It's a racket.

Some win big, a few eke out a living - the rest work at Starbucks.

As a former social worker, I think that we tried hard to provide support services to families, and in desperate cases, safe homes for abused and neglected children. But by the time a child comes to the attention of the authorities, a huge amount of psychological damage has already occurred.

At the risk of being self-serving, it's not the social worker's fault that the child was permanently damaged with fetal alcohol, has been raped by the parents or parents' friends, or simply has been shown that adults handle stress by becoming irrational and scary.

What social work can do is teach parenting alternatives to violence, and support the kids with life skills and a bit of money until they are 19 and then we kick them out of the system, often literally into the street.

Obviously whatever social work does is not enough. I think it can never be enough.

The solution is not to give your children permanent brain damage and to resist any urges to fuck them.

That sounds like common sense but not as common as you might think.

If we took all this money and locked criminals up can you imagine how great society would be...but the whole industry around cops and judges and social workers and lawyers and welfare would never allow it...can't get rid of a multi-billion dollar industry. Just like the war on drugs in America.

Social work (in the real world, not ideally) is about prevention. To stop the troubled and the marginal from harming themselves and others. No one is going to pay huge money for that.
Just saw an article about the $9bln+ YVR improvement proposal, where they'll put a forest into the terminal. Because when I think "airport terminal", I think "forest"...
But it's shiny and ostentatious, and people like that.
Social work is unglamorous and often grimy. All the feasible choices are usually bad, so hopefully the least bad one is chosen. But not always, because... Just because. These are economically unproductive and difficult clients that nobody cares about very much and no one wants to deal with. They are the "unnecessariat", and almost everyone wishes they would just go away.
It's set up for limited gains by definition. And you're lucky to get that.
And there is NO value given to preventing a problem, and nobody appreciates it. Because successful intervention and prevention are not prioritized and fully funded, firefighting and crisis management are the default.
What sort of effectiveness can you get out of a system like that?

I've obviously met too many medical and social workers.

I saw an ad, $76k per year to start with a bachelor of social work. More than 1.5 a teachers starting salary. Your drug addicts are worth more than your children BC. Mainly because the wealthy aren't terrified of the latter.