Abstract
In his influential paper, ‘Social work and social presence in an online world', Walter LaMendola (2010) put forth the idea that social workers need to go beyond mobile emerging encounters of place and space (see Ferguson, 2008) toward the development of ‘innovative tools to help people navigate and find new knowledge in the birthing of a culture propelled by mediated encounters’ (LaMendola, 2010: 113). The subsequent decade witnessed a proliferation in the everyday use of digital technology enabling the storage and flow of information (Horst, Sinanan and Hjorth, 2021), with an estimated one in three internet users being children (Livingstone, Carr and Byrne, 2016).
The recent worldwide pandemic of 2020 saw governments across the globe order their citizens to stay at home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. This singular response to the pandemic enabled a significant digital shift in all areas of social, political and economic life – a global acceleration that transformed lifestyles and working lives. The pandemic was a catalyst for the widespread adoption of digitalisation (Amankwah-Amoah et al., 2021). It also led to an unprecedented change and development in the provision of social work, which not only propelled but also necessitated that the sector navigate and develop services to encompass the mediated encounters of the type LaMendola foresaw over a decade earlier (Mishna et al., 2021).
For children and young people, the digital shift brought about as a direct result of the pandemic resulted in the transformation of their daily lives, as schools were closed to all but the most vulnerable children. Children’s social lives were disrupted and circumscribed so that everyday activities, such as playing with friends, were denied. For children who are looked after away from home, legislation was swiftly enacted to facilitate remote practice, which meant that assessments, visits, statutory reviews and other meetings could be held on video-conferencing platforms or telephone calls (Department for Education, 2020).
One could argue that LaMendola’s (2010) article was also prophetic in recognising that service users would inhabit the virtual spaces afforded by YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and others. Moreover, we also saw as never before, both children and adults glued to their mobile devices (Turkle, 2006). Importantly, LaMendola highlighted that one of the difficulties the social work profession would face would be the way in which people form associations or, in other words, communities. He also added that the issues and challenges that would emerge for the profession are in actual fact common to all societies, that is, ethics, trust, responsibility, obligation, common good, common interest, reciprocity and participation (LaMendola, 2010: 116).
The collection of articles that make up this special issue of Adoption & Fostering are aimed at exploring the changes in digital social work practice with children and families that grew in and beyond the context of the pandemic. The insights emerging from these articles suggest that technology and the digitalisation of practices, services and systems are having a widespread impact and, echoing LaMendola (2010), raise moral and ethical questions about the provision of services, the creation of self-help communities, the use of data, and children’s digital rights and experiences.
In seeking to introduce this special issue, we have grouped the articles into a series of themes that in many ways mirror the issues and challenges LaMendola mentioned a number of years ago. Firstly, the dichotomy of age and relationships. The articles by Phippen and Bond, Corliss, and Stabler all speak to digitalisation, children’s rights and their agency. A common feature of these contributions is that young people in the care system make use of their smartphones and other digital devices as a ‘lifeline for normality’ (Phippen and Bond). The articles also make transparent adult perceptions of social media use as negative (Children’s Commissioner, 2017; Simpson, 2020). Added to this, they challenge the existing narrative that is often linked to young people in the care system, that is, vulnerability. Equally, the articles highlight that the practitioner response is often one-dimensional, forgetting that children’s engagement with the digital world will be framed by the context of age, gender, legislation, parenting and also the social and economic background that is inhabited inside the digital society. In sum, we see through these articles that: ‘The digital environment must take into account the evolving capacities of children as they age and mature, develop knowledge and understanding and experiences’ (5Rights Foundation, 2021).
Returning to the issues and challenges discussed by LaMendola (2010), the articles by Mitra, Bhaskar and Bode, Cree and Mackenzie, and Larkins and colleagues fit comfortably within the realm of trust, common interest, reciprocity and participation. Cree and Mackenzie’s work, which constitutes a description of a collective ethnography, illustrates the importance of relationships and record-keeping in adoption services, based on their experiences of using digital tools and resources to unpack their shared history. Their story was only possible because of the transformation that wide-scale digitalisation has enabled. This transformation has democratised knowledge and its accessibility so that individuals can now seek out and explore information that was either not made available or not easily accessible. This is evident in Nixon’s paper in this edition, which illustrates how consultation with children regarding the resumption of face-to-face hearings in Scotland led to a new hybrid model being developed. The continued importance of relationship-based practice, alongside any digital innovations, is also emphasised in the paper by Larkins and colleagues, which provides a framework for considering how participation and accountability might be extended in interpersonal practice between children and social work or education professionals, and through children’s collective relationships with systems.
Mitra, Bhaskar and Bode examine the challenges, benefits and limitations of the digitisation of the adoption process in India, which began in 2015. The development of this system in India brought with it the inadvertent implication of unravelling the closed system of adoption, as social media is now enabling birth parents and children to search for one another.
In the articles presented here, we can see that characteristics of trust, common interest and reciprocity are no longer within the exclusive gift of social work practitioners. These characteristics can all be independently achieved by those who are subject to social care services. This realisation requires us to return to LaMendola (2010: 116) who remarked: ‘Across any number of personal networks, practices emerge with use and human activity with computing artifacts commonly result[ing] in unanticipated practices’. We would argue that if social work is going to continue to adapt successfully to digitisation, there is a need for the profession and its leaders to ‘engage intimately with the practices of everyday life’ (LaMendola, 2010: 117). This will mean returning to and upholding as a central tenet relationality, which can only be achieved through trusting, caring and mutually respectful relationships with the people social work practitioners work with.
This collection of articles also confirms the more recent concern raised by Goldkind, Wolf and LaMendola (2021) that the widespread use of digital devices and technology enable the almost invisible collection of data through everyday interactions, which can tend to concentrate knowledge and power in the hands of large-scale systems, rather than with individuals or communities. We echo their encouragement that ‘individual social workers and the social work field are responsible to apprehend and to protest advancing technological mechanisms of disenfranchisement’ (Goldkind, Wolf and LaMendola, 2021: 251).
At the same time, we call for action within the social work profession to seek out and actively promote any opportunities that digital adaptations offer for deepening relationships, redressing inequalities and holding systems to account.