Spotting the Mediator: A Social Work Intern's Field Notes

When people mention "legal professionals," what comes to mind? Is it Justice Pao's stern and arbitrary authority, Komikado's sharp tongue in Legal High, Kuryu Kohei's tenacity in HERO, or Wang She's righteous aura in The World Between Us? This summer, after logging over two hundred hours of internship at JRF, I watched the JRF office every day from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, brightly lit, with the secretariat, pro bono lawyers, and volunteer interns taking turns working busily.

To me, the members of JRF are warm and deeply humane practitioners of legal services. From a social work perspective, what makes this internship field "most like social work" is probably how its members and the organization itself exhibit, on various levels, the role and posture of a mediator.

The JRF Secretariat in My Eyes

The issues JRF concerns itself with are all-encompassing. Whether it is judicial system reform, rescuing wrongful conviction cases, evaluations of incompetent judges or prosecutors, or human rights issues in Hong Kong and China, all fall within the scope of JRF's services.

JRF members come from diverse backgrounds, with distinct yet fascinating experiences. Within the secretariat, there are "former" interns from various cohorts who have transformed into the organization's management and legal affairs specialists; there are also activists who once stood on the frontlines of protests, who stumbled into JRF to leverage their expertise in information science; and innocent victims of miscarriage of justice like Su Chien-ho (蘇建和) and Hsu Tzu-chiang (徐自強), who once languished in prison in utter bewilderment, entered JRF to contribute their efforts after being exonerated.

In my view, regarding internal organizational affairs, members perform their respective duties across different task groups, doing their utmost to complete the work; yet when it comes to judicial advocacy, members can shift to center their efforts on the values and ideals the organization wishes to embrace, participating in ways and postures "acceptable to themselves." Relationships are built and dynamic forces exist between the organization and its members, as well as among members themselves. The circulation of these relational dynamics turns the organization into what members describe as an "organism"—vivid and resilient.

Spotting the "Mediator"

However, through my observations over these past two months, I have felt that precisely because each member has different life experiences and individual capacities for coping with work stress, conflicts and frictions within relationships are inevitable. Even seemingly egalitarian interaction patterns still conceal underlying power hierarchies. As an outsider without sufficient time and tools to fully understand the emotions and pressures weighing on the members, what I could perceive was the "mediator role positioning" within the organization, as well as the "sincere" attitude displayed during members' interactions with one another. JRF's awareness of power gaps and ideological differences among members, coupled with efforts to treat each other as sincerely as possible, creates a unique environment in which members work.

In my view, JRF members exercise the role of mediator to varying degrees.

For instance, in the internship setting, supervisors across departments share their experiences with interns, becoming mediators who bridge campus knowledge and workplace skills. Furthermore, regarding relational connections among institutional members, some members are adept at "translation" due to work tasks or personal traits, enabling them to be thorough and act as mediators among different departments, positions, and participants in the workplace. Extending this to the institution as a main entity, JRF itself is also an intermediate hub attempting to transmit public opinion and the system! This intriguing coincidence, along with the mutually influencing groups and environment, reveals the significance of the organization's existence and the value of its members' services.

Viewed from another angle, the pressure of serving as a mediator is considerable. Sources of emotional displacement may come externally from the anxieties and venting of grievances by people seeking help; internally, they may stem from differences and conflicts arising when members' personal views on issues promoted by the organization diverge from the considerations and concerns of other members or institutional funders.

How to confront emotional stress responses to achieve a sense of ease and comfort, and how to muster the courage to keep moving forward even after experiencing conflict, is a difficult challenge.

Whenever I asked about their mindset or strategies for dealing with conflict, members often mentioned that no matter what form divergences take or how they manifest, the issue itself is the core of the dispute, and the inherent goodness of members was repeatedly brought up. When feeling "sty-like" (frustrated and cluttered), a direct and frank venting of inner displeasure is followed by the support and backing of neighbors close by. When individuals in the organization present their sincere selves to one another, tension and conflict are released within their relational interactions.

Witnessing the Power of Self-Healing

As my field observation draws to a close, looking back at the beliefs and traits of the organization's members, these perhaps constitute the source of their self-healing capacity. Knowing full well that the probability of successfully advancing an advocacy issue may be extremely low, one still feels discouraged when the reality of failure occurs; after relentless struggle, a rescued wrongful conviction case finally secures the ticket to reopen a retrial, only to be met repeatedly with death sentences finalized over and over again—frustration and disappointment cannot simply be ignored.

Faced with advocacy outcomes, members believe that "hope" exists, confronting setbacks with optimism and looking forward to the near future when an egalitarian culture and a just society will finally be realized. One day, death row inmates returning from the abyss of catastrophe will chat and laugh with you in an office with wood-grain flooring, sharing how they brewed fruit wine of mild intoxication in prison, using the years as a pen and life as stationery to let you see their stories, repaid with tears and heartache.

Side Story 1: Reflections from Past Social Work Interns

"As a non-governmental organization also dedicated to helping work, JRF often makes me feel like I am in an office without social workers, yet brimming with the soul of a social worker. Stumbling into an internship at JRF brought rewards I never could have imagined. Although the practical work I encountered was not social work proper and I could not frequently face clients directly, I still saw many lives through case files and was prompted to think about how social work expertise can be applied in the judicial dimension. I am so glad I came to JRF, which allowed me, while learning helping work, to understand how helping professionals other than social workers utilize their expertise to help others."

~ A Little Social Worker Who Stumbled into the Legal Circle — 2017 Summer Intern Reflection

"Social work is not merely what we see on the surface; it allows us to think about how to break out of limitations, avoiding becoming a conveyor belt of welfare and losing the essence of a social worker. After half a year of internship, I cannot claim how much I resemble a social worker or how much I have grown, but I have achieved new awareness and breakthroughs regarding the narrowness and limitations of my past perspective."

~ Reforming by Breaking Through Prototypical Frameworks — A Social Work Intern's Reflection on the Social Work Profession

Side Story 2: Responses from Senior Peers | Is it Recommended for Social Work Students to Intern at JRF?

Reasons to Recommend

1. Law is also a very important component of social work. Learning at JRF allows for a deeper understanding of how the legal perspective views judgments passed on individuals and their resulting impacts. It also enables one to experience the differences between distinct modes of thinking (social work education versus legal education), groping repeatedly to ascertain what values one identifies with (Summer + Semester Intern A)

2. Although compulsory courses in the social work department seemingly lack law, in reality, notifications or applications across various fields must be executed in accordance with legal provisions. Furthermore, frontline social workers often need to accompany clients to court or collaborate with lawyers. Interning at JRF provides an excellent opportunity to understand case files and grasp the thinking directions and logic of judges, lawyers, and prosecutors. Greater exposure to the courtroom helps social workers assist clients more effectively when accompanying them to court, while deepening their understanding of courtroom operational models (Summer + Semester Intern B)

3. During this period, I participated in many fields and activities I had never engaged in before, or which one rarely encounters when interning at general social welfare agencies.
   Interning here seemingly has nothing to do with social work, yet we are able to view events from different angles. Judicial investigations or trials, which appear to have no direct connection to social work, are all causes and results of various social phenomena. When we step out of the social work field to a higher or broader perspective and look at things from a sociological standpoint, what we see are the different levels of expression of social individuals or collectives.
   JRF also engages in advocacy and reform. This relates to policy aspects, and although I have not yet studied policy courses, learning here how to promote a policy or bring an issue to the surface for public attention has been invaluable (Summer Intern C)

Reasons Not to Recommend

1. The skills and knowledge utilized in the process all require relearning. Moreover, because JRF is not a traditional social welfare agency, if one's future career goal is to be a mainstream agency social worker, one might feel that what was learned is not put to its intended use (Summer + Semester Intern A)

2. Learning opportunities for internship items required by traditional social work are insufficient; activities like case records, group programs, home visits, and phone calls are practically nonexistent. Although there are similar tasks such as case record forms for files, receiving phone calls, or returning calls, these still fundamentally differ from what is taught in social work. Although one can acquire a great deal of legal knowledge and broaden one's horizons by interacting with people from different departments, insufficient mastery of social work fundamentals may still affect initial performance in future employment after graduation (Summer + Semester Intern B)

3. Interning here inevitably requires interacting with law majors, but due to the differing nature of our academic fields and personal values, conflicts may frequently arise over certain points.
   Furthermore, because JRF is an advocacy-oriented organization, it may involve street-level, dynamic activities such as protests and petitions, which differ from the service-oriented work usually undertaken by social work students. Therefore, those who dislike public exposure or protest-oriented activities might find this less recommendable (Summer Intern C)

※ JRF currently has supervisors holding social worker licenses. Students who need internship hours meeting this requirement, please do not worry and feel free to apply!