Fear Fails to Weaken a Young Social Worker’s Resolve

Maria Bertucci’s job frightens her.

From the moment the family services caseworker leaves her office in downtown Brooklyn until her day visiting clients is over, she worries about her safety.

Bertucci fashions a route to the housing projects she serves that seems most secure--walking along tree-lined streets that appear benign, searching out avenue blocks with stores that can serve as havens in times of trouble. She knows exactly where the housing police offices are.

“That’s the building where the teen-ager was shot because he didn’t give somebody the high five,” Bertucci says as she strolls along Navy Walk in the Ingersoll Housing Project. She almost matter-of-factly points out other buildings where there have been shootings, murders and muggings.

Many jobs--particularly those in urban centers--are hazardous. In law enforcement, skyscraper construction or firefighting, for example, the risk is expected and accepted.

But social work? Aren’t social workers all middle-aged women who visit welfare clients’ homes unannounced to check up on them? Not any more.

For Bertucci, a petite woman of 25, preparation for the two or three days a week she spends in some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods entails much more than reading the files on the people she will counsel that day for the city’s Office of Family Services.

Before she leaves her house, she removes her jewelry, puts on a comfortable pair of sneakers, grabs her brown leather satchel and makes sure she has some money in the bottom of it.

The jewelry comes off so it won’t be stolen. The sneakers are crucial because when asked what transportation the city provides for her on the job, Bertucci pointed to her feet. And the money is necessary to appease potential muggers.

The money came in handy a few months ago when Bertucci and another caseworker were in an elevator and a man demanded money. She had $4 and gave it to him. The guy wasn’t happy, she said, but then the elevator stopped, and she and the other worker quickly got off.

Bertucci also doesn’t like to spend much time in halls. They are deserted and there is no fast way to get help.

In one building, she rapped on the gray metal apartment door. No one answered.

“Caseworker,” Bertucci said loudly as she again banged on the door. Her voice and demeanor changed noticeably as she was forced to spend more time in the hall writing a note asking the client to call and set up another appointment.

Bertucci puts herself at this risk because at the other end of the walk and behind the metal doors are people with problems who need her.

Most are single women with children who were homeless and are now trying to adjust to housing-project living. Others are people who are sick, and Bertucci helps arrange for home care or other services.

Part of Bertucci’s job is to ensure the city apartments her clients have are in decent shape. During one such inspection, a mother took Bertucci into her son’s bedroom to show her a window with a bullet hole in it.

“What do you do when the shooting starts?” the boy asked Bertucci.

“What do you do?” Bertucci asked back.

The child told her that he runs.

Bertucci told him it was a better idea to get down and crawl into the nearest building.

“I walked out of there and I said, ‘My God, what am I doing here? Do I have to hand out little information packets not only on how to feed your child properly, but also (on) how not to get yourself shot when there is shooting outside?’ ”

None of her classes as a psychology major at Oberlin College, her tenure as director of community services at the Epilepsy Institute in New York or training she received before going out in the field prepared Bertucci for what she was to encounter.

“I didn’t know until my first day at work that I’d be going out alone,” Bertucci said. When her director explained that to her, she realized she had two choices: “I figured I could just bail out and perhaps later wonder if I could have made a difference, or I could see for myself and make a decision about whether to stay in this.”

She chose to try it. Eight months later, Bertucci is hesitant to say how long she plans to continue. She concedes that friends say she is crazy for putting herself at such risk.

But she says she gets satisfaction from getting a young mother into a program to get her high school equivalency diploma, helping a woman cut through the bureaucratic morass so her son could get the counseling he needed, and helping another young mother enroll in a secretarial training program that also offered day care.

“She’s all right,” said one of Bertucci’s clients, smiling and peering over her glasses at her caseworker. This day Bertucci was helping Barbara, who is ill, fill out some of the forms that seem to come daily--forms for her medical care, forms for recertifying her for social services, forms for her children.

“She takes more time than the others,” says Barbara, a veteran of the system. “She gives me time to talk. She listens.”

Not only does Barbara appreciate Bertucci’s attitude, she worries about her walking around the projects alone: “I don’t like her out there by herself.”

Barbara, who has lived in the housing projects for many years, says the drugs and violence make the area unsafe, even for neighborhood people.

Dom Cucinotta, Bertucci’s boss and district director of the Office of Family Services, believes the social worker’s job is a “badge of protection.”

He believes they become known in the neighborhoods they serve as people who help. And while there is concern, he said, there have not been--at least in his office and others he knows of--instances where caseworkers have been harmed.

Cucinotta doesn’t deny there is danger. He attributes it to crack.

“Crack is the significant thing that has changed fieldwork,” Cucinotta said. “I was in the field in the ‘60s, in the height of the heroin problem, and these kind of fears weren’t there.”

He does not believe in routinely sending two caseworkers out together because sometimes clients won’t open up to the worker as much if there is another caseworker in the room. All his caseworkers know, he said, that they can call the management offices in the projects and get housing police officers to accompany them to and from a building.

For now, Bertucci is working through her fears, doubling up with another caseworker when she feels she has to.

“Some places you feel OK about. Others you don’t. When it’s too isolated, I just don’t go.”