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Help that harms
System abuse constitutes a significant threat to family stability that makes parenting even more of a challenge for parents with learning difficulties.
System abuse shows itself when people's problems are made worse by the services that are intended to support them. As an umbrella term, it refers to institutional attitudes, policies and practices that hurt children, harm family integrity, or infringe basic rights.
System abuse is a form of bad practice. But where bad practice does not always damage those it afflicts, system abuse does – either because the individual or family is particularly vulnerable or because the bad practice is particularly serious or sustained.
A huge amount of effort has been put into investigating physical and sexual abuse. By contrast, there has been very little research into system abuse.
There are probably all sorts of reasons for this omission. Official agencies are more prone to secrecy than openness about their own failings, and whistle-blowers are often dealt with harshly. In any case, system abuse usually arises as a result of the actions of more than one agency. Only those affected may see the full picture and they usually lack the power to speak out or, when they do, their voices go unheard.
Because system abuse has a long fuse, it is hard to link cause and effect without close knowledge of an individual or family's personal history. Without such a perspective it is all too easy to mistake the signs of system abuse for something else. For instance, problems encountered by parents with learning difficulties are frequently put down to their own limitations when they owe more to deficiencies in the support services.
System abuse presents itself in a myriad of different forms. Some of the characteristic manifestations of system abuse by families our research include:
Unwarranted intervention in family affairs
Lack of continuity in service delivery
Failure to involve parents in decisions affecting them or their children
Passing the buck
Taking advantage of the parent's learning difficulties
Treating the parents as less than fully adult
Undermining the parents' authority in their own home
Judging parents by standards and values that are foreign to their neighbours, family and friends
Applying standards of behaviour to the parents that are not maintained by service workers and professionals
Diminishing the importance of family relationships and undervaluing the strength of family bonds
Using parents' fears of losing their child to secure their acquiescence
Gender bias
Failing to respond to problems until a crisis erupts
Seeing only the evidence that confirms prior opinions
Forming snap judgements on the basis of partial evidence or enquiries
Experts who deviate from their field of expertise
Practitioners who interpret their role idiosyncratically and fail to follow laid-down procedures
Poor communication with parents, inaccessible practitioners, and the provision of contradictory, inaccurate, or insufficient information
All these factors contributed to parents' widespread perception of the service system as a juggernaut before which they were merely hapless and unheard victims.
System abuse becomes more of a problem the more people lack the means to resist its pull. The fewer resources and supports people possess the more vulnerable they are to system abuse. The more they rely on the service system for support the more they risk being let down.
Many people possess the adaptive capacity to absorb or shrug off the kinds of institutional failings listed above. Others have a much thinner protective layer. For people and families operating on the edge of competence, whose coping abilities are stretched, the extra burden imposed by unresponsive services may be enough to push them past breaking-point.
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