Going virtual: Digital social service delivery to vulnerable families

With the onset of lockdown measures in response to COVID-19, social service providers were forced to pivot to virtual support with little warning or forward planning. For Anti-Poverty Week, we examine what this might mean for clients. In today’s analysis, Robbie Fordyce (@r4dyc) of Monash University (@Monash_Arts), Milovan Savic (@nav0lim) of Swinburne University of Technology (@Swinburne), Policy Whisperer Kay Cook (@KayCookPhD) of Swinburne University of Technology (@SwinHASS), and Kath Albury (@KathAlbury) of Swinburne University of Technology (@AdmsCentre) share their research into how family welfare workers and their clients view the potentials and drawbacks of virtual support. This blog draws from the research report Doing better for vulnerable young parents and their children: An exploration of how technology could catalyse system transformation.

Social services were forced into a quick pivot

If COVID-19 has done nothing else, it has exposed every fault line and crack in society’s fabric. The strain that has been put on our safety net has been enormous, with record numbers of new benefit recipients, women in need of crisis accommodation in order to escape violent households, and families in need of food parcels to name but a few.

On top of these difficulties, social distancing and lockdowns have brought new challenges to the social service sector. While exacerbating pressures, COVID-19 has also accelerated the push for new ways of accessing and delivering social services. The use of technology in the social service sector, described by the Swinburne Social Innovation Research Institute as Social and Community Services 4.0, has been touted as a way to shift intensive and face-to-face services into digital and mobile contexts.

Technological solutions such as chatbots, smart devices, automated decision-making tools, and other platformed services can mitigate some of the practical limitations on in-person contact. The context of coronavirus makes this particularly important. Social workers can avoid becoming vectors for people who deserve high quality care. Aided by these digital tools social services can potentially reach some new or hard to engage clients and communities. But before service providers can meaningfully engage with their clients, they need to understand what ‘technology’ means to them.

Almost overnight, social services moved to remote delivery. What do we know about the accessibility and efficacy of remote support? Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels

Practitioners and clients have different views

In 2019, we interviewed 6 frontline family welfare workers and 10 of their clients - young mothers with children who were at risk of child protection intervention. We talked to them about the purpose, value and reliability of digital technologies and social media as an addition to social service provision. Media literacy amongst welfare workers and vulnerable young mothers varied greatly. For both front-line staff and their clients, mainstream social media channels bear less institutional baggage than bespoke enterprise client platforms.

Parties on both sides demonstrated variations in knowledge of and optimism about digital technologies. Welfare workers recognised opportunities introduced by digital technologies for supporting vulnerable young mothers. For example, they praised the potential of online parenting groups and what might be termed ‘mumfluencer’ content.

At the same time, workers were also cautious about digital platforms and concerned that excessive technology use might disrupt connection between parents and children. They also expressed concerns about the appropriateness and reliability of online parenting advices. In particular, they recognised that young parents might encounter misinformation, judgmental and unhelpful environments, and even traumatising material on social platforms:

when people become parents and they're online and there's all this information around - you shouldn't be doing this, you shouldn't be doing that. Putting a lot of blame and a lot of pressure on people to be perfect parents. I think there's unrealistic expectations and trolls that will jump on and make people feel worse about how they're doing (Family Welfare Worker).

Young mothers, on the other hand, experienced digital media primarily as a place of support and connection. Many of them were facing social isolation and a diverse range of vulnerabilities, and social media offered them a mechanism for connecting with support through familiar interfaces. Social media platforms, ranging from Facebook and YouTube to WhatsApp, became embedded in their daily practices. These platforms are easy to use, and do not require high levels of literacy.

Crucially, they are sites of informal peer-support. In the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic, these tools proved efficient in their role of connecting us while remaining physically distant from each other.

Online support can’t work without the (expensive) infrastructure

However, as documented in the Australian Digital Inclusion Index, some members of the community still face significant barriers to (full) online participation. Therefore, digital literacy cannot be assumed, particularly for the most vulnerable in the community. Single parents in particular may not have access to fixed internet, and they are also disproportionately on pre-paid and limited mobile plans.

Digital devices can also be points of tension in domestic violence contexts due to tracking, intimate partner jealousy, perceived excessive costs, and other related issues. Any move to increase social welfare services’ reliance on technological interface would need to ensure that clients could easily access such services, privately and confidentially, without the technology itself complicating existing social issues. It is unknown whether the pandemic has pushed welfare services towards digital service delivery without ensuring such safeguards are in place.

The Federal Government’s Coronavirus Supplement provided some welcome financial relief to vulnerable families, providing additional JobSeeker funds for those in precarious positions. Yet we are likely to see the rate of benefits returned to pre-COVID-19 levels during the period where in-person service delivery remains restricted. This would mean many vulnerable families could be prevented from accessing much-needed services due to the costs of maintaining devices and internet access.

Importantly, increased reliance on online services for both government and social support services also brings additional expenditure for many vulnerable young parents. Consequently, there is an increasing need to account for internet connections in benefits provided to these groups.

What will the future hold?

While digital technologies might enable continued communication during the pandemic and consequent lockdowns, it still cannot fully substitute in-person social work. There are many things that are lost in the mediated context: the very important role of non-verbal communication in conveying additional context and meaning; being able to educate people with devices and services in-person; or even simply the comfort of another human being close by to stave off loneliness.

This is a reciprocal problem, potentially devaluing the efforts of social workers also, by putting them in positions where they may be unable to directly support clients or miss the cues and subtle aspects of the environment that might help them understand a client’s experience. The push to the digital also means increased personal tracking, certainly from government and support services, but also opening up all sorts of other surveillance – from partners, from family, and from others as well. As much as a device provides help, it also opens up new risks.

Digital technologies have a potential to support and complement, rather than replace, existing social work services. There is also a great need to have services that can aid in reducing the need for in-person meetings when coronavirus infection controls are in place. Social media can help in these contexts, and despite their issues – which should not be overlooked – they can make it safer and easier to provide support in the context of a pandemic. Online support groups and digital services may be one way to overcome the physical limitations imposed by COVID-19, and do offer a new mode of social welfare service delivery for society 4.0. Yet there are critical issues of literacy, access, safety and equity still to be overcome.

Read the full report: Doing better for vulnerable young parents and their children: An exploration of how technology could catalyse system transformation.

This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here.

Posted by @SusanMaury