Guide-lines for Social Workers in Coping with Violent Clients

How does it happen that the well-intentioned efforts of local authority social services departments to offer guidance to their social worker employees in coping with violent clients actually result in declarations that violence is inevitable and in the expectation that the social worker on the ground will manage it? This paper discusses the problem of violence against social workers and the response of four local authority social services departments as expressed in guide-lines issued to staff. The first part of the paper examines the background of news events and theories of aggression against which the guide-lines were produced. The second part discusses the response of the local authority social services departments as employers to the problems of assessing risk and coping with violence and its aftermath.