Part 19 (2/2)
IX
FAMILY CASE WORK
The discussion up to this point has dealt with the family which has not fallen into distress. It has been confined to problems of adjustment. But there are numerous families which fall into distress and need the services of the social case-work agency. Because of limitations of s.p.a.ce and because the principles applying to their care and treatment apply to other kinds of service, the following discussion will treat only of agencies concerned with the care of immigrant families in need of material aid. Of the 8,529 families cared for by the Cook County agent, 6,226 were from the foreign groups, and of the 569 under care by the Cook County Juvenile Court in its Funds to Parents' Department, 386 were foreign born.[72]
Attention is called, however, to the fact that the special application to the care of foreign-born families of the principles supposed to guide the conduct of good agencies in their care of any family calls for the elaboration of much more skillful devices and for much more extensive and closely knit organization than has yet been developed.
This chapter deals only with these special applications of general case-work principles.
The principles of care in any case of need are: (1) That such care shall be based on adequate understanding of the immediate individual problem; (2) that it shall be adapted to the special need; (3) that it shall look toward the restoration of the family to its normal status; and (4) that treatment, whether in the form of relief or service, shall be accompanied by friendly and educational supervision and co-operation.
These are no simple tasks when the family is English speaking, native born, and when no particular difficulties arise from difference in language and in general domestic and social habits. With the non-English-speaking family, the agency is faced with difficulties at each of these points. There is first the problem of getting at the facts as to the nature and extent of the distress and the occasion of the family breakdown.
In addition to the foreign-born families who actually need material a.s.sistance there are many who, because they are laying aside part of their income either to meet past debts or future needs, are living below the standard prevailing in their community. This family needs to be urged to spend more rather than to save. Unless the agency coming in contact with it digs below the apparent poverty and finds the real income, it will be tempted to give pecuniary aid rather than the personal service the family is in need of. Its service must not result in increased dependency.
Special care in applying this principle of all good case work needs to be exercised in the case of the foreign-born family. Moving from one continent to another, with almost every element in the situation changed, makes the adjustment of the family to normal and healthy standards a delicate and important one. We have been told, for example, by thoughtful members of the Italian group, that in their judgment their fellow-countrymen are often led, through unwise alms-giving, not only to pretend to be poorer than they are, but to live in conditions of squalor detrimental to their well-being.
In fact, in order to understand that normal state from which the family departs when its members become applicants for aid from a case-work agency, the representatives of the agency must have at command facts with reference to the standards and practices prevailing in the particular community from which the family under consideration comes. Only then can the need of the family be estimated with any degree of exactness.
When the facts are learned and the nature and extent of the need are understood, there is the question of resources available for treatment and the question of methods to be used in building and maintaining the family life and in fostering the process of adjustment between its life and that of the community as a whole.
To be able fully to utilize resources, to forecast the effect of certain kinds of care, it is surely desirable for the agency to know the life of the national group into which the family has come, the resources to which the family itself has access, and the ways in which others of the group expect care to be given.
THE LANGUAGE DIFFICULTY
The social case-work agency is faced, then, with several quite different and quite difficult problems in equipment. There is first the question of overcoming the language difficulty. The use of the foreign-speaking trained visitor would probably be regarded as the best way of doing this. The supply is so inadequate that the choice has been generally between a person speaking the language and a person knowing something of methods of case work. And unless the visitor is a fairly competent case worker she would probably better be used as an interpreter and not be given responsibility or allowed to make decisions.
The use of an interpreter gives rise to many difficulties.[73] Because these difficulties are so universal and so important to the full use of the opportunities lying before the case-work agency, an attempt was made to obtain information as to the practice and as to the desires of a number of case workers. Case-work agencies, the district superintendents and visiting housekeepers in the United Charities, the Jewish Aid, the Juvenile Court in Chicago, relief societies in other cities, and the Red Cross chapters throughout the country, were consulted.
Six of the ten districts of the United Charities had foreign-speaking visitors. There were 14 in all--3 Italian, 8 Polish, 2 Bohemian, and 1 Hungarian. Nine of these speak other languages besides their own. All the Jewish Aid Society visitors speak Yiddish. The Funds to Parents'
Department of the Juvenile Court has no foreign-born workers, but the Probation Department has 3--Polish, Italian, and Bohemian.
The five Red Cross chapters answering the questionnaire--New York, Brooklyn, Rochester, Buffalo, and Philadelphia--all employ foreign-speaking visitors--11 Italian, 8 Polish, 8 Yiddish, and 2 Russian.
Sixty-one of the members of the American a.s.sociation for Family Welfare Work replied to questions about their methods of work and the devices they had found successful. Twenty-eight of these were not doing work with foreign born or were not doing work along the line indicated. The other 33 described their work and their difficulties, and made suggestions.
Twenty-two of the thirty-three agencies did not make use of the foreign-language visitor, although Fall River in the case of the French, and Topeka in the case of the Mexicans, overcame the language barrier by the fact that their secretaries spoke the language of their largest foreign-born group. Three others did not have foreign-born visitors on their staff, but reported that they had foreign-born volunteers. It is interesting to note that among the 22 cities without foreign-language visitors there are 9 cities with over 100,000 inhabitants, and all but 2 of them have large immigrant populations.
The other 13 cities on the list are all places of less than 100,000 inhabitants, and it is probable that the case-work agencies in most of them do not have more than one worker.
The case-work agencies in some cities with large foreign-born populations come in contact with many of the foreign-born families in distress, but not in sufficiently large numbers to take the entire time of a visitor. In other cities, however, a large part of the work is with foreign-speaking families. In Stamford, Connecticut, for example, 70 per cent of the families cared for are foreign born, and 44 per cent are Italian. In Paterson, New Jersey, 120 of the 840 families were Italian.
Eleven case-work agencies did employ foreign-born or foreign-speaking visitors. Eight of these were in cities of over 100,000 population--New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Cambridge, and Grand Rapids. The other three were in smaller places; Waterbury, with a population of 73,000, El Paso with 39,000, and Kenosha with 21,000. While these 11 agencies do employ foreign-speaking workers, it appears in every case that they either do not have workers of all the groups with which they work, or do not have enough foreign-language workers to do all the work with the foreign-speaking groups. New York City, for instance, has 5 workers who speak Italian, of whom only 1 is an Italian and served in the course of a year over 1,000 Italian families. Philadelphia has only 1 foreign-speaking worker, who speaks Italian and some Polish. It reports the number of families as 526 Italian, 229 Polish, 69 Russian, and 43 other Slav.
There is, however, a decided difference of opinion as to the value of the visitor from the foreign-born group. All the agencies testify to the difficulty of getting workers with the same education and training demanded of the English-speaking visitor. One of the district superintendents of the United Charities of Chicago, who in despair of her work with interpreters began to use foreign-born visitors, speaks of success with exceptional individuals, but says:
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