoughts with a bit about my personal history.

When Margaret Thatcher's reign of terror finally came to an end in late 1990, I had just become able to vote. However much I rebelled against them, those preceeding eleven and a half years of egos and yuppiedom must have rubbed off on me a bit (although looking at the current state of politics I may have had a lucky escape...)

At the same time I did well at school and decided I loved the 'poetry' of mathematics. Like most young people, by my early twenties I was feeling pretty confident about myself.

Luckily I got involved in community work and quickly realised that knowledge and logic were a recipe for disaster: they were the barriers that would prevent me from properly listening to people. Of course I could have spent my time with others like me and we probably would have got on ok, but I dedicated myself to the needs of the local community, and many people had different ways of thinking and expressing themselves.

This was a challenging time for me personally. I challenged myself and I allowed myself to be challenged by others. I worked hard for no financial reward. I teetered on the edge of depression. Looking back on it I was going through a process of self-negation and re-creation, and this is inevitably painful.

What I was trying to do was to learn to listen to people, and to learn to effectively and appropriately change things. I was really actively trying to develop a personal humility that would help me to do these two things, and the idea or aim of humilty really was important to me at the time.

One of the results was my first independent charity, Hyde Park Source. We aimed to involve local people in the creative reclamation of disused space in this inner city part of Leeds. My role was to do all the shit admin jobs that no one else wanted to or could effectively do - this included storing tools and bags of cement in my cellar, pushing a wheelbarrow to work every morning, and carring my office around in a Morrison's plastic bag. This was to enable other people to come along, get practically involved, and achieve things without too much hassle.

That was eight years ago, and things have continued to develop. I'm a lot more calm and relaxed now - an important part of humility - and I think I continue to challenge myself to learn and develop. Then today someone questioned my humility.

First of all, I was fine with this question. I've see plenty of people who seem to particularly hate the faults in others that they don't like to admit in themselves, and I can see that sometimes if you think you've been working on something you can become blind to the realities that others can still see in you. I can also see that this blog could be taken as an example of my burgeoning ego, although at this stage I would still disagree with that.

Anyway, I had some interesting responses to this questioning of my humility (I wasn't attacked or questioned in a nasty way, someone just decided to underline the importance of humility to their organisation).

I think it's important not to confuse humility with inaction. Some people do humbly accept all the problems that come their way, but this attitude doesn't help anyone.
Humility is about properly, actively listening and engaging, and about taking on board what's being said or what's going on around you.
It's about sacrifice in many ways: giving time, pretending you're not too busy (or making yourself not too busy), giving food or lifts or just spontaneously going out of your way to do some small thing for someone.
It's also bound up with the way we accept gifts: something I've particularly learned from the various refugee communities that I've had the fortune to spend time with over the years. (N.B. Some official policies on this really upset the fine balance that exists here.)
Finally, what I said today, was that humility should involve speaking out loudly about things that are more important than you, but also being open and able able to take criticism in return. In other words to subjugate yourself to your principles but also be open to the fact that you may make mistakes while trying to do this.

So finally we have this blog. I started in ignorance, and I believe that by opening out what I have to say in this informal unedited way, I'm trying to give some free gifts to anyone who is interested, and continue my exercise in learning humility. If you think I'm wrong, I'd like to hear from you, particularly if you can convince me to think again...

Advocacy and therapy

2006-05-17T09:09:00.000+01:00

I'm usually keen to distinguish advocacy from other disciplines, especially advice, mentoring, mediation, and the model of support work that underlies so many professional roles.

Some other roles, notably interpreting and befriending, are still different but have a more interesting and closer interplay with advocacy work.

Recently however I've realised that advocacy falls wholly within the realm of therapy, and we should see it as part of an 'art of healing'.

Some quick notes to begin to explain and explore this:

There are lots of modern therapies (whose practitioners can guard the boundaries jealously) but the art of healing has been practised for millennia;
Healing isn't just based on specific medical symptoms - it's wider than 'curing' for example. In it's more holistic sense it's more about re-adapting people to their environment (and sometimes trying to adapt the environment for people);
The idea of 'just therapy' developed by the Family Centre in New Zealand makes these observations, but also describes therapy as helping people to place new and more positive meaning structures on their experiences, to replace problem-centred meanings that can make life seem so difficult;
There is an analogue here with the description I wrote about Helping someone not to get angry, and with many other advocacy interventions: people feel they can't communicate with services, or people are not listening to them, but working with an advocate helps them to develop communication skills and strategies that can overcome these difficulties, so they can get services and live more easily.

I think there's a lot of interesting potential in exploring the links between therapy and advocacy further. I know some other people have got some ideas in this direction too. Watch this space.

Cat's have voices too...

2006-05-15T20:38:00.000+01:00

This isn't a fluffy and personal blog really, but since I've updated my profile picture I thought I should give proper credit to my companion in the photo, Maisie.

Maisie lives a long way away from me, but whenever we see each other we have long conversations. I don't think I fully understand them, but I get the gist: she's pleased to see me again.

Anyway, here she is in mid-expression, and in her full glory:

No advocating for avocados!

2006-05-13T11:02:00.000+01:00

I don't really know about this whole Gillian McKeith phenomenon, and I'm glad I run little risk of seeing her on television, but the comedy value (to my geeky self at least) of one comment at least in her book makes up for any problems. She says:

"I generally advocate ... avocados to my patients."

I laugh at this partly because of the similarity between the words, but mainly because of the painful conflict between McKeith's approach to advocating and my approach to advocacy.

Let's get straight to the point: I'd like to ban the verb 'to advocate'. I don't think advocates need it, and I think it causes a great deal of confusion and maybe even bad practice. It leads to statements like 'advocate on behalf of...' or 'advocate for...'

We are advocates, we practise advocacy. These nouns are enough, we can celebrate them. But if we do too much advocating for avocados the joke will quickly get worn out, so please, just don't go there.

Helping someone not to get angry

2006-05-13T02:13:00.000+01:00

In a way there is a potential subtle conflict here: if someone is angered by something, shouldn't we, as advocates, help them to express this anger? In this case however the individual had clearly expressed the view that they saw their anger wasn't helping and they wanted me to help them avoid it.

In a way, this situation appeared entirely ordinary to me, and I just saw it as a normal sort of advocacy activity. But then when I was describing some of the work I'd done, to another much more experienced advocate than me, whose work I really respect, they said that they'd never thought of doing that, and it sounded like a really good thing to do. So maybe its a useful thing to write about...?

Hopefully I'll soon be posting a Recipe for paranoia which also touches upon this problem, and maybe this is something like an approach or maybe even a solution to the situation. The context this time was mental health, but I also think it has relevance to any other sorts of client: we all get angry when (allegedly, we feel) spurious events get into official reports or discussions about us. So what do we do?

It seems that often people get more angry about the apparently small issues. The problem is that quite often it seems that small issues for an individual advocacy partner can easily grow into big issues for various professionals. It is the gulf in perceptions that generate the anger or distress however, not the nature of the action (say self-harm or drug use, or sex or travelling on a bus). These issues or incidents then become the focus of reports, especially in this risk-averse society. Social workers or doctors or others then start asking all sorts of questions which aggravate the already antagonistic perceptions and provoke anger or other aggressive or defensive responses.

I used a much more local and specific description of this phenomenon with my partner, but we spent quite a lot of time talking about the things that made them angry or upset or anguished, and we developed ways of dealing with these issues in less destructive ways, and concentrating on making more positive statements, recognising what sort of arguments provoked conflict and which sort of arguments encouraged sympathy and understanding in people.

Here's an advantage of the advocate's role. My partner and I and the professionals all saw these issues as something that needed to be dealt with. The professionals needed to clarify, objectify and assess various bits of conflicting information, so they continued to need to ask objective questions. The fact that my partner would react badly to these questions caused particular difficulties for the assessment part of the process and led back to more questions.

My partner didn't want to talk about these things, because they didn't see them as particularly relevant, or even valid or based in truth. But I could provide a valuable space for them to talk about the issues they didn't want to talk about without getting angry, to talk about how they became angry, to identify the issues and where the problems were developing from. This comes from a basic approach of advocacy: giving people a safe space to vocalise things that they may not have been able to vocalise before, and being able to speak about something is an important boost to being able to think about it, put it in a new perspective, and relax about it.

To me this is one of the important methods of advocacy: to help people express themselves in a way that is more understandable to others and less confrontational. There are risks with this sort of approach: you risk at a not too distant extreme the problem of neglecting people's real wishes in favour of ready compromises. However I believe it is possible to maintain your commitment to specific goals, but develop less confrontational and more effective strategies and tactics to achieve these goals.

I don't know what more to say at this point. I feel as if I haven't really managed in this short space, confined by the written word, to explain clearly what I set out to explain. I seem to have got a bit repetitive, and at this point I wish I just had a few bullet points and a discussion group to explore these ideas. Anyway, as always I'd value comments.

Cheers.

Google good...?

2006-05-12T00:14:00.000+01:00

This is a kind of interesting article on The Register, The worse Google gets, the more money it makes?

In a way you need to know some of the history. I'm hardly qualified to provide this, but what I understand is that Google were originally a smart couple of guys who developed a radically improved way of searching the web as a research project. They put their service online and it gained huge popularity. They also had another brainwave: to fund their service through tageted advertisements based on your search and the results. Google has now become very rich, and has developed a whole range of other innovative services along the way. The article picks up on this history and talks about some of the problems that beset the search engine now - and why Google might be happy about this.

Another important part of the story is that Google made lots of very principled ethical statements about their company, their services, and the way they worked. In many ways they appeared the ethical opposite of Microsoft just at the time when people were beginning to recognise the depths of the problems with Microsoft and its monopolistic practices and shoddy goods (and realising that we'd been quite successfully conned into believing that MS software was still high quality).

Google was going to bring a new democracy to the net, a democracy perhaps better than any of our governments provided because it would be a true people's democracy. There's something worrying me about this idea, although I wish there wasn't. Anyway this democratic vision has been challenged on a number of fronts: the scanning of people's computers and their emails to generate targeted ads on their webpages and emails; the censorship thing in China; the dispute with the previous owners of Gmail.co.uk, and I'm sure there are more examples. There are some people who claim that Google is just turning into another big bad bully, trying to out-microsoft Microsoft. The link above touches on some of these issues too.

It also seems to me, and I don't know if I read this somewhere or inferred it, that the top results in Google searches are self-sustaining. We search for something, usually just try the top few sites, and then put links on to what we've found. The more links to a site the better its rating in Google, the higher the site is the more likely you are to create a link to it. This potentially stifles creativity and innovation because the smaller and less well-know sites are less likely to be highly rated.

Getting back on to the more positive, I do think the apparently person focused approach of Google is interesting. Most people say its a great place to work - lots of freedom and creativity and different ways of working (although I bet they still work ridiculously long hours). People used to think Microsoft did this, with all their plush offices and employee benefits, but some high profile desertions to Google suggest they're winning on this front too.

Another people-focused approach of Google is to support voluntary open source projects, both financially and in their wider working practices (although not as much as they should, and I believe they still retain trade secrets, patents and copyrights - and defend them).

One people-focused thing that most observers leave out of discussions about individual companies or services though, is that although access to computers and the internet is growing, there are still huge numbers of people who are simply excluded from participating in net culture or benefitting from web-based services. And many of the people who do have web access lack basic knowledge to enable them to navigate and use it effectively). I think any company worth its ethics must take responsibility for this too.

At the moment, while many people are benefitting positively from Google, it is still getting inexorably caught up in the cash trap. There is now so much money invested in Google, not just the giant company itself but all the other companies and individuals that syndicate their services like search boxes, and also all the advertisers ploughing revenues into the system, not to mention all the organisations for whom Google falls somehow into their business plans. This is why Google is silting up, and why it likes the mud.

This is just a microcosm of the current economic situation though. Everything seems to be getting silted up with bureaucracy and business plans and cash. I'm not sure if I'd choose the word democratic (although it's not a bad word), but if we are to try to go in this direction we need to recognise that this cash trap we're getting ourselves into is really damaging society, not to mention the environment, and freedom and democracy require breaking out of the trap.

This can't be done quickly. Like it or not, Google is trapped in the current economic system, and we don't want it to suddenly become so principled that it cancells all its advertising and goes bust. They really do seem to need to put their ethics where their search engine is and ensure that their results focus on high quality and relevance rather than advertising potential, and they really need to respond more directly to the problem of all the people who can't access computers effectively today. Then when they've made some progress against these hurdles they should look at the wider issues.

Of course this blog is powered by Google. I constantly use Google services at the moment (although I need them to support Linux more). I'd be interested to hear about more ethical alternatives (in fact various competitor blogs are good examples, and I will swap over sometime, but I'm stuck here for a bit now I've just started). I'm even listed quite high in Google searches despite the fact that my sites are so small and new and obscure.

Finally, I was delighted to find out today that if you search for "incorporeal transformations" deleuze on Google Canada, this blog is the top result!

Thank you Google, I love you
;-)

All work and no pay

2006-05-11T00:36:00.000+01:00

Actually I'm feeling quite relaxed at the moment. Since the money ran out to pay me at the end of April, I don't have to work so hard. I can catch up with some of the other things that have been falling behind a bit recently.

Of course this not working so hard thing hasn't worked out so well. I realised this after ten and a half hours in the office today. But I had promised to do various things for people and it all felt quite productive really.

And I do have a nice little rewarding and quite flexible part time job for 10 hours a week that will keep the bailiffs away for a while.

In a way this is my response to the boiling water principle, trying to take myself off the burn a bit and be productive in non-monetary ways, and not worrying too much about growth. Time to be more flexible about my options and my thinking and to ready myself for the next wave of activity.

I'm also wondering at the moment about this whole copyright and intellectual property thing. Most people today seem to think that if they write something or invent something or have a new idea, then they must protect it. There's a vague hope that they may be able to make money out of it and thus make their daily life easier. This is a terrible restriction on innovation and shared good practice though, and terrible in so many other ways as well. I haven't read all this chapter, and I can't find any better online resources tonight, but here is a good start:

There is a strong case for opposing intellectual property. Among other things, it often retards innovation and exploits Third World peoples. Most of the usual arguments for intellectual property do not hold up under scrutiny. In particular, the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas provides no justification for ownership of ideas. The alternative to intellectual property is that intellectual products not be owned, as in the case of everyday language. Strategies against intellectual property include civil disobedience, promotion of non-owned information, and fostering of a more cooperative society.
Against Intellectual Property
Brian Martin

Why is it so difficult to find a range of high quality free policies or training materials today? Why is it that so much advice that is given, or services that are sold to us, are so wrong or inadequate. If there was an open economy of knowledge, would it be so easy for people to pull a fast one on us?

The FLOSS community seem to be developing some really good responses. Many people are managing today to get paid to produce high quality free software, in collaboration with an international community of like-minded people.

Can the advocacy community similarly benefit from these sorts of approaches? What resources do we have amongst us that are currently being 'protected' by concerns about intellectual property that we could use to strengthen ourselves and further develop quality services?

An apology

2006-05-10T23:04:00.000+01:00

I'm sorry to all the small farmers out there trying to make a living, especially the organic ones, and especially the ones nearest to me. I'm sorry to all the independent shop owners and market traders, especially those that sell locally produced goods. I'm sorry to all the people who work for any of the big supermarkets.

I have a terrible confession to make: I've been shopping at Asda.

I promise I don't do it often and I bought the bare minimum, but I've worked a long time today and it was after 10pm so everywhere else was closed. I just needed something wholesome and nutritious to eat and keep me going another day.

I'm not sure what my penitence should be. It almost makes me hark back to the good old days when the police would dispense you a good beating if someone put a word in on your behalf.

Since this isn't going to happen though, I'll have to make do with inviting comments. Please let me know how you've managed to give up supermarket shopping. Take the pledge online, and vow never to set foot into one of those horrible places again. Think up some imaginative chastisement that may help me, or some words of gentle support and encouragement to have a similar effect.

I'm relying on your good nature and support now. Thanks in advance.

The boiling water principle

2006-05-09T23:54:00.000+01:00

There seems to be an expectation today that we should all be better: that we should learn more, work more, achieve more and produce more, be tested, monitored and assessed more, and at the same time keep fit, cook, clean, look after the kids, and keep up with your social and cultural interests. This is only the beginning, but it's already exhausting.

It seems that the main reason for this improvement drive is economic: the growth economy. The idea is that development, health and happiness requires that the economy must grow year on year: it would be nice if the total of all the economic transactions in 2006 will be 2.5% (or even 5%) bigger than the total in 2005. The alternative is apparently depression, in every sense of the word.

I don't agree with this. I can't help thinking about the image of a pan of water sitting on a gas flame. As the water is heated, the temperature grows. Quite quickly we get to a point where some of the water gets so hot it's transformed into steam and evaporates away. The more we heat it, the more we get out of it (that is the more water turns to steam and gets out of the pan). Gradually all the water disappears and we're left with an empty pan (or, under other circumstances, perhaps an explosion).

Classical economists would reject this image out of hand: they say the economy is a closed system and all the profits get reinvested. Today it's clear to many people that this is a scandalous conceit which completely fails to account for the raw materials that are being turned into landfill and pollution on a massive scale. Our oil, gas and mineral reserves are being increasingly relied on and depleted, intensive forestry and agriculture is taking all the nutrients from the soil and replacing them with pesticides and other chemicals, and on a human level we seem to be suffering in ways we don't quite recognise from our past.

It seems that we cannot go on as we are: certainly not indefinitely, and maybe not even for as long as 20 years. It seems quite likely that in 20 years the environmental and economic restrictions on many materials that are basic to our lives today will make them largely unavailable to the majority of people and change our lives drastically. And what does this insistence on an ever growing economy really mean to the working lives of people? I don't think we can really know, although I feel that some of the stories in this blog are indicative of some of the trends. Can you see yourself becoming 2% more productive every year for the next 20 years? Can people and communities and societies manage to average out at this growth level for ever? And even more importantly, what is the cost? What is it in these people that's going to evaporate off like the steam from the pan?

I think we need to start to take a look at some of our services and their cost and sustainability and maybe use some economic questions like these to develop new critiques and alternatives.

This will be an ongoing discussion, comments welcome...

Cantonese/Mandarin reading matter sought

2006-05-08T22:18:00.000+01:00

Donations of reading matter only please, for a lonely Chinese woman with limited mobility.

Please email me for delivery/collection arrangements: blogger@visctrix.net

Thanks

Delivering the world from its exhausting boredom

2006-05-07T23:52:00.000+01:00

I've been slowing down a bit with the posting over the last week, but partly because I've been having so many interesting conversations. This seems to be turning into an interesting project, with lots of potential.

To try and make more sense of it all I feel I need to keep some kind of 'clinical' and 'methodological' diary. In other words, I need to break down the different elements and find the links between them (in a clinical way); and develop a practice and an ethic that will propel the project and give it a sense of consistency and direction (a methodology). I've already started in a small way, for example clinical: the April summary, What's this blog about, links and refereces in the text and the sidebar, etc.; and methodological: the advantage of ignorance, the space not enclosed by words, and in a practical if not objective sense in protecting vulnerable people from objectivity, etc.]

You don't need to understand the jargon to understand the situation. Some people have already suggested that I need to be careful about the contents of my blog. This would be a simple truism if they clearly hadn't meant a whole variety of other things behind these plain words. Even my mother is concerned that I might get myself into trouble, and many of my friends have urged caution.

At the same time, most of the same people are very positive about the blog and its contents, which are important to them too. Also many of these people see me as quite cautious and responsible really, and it is true that I've spent a lot of time and thought and caution on my words so far.

OK, so I need to work out what we mean by caution, and what I need to be cautious of.

I think the key to my response lies in the idea of the 'greying society'. I'm sure loads of people have written about this, but I don't know where. The greying society sits around in meetings, often without clear agendas, or without a clear vision of how they are going to act on their decisions. They often struggle against the constant chaos around them, or they sail obliviously through it (they're managed by Scylla and Charybdis). They're exhausted by a constant demand to do more work, to fill in forms, to be assessed and reviewed. They can be stressed and irritable, although usually they manage to put on a brave and professional face. They have to spend lots of time doing admin work. Their task is Herculean, and their performance heroic, but they achieve about as much as Sisyphus. And finally, amongst other things, they do a funny little dance between trying hard not to upset each other on the one side and occasionally flaring up into threats and retribution on the other. We could find similar images in people's experiences of education and in the general lives of the many and various adults that cannot or are not 'working' (earning money in the system).

I use caricatures like this to briefly summarise various aspects, to make a general picture of a society that may be developing. I think this way of characterising ideas is a useful way to go about thinking - in an important way, it is a subjective thinking. [I think I'll have to come back to this in another post as there's no space here, but one claim I want to boldly make is that you cannot accuse someone of a subjective crime, which is also to say you should not be offended by a subjective statement. N.B. There are important scholia to this.]

I suppose people like John Major or GW Bush are probably up there too as prominent examples of the greying society (as in, 'thou shall not be seen to have had a life in the past...'). I don't know; I'm happier talking about people I do know (with their permission of course) and I get the feeling from lots of different people that they recognise this grey world but they can't see what to do about it. But I think you can see what to do about it. I think you have seen many times and you can see again, and many of us have made a difference and we all can in the future.

So all of this blog will be approached from the perspective of what I will call a positive ethics, an ethics that will help us to recognise and move out of this grey society. I am looking for an ethics that will help us do more and to recognise our own and others achievements. I do think that this goal is realised on many levels in good advocacy practice, and I will continue to explore this idea in the blog.

How cautious can I be? Such an ethics will inevitably challenge the greying society, however it manifests itself, and it will also challenge real individuals, communities and organisations. It's inevitable that any ethical stance, any action, is going to encourage equal and opposite reactions. It also seems clear, contrary to the objective laws of physics, that sometimes apparently small actions or events can become multiplied out of all proportion and have serious implications.

I will vigorously act to minimise conflict, within the context of the ethics that I am trying to set out. This is my promise to caution and to my interlocutors (electronic or otherwise).

At the end of this post I must quote my friend Georges Bataille, who made a significant impact on work around positive ethics in the last century. At the same time as I make this promise I can't escape the fact that life is challenge, and avoiding challenge is greyness and death. In Bataille's immortal words,

the future will belong not to those for who action is a demand for morose and disagreeable work, but to those who, on the contrary, will deliver the world from its exhausting boredom

I hope you're looking forward to that future with me.

Rather they convict me than abase myself

2006-05-06T00:37:00.000+01:00

I spent some time with Shaun today going over some things in more detail and trying to work out a strategy. It's a good thing I have advocacy experience, or what he said would have been difficult to deal with. [For background see More Police Racism and Undressed, humiliated and lied to.]

I'll get to what I mean by this by the end of this post, but first the details and the strategy.

The first detail to suddenly jump out at me was the date he was stopped. The 5 January: just two days after he was last in Court (because the police failed to record that he had produced his documents) and just three days after I wrote him a supporting letter pointing out his good character and reliability at producing his documents on all the other occasions...

The next detail was that the receipt he was given for the stop and search. I knew he was given a fixed penalty notice for a faulty brake light, but this receipt that he was given at the same time tells another story. It says he was spotted outside the 'Latzian Club' [sic] 'drug dealing' (he was actually getting a take-away from Cantor's Fish Shop a few doors down). They then followed him all the way from Chapeltown Road, through Little London, to Clay Pit Lane near the City Centre. Then they stopped and searched him and the car and wrote 'the car smelled very strongly of cannabis' (not true, just an excuse). It was only after all this following, searching and making up a story that they finally brought up the brake light issue.

Shaun and others wonder whether it's legal to stop someone for one reason and then slap a fine on them for something else? If a Police Officer decides to search you for any reason other than suspected terrorism, they have to explain why they're searching you first. There's a list of potential reasons on the back of the receipt. They said it was to look for drugs, not a faulty brake light (which isn't a reason). Shaun also wonders if it's legal to immediately give someone a penalty notice for something so minor - isn't the usual procedure to tell you to get it fixed?

The third detail that seems key to any defence is that Shaun is an extremely cautious driver. Because he gets stopped so often and he knows the Police could pick on any minor issue to justify stopping him, he literally checks his car once or twice a week. I've been frustrated before when we've been on our way somewhere and he's stopping yet again to do basic maintenance like checking the tyres and topping up the washer water. With all these stops and checks and producers, and all the care Shaun takes, this brake light was a very unlucky event. I can't see how he could do any more than he already does to ensure his car is always roadworthy.

Anyway, our defence is building up, but on Thursday I got some pro bono legal advice from my kind and distinguished friend Ruth Bundey that confirmed some nagging doubts of mine and kind of put a dampener on things.

The fact is that the light wasn't working at the time Shaun was stopped. Shaun has not denied this, just said that he is very cautious and that the police are simply victimising him for an unlucky coincidence (if it had been a day or two later he would have spotted and fixed the broken light anyway).

Unfortunately the language of the Courts and the language of Shaun differ here. Shaun says he's not guilty because the broken light wasn't the real issue: the real issue is that at that point the police were looking for any excuse to justify their failed stop and search. It seems that the Court will say that this is not a valid defence: it doesn't challenge the material basis of the charge, that the light was faulty.

There are two strategies at this point. Firstly write to the CPS on Monday and try to persuade them that this prosecution is not in the public interest (it will cost more than any fine Shaun receives, and it cannot make him any more careful about his car). This is ok with Shaun, letter to be posted Monday.

The second strategy, if this fails, is to plead guilty on 7 June. That is, to agree that at 18.30 on 5 January the brake light was faulty. Then there is an opportunity to detail the mitigating circumstances (the caution, the many times the lights have been ok, the fact that he was stopped for another reason, etc.). If we do a good job of this mitigation then at the very least the fine will be minimised, and there is a chance the penalty could be waived (I don't know the proper legal terminology here, but Shaun may not have to pay any fine).

This is not ok. This is the interesting bit.

'Plead guilty? But I'm not guilty. I'm not willing to say I'm guilty for something I don't believe in. It's not about the fine - they're abusing me enough already and any fine would just be a continuation and a confirmation of this abuse. I don't care about a fine.

'I want to stand up and say what I believe in. I don't feel I'm guilty, and I think I've got enough evidence to persuade the Court to dismiss the charges.'

So we come to a third strategy. I'd like to call this the brave and principled strategy, although I suspect you readers may like to categorise it in other ways...

Luckily, both as an advocate and as a friend I respect Shaun's right to decide how he wants to defend himself. I also understand that by following his own path, with the support of myself and other friends, Shaun will gain in self-respect even if he loses in dollars. We have agreed to write a statement together for the Court, outlining his defence and helping to ensure that Shaun can say what he wants to say as coherently and effectively as possible.

I just hope we get a sympathetic magistrate.

Welcome to the mental health hotline...

2006-05-02T21:17:00.000+01:00

Mental Health Hotline (MP3)

File under humour.

Thank you to the Mental Nurse for this, and for adding me to their blogroll...

;-)

"We all have an obligation to intervene"

2006-05-01T14:40:00.000+01:00

'In his first interview in an English newspaper, 83-year-old Portuguese novelist José Saramago [is asked if he believes] that the artist is obliged to take on a political role?'

"It isn't a role," he says, almost sharply. "The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens. As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved, it's the citizen who changes things. I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level."
Still a street-fighting man in yesterday's Observer

Happy Beltane

2006-05-01T11:56:00.000+01:00

Amongst other things, today is the first day of summer in the old Celtic calendar. It is exactly six months until Samhain, more commonly known as Halloween.

Samhain is the most important festival of the Celtic year - the Celtic new year, the time of death and also the time to begin to reflect on the new life that will bring. Beltane is the complement of this, the height of spring and a celebration of flowers, fertility and delight.

There's lots of good information on the internet. If you were more organised than me you will have been out at one of the many fires and celebrations that were held around the country last night. But many people have never even heard of Beltane, and it makes very little impression on our lives today.

On the other hand, thinking about health and self-expression, thinking about the visions that some of the people I work with in hospital have, thinking about Jung's faltering engagements with Shamanism, I can't help feeling that these ancient festivals do have an impact on us today - only we are so distracted by other things we usually don't notice.

I'll write about this again, but on this special day I just want to make the point that our society, so focused on economic consumption and growth, so focused on objectivity, knowledge and truth, seems to be quickly destroying itself.

Now I'm going to get away from this radiation emmitting screen and go far a walk...

April summary

2006-04-30T23:55:00.000+01:00

Wow, over 11,000 words in 28 posts since 10 April. So to help make sense of it all...

Beginnings, explanations and support:

The advantage of ignorance - my first ever post (start as you mean to go on)
What's this blog about - some early ideas
How you can contribute
General comments
Disclaimer

Advocacy

What is independent advocacy? - the basics
Advocacy training for non-advocates - where can it lead?
RASA Advocacy Project - short AGM report

Ethics

Incorporeal transformations - a subtle but vital experience, and some links with communication and learning issues
Racism and discrimination - putting some things into context
Protecting vulnerable people from objectivity - objectivity comes from western morality, religion, science and men - here are some of the problems it's led to
Can we apologise for our beliefs? - or should we?
The space not enclosed by words - this will go in some kind of spirituality section later, but it also fits in here as well as under dance.

State violence and discrimination

Racist police actions - a story of a young Kurdish man gets me into trouble
More police racism - a bigger story about Shaun, see below for follow up
A family's freedom - £45! - a woman faces jail and her baby daughter going into care over an admin error
Racism and discrimination - the police have quietly threatened me but they won't speak to me directly, so this is one part of the wider picture while I wait...
Undressed, humiliated and lied to - what happened when Shaun and I went to Court - helping to understand state violence
Protecting vulnerable people from objectivity - the state does it's best, but it pins its hopes on objectivity, which is in fact the real danger

Law

Can you have my body? What about my mind? - the first of some very occasional forays into the law, looking here at habeas corpus

Creativity and literature

Reading and self-development - a hesitant start
A few good books I've read recently - and some comments about advocacy

Voices

A family's freedom - £45! - as mentioned above
You and I - a disability perspective - including a link to an excellent website
Good words - taken from the above website

IT and the Web

Why free standards matter - an outside expert link
Google cheat sheet - a useful little resource
The sorry state of charity websites - my initial reflections

Politics

Where's all the money going to come from?
Nasty party politics - about the BNP

RASA Advocacy Project

2006-04-30T18:58:00.000+01:00

It was RASA's annual general meeting (AGM) on Friday, and there was a really good turnout. I didn't count but it seemed like more than 50 people to me, from a variety of places around the world. An Iranian breeze blew in a violinist to entertain us, and Ramtin did his usual wonders on guitar. There was also some delicious food.

Amongst a few surprises I ended up taking the minutes (again), receiving a special recognition award on behalf of Chris who has been a dedicated volunteer and considerable asset to the organisation for the last seven months, and being nominated onto the Committee by Nesar (and duly elected).

Over the last couple of years I haven't been as closely involved with RASA as I was in it's first year or so, although I have kept in close touch, and we have continued to support each other in different ways. I feel really happy about recementing this link and developing a new relationship as a committee member. As with any community organisation there are a variety of challenges ahead, but I feel like we can work together to continue our growth towards a vibrant and effective project.

The sorry state of charity websites

2006-04-28T22:10:00.000+01:00

It's not difficult. I had some spare time recently (my employers ran out of money to pay me!) and I learnt web design. I didn't intend to do this, I only meant to add some content to a structure that a volunteer had already created for me.

In the end I started almost from scratch in order to ensure ease of use and editing, adherence to web standards, and accessibility. It only took me a month to create a website for Advocacy Action. This is W3C compliant. It is Hermish approved. It does use open licensing. All pages on it validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

Standards compliance helps almost everyone, especially people with disabilities, but everyone else too. You can check any site for standards compliance very easily if you go to the official validation page and enter the URL from the address bar. The first thing that is needed is a DTD.

I am shocked at the number of advocacy project websites that don't have this simple basic beginning. To see what I mean, right click on any page and then choose 'View Source' from the menu. Right at the top you should see something like this:

    PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

If you don't see this, the web designer has made no effort at all to make the site standards compliant. It automatically fails, and it automatically fails to give your browser the information it needs to help end users see what you want them to see.

If you have a website, check it, and sort it out - for the sake of the people you really want to read it.

If you want to learn how to do this yourself, learn CSS and read some articles at A List Apart, and other places like this, or here. Use colour resources like VisiBone's Color Lab. Dive into Accessibility or use the RNIB's resources.

And keep your site up to date. Create relevant links to other advocacy projects. Share links (the best way of making your site easy to find is to have links from other sites). Be part of the community.

Email me if you want any more info.: blogger[@]visctrix[.]net

We just need a little humour...

2006-04-28T21:48:00.000+01:00

Cheer up guys, it's not all bad...

The space not enclosed by words...

2006-04-28T20:56:00.000+01:00

feelings - beliefs - thoughts - actions - perceptions - life - the universe - race - sexuality - culture - quiet - music - dance - spirituality - messages - dreams - movement - rhythm - light - darkness - childhood - knowledge - fire - water - art - creativity - touch - smell - ...

Mutabaruka, the Jamaican dub poet, is asked:

"Muta. All the while I 'ear Rasta talk 'bout 'I and I' - what the 'I' mean to you?"

Muta seh: "Well the 'I' is the space not enclosed by words."

And truly, although I am far from Rasta, here we meet. And we dance. And objectivity is the tool of the babylon system that we must fight.

Peace and love and respect for our brethren. And may the babylon system soon fall.

Next performance is at the annual Community Dance Platform, Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Chapeltown Road, Leeds, 7-9pm on Saturday 20 May. Tickets £4/£3 call 0113 219 3018.

Big up to David Hamilton, the Reggeyeshun Dancers, and Back Bone.

Can we apologise for our beliefs?

2006-04-28T20:40:00.000+01:00

Should we apologise for our beliefs?

If we believe something happened, if we have friends who also believe what we believe, if we have heard subjective evidence to suggest that similar things have happened to others in the past...

If someone who wields power and deals in objective evidence and makes demands doesn't believe us...

Should we apologise? Doesn't this compromise us in the deep sense of the word? Don't we lose a part of our integrity by apologising in the face of our beliefs?

On the other hand, could it be better to lose our integrity and compromise rather than suffer the fate that those with the power and authority would like to see?

We'll have to see...

Protecting vulnerable people from objectivity

2006-04-28T18:11:00.000+01:00

Sorry. I've already abused millions of people and I've only written a title. If this label is sometimes applied to you, I hope what follows might be of use, and please believe I usually try not to use the term except for ironic or dramatic effect. If you ever talk about or work with 'vulnerable' people, then you should understand this (that is, I hope you already understand this).

What is objectivity, and why must some people be protected from it? Let's start with some more dramatic language, and then think about some examples. Objectivity not only fixes some people with labels, it is also an excuse, a lie, and full of contradictions.

Objectivity fixing people with labels
This is an obvious one: 'you are autistic'; 'you have learning disabilities'; 'you are black'; 'you are a woman'; 'you are a child'; 'you are disabled'; 'you are a paranoid schizophrenic'; 'you have adhd'; you are sick, you are inadequate, you will never be able to escape from this because this is who you are and 'I am an expert'.

Once you have been categorised, objectified, by experts or by common opinion, it's very difficult to escape. As I reported with Ronelle and Shara, if Shara had been taken into care because of an admin error and because Ronelle had changed address so she didn't know about the Court proceedings, the objective fact would be that Shara had been in care. This objective information would have stayed with her for the rest of her life, and at the very least for the next 17 years and 7 months, until she reached adulthood. 'Shara has been in care (because her mother didn't pay a fine) and is thus vulnerable'.

Objectivity is an excuse
'We can't prove that in a court, therefore we can't do anything about it'; 'we can't take action without objective evidence, so you must keep a diary of the racist abuse against you over the next three months'; 'we're sorry, but you were the only witness, so it's your word against their's (and you have a learning disability or whatever) so we can't possibly take any action/believe you.' I could go on. It's worth pointing out that these are all things that I have actually heard professionals say repeatedly over the last couple of years. I expect most people reading this will quickly recognise these excuses.

Objectivity is a lie
'We saw your flatmate apologise for hitting you, but we can't objectively establish that he did hit you because you both have learning disabilities and we don't believe you are capable of objective and consistent communication, therefore we don't believe you, i.e. we have decided that you are lying'; 'we can find no objective evidence to support what you say, we do not accept that your subjective evidence (what you feel or believe) has any weight, therefore we demand that you withdraw your subjective evidence (i.e. apologise for 'lying')'.

Objectivity is full of contradictions
What is the most objective thing you can imagine? 2+2=4? Maybe this is true, but mathematics is in many ways a completely abstact system. It has been constructed to be objective. You're right: maths is the most objective thing you can think of; arithmetic, adding, is the most simple form of this objectivity. 2+2=4. But it is also true that 2+2=11 (in base 3). And it is also true that even the most basic and 'objective' system, like arithmetic, is not objective! (or see the more comprehensive Wikipedia article).

Objectivity is everywhere, and we all need protection from it
'You claim your manager did this to you, but you are unshaved, very agitated, your story isn't very consistent, you keep on bringing up other incidents, and we can't keep track of what you're saying. On the other hand your ex-manager is very calm and well presented, he has explained all the difficulties he has had with you and the ways he has tried to help, but you didn't cooperate...'

Objectivity really started taking hold of life in the enlightenment, when science was taking over from religion as the dominant guiding force of society. It is the basis of today's education: learn these objective truths, and we will objectify you by your capacity to remember them. Many of us are stuck in the world of objectivity, and as we grow older and 'wiser' we learn to fit in even more to the unwritten rules of society and not rock the boat too much. If we don't fit into these rules we are in danger of becoming outcasts, outlaws, or lunatics. (N.B. That's very far from saying religion was a better system, for religion was also an attempt at reifying [sic] certain beliefs and excluding lunatics and heathens.) Foucault writes a good history of all this.

What are the alternatives?
Many feminist activists have shown us ways forward: let me have the freedom to be who I want to be; let me act and show what I can do; do not objectify me as a woman or a housewife; don't insist that I use your language; don't make the mistake of believing that you can understand me. Rosa Parks believed in her right to sit near the front of a bus, despite her 'racial classification'. Ghandi's non-violent campaigns also showed us ways forward. Both of these have unfortunately been transformed from the simplicity of principled action into systems of objective human rights (which I and many others can never support), but there are many good contemporary examples.

Advocacy is another good way forward. We don't believe in (objectively) representing people's 'views' (or even worse, their 'best interests'). We listen to their thoughts and feelings and wishes and help to express them. In many instances this is helpful. It's more than helpful: it's the most positive way forward I know. The more people are forced to listen and take account of thoughts and feelings and wishes and other such subjective and occasionally irrational kinds of communication, the less likely they are to come down hard and refuse and deny and lie and avoid and label and abuse.

Because this is what's happening at the moment, and we need to open our eyes and ears and hearts to it and protect people.

And then we need to come to a time when we can forget about the negativities of protection and vulnerability, and open our eyes and ears and hearts to life.

Good words

2006-04-28T00:53:00.000+01:00

Also from the Getting the Truth Out site, this quote:

You wonder how a system so sophisticated, so technologically advanced, can treat people with such cruelty. Of course, it is not the system at all. It is one doctor, two nurses, an aide, or an orderly. It is people who lock people into seclusion rooms, and it is people who affix the leather cuffs or the chains or the gauze strips. It is people who do this and who do not have the courage to confront the unimaginable. It is people who believe they must do what they must do and that what they must do is the expedient thing. It is people who justify torture. "We're only trying to help. We don't know what else to do," they say, with their refrigerated voices.

Does it really matter what else you do? Or is it enough to acknowledge evil, which is indifference to suffering and indifference to the sacredness of the human person? The only way to fight evil is to unmask it, to speak up, to refuse to participate in it, to not be indifferent.

But to us, the hostages of evil, the feeling of endless time is crushing. For us, even when the door is opened, the restraints loosened, we remain captives. We can never forget.

-Rae E. Unzicker, "From the Inside"

You and I - a disability perspective

2006-04-27T22:16:00.000+01:00

This is a nice and concise piece of writing. Read it here.

There is also a link to a bigger website Getting the Truth Out. Do persevere with this. I was initially shocked and thought it was a terrible site. As you get through the pages you discover its real message though. There is an excellent video (mpeg, 30.5 MB) of a woman communicating with a communication board (but ideally go through the website first).

In the end I couldn't stop reading. It is a little hard work, but rewarding, and really excellent overall. Written by an 'autistic' woman, it's relevant to many people who are taken over and controlled by 'services' and stopped from making their voices heard.

General comments

2006-04-25T22:04:00.000+01:00

If you want to make a general comment about the blog, leave it here.

Thank you.

Advocacy training for non-advocates

2006-04-25T21:01:00.000+01:00

Today I ran the second of three pilot training sessions for Connexions West Yorkshire. The title of the training was 'Practical advocacy techniques for working with young people'.

This seemed to go very well although I felt surprisingly exhausted when I got back to my office - maybe the stress of maintaining a relaxed attitude together with closely concentrating on doing a good job and remembering everything. (The worst moment was when I plugged in the projector and it didn't come on, solved after five minutes of sweating by plugging it into a different socket of the extension cable...)

In some ways though I think providing this sort of training is more controversial than writing about police racism, certainly as far as the advocacy community is concerned. We know that racism in the police ranges somewhere between 'endemic' (mostly in the past) to the (much lesser) 'still institutional' or 'getting better'. When we find examples we feel a need to speak out about them, but the only people who seem to be surprised, upset, or even interested, are the police themselves.

Training Connexions PAs in advocacy techniques on the other hand, now that's a serious matter. Despite the fact that I stressed again and again that my trainees could never be real independent advocates during working hours, only benefit from the techniques, one of them still asked the killer question: if it's difficult to fund pure advocacy, couldn't trained PAs fill the gap?

No, no, no. I keep on hearing good things about the local Connexions and the Young People's Service, but they will always be more influenced by local and national government policies and demands than most advocates. Thus they can never be fully independent - free from conflicts of interest.

I do think that the methods and the principles of advocacy should be spread as far as possible, and we should encourage more diverse approaches to providing people with advocacy support, especially more people in community settings. But if Connexions see the need for this training, this should indicate more need for proper sustainable funding for real independent advocacy projects.

I'd be interested in peoples thoughts and comments on this.

Google cheat sheet

2006-04-23T17:24:00.000+01:00

Here's a useful little 2-sided pdf that tells you all about google services and how to use them:

http://www.feedsforme.com/google/

Did you know you could use Google as a calculator? Google also own and run Blogger, the Picasa photo organiser, the Froogle shopping service and many other things.

Undressed, humiliated and lied to

2006-04-23T11:01:00.000+01:00

This is what happened when I went to Leeds Magistrate's Court with Shaun last Wednesday, as promised.

First the court official asked Shaun 'is your headwear for religious reasons?' Shaun said yes and that was ok, but this was just the first of four instances of what I think should be described as violence towards us from the court. I'll describe the others and then explain what I mean.

The second thing was that Shaun was given a 'Statement of means' form to fill in. This had to be completed before Shaun could go before the court, and it was an offence not to provide the information (a note said 'see the other side for details' but the other side was blank). This form was not only difficult to fill in on the spot with no warning, but it had no relevance to the hearing.

Thirdly as we were entering the court I was directed to go to the back of the room. I thought at this point that I should say I had come to speak to the court. The court official went to check this with the magistrate, came back and said I should still wait at the back until I was called to speak. This was a lie, and it led directly to the final piece of violence.

Finally, Shaun was before the judge/magistrate. He was told the charge (faulty brake light), asked whether he understood this (yes), and asked whether he pleaded guilty or not guilty (not guilty). Shaun asked if he could explain what happened and he was allowed to speak for about 2 or 3 minutes. The judge/magistrate didn't seem very interested, said that this wasn't a trial, asked the CPS representative if they wished to pursue the case (yes), and that was that.

At that point I offered to assist the court. Remember I had informed the judge that I had come to speak before I entered the room, and I had been effectively told that I would have an opportunity. In fact the judge reacted with more violence to my offer of help: he shouted at me, said I was abusing his court and if I wasn't careful I would be removed from the court or even worse.

Violence
I said I would explain what I meant by violence and why it was important to think of these four experiences in terms of violence. I would define violence as any use of power to restrict movement or action. There are lots of reasons and precedents for this definition which I won't go into for now, but we can see that it covers things like assault (because after we are assaulted we hurt and our movement is restricted), as well as a wide range of other types of violence. One area familiar to many people which opens up the definition of violence in this way is domestic violence, and here are a couple of quick links 1 | 2.

Let's go back to the headwear example that I started with. Shaun was ok, but imagine another young man coming to the court. He may not look very smart to the court officials in their suits, but the chances are he's made some sort of personal effort to look his best and to prepare himself mentally and physically. For many people these days looking good includes wearing a hat. Many young men in particular habitually wear hats. So much so that the hat becomes a part of their identity.

Then, just before they go into this scary room full of officials who have the power to change their lives, they have to remove their hat. Tradition or something says that wearing a hat before the court is a mark of disrespect, so you have to remove it. And now your 'hat hair' is looking stupid, you're feeling stupid, you can feel your head and your hair and the fact that you're not wearing your hat. Effectively the court has dictated that you feel humiliated before you even start. There is a very close correspondence here with the domestic violence situation of a man denying a woman the possibility of wearing clothes that she feels comfortable in. Both victims of domestic violence and victims of court violence feel less able to act, less able to speak out, less able to defend themselves. They suffer. But what pains me even more is that justice and liberty also suffers.

This violence can be seen again in the case of Ronelle. Legal procedures have taken place, she has been unble to speak out, and an admin error nearly caused her to be imprisoned, have her baby taken into care, give the two of them a record that will last for the next 18 years or more, make it more difficult for them to find work and support themselves to live and grow as a family. This is violence by any other name. We need to recognise this, and as advocates we are in a position to do something about it.

Racism and discrimination

2006-04-22T13:40:00.000+01:00

These weren't subjects that I initially planned to write about here, but the way things have happened I need to say more.

Racism is a serious issue, but it needs to be seen in the context of wider discriminatory practices. One example of discrimination among many is the dalits of India (also known as the untouchables). A quarter of India's population is dalit, but they are systematically abused by many people (including the police, the judiciary, landlords and businesspeople) according to this Human Rights Watch report (see especially chapter VIII: The Criminalisation of Social Activism).

This is not racism, although it is very close structurally to racism. This is the legacy of more than 3000 years of religious and intra-racial segregation, discrimination and abuse. So much so that many Indian people (those in the caste system as well as some dalits) cannot even see the discrimination. And those who dare to speak out are likely to suffer.

It is very often the case that people who suffer discrimination of whatever sort also end up having difficulty communicating their problems. I'm not just talking about the dalits here, but about people in the UK with learning disabilities or mental health problems, working class people, people with few formal educational achievements, poor people, children, old people, people from minority religious groups, ill or disabled people, people who are not heterosexual, or people from minority ethnic communities. For a whole range of reasons these groups of people are more likely to suffer from discrimination, and are less likely to have their problems listened to or seriously addressed.

I am fortunate in many ways. I don't belong to any of these groups. I have a strong voice. I have been able to help some people to speak out and get results.

Ironically when I was working for Social Services & Health, a role where it is important to be particularly aware and careful of potential political implications of everything you do, I got the message that seior management did want advocates to challenge their staff and services. They recognised that there were inevitably people who were not receiving the services they were entitled to, and that these people often didn't have the resources to make effective challenges on their own.

Now that I am helping the Wakefield Children and Young People's Strategic Partnership to develop a Code of Practice for Children's Complaints, there are clear messages being developed about the importance of complaining for children and organisations alike.

Racism is a small element of this wider picture, and I take it as seriously as I do everything else. It is as wrong for a police officer to stop and search a car driver for the colour of their skin as it is for a doctor to not spend extra time making sure they can hear what a woman with a speech impediment is trying to say to them.

The police are doing well in some ways. Following the Lawrence inquiry they have a good definition of racism:

Recommendation 12 of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report states that the definition of a racist incident should be:

"any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or by any other person"
Source: Crime Reduction Toolkits

This is good because it depends on the perceptions or feelings of people, rather than objective and independent evidence which is often difficult to obtain. It has problems becasue it's hard to understand in some ways, especially if you're immersed in the legal system. It is also problematic because we can accept that an incident is racist, but feel that every other point about it makes it impossible to act on (someone wrote 'packey' [sic] on your car, but there are no witnesses and no leads). There is also a good report from Civitas (pdf) that questions the value of the Macpherson definition of 'institutional racism'.

In my quiet advocate's way, I want to work with the police on facing these real issues. They come from the stories of actual people, and they cannot be resolved through traditional policing methods which rely on objective evidence that can be judged in court.

'Quiet?' I hear some of my readers asking... I think I have been writing in a quiet way. Maybe not the headlines: I wanted people to read, but perhaps in retrospect the headlines prevented them from paying proper attention to what they were reading. But the stories themselves are quiet: a young man is quietly taken into custody, records quietly fail to appear, he quietly declines to complain, Shaun and I quietly try to speak in court and are quietly ushered out, Ronelle quietly says 'I used to think the Police were here to help us, but now... now I don't know... I don't think they're very helpful really'.

For years I've been hearing complaints about the police, and usually I'm left trying to help people address problems they can do something about, maintaining the quiet.

These stories remain a quiet protest, a quiet call to action, because I am not shouting about the deaths in police custody, I'm not shouting about the weapons the UK police have issued that international law bans armies from using (CS Gas is a chemical weapon banned under the Geneva Convention), I'm not shouting about the discriminatory record of local police forces around the UK (this report has already been quoted, there's the MacPherson report, Racism still blights police despite post-Lawrence improvements, Police 'frozen solid' in addressing racism, report finds, and many others).

The stories I hear are usually too quiet to get anywhere, but I write them here because I think these quiet and relatively uncontroversial stories are the place to start to make positive changes.

I'm not shouting, and when the original story that started all this (for this blog at least) is republished with the relevant follow up, when the current fuss has died down, I am still hopeful that most people will be thankful that the issues are being raised in this simple way.

Disclaimer

2006-04-20T23:58:00.000+01:00

This blog is the independent work of Henry Fisher, who accepts all responsibility for its content. It is meant to support the work of independent advocacy organisations and independent advocates.

As stated in the very first post: I claim no special knowledge, the blog is about exploring issues and ideas, and don't be offended...

While I accept responsibility for the content of this site, I cannot take responsibility for readers misunderstanding or misusing this content. You are responsible for your own actions and decisions: do act, but do also take care.

Finally, it is important that readers should engage with the blog through contributing comments. I cannot however take responsibility for comments made by third parties.

A family's freedom - £45!

2006-04-19T22:48:00.000+01:00

It never rains, but it pours. I will write about my experiences in the Magistrates Court earlier today, but you'll have to wait a bit.

This morning two officers knocked on my friend Ronelle's door. They said there was a court order, and if she didn't pay £45 straight away they would have to take her into custody. Then they asked if there was anyone who could look after Ronelle's five month old daughter Shara. At the moment, on the spot, Ronelle couldn't think of anyone. She had no money at all. I know she has been short of food recently. Her husband is desparately trying to find some money that's promised to him in London.

My phone was off (I was in a hospital), so Ronelle rang my friend Alison. Ronelle and Alison have met because Alison is a bountiful distributor of things in the community (amongst other talents). She is an insatiable collector, knows many people who give things to her, and passes them on to good homes without a second thought. I've know Samuel and Ronelle for almost four years now, but in the last year things have been very difficult and they needed to know someone like Alison. Unfortunately Alison is also disabled and poor herself.

But faced with the prospect of a mother being sent to prison and her baby being taken into care if you can't find £45 to help, what option do you have? Just before I went to Court I got a message from Alison. She couldn't afford to have this money out of her account for more than 24hrs. After court I had no option but to reimburse Alison. I've just got back from trying to console and reassure Ronelle. Fortunately Shara is keeping her in cheerful company.

£45? The system is prepared to lock a woman up and take her baby into care for non-payment of a £45 fine? How much will this cost? It costs £3125 per month to keep someone in prison (source: Rethinking Crime and Punishment, a strategic initiative of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation). Recent research suggests it costs £633 per week to provide foster care in England, with a funding shortfall of £615.7million across England in 2005/6 (source: British Association for Adopting and Fostering, BAAF). This doesn't include the ongoing damage to family life. It doesn't include the fact that Ronelle would then have a criminal record and would probably find it more difficult to get work, even doing the minimum wage care work she aspires to. And it doesn't include the costs of the Court proceedings and Police time.

What's all this for? A couple of years ago the teenage Ronelle, fresh from Namibia, agreed to have a car registered in her name. The car was sold, but there was some problem with the registration documents. There was a parking fine. The new owner ignored it and Court letters were sent to Ronelle's old address so she never received them. They caught up with her finally when she was 8 1/2 months pregnant, very ill, and unable to attend Court. I sent a message to Court, but so much was happening at the time it all got swamped and forgotten about.

So here we have it: after a minor admin error a couple of years ago I have paid £45 to save a family.

What more can I say? What a ridiculous situation.

How you can contribute

2006-04-18T22:30:00.000+01:00

This is an open and collaborative space. Readers are encouraged to add the thoughts and comments, positive or negative. Comments add a whole extra dimension to the posts.

I realise it may not be obvious how you can contribute, so here is a quick guide. (Contents: Adding Comments | Permanent Links | Glossary)

Adding comments

On the main blog, at the bottom of each post is some extra information and links (see below for glossary):

the first line says who wrote the post and the time
the second line says 'Permanent link to this post' - this is useful if you want to email anyone to read a specific post, or if you want to make a link on your blog or webpage (see below)
the third line says how many comments have been added, and gives a link to 'View/Add comments'

Sometimes you may be looking at a sub-page, showing only one post. At the moment the information and links at the bottom of this page are slightly different, but there is still a link which says 'Add a comment'.

Either way, click on 'View/Add comments' or 'Add a comment'.

You will now be transferred to a new page. Existing comments are on the left, and on the right is a box where you can add your comments.

Type your comments in the box. You can use basic html to format your text, but don't worry about this, it's not important (you can ask me to tidy it up for you if you want).

When you have finished your comment it says 'Choose an identity' and you have three options:

If you have a Blogger account, you can use this. Your comment will be linked to your profile and your blog. If you don't have a Blogger account or you don't want to admit to it, try one of the other options...
Click on 'Other' and a space will open up for you to type your name or nickname, and to give a website address if you want.
Or click on 'Anonymous' if you don't want to give any information about yourself.

You can 'Preview' your comment to see how it will look (and still edit it again if you want). Or you can 'Publish your comment'. It usually takes a couple of minutes for the comment to show up on the main blog.

Thank you for contributing :-)

Permanent links
These are useful if you want to reference a post, e.g. send someone an email telling them to read a particular post, or put a link on a website, forum, or another blog. You can right click on the permanent link and copy it, ready to paste wherever you need. Or you can click on it and you will be taken to a page with just that post - then the permanent link will be in the address bar of your browser - so just highlight this and copy and paste as usual.

Glossary

Post - each article is called a 'post' - ask the computer geeks why, but we're stuck with it now.
Link - click this and it will 'link' (take you) to another part of the World Wide Web, or just another page on this Blog. Links on this Blog are bold and green and when you put your mouse over them they are also
underlined.
Blog - short for web log, a sort of web-based diary, often providing links to other places of interest on the web.
Blogger - a free community website where anyone can simply and easily create their own blog. Give it a try...!
Blog Roll - links to other people's blogs that I like (like a 'roll call', for anyone with a dirty mind...).
Recent Posts - links to recent posts that have been contributed to the blog.
Archives - any post older than 30 days (that is, written more than 30 days ago) will be in one of the archives, and not on the main page.
External Links - other links to websites that I like, but not blogs.

More police racism

2006-04-17T15:31:00.000+01:00

This is my friend Shaun (on the left) with Maxi Jazz from the dance group Faithless. I doubt I'll get such a nice photo this Wednesday – I'm going to Court to be a character witness for him. He appears to be in Court because he's black (and allegedly because a brake light on his car wasn't working).

First of all, I've also been stopped because my brake light wasn't working. I was also breathalised at the same time. It was quite a nice experience really - I'd never been stopped by the police in 12 years of driving and I was interested to see what would happen. They were friendly and polite, the breathaliser was green, they asked me to fix my brake light, they didn't ask for any information about my driving license, MOT or insurance, and that was that. I haven't been stopped since that incident 2 or 3 years ago despite my car being quite old and beaten up.

Shaun is not so lucky. In the last three months he has been stopped by the police on average once a week. Every time they stop him he is given a producer, which means an hour of his time the next day. He is often searched. He has lots of shocking stories. I should point out at this point that he is a musician, performer, dancer, and youth worker. I met him in 1997 when I was more involved in Unity Day and he was working for Pyramid of Arts and setting up Breakers Unify. He's a quiet and unassuming man, but he has a lot of respect from a lot of people and he gets a lot done in the community.

I want to mention some of the stories. I think it's bad enough that he is stopped every week as he is going about doing his community work, but the stories of what happens when he is stopped are much worse.

One time he was stopped in Leeds City Centre in front of loads of people and his whole car was searched for about 30 mins. A take-away meal was emptied out of its packaging onto the passenger seat and left there, and all the while a woman police officer was telling Shaun to 'calm down' and in his words 'grabbing me by the elbow' - as he was calmly trying to say the search was unnecessary. Shaun is such a calm person he wasn't in much danger, but he felt like the woman was trying to provoke him, her partner tipping his food out on his car seat was trying to provoke him, and the fact that this search was carried out in front of a crowd of people was also provocative. Of course they didn't find anything - and of course he was given a producer. This is extreme because it happened in the city centre and his food was searched, but in every other way it is what always happens, including the apparent attempts to provoke.

One time he got away without being given a producer, but it wasn't that cool. Shortly after he was pulled over a second police car arrived, blue lights flashing - it appeared the original officers had called for back-up, fearing this black man might be dangerous. One officer, getting out of the back-up car looked over at Shaun and recognised him ('Aren't you that youth worker?') They still followed procedure and searched him, presumably 'just in case', but he didn't have to go to the police station the next day.

Another time he was recognised again. The officer asked 'Didn't I stop you a couple of weeks ago?' Shaun: 'Yes, you gave me a producer and everything was ok.' The officer: 'Well, these documents could still be false so I'm going to have to give you another producer.' This was last year, back in the time when he used to always carry his documents around with him because he was stopped so often. But what's the point if you're not going to be believed anyway? Another officer said that 75% of the criminals they caught were black, so it's not surprising Shaun was being stopped.

They also used to claim that he had no insurance. He would show them his insurance certificate - and they still wouldn't believe him! They would say they had called the insurance company and they had no record of him. But he is and always has been insured - you have to be if you're stopped by the police every week.

Earlier this year Shaun was in court for failing to produce his documents. In fact he had produced his documents, but the police had failed to record that he had produced them. He went to Court with a pile of producers, counted them up in front of the magistrate, pointed out that he had always produced and everything had always been in order, and within 10 minutes the case was dismissed.

Since then he has been trying to collect evidence. He has a video recording of him going into the police station and the desk officer saying 'Not you again. I'm not even going to look at your documents - I know they're ok.'

But here we are in Court again...

This is a terrible waste of public money...
A waste of the Court's time...
A waste of Police time...
Most importantly, it can only be described as police harassment, and is a terrible way for anyone to have to live their life.

Surely a stop can be put to this. Can't the Police see from their records that this car has been stopped (several times) already and everything is in order? Shouldn't a quick check of the registration number on the police computer say 'do not stop this person again'? Can the Court be of some help to identify this misjustice and ensure it doesn't continue?

We'll have to see on Wednesday. I'll let you know.

Follow-ups: Undressed, humiliated and lied to (about our experience in Court, and about state violence), and Rather they convict me than abase myself (about our preparations for the next hearing). Also see my comments on Racism and discrimination which do relate. (This update, 15 May).

A few good books I've read recently

2006-04-16T13:26:00.000+01:00

Cereus Blooms by Night, Shani Mootoo (Granta, 1996)
An old woman is brought bound to a stretcher to an Almshouse on a fictional Caribbean island. The only person who will go near her is a gay nurse, himself ostracised from the community. Through his care he pieces together her story and his life changes at the same time. A beautiful and inspirational book.

The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss (Penguin, 2006)
A beautiful and inspirational book again, though probably less relevant to advocacy. While the old woman in Mootoo's book needs to be coaxed back to life, the old men in Krauss's are vividly alive, as are the other characters. One of the best books I've read for a long time.

The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho (HarperCollins, 1995 - orig. 1988)
A simple beautiful book about listening to and following your heart. Short enough that no one has an excuse not to read it.

Stick Out Your Tongue, by Ma Jian (Chatto & Windus, 2006 - orig. 1987)
I bought this after the January NAN meeting to read on my train journey home, and I was a little disappointed that I finished it before I even got to Kings X! On the other hand, this is a truly different voice, and the increasingly haunting dream imagery was more than enough justification for the purchase.

Memoir, by John McGahern (Faber, 2005)
Rooted in the landscape and people of northern Eire, this is a deeply affecting picture of a community which McGahern continued to give voice to all through his life in apparently one of the most important careers of contemporary Irish writing. Sadly he died of cancer last month, but I'll be reading more of his books.

The Possibility of an Island, by Michel Houellebecq (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005)
I was blown away when I read Atomised in 2001 and I've since read all of Houellebecq's books. The Possibility of an Island ended up being a bit heavy going for me, although maybe I just wasn't in the mood. It is still a very good book I think, and the reason he comes across as such a misanthropist seems to me to be the fact that he really loves the potential of people, only to be constantly disappointed... He seems to want to shock people out of their apathy: if you understand him you'll laugh your head off, otherwise prepare to be properly shocked and probably disgusted.

Reading and self development

2006-04-16T10:33:00.000+01:00

Note: This post lacks focus and didn't achieve want I wanted, but I'll leave it here for completion and because it's not without value. Henry, 17 April

I read a good book yesterday, which I'm happy to recommend: Erasure by Percival Everett. Currently available for 99p from Waterstones, in what looks to be a Faber promotion ('Try me for 99p').

I seem to be reading a fair amount of fiction these days which I'll come back to later. I've certainly read a lot in the past, and a lot of non-fiction too. In between I go for long periods without reading much. I fear becoming like Rimbaud's 'Sedentaries', who I always see as people who get too bound up in reading and don't take enough action. Of course Rimbaud gave up Poetry at the age of 19 and eventually became a gun runner and slave trader in Africa, which is maybe more action than was necessary (I have a private theory that he was Joseph Conrad's model for Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, and then later in Apocalypse Now!).

But as long as we don't get too lost in fiction, what happens to us when we read? Certainly for me yesterday, reading Erasure, I recognised a lot of things. I recognised people like me, and I recognised some of the challenges that were being faced (both in the novel and in the novel-within-the-novel, the race issues, the issues of creativity and self-creation, of work and place-in-the-world, and the references to continental philosophy). At the same time there were recognitions of difference. Of course I'm not an 'African-American' academic, but this is a banal observation: it is only through the initial recognition (I don't want to use the word 'identification') that we can begin to recognise the important subtle differences, and it is largely the subtle differences that are important...

So I come back to the idea of incorporeal transformations. Erasure is a book that made me think quite a lot, particularly through those subtle recognitions and differences. In part it made me see who I am, who I'm not, what I might be, and what I'd like to avoid, all in slightly different ways than I've seen before (which is what every book has the possibility of doing).

It's possibly changed me, or at least it gave me the possibility for change. So I may not be the same person I was two days ago, and the way I interact with other people could well also have changed.

This is what people say after they read books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (check out this link, it's excellent) or Stuart - A Life Backwards (even though Mark Haddon is so naive and annoying). Of course these are two examples of books for which big claims are made - they'll make you understand autistic or homeless people - which are quite ridiculous really.

Nevertheless, this is the reason why many books are worth reading: they give us access to other voices, which help us to understand other people, which help us to listen to other people with more open minds, which changes us as individuals.

It certainly seems to me that exploring other voices through literature is a very helpful way of opening up advocates ears and eyes to the experiences of their partners, and the possibilities of their own interventions.

Why free standards matter

2006-04-14T23:59:00.000+01:00

I sent a link to this blog article to someone last week and I'd forgotten it already so I'll post it now that I've found it again.

Good reasons to use Firefox, Open Office and other free and open software, from a man who knows...

Why free standards matter

Racist police actions

2006-04-14T13:26:00.000+01:00

Update, Monday 15 January 2007

This is a very old post but people are still finding it through Google searches and it needs an update. A group of people working with the council supported a Kurdish youth group. Something happened to one of the young people and issues were raised on this blog. A lot of positive work was done as a result - threats of legal action by the police have a tendency to motivate a blogger! By June the issues with the police were resolved (do look at this post).

The situations described are now well in the past. Readers of this blog are advised to click on the title (Advocacy Blog) and concentrate on more recent posts.

---

Update, Thursday 20 April, 11:50 PM

This post has been temporarily removed while the Advocacy Action Committee considers threats of potential legal action by West Yorkshire Police.

Please see the Disclaimer for further information about the relationship between this blog and Advocacy Action.

There have been some positive discussions today about how to move forward on the issues that have been raised, and it has always been my intention to move forward positively. I would like to stress that I have never suggested that any individual officers are racist - the post refers to racist actions. (Just as I believe in my work with vulnerable people we cannot call any individual 'stupid', but we all do stupid things occasionally.)

There was one particular officer who was identified personally in a comment I attached to the original post. I have heard today that this officer was upset about being identified in this way and felt that they were thereby associated with the alleged racist actions. I am sorry for any upset caused by this misunderstanding, and can clearly say that after several years of working with this officer the thought would never cross my mind that they were themselves racist.

There will be further updates after due deliberation on the issues.

Incorporeal transformations*

2006-04-14T09:51:00.000+01:00

I tried this idea out during some training I delivered recently, and it went down quite well. Then yesterday I was talking to an advocacy scheme manager and a trainee social worker who also really appreciated the thought, so despite the unwieldy title...

'Incorporeal' means 'not of the body', or perhaps more importantly for us 'not visible', or often even 'not communicable'. So these sorts of transformations are hard to see or describe, but they are very important, and we can certainly feel them and recognise them.

My favourite example comes from a novel called Remembering Babylon by the Australian writer David Malouf. The book focuses on Gemme, a character caught between worlds and spaces, but in this scenario Gemme is not so important. What is important is that he is the excuse for Janet (13) and her younger sister to go often to tea at Mrs Hutchence's house. They would be joined by Mrs Hutchence's niece Leona, and two local lads, George and Hector (all around 18 years old). One day, a day apparently like any other, the children and the young adults are playing their games around the tea table, Leona in charge as usual, when Janet suddenly starts to see things she has never seen before. In particular she sees the way Leona is managing George and Hector, and the way George and Hector are competing for her favour. Suddenly a whole range of subtle signals becomes visible to her as this new understanding settles in. Janet feels as if she has changed (transformed).

I would say (and I don't think Janet or Malouf would disagree) that she had learned something in the true sense of the word: like learning to ride a bike, Janet now has access to some knowledge that is 'in her body' that was not there before.

If that is a bit difficult to understand, think back to your own experiences of learning to become an advocate. At first there are some rules and methods; you see other advocates working, but it's generally very like what you've seen before from social workers or whatever. At some point however it's likely that something will have 'clicked', that you stopped asking such directed questions of your partners for example, and could now feel the advantage of people struggling to express their problems in their own voices. Or maybe you didn't have this moment of realisation, but you can still look back and feel a transformation in your practice between starting out as an advocate and now.

The reason for my interest in incorporeal transformations is threefold:

How does it affect the people we work with?
How does it affect the way we work?
How does it affect the way we learn (about advocacy)?

I will end with some brief thoughts in response to these questions.

Many of the people we work with are lacking in knowledge in one way or another. They may not know what they want, what they are entitled to, or how to get it. The traditional model of knowledge says 'give someone the information so they can know it', but again and again we see that giving people information is not enough. What is needed is an incorporeal transformation where that knowledge gets into people's bodies: so they can feel able to ask for something, so they can feel like they know what they want, so they can feel that when they look at things around them they are more confident, understanding, and independent.

I think our work as advocates often addresses these issues already. The pioneers of advocacy were pathetic in the true sense of the word (in touch with feelings and experience - it still has this meaning in French), and their methodology naturally reflected these needs. We are not advice workers, we don't deal with information in the same way as other professionals. It is still beneficial to have an awareness of the feeling of incorporeal transformations however because this helps us to see them when they happen, and it helps us to see that if we are seeking to support change, this is one of the best ways for this change to happen in our partners.

Finally, in terms of learning, the traditional approach as still seen in schools is to give information and then test the memory. This is a very 'intellectual' approach (in the crude sense of the word) and is completely inappropriate for large sections of society, including many advocates and other caring professionals. I believe that part of the reason for the delays in agreeing national standards, definitions and training programmes for advocacy is advocates' natural aversion to these traditional educational approaches. The advantage of our current approach, although it often creates some confusion at the start, is that it opens itself to that moment after a bit of practice wher it all clicks, and we have a much deeper and more physical understanding of the process as a result.

There are many alternative approaches to education which implicitly value these sorts of approaches - check out those of Freire or Steiner for example.

* Note on title: I could choose a more readily understandable name for this concept, but the advantage of 'incorporeal transformations' is that it is unlikely to be confused for something else, and hopefully the idea will stick in people's minds. There is also a philosophical precedent for the term in the work of Deleuze & Guattari.

Nasty Party Politics

2006-04-12T22:54:00.000+01:00

Advocacy should be far removed from politics, but we live in strange times...

Someone has just forwarded me an email from the local peace group. A group of young people has spent the morning campaigning against the BNP, but the Wakefield Express won't publish a story because of a 'no-platform' policy about reporting BNP issues.

Checking out the Council website I find there are BNP candidates in 12 of the 21 wards in the District, plus a few UK Independence party candidates. There's even a BNP candidate standing in the ward where I live. This is very worrying...

What is independent advocacy?

2006-04-12T21:44:00.000+01:00

OK, so if you've randomly found my blog you may be a little confused. Some simple words of introduction are needed:

independent advocacy works to ensure people's voices can be heard;
it works through special sorts of relationships, called partnerships.

Usually advocates work with people who:

have particular difficulties with communication;
and are having problems accessing services.

Usually these people are labelled as (for example):

having learning difficulties
suffering mental health problems
being disabled
being a child in the 'looked after system' (in care)

Through a variety of circumstances a person fitting one of these descriptions might be referred to an independent advocacy project. They will then be paired up with an advocate.

The advocate will spend some time getting to know their new partner and finding out what they think the problems are – and what they want to do about it.

The advocate's job is to help these views to be developed and expressed – hopefully directly. The goal is self-advocacy: people speaking up for themselves. Advocates do not give advice and they don't try to influence people to do what might be in their 'best interests' (there are plenty of other professionals who do this.

OK, so that's the brief introduction. For another version targeted more at people who might need an advocate see the equivalent page on the Advocacy Action website. For the next stage, I will write a new post soon about 'what's great about advocacy' that will be the next step, and a little more thoughtful - so keep watching this space...

Where's all the money going to come from?

2006-04-11T20:30:00.000+01:00

I just got home this evening to an election leaflet boasting about our Council Tax being the lowest in West Yorkshire.

But 18 months ago I started noticing warning signs about the lack of money in Wakefield District. Social Services had a big cash injection after the damning Joint Review a few years ago, and that had run out (thankfully they did a good job of improving services). I don't follow the details but it seemed in late 2004 a big overspend was discovered and the Council has been clamping down on spending since then.

And since then we have started to embark on a merger of Education and Social Services (which is going to cost a lot of money) and the local PCTs are also going to merge (which is going to have some expensive knock-on effects).

In between, funding that had previously been promised to some local projects has disappeared; Council staff seem to be in a bit of an extended limbo, not knowing about what the final budgets are going to look like; there are rumours about staff cuts; and it goes on...

So I can understand a lot of this, even if I don't like it, but what I can't understand is why in this climate of multiple financial burdens the Council is boasting about keeping our Council Tax down. Personally I'd like to pay a bit more, even if it only kept services at their current level, and I'm not really convinced by this bit of electioneering...