At Chapeltown Carnival

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

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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

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...

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?

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

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...

...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

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

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

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?

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

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

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:

• Cantonese/Mandarin reading matter sought
• Cats have voices too
  

A practical novel

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

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

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

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

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

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...