Wise after the Event: Some Comments on ‘A Danger to Themselves and Others’

Abstract

Herschel Prins's paper on 'Social Workers and Potentially Dangerous Clients'1 presents once again for social workers the chimera of prevention, and as such raises a number of important issues about the nature of the social work task. The thesis contained in the paper can be outlined quite briefly, and revolves around the positivist assumption that there is a body of knowledge which it is possible to apply with a fair degree of confidence in determining just who is or who is not likely to be a violent offender.2 In the article are marshalled a number of findings which together suggest a relationship between certain 'signs' and the committal of a violent act, though these separate data are never integrated into a coherent theory. The author goes on to maintain that the failure of social work in the preventive arena can be explained in terms of inexperience, organizational malfunctioning and communication problems, and in this sense echoes the kind of indictment made of social work found, for example, in the Colwell Report. Whilst these factors may undoubtedly play their part in explaining the failure of social workers to act appropriately in order to avert tragic con sequences, we should not automatically assume that the knowledge con cerning the cause of dangerous outcomes is quite so unproblematic as Herschel Prins implies it is. In other words, it is possible that the status of the knowledge which social workers employ is just not up to the sorts of predictive tasks which are expected of it. I am inclined to think that this is the case and that the arguments in this paper do not constitute a per suasive enough case to convince one otherwise. Though I intend to examine in a certain amount of detail some of his propositions, my overall case is that the various post hoc explanations are not welded into a coherent theory with sufficient a priori reliability or