Social Work as a Foreign Language May 10, 2008

Earlier this week, I received a referral for a Bosnian refugee family.  An adolescent daughter reported to her school counselor that she was being beaten at home by her father.  She said her high school aged brother also was violent at times.  She reported that her father left her with two black eyes and a bruised rib after he found out she was sexually active.  Nobody ever saw the bruises; the daughter said she was not comfortable reporting them right away.  She said her father threatened to kill her, that her parents wanted her to enter into an arranged marriage, and all of this left her feeling unsafe.  She stated that the abuse at home made her want to kill herself.

This referral made me nervous.  It was foreign territory–I not only had to mediate conflicts and teach skills, but also work with significant language and cultural barriers.  The worst part was the daughter had left the home to stay with friends already, as part of an emergency safety plan created with the CPS worker.  She said she just did not feel safe at home.  In fact, she told the police that she would kill herself with a gun if she had to return to her parents.  But because my program’s focus is family preservation, the children need to be in the home after a few days or I become disqualified.

My first contact with the family was a visit with the parents, CPS, and an interpreter.  CPS warned me that the father of the family likely would not respect me because I am a woman in a position of some authority.  In the past, CPS had apparently found Bosnian families very private, embarased about CPS involvement, and resistant to services.  With all of the risks and barriers, I was not optimistic about my ability to reunite this family safely.

As has been the case countless times in this job, meeting the family face-to-face changed everything.  Language was not the barrier it was made out to be.  The mother speaks English quite well, the father can understand a lot.  And the interpreter was particularly helpful because he had worked with CPS before.  In the past, my coworkers have hired several interpreters who do precisely what they’re hired to do:  they translate word for word, dealing with language only and not culture.  On the other hand, we’ve also had interpreters who try to be more actively involved, carrying on independent conversations with clients and essentially  attempting to run the intervention themselves.  This interpreter was, in the language of Goldilocks, just right.  He knew what CPS was all about and he was interested in conveying information to the family clearly and in a way that would put them at ease and help them succeed.

After watching the language barrier dissolve rather effortlessly, I observed the family as they interacted.  I observed the father get up, greet me with an extended hand and introduce himself by his first name.  I observed as the mother made traditional Bosnian coffee for the group.  I watched and listened as the father explained the family’s concerns around their daughter’s boyfriend.  He was a high school drop out and purportedly involved in gang activity.  The father described how initially they let the young man come to their home, even though they didn’t like him.  Later, after they found out their daughter became sexually active, they tried to prohibit the relationship all together.  The father admitted he became very upset about the sex and slapped his daughter on the face when he heard the news.  He said he felt awful afterwards.  He was disappointed and thought his daughter deserved much better than this young man who was stealing her away from the family.  The mother cried as she described how her once vibrant and interactive daughter now spent all her time locked in a bedroom upstairs.  Over the weekend, they learned she had a My Space page and was spending most of her time socializing online.  The daughter’s grades slipped and she never wanted to join her mother for shopping or other family activities.  Her mother would make coffee and ask her daughter to talk, and the daughter would sit there silently.  Oh, and by the way, there was no arranged marriage.  There were some jokes about the son of some friends, that was it.  The parents said they had chosen one another and would expect their daughter to do the same.

During the weekend before the referral to my program things came to a head.  The daughter executed her safety plan, which involved going to her boyfriend’s grandmother’s home.  Then the boyfriend showed up there to hang out, which was expressly against the rules established by CPS.  Nobody ever informed the parents where she went.  It was a disaster.  By the time I showed up, the daughter had moved to a mutually agreed upon family friend’s house.  Two days later, she got kicked out of there because her boyfriend showed up when he was not supposed to.

The situation turned out to be one I did not expect, but one that is common with immigrant families.  The children understand English and American culture–not to mention technology–much better than their parents and this enables them to run circles around their families when they want to.  It brings classic teenage attention seeking and limit testing to a whole new level.

I’m still working with the family, but it has turned out to be quite a run of the mill situation.  We had to complete a formal suicide assessment for the teen–no surprise, no real suicide risk.  We have to work on communication, with the help of interpretation both for the Bosnian language and for various aspects of American teen culture.  We have to work on reasonable expectations, rules, and consequences.  Luckily, we do not actually have a suicidal teen on our hands, and even more fortunately we do not have parents treating her in ways that would make an assimilated teen want to harm herself.  My case just got a whole lot less interesting, and right now that’s fine with me.