In forty years as a social worker, I've watched laws and reforms come and go—in healthcare, in social services, one after another. There's one principle that's always been held up as crucial: "the centrality of the person" in the helping process. I've tried to keep that idea close, but too often, serious organizational failures—and worse—have threatened to bury it altogether.
You can lose sight of the person when you have to tell a mother her child with a language delay will have to wait a year for an evaluation. When you redesign public service buildings without thinking about wheelchair access. When you notice that foreign-born clients always get addressed informally, while severely disabled children and teenagers never get a spot for therapy. When you roll out systems so high-tech that ordinary people can't even submit an application. When a social worker is expected to conduct thirty intake interviews in a single morning.
There's another serious risk: reducing people to categories. Services get organized by age group, by type of problem. It may be more efficient. But we end up treating people like specimens to be filed away.
I've heard it said many times that social services are only as good as the people who work in them. I don't entirely agree. You need proper facilities and adequate resources too. But it's undeniable that what matters in any helping relationship is the human connection between the worker and the person asking for help. We have to truly believe—not just say it—that there must be real exchange, real communication between us. When someone in need meets with genuine recognition, they find the confidence and resources to move forward, to try new paths out of their difficulties.
I want to tell you about three encounters from my forty years of work. All true. Brief stories of three meetings that changed something.
Alia
A Roma family with their youngest daughter, Alia, ten years old, with severe physical and cognitive disabilities. After long, patient work by volunteers from the Community of Sant'Egidio, they finally bring her to the public health clinic. The neuropsychiatrist comes out of the room, pinches his nose, and asks me: what can we possibly do with this child—so dirty, already so damaged?
In the end, my colleague and I were the ones who worked with Alia. We tried to get her into a rehabilitation center—without success. We fought to enroll her in school, at least formally. We worked to get her family accepted into an organized camp, so they wouldn't have to squat on the edges of empty fields, cut off from any resources.
When Alia's parents came to the clinic, every worker would disappear into their offices because of the smell. My colleague and I would open windows, but we made sure to give them a proper welcome, for as long as they needed.
One day, Alia's mother gave us a real lesson in dignity. My colleague ran into her in front of the parish church, where she was asking for alms. My colleague greeted her and reached for her wallet. But the mother, tears in her eyes, said: "No, thank you. I can't accept from you." My colleague was moved to tears, and they embraced.
A "Person"
For years, a woman would come see me at the clinic. Her children were grown, but she'd stop by for advice, so often that my colleagues would call and say, "Your little old lady is here again"—though she wasn't old at all.
She talked about her eldest daughter, married to a poor man, then widowed, jobless, with four children, the youngest with some problems. This woman kept asking me to speak with her daughter, who lived outside my area—at the far opposite edge of the city.
I had no intention of getting tangled up in something so complicated, or making this woman travel across the whole city for nothing. But after so much insisting, I finally gave her an appointment, while making clear I probably couldn't do anything for her.
One morning, a woman showed up. She was hiding her youth under extra weight and her missing teeth behind her hand, but she was decent in appearance and spoke with perfect courtesy. She described her difficult economic and family situation. But maybe what she really told me was about her fragility, her insecurity facing all these problems.
I listened. Then I gave her directions: where to go, whom to contact. When she left, I apologized, saying I was sorry, that I'd warned her I couldn't really help. But she looked at me and said: "Thank you anyway. You did so much for me—because you treated me like a person."
The Addict
Luana was barely more than a girl. Drug-addicted, HIV-positive. At twenty-three, she had a three-year-old daughter from a relationship with a much older man—already married, living with another woman.
Her family of origin was broken, ruled by drugs—both as consumption and as income. A confused young girl whose ex had taken the child from her, perhaps justly, at a particularly bad moment in her life.
It wouldn't have been easy to help this unfortunate young mother get her daughter back. The addiction. No house. No job. No family to support her. But I looked past all that and saw only a young mother with a fierce bond to her child and fierce determination to care for her.
After some meetings, I confronted Luana with her responsibilities. I laid out the situation clearly, harshly even. I asked her what she planned to do to get custody back. She reacted with anger. She stormed out, slammed the door, cursed at everyone—including me. But a few days later, she came back. She asked for help herself. Then we worked together—really worked—to find solutions to her problems. At one point, during a session, she said to me with great seriousness, but also embarrassment: "You see, I keep calling you by your first name, sometimes I'm rude. But that doesn't mean I don't respect you. That's just how I am. I've understood that you want to help me, and you treat me like someone who should be grown up by now, a mother—not like an 'addict.'"
Rita Massi, 2011