Great Expectations, mental gymnastics for the bewildered & dissatisfied.

"...few people know the secrecy that is in the young, under terror ".

                           Charles Dickens

Driving about yesterday, running errands for a sister, who having spent thirteen years away tending to my parents' needs & who is currently restoring to her own home, I listened to a community radio  fellow advertising the benefit of reading Great Expectations. I recall he said something about readers' growth as an outcome of reading this book on particular. 

What's not commonly known is that I worked, for about a decade working to protect children from harm, mostly from their parents & guardians. What makes this a devil of a task is the plain difficulty of gathering evidence from the mouths of the children. Yes, I undertook undergraduate studies & specialist training on the matter, but often came up short, shorter than i would have liked on many occasions. 

Now, I read this, tiny part of a sentence expressing Pip's thoughts that so clearly & intelligently articulates the nub of the problem. Had any of my lecturers asked me to right that line on longhand a hundred times, & commit it to memory I believe I would have been more effective. There's something in the simplicity of expression that cuts through all the subterfuges undertaken during training. Though, I did often wonder whether Social Workers more often did a half-arsed job on order to consolidate their futures. Rather than go to "underlying causes" as the Welfare Worker is won't to do, the Social Worker will pat things down, & make pretty for the victim of some heinous social crime "adjust to the circumstances". Like, acknowledge the issue, suck it up & move on.