More than 100 social workers staged a protest outside the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) yesterday, panning Minister Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) over comments he made about social workers “not being alert enough” earlier this week.
Asked to comment on a case in which a single mother managed to kill herself and her daughter earlier this month even after the girl told teachers two weeks in advance of her mother's intention to kill both of them, Jiang said earlier this week that the tragedy happened probably because social workers and the police were not alert enough.
The protesters, who were mobilized by the Preparatory Committee for the Social Workers’ Union, said they were not to blame and called on the minister to apologize.
PHOTO: TSENG WEI-CHEN, TAIPEI TIMES
“Instead of blaming social workers for the deaths, the government should think about how to fill the loopholes in the social security network and solve difficulties with social workers’ work,” said Cheng Tien-jui (鄭天睿), spokesman for the preparatory committee. “There are too few of us [social workers], we have too little power, we have too many cases to look after and each of us has too large a geographic area to take care of.”
Cheng said that, on average, each social worker has around 30 cases on hand, and for those who handle domestic abuse, “each has to look after 80 cases.”
In fact, statistics from the Yunlin County Government — the county with the least number of social workers — show that each social worker on average handles 179 cases at a time.
One social worker from Yunlin, Wu Chia-shen (吳家紳), currently has 251 cases — the most in the country.
Besides the heavy workload, Cheng said that social workers often do not have enough protection, either in terms of personal safety or job security.
“Social workers have to travel to individuals or families in need in person, and sometimes they may be attacked or harassed by people who do not welcome them,” Cheng said. “We don’t get much protection or compensation from the government if we run into trouble.”
In addition, social workers who work for local governments are usually kept on year-by-year contracts, “which means that we could lose our jobs at anytime.”
“Lack of protection for personal safety and job security makes a lot of social workers want to quit as soon as they have a chance to do so, and it’s not a good thing for society, because we will always be in need of experienced social workers,” Cheng said. “The government should solve all the challenges we run into before blaming us for things like this.”
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