A number of therapists have contacted me over the years to tell me, in strict and frightened confidence, how traumatic it was for them to work with the DWP. They chose this employment because it paid a salary and because they thought they could be useful to claimants but very quickly came to realise that they were working in an intentionally abusive, coercive culture. When they couldn't endure being abusive or coercive any more they left.
They had not been aware of the reality of the culture they were entering, and it was striking that independently all of them used the same language that so many claimants use about their experience. They were frightened, a kind of pervasive and difficult to define anxiety around being found out, punished, removed from some kind of support if an undefined authority discovered they were talking about their experience.
Who was this authority? Not any professional body. Employment and unemployment, health and its opposites hold and infuse profound meanings throughout our society; in counselling and psychotherapy we have been explicitly told that getting people 'to increase their employability so they can get work, and help keep them at work' is an ethical opportunity. What might be called the Superego or the External Locus of Evaluation (forgive the very inaccurate shorthand) – the part of us that learns moral standards and values from superiors – would have been all for it.
Was the DWP the source of this anxiety? It is (or it should be) common knowledge that the DWP has particular powers of surveillance and control over vulnerable people’s lives. A dedicated free hotline has been available to anyone to anonymously report a claimant to the DWP for fraud, for decades. No research has been done on numbers of malicious calls, but once a call is made benefits are stopped. Claimants have had long-lens photographs taken of them in their own homes, been secretly filmed to see if they're having a relationship, had photos of their drying underwear taken to gain evidence of them not living alone. The Human Rights Act does not apply to people on benefits.
In 2021 claimants were made to photograph themselves with their right hand on their street sign, sometimes holding that days newspaper, and threatened with loss of their benefits if they couldn't.
This wasn’t a central government policy, it wasn’t a DWP policy. It emerged from individual, multiple Job Centres. Universal Credit Director, Neil Couling, said it looked like fake news and it took him three days to admit that it was ‘legitimate.’ So yes, anxiety about what individual people in individual centres who work for the DWP can do with impunity should be very real. If you’ve worked as part of it you will know this very well.
Shame might have been part of the anxiety, I never asked. Without entering in to a boundaried therapeutic relationship how would I? “The things you’re saying sound terrible. You were working as part of a team that you saw doing these things day in day out, and I’m wondering how that might have been for you?” Exploring this kind of experience even at this beginning stage has the potential to be very unpleasant for the person thinking about it, and none of the therapists who approached me were asking me to be their therapist.
It might be that, knowing I have a particular stance on this subject, they came to me because I would believe and understand them? Less consciously, that speaking with me might be an act of some kind of confession? Therapists and priests know the power of speaking a secret to a trusted person who is taught both to listen without judgement and how to keep those secrets. Priests can offer absolution and although judgement or forgiveness are not any part of a therapists role, many therapists seem keen to offer forgiveness in the guise of helping a person understand why they made various choices, or suggest forgiveness as a way to bypass difficult feelings, often their own. I'm not one of those therapists, it's not my role or need to 'make' people feel good, bad or indifferent about what they've done or not done, and forgiveness is not part of my vocabulary in any setting. Forgiveness and punishment is way outside of my understanding of the function of therapy, and it may be that some therapists who came to me wanted me to punish them?
Whatever the case, our conversations lasted no more than a couple of hours.
Those who found this employment satisfying, satisfactory or even just worth the money have not been in touch. The lack of information on experience of this psychotherapeutic ‘opportunity’ is information in itself.
Another reason for the dearth of material is that for many years the DWP refuses to allow any independent research into any part of their role, function, activity or outcomes and routinely conceals its own research. This should be profoundly interesting to a profession that encourages its members to work with any group. But it's not.
In a culture that repeats the mantra of 'evidence based practice' there was something weird about the complete lack of references in Therapy Today articles announcing the opportunities available for counsellors to work with the DWP. Academic publishing is a factory that churns out contradictory evidence all day long, it's always possible to find evidence to back up any assertion, but these articles contained none. They didn't need to. It is so blindingly obvious throughout to our professions that Work Is Good For You and Unemployment Is Bad For You that to question this would be like questioning if women could be doctors.
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