What I'm really thinking: The social worker

Like everyone else who goes into it, I became a social worker because I wanted to help people. Very soon, I realised that's not why you do it at all. You can't. As a rule, people can't change – at least, adults can't. I've worked in child protection in an inner city for five years. Your left­wing views go out of the window. You get a skewed view of the world in which everyone is on drugs, ­psychotic, violent. ­Especially men. In my mind, they're all wife-beaters. I pretty much always blame the parents, and some days I just wish I could take all the children into care. But I know that isn't the answer. We can't just take kids away from their parents at the smallest inkling of a less than happy home. You've got to try everything else first. And when the decision is made to put a child into care, it's not an easy one. You've got someone who's lost everything they know, plus they're usually ­suffering the lasting effects of abuse. We have a bad reputation – even Mariah Carey makes a dowdy social worker – but where I work we take pride in the fact that we're doing an important job and doing it well. On a good day, I can see the job as a series of triumphs – we can never know ­exactly what tragedy we're averting, but we know that without our intervention things would be a lot worse. I can't just switch off when I go home, and it can be horribly ­upsetting, but that's part of having the least boring job I can imagine. If I stop feeling that, maybe it's time to do something else. • Tell us what you're really thinking at [email protected]