How to turn a children’s social services crisis into a catastrophe

Ray Jones, author of In whose interest?

How to turn a crisis into a calamity and catastrophe?

Well, it is not that difficult as shown by the current state of children’s social services in England. But it does require commitment and continuity over time.

Here’s how to do it.

First, see the banker-created crisis of ten years ago as an opportunity. Blame Labour’s commitment to, and expenditure on, public services such as the NHS, schools and children’s social work for creating the crisis, ignoring that it was reckless and selfish behaviours within the financial private sector which took the UK and others to the economic cliff edge.

“When elected to government continue the script that what is required is a good and lengthy dose of austerity with cuts targeted at poor people and public services.”

Secondly, when elected to government continue the script that what is required is a good and lengthy dose of austerity with cuts targeted at poor people and public services. Keep this narrative going through a friendly media with programmes and news reports about shirkers and skivers and about failing public services and incompetent public servants.

Thirdly, create a self-fulfilling prophecy by cutting funding for public services year on year at a time when families are moving from deprivation to destitution amongst the slicing away of social security benefits so that it becomes harder and harder to provide help for children and families who have been left stranded and neglected by the state. Then ratchet-up the story-line that it is the private sector that is the solution to crumbling public services.

Fourthly, change the legislation so that even very personal services such as children’s social work and child protection can be contracted out to private companies who see this as an opportunity to make money. Their route to generating a profit is by cutting back and down-skilling the workforce, reducing terms and conditions of employment, and asset-stripping by selling off buildings and land. And if it all gets too hot, the international venture capitalists who have now come into this commercial market place of the children’s services ‘industry’ sell on their businesses or just walk away.

This is now the context for statutory children’s services and social work in England. Companies such as G4S, Serco, Virgin Care, Amey and Mouchel have all attended meetings with the Department for Education to work on creating and opening up this market place, and the market analysts Laing Buisson have been commissioned by the government to advise on how to create a privatised market in children’s social services.

“Over 70% of children’s homes in England are owned privately and run to provide a profit.”

And it is already happening. Over 70% of children’s homes in England are owned privately and run to provide a profit. A third of foster care is now provided through for-profit foster care agencies. Almost 20% of children’s social workers working within local authorities are employed through private for-profit employment agencies. And international accountancy firms such as KPMG are now paid by government to shape the future of children’s social services.

Hundreds of millions of pounds every year are being taken as private profit out of the public funding allocated to children’s services, money which should instead be used to help and assist children and families in difficulty and to protect children when necessary.

So a crisis created by the bankers has been used as the context to sustain policies of politically-chosen austerity creating a calamity for public services and a catastrophe for children and families but also profit-opportunities for private companies. And the commitment of the government is to even more cuts in the funding for public services, even more draconian cuts in welfare benefits, and even more privatisation. Absolutely awful, and it is without shame or humanity from those who still use a crisis of 10 years ago to hurt and hinder children today.

 

In whose interest? by Ray Jones is available with 20% discount on the Policy Press website. Order here for £19.99.

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Protecting Children: Time for a new story

 

Protecting children is out now

As their new book, Protecting children: A social model, publishes this week, Brid Featherstone, Anna Gupta, Kate Morris and Susan White look at how child protection practice must adapt to reflect our changing world.

And so it goes on: the roll call of more children coming into care, more children living in poverty, more families using food banks and more families living in overcrowded and unsuitable accommodation.

 

It is painfully apparent that the settlement between the state and its citizens, forged post-war, has been undermined profoundly, if not broken, over the last decades. Increasingly, expectations of decent work, secure and affordable homes and enough to eat can no longer be guaranteed by a state that is experienced as both intrusive and neglectful, especially by those living in poverty, with a subsequent loss of trust and widespread feelings of alienation and disconnection.

The policies and practices that have been developed to protect children must be understood and located within this wider canvas. While the state and its resources allegedly shrink, its gaze is harder and its tongue sharper. As part of an increasingly residual role, the system has become narrowly focused on an atomised child, severed from family, relationships and economic and social circumstances:  a precarious object of ‘prevention’, or rescue. As its categories and definitions have gradually grown, the gap between child protection services and family support, or ordinary help has, somewhat paradoxically, widened.

Indeed, the child protection mandate struggles to move beyond holding individuals (usually mothers) responsible for managing children’s protection, thus, in effect, privatising what are often public troubles and outsourcing their management to those often most harmed by such troubles.  When they almost inevitably struggle to cope, state responses incline towards removal and the rupture of connections and networks with ethical and human rights considerations becoming casualties of a risk averse climate and narrow and reductive understandings of children’s outcomes.

“Austerity has made things very much worse as successive governments, since 2010, have pummelled the poorest areas of our country and the poorest families relentlessly.”

Austerity has made things very much worse as successive governments, since 2010, have pummelled the poorest areas of our country and the poorest families relentlessly.   But it is vital we recognise the roots of our current malaise go way back and are intimately connected to a long-standing tendency to see child protection as something apart, the province of uniquely troubled families and thus disconnected from the wider contexts in which all families seek to survive and thrive.

The following deep-rooted assumptions are core to the child protection story:

• The harms children and young people need protecting from are normally located within individual families and are caused by actions of omission or commission by parents and/or other adult caretakers;
• These actions/inactions are due to factors ranging from poor attachment patterns, dysfunctional family patterns, parenting capacity, faulty learning styles to poor/dangerous lifestyle choices;
• The assessment of risk and parenting capacity is ‘core business’ and interventions are focused on effecting change in family functioning.

In our new book Protecting Children: A Social Model we argue for a new story to support more hopeful and socially just policies and practices. This would oblige rooting the protection of children within broader understandings of what all families need to flourish and locating such understandings within the scholarship on inequality and poverty. Crucially, it means developing a range of strategies and practices to deal with the social determinants of many of the harms experienced within families such as domestic abuse, mental health difficulties and addiction issues; all pervasive features of highly unequal societies such as ours.

“Social work practice needs to be re-thought obliging the re-visiting of the old and engagement with the new.”

Social work practice needs to be re-thought obliging the re-visiting of the old and engagement with the new. When there is widespread misery and deprivation, how can the individually focused home visit continue too often to be the only game in town?   Collective strategies must be considered in a project that promotes community work, locality based approaches and peer support and is founded on seeing families as a source of expertise about system design and best practice.

Building on the ideas in the best-selling Re-imagining Child Protection: towards humane social work with families, and drawing from a wide range of social theorists and disciplines, we identify policies and practices to argue for a social model of protecting children that is animated by the need to:

• Understand and tackle root causes;
• Rethink the role of the state;
• Develop relationship(s) based practice and co-production; and
• Embed a dialogic approach to ethics and human rights in policy and practice

Re-imagining child protection by Brid Featherstone, Susan White and Kate Morris is available with 20% discount on the Policy Press website. Order here for £19.19.

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The views and opinions expressed on this blog site are solely those of the original blog post authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Bristol University Press and Policy Press and/or any/all contributors to this site.

Introducing Marx at 200

Iain Ferguson and Michael Lavalette introduce the new special issue of Critical and Radical Social Work, ‘Marx at 200’, in this editorial.

To see beyond the horizon is any manifesto’s ambition. However, to succeed as Marx and Engels did in accurately describing an era that would arrive a century and a half in the future, as well as to analyse the contradictions and choices that we face today, is truly astounding. In the late 1840s, capitalism was foundering, local, fragmented and timid. Yet, Marx and Engels took one long look at it and foresaw our globalised, financialised, iron-clad, all-singing, all-dancing capitalism. This was the creature that came into being after 1991, at the very same moment that the establishment was proclaiming the death of Marxism and the end of history.

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’s glowing tribute to Marx and Engels in his introduction to a new edition of The communist manifesto is only one of many that have been paid on the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth. In this special issue of Critical and Radical Social Work (CRSW), we pay our own tribute to Marx in a series of commissioned papers that seek to highlight the relevance of his ideas today. (We suspect that CRSW may be the only professional social work journal that will celebrate the anniversary in this way but would be very happy to be proved wrong on that point!) In our view, no other thinker provides the conceptual tools that make possible a critical analysis not only of 21st-century capitalism, with its crises, wars, inequality and austerity, but also, and more narrowly, of the ways in which social work as a global profession has been transformed by the forces of marketisation, managerialism and consumerism that have characterised the neoliberal phase of capitalism.

“Such misogyny, it has become clear, pervades every major institution in society…and is starkly personified in the current President of the US, Donald J. Trump.”

This issue opens with an article by writer and activist Lindsey German on Marxism and women’s oppression. The year 2017 will be remembered not least as the year of the #MeToo movement, when women from across the globe spoke out against the sexual harassment, sexual abuse or rape that they had experienced, and challenged institutional sexism and misogyny. Such misogyny, it has become clear, pervades every major institution in society, including churches, political parties, the media and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and is starkly personified in the current President of the US, Donald J. Trump. In her article, German explores the roots of women’s oppression and its close links with capitalism and class, and argues that Marxist ideas can provide a basis both for making sense of that oppression and for challenging it.

Race and racism also feature prominently in current political debate and discussion. In previous issues of this journal, contributors have discussed the Black Lives Matters movement in the US and the involvement of social workers in that movement. However, the rise of racism is currently a huge issue in many countries, including the UK. Twenty five years after the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence by racist thugs in South London and 22 years after a senior judge, Sir William McPherson, branded the Metropolitan police ‘institutionally racist’ for the way in which they investigated Stephen’s murder, a new scandal – the Windrush scandal – has exposed the extent to which racist ideas continue to inform UK government policy and practice.

“The Windrush scandal has shown that institutional racism is alive and well and deeply entrenched at the heart of the Conservative government”

The term refers to the ship MV Empire Windrush, which arrived at Tilbury Docks, Essex, on 22 June 1948 and brought workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other islands as a response to post-war labour shortages in the UK. The ship carried 492 passengers – many of them children. Despite living and working in the UK for decades, many of these people and their children have now been told that they are living here illegally because of a lack of official paperwork. The scandal has shown that institutional racism is alive and well and deeply entrenched at the heart of the Conservative government headed by Prime Minister Theresa May. Meanwhile, openly racist, and, in some cases, neo-Nazi, parties have representatives in several European parliaments. In the second article in this special issue, writer and activist Ken Olende examines the historical and contemporary roots of racism and draws on Marx’s writings to show its close connection with the rise and development of capitalism.

These two articles provide a strong theoretical underpinning for a social work practice that seeks to challenge racism and women’s oppression. However, as the next article by Paul Michael Garret shows, Marx’s ideas have much to offer in other areas of social work practice, too. These include the analysis of: the labour process and working lives in a capitalist society; neoliberalism and what Garrett calls ‘the voraciousness of capital’; and the role of the state and ideology. Citing Marx’s thesis that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it’, he ends the article by suggesting ways in which a Marxist analysis can inform a radical practice.

Almost a decade and a half ago, the two editors of this journal wrote an article for the British Journal of Social Work, arguing that Marx’s concept of alienation provided a better way of understanding issues of power and powerlessness in social work practice than did the then fashionable approaches of post-structuralism and postmodernism. In this issue, we revisit that concept of alienation and the related concept of commodity fetishism. Our purpose in doing so is not to continue a debate with approaches that even then were not the dominant critical approaches in social work, and are even less so now. Rather, it is to argue that the lack of control over our lives and creative activity that, for Marx, defines alienation has actually intensified during the era of neoliberalism, not least since the global economic crisis of 2008 and the subsequent imposition of a politics of austerity. Through an examination of the areas of work, sexuality and health, we examine the terrible toll that that lack of control and greatly increased commodification is having on our health and relationships. Finally, we point to some ways in which an understanding of alienation can contribute to a radical social work theory and practice.

“In few other countries have the ideas of Marx had such an impact on social work as they have had in Brazil”

In few other countries have the ideas of Marx had such an impact on social work as they have had in Brazil since the period of the Reconceptualisation movement of the late 1960s, and in a challenging but fascinating paper, Elaine Behring explains the contribution of Marxist ideas to the development of the ethical-political project of Brazilian social work.

In the next section, in place of our usual Radical Pioneer section (given that the whole journal is already devoted to discussion of the ideas of one particularly eminent radical pioneer), we have three commentary pieces, each of which addresses a particular area of current debate or struggle. In the first of these, Dr Glyn Robbins, housing worker and campaigner, examines the writings on housing of Marx’s friend and collaborator, Frederick Engels, and shows their relevance to the current housing crisis in the UK and elsewhere. In the second piece, we return to Brazil for a discussion by three Brazilian social work colleagues of the concerning political developments there and their implications for social work. Finally, leading Scottish Jewish activist and academic Professor Henry Maitles assesses recent debates around anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

Read the special issue of Critical and Radical Social Work ‘Marx at 200’.

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Social workers crossing borders

Liz Beddoe

Liz Beddoe, co-author of Transnational Social Work – out today – talks about the experiences of social workers practising in countries different to those where they gained their social work qualifications.

“In the mid-2000s graduates from my social work degree programme in New Zealand began responding to the recruitment adverts for social workers to go to the United Kingdom and Ireland to work, particularly in children’s services. We were educating our social workers to work in a very different way, our child welfare legislation was very focused on family engagement and family decision making. And with a great deal of attention on addressing the needs of the disproportionate numbers of Maori children in care. I was curious about how our kiwi social workers fared working in a very different context. They told me that it was a huge culture shock but that they had great opportunities to learn and develop their practice.

The Crossing Border research team: (left to right)
Allen Bartley, Shajimon Peter , Liz Beddoe

I thought these experiences would be the basis of a great research project. So, in a long story cut short, I found colleagues in my department who were really keen to work with me on a project, Christa Fouche and Allen Bartley. Christa (a social worker) and Allen (a sociologist whose main research interest is in migration and transnationalism) were both migrants and knew the challenges of relocation. Our enthusiasm grew into a multi-phase and multi-country project which is still happening! We’ve talked to migrant social workers both new to practice in New Zealand and practitioners in other countries. We have researched with managers and supervisors also, along with some regulators. You can read more about our project ‘Crossing Borders – Migrant Professionals’ on our project blog.

“…it’s not just the different cultures of the new country that migrants face, but the very different professional and organisational cultures as well.”

Our research has taught us that social workers face challenges and opportunities settling into work in a new country. Apart from all the anticipated issues —hassles getting registration, unfamiliar law and policy and so forth—we also found experiences of racism and discrimination and more consistently our participants have described what we call ‘enduring professional dislocation’. Because it’s not just the different cultures of the new country that migrants face, but the very different professional and organisational cultures as well.
Along the way we have met some great people and made connections with researchers exploring the same issues in other countries- England, Ireland, Canada, Australia and other places. Many are members of the Research on Workforce Mobility in Social Care and Social Work Network. We were delighted to have some of these great researchers to contribute to Transnational Social Work.

Our project hasn’t finished yet. We’ve revealed the challenges faced by migrant social workers in New Zealand and we want to focus on solutions.

With our research fellow Shajimon Peter, himself a transnational social worker, we’re currently analysing data from a project which aims to engage stakeholders – employers, supervisors, professional bodies- to develop strategies to help migrant social workers to settle and make the most of the knowledge, skills and rich experiences they bring.

Transnational social work: Opportunities and challenges of a global profession, edited by Allen Bartley and Liz Beddoe is publishing on 7 February 2018 and is available with 20% discount on the Policy Press website. Order here for just £60.00.

Find out more about impact, influence and engagement at Policy Press here.

Policy Press newsletter subscribers receive a 35% discount – sign up here.

The views and opinions expressed on this blog site are solely those of the original blog post authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Policy Press and/or any/all contributors to this site.

‘Baby P’ 10 years on and the devastation of child protection

The updated and expanded second edition of ‘The Story of Baby P: Setting the Record Straight’ by Ray Jones, was published by Policy Press in February. Here, Jones discusses the impact of the Baby P case 10 years on, especially the ineffectual regulations on abusive press behaviour and the devastating effect on the social work profession.

Ray Jones

“On 3 August 2017 it is the tenth anniversary of the terrible death of 17 month old Peter Connelly in Haringey, North London.

Abused within his family home, his death became a focus of national and international media coverage when his mother, her boyfriend and the boyfriend’s brother were each found guilty of ‘causing or allowing’ Peter’s death.

Within the press, Peter was known as ‘Baby P’. One newspaper in particular, The Sun, and its editor, Rebekah Brooks, day-after-day, month-after-month, and year-after-year ran a campaign of harassment and hatred targeted at Peter’s social workers and their managers, and a paediatrician, who sought to help and protect children.

The Sun launched a ‘campaign for justice’ with a front page accusing those it was targeting as having ‘blood on their hands’. This notorious banner headlined front page is no longer to be found on The Sun’s website but is still accessible through other sites.

Much has happened since August 2007. David Cameron, who is now known to have been a close personal friend of Rebekah Brooks, wrote a column in The Sun demanding the sacking of the social workers and managers and that ‘professionals must pay with their jobs’. At the time he was leader of the opposition. He has subsequently come and gone as Prime Minister.

Mr Gove, who was the Shadow Secretary of State in 2008, joined in the targeting of Sharon Shoesmith, who was quickly (and the High Court in 2011 decided wrongly) dismissed from her post as Director of Children’s Services in Haringey. Mr Gove has also come and gone as a government minster … and has now recently come again.

Mr Gove has been a champion for Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Sun and The Times. Murdoch had also owned The News of the World. It closed amid the exposure of the long-standing criminality perpetrated by editors and reporters at the paper in hacking phones, including the phones of bereaved parents and a murdered school girl.

It took several years for the Metropolitan Police to conduct an appropriate and proper investigation into the criminal activities rampant within Mr Murdoch’s British press.

“At last acknowledged that the… threat and harassment of Sharon Shoesmith was “cruel, harsh and over top””

The self-serving parasitic relationships between the Murdoch press, Metropolitan police and politicians was exposed through the Leveson inquiry. At the inquiry Rebekah Brooks at last acknowledged several years late that her paper’s threat and harassment of Sharon Shoesmith was “cruel, harsh and over top” and that “balance went right out of the window”.

Mrs Brooks, who was found not guilty of charges at the phone hacking trial, claimed that she knew nothing about the wide-spread criminality in the organisation she led, even though this criminality also included the actions of her deputy editor, Andy Coulson. Mr Cameron had appointed Mr Coulson as his media advisor, an appointment which ended when Coulson was convicted and then imprisoned.

Politicians have come and gone. So have senior police officers. The hacking investigations and trial led to the closure of a newspaper, prison sentences for newspaper editors, and a major public inquiry. That inquiry, however, has been cut short.

Its major recommendations on regulating abusive press behaviour are not being enacted and the press continues to intrude, bully, and abuse much as before. The Sun, for example, recently and remarkably used its ‘blood on their hands’ banner headline, this time to target Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonald and Diane Abbot during the 2017 general election campaign.

And Mr Murdoch and Mrs Brooks have had their down times but are now again both flourishing.

“None of the social workers or managers targeted by The Sun have been able to regain employment as social workers.”

But what of the social workers and social work? None of the social workers or managers targeted by The Sun have been able to regain employment as social workers, despite those whose cases were heard by the social work regulator allowing them to continue their registration as social workers.

Sharon Shoesmith has completed a PhD and written a book about child and familial homicide but has not been able to get paid employment since being dismissed by Haringey Council at the instigation of Ed Balls (another politician who has come and gone).

Not surprisingly, it is now difficult to recruit and retain social workers (and specialist doctors working in child protection) to work in statutory children’s services with the continuous threat that they too could be a focus of vilification and vengeance by the media. There is now a dependency in most local authorities on short-term interim agency social workers and managers with services no longer having the stability, continuity and experience which is needed to provide good children’s and family social work and child protection.

There has also been a dramatic shift in social work and social services practice from helping children and families to an emphasis on surveillance, assessment, risk management and child protection.

Since 2008 there has been a 90% increase in England in child protection investigations (now running at over 170,000 a year) and a 130% (and still rising month-by-month) increase in court proceedings to remove children from families. In part, this reflects more defensive practice by professionals and agencies fearful of media attacks.

But it also reflects big cuts in government funding to local authorities (a 40% reduction since 2010 and still to be reduced further) with the closure of Sure Start programmes, children’s centres and youth services. This is at the same time as draconian cuts in social security and housing benefits are moving more families into severe poverty and destitution and making it harder for stressed and overwhelmed parents to care well for their children.

The response of the Conservative-led governments has been to see this all as an opportunity to say that social work is not good enough and the answer is to take children’s social services outside of local councils. They have sought to create a commercial and competitive market place open to all comers who can now be contracted to provide these services, and to favour fast-track social work education outside of universities provided by independent companies and shaped by management consultancy and international accountancy firms.

‘Child protection services in many areas are now at the point, and for some beyond the point, of breakdown’

Who would have anticipated in 2007 that within ten years one of the safest child protection systems in the world, based on 40 years of learning and development, would have been churned up and undermined by politicians using the ammunition provided by the tabloid press whipping up public hostility and in the context of politically-chosen austerity?

In the book, ‘The Story of Baby P’, I comment that “my greatest horror is what happened to a little child, Peter Connelly, and my concern is that the campaigning by The Sun and others has done nothing to make it safer for children like Peter”.

It certainly has not made it safer. Child protection services in many areas are now at the point, and for some beyond the point, of breakdown. This is today’s story which the media choose not to cover – unless of course every so often they skew the story and focus on another child death and find new social workers to abuse and attack.

Dr Ray Jones is a registered social worker, a former director of social services, and an emeritus professor of social work and frequent media commentator and columnist.

 

The Story of Baby P by Ray Jones is available with 20% discount on the Policy Press website.  Order here for just £11.99

Find out more about impact, influence and engagement at Policy Press here.

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The views and opinions expressed on this blog site are solely those of the original blog post authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Policy Press and/or any/all contributors to this site.

Social work can lead itself for far less than College funding

Originally published on www.communitycare.co.uk on 30 July 2015.

Bill Mckitterick

Government contracts and allocating responsibilities to employers are in danger of infantilising the profession, says Bill McKitterick, author of Self-leadership in social work. It’s time for self-leadership.

The “reform” of social work over the last six years shows an unprecedented level of interest and financial investment by the government in social work and social workers.

We have seen the deliberations of the Social Work Taskforce in 2009, the Munro Review of Child Protection in 2011, the Social Work Reform Board in 2012 and the two reviews of social work education in 2014, by Narey and by Croisdale-Appleby.

A glance at a thesaurus offers some revealing alternative words for “reform”: improve, mend, reconstruct, rehabilitate, renovate, repair, get back on the straight and narrow, get one’s act together, pull one’s socks up, turn over a new leaf…

Have we really been in need of so much improvement?

I have been unable to identify another period when there has been such a concentrated focus and money allocated to social work – yet we have so little to show for it!

World Social Work Day 2015 #WSWD2015: WIN a Policy Press Social Work book of your choice…

Jessica Miles, Marketing Executive

Today is World Social Work Day and you can follow all the actions and events happening around the world using the hashtag #WSWD2015. This year’s theme is ‘Promoting the Dignity and Worth of Peoples’, something we hope we contribute to, at least in a small way, here at Policy Press.

To celebrate we thought it would be great to find out from you which Policy Press social work title from recent years you’ve most enjoyed. In fact if you email us here with your favourite book and a bit about why you liked it so much, we’ll enter you into our prize draw to win a Policy Press Social Work title of your choice! Just mark your email ‘Happy World Social Work day‘ and send it to us by 5pm on Friday 20th March.

According to our data crunchers our top five best sellers over the past few years are:

The story of Baby P: Setting the record straight

by Ray Jones

The first book to tell what happened to ‘Baby P’, how the story was told by the media and its considerable impact on the child protection system in England.

 

Re-imagining child protection: Towards humane social work with families

by Brid Featherstone, Susan White and Kate Morris

This important book challenges the current child protection culture and calls for family-minded humane practice where children are understood as relational beings, parents are recognized as people with needs and hopes and families as carrying extraordinary capacities for care and protection.

Understanding research for social policy and social work (2nd edition): Themes, methods and approaches

Edited by Saul Becker, Alan Bryman and Harry Ferguson

This acclaimed international textbook combines theoretical and applied discussions and case examples to provide an essential guide to research methods, approaches and debates.

The short guide to social work

by Robert Adams

This one-stop text for new and prospective social work students is easy to read and full of essential information and practical advice about what is needed to qualify and practice in social work.

Communicating with children and young people: Making a difference

by Michelle Lefevre

This timely book prepares social workers and other practitioners for the challenge of engaging directly with children and young people in order to make a difference to their lives.

 

We’ll also add you to our mailing list so you can be first to know about all our new Social Work books – please do let us know if you’d prefer not to receive these mails but don’t let that stop you from entering the draw! All entries must be entitled ‘Happy World Social Work day‘, emailed to pp-marketing@bristol.ac.uk and received before 5pm on Friday 20th March. The winner will be announced in our newsletter at the end of this month.

We also publish the journal, Critical and Radical Social Work… find out more here.

All these books are, of course, available to buy on our website. Find out more about these and our other titles in social work here. Don’t forget, if you’re a subscriber to the PP newsletter you get 35% discount on all our titles if you order on our website.

Don’t feel left out if you’re not a subscriber – click here to sign up now! We promise never to let anyone else have your details and we’ll only send you two newsletters a month, keeping you up to date with latest title information, special offers, free journal articles and forthcoming events.

Happy World Social Work Day!

Our thanks to our Marketing Executive Jessica Miles, who specialises in Social Work as one of her subject areas, for writing this post. You can follow Jessica on twitter here: @TPPjess

Racism, anti-racism and social work

by Iain Ferguson and Michael Lavalette

A spectre is haunting Europe. It is the spectre of racism, xenophobia, and in some countries, outright Nazism. For Golden Dawn in Greece and the Jobbik Party in Hungary, there is little attempt to hide the associations with 1930s German National Socialism. These include overt anti-semitism, paramilitary marches, and the encouragement of violence against asylum seekers, immigrants and left-wing activists. At the time of writing, a member of Golden Dawn is being held in custody for the murder in September 2013 of Pavlos Fyssas, a rap singer and well-known anti-fascist activist in Greece. Elsewhere in Europe, racism wears a more respectable face. Parties such as the UK Independence Party in Britain or the various People’s Parties in Scandinavia have gained a degree of electoral support by playing on popular fears about waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe coming to the West solely in order to live off the benefits system. It is a rhetoric which, shamefully, is increasingly echoed by the leaders of mainstream political parties, both Conservative and social democratic.

In reality of course, the vast majority of immigrants are young, hard-working, ambitious, make less use of health services than the rest of the population and do the jobs that the local population refuse to do. The residential social care sector in Britain, for example, would collapse without the labour of people from the Philippines, South Africa and Poland. But that truth is lost in the deluge of anti-Roma, anti-Muslim and anti-asylum seeker propaganda pumped out on a daily basis by the tabloid press. In early October 2013, the bitter fruits of that propaganda, and of the increasingly restrictive immigration policies adopted by governments across Europe, were only too graphically demonstrated. Then, some 274 refugees from Eritrea and Somalia drowned when their overcrowded boat sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa. These were ordinary men, women and children fleeing war, torture and hunger in search of a better life for themselves and their families. But as a letter in the Guardian newspaper in the UK pointed out, responsibility for their deaths lies not just with the people smugglers but also with the exclusionary policies of Fortress Europe: ‘People-smuggling is the symptom and not the cause of migration. Tougher border controls, higher fences and more expensive surveillance systems won’t deal with the causes either. They will make things worse by driving more people into the perilous embrace of the smugglers. The causes of migration are overwhelmingly poverty, inequality and conflict’.

The main challenge to racism and fascism has come, and will continue to come, from parties of the Left, social movements and trade unions. In Greece, for example, following the murder of Pavlos, some ten thousand people demonstrated against Golden Dawn in the streets of Athens. In Britain, the anti-Muslim English Defence League is currently in crisis following the resignation of its two founders, a crisis provoked in large part by the fact that every time its supporters appeared on the streets they were physically challenged by much larger anti-fascist protests.

As individuals, social workers from Glasgow to Athens and all points between have participated in many of these demonstrations. But we also need to explore the implications of the growth of these new forms of racism for our social work practice. And here, it is important to learn the lessons of the past, both negative and positive.

Discussing the role of social work during the Nazi period, Walter Lorenz has commented on the use of social workers’ diagnostic skills to sort out the ‘deserving’ from the unworthy, the latter referring to those with mental illness or learning disabilities who would then be deemed eligible for compulsory sterilisation or worse. As Lorenz (2006) describes it:

Sticking to their professional task with the air of value neutrality and scientific detachment (especially after the ‘non-conforming’, ‘politically active’ social workers had been sacked or imprisoned) they did not feel responsible for the consequences of their assessments and may indeed not have been conscious of the full implications their work had in the national context (pp 34-35).

As Lorenz argues, the issue here was not only State coercion or lack of discretion but rather the understanding of their role which informed the practice of these workers:

The evil of a fascist approach to welfare had not emanated primarily from its collectivism and from the imposition of ideologically determined forms of practice (which social workers usually knew how to get round) but rather from the disjuncture of the political and professional discourse that prevented the ‘ordinary welfare workers’ from fully facing up to the consequences of their actions (p35).

If there is a lesson for today, it is surely that social work cannot respond to the growing tide of racism and xenophobia by hiding behind a mask of ‘professionalism’ which seeks to deny the political nature of our profession or pretend that somehow we are above the struggle.

A very different response to racism developed in the late 1980s. In that period, social workers and social work academics in the UK and elsewhere sought to develop forms of anti-racist theory and practice which challenged the ways in which racism shaped the mind-set of many white social workers on the one hand and blighted the lives of black and minority ethnic clients and communities on the other. The limitations of these approaches, above all their focus on personal racism at the expense of State and institutional racism, have been well-documented. Nevertheless, they were important in putting issues of racism and anti-racism on the social work education agenda in a way they had not been previously.

Race, racism and social work

Recent publications have sought to develop new forms of social work theory and practice that can challenge the forms of racism that have emerged over the past decade and can defend multiculturalism (Lavalette and Penketh, 2013; see also Mahamdallie, 2011; Richardson, 2013). This is a very positive development. Critical and Radical Social Work welcomes papers on all aspects of racism and anti-racism in social work. These can include both analyses of current developments and also historical pieces which critically evaluate the role of mainstream social work in oppressive and racist regimes such as Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa as well as those highlighting examples of social work resistance which have until now been’ hidden from history’.

References
Lavalette, M. and Penketh, L. (eds.) (2013) Race, Racism and Social Work: Contemporary Issues and Debates, Bristol: Policy Press
Lorenz, W. (1993) Social Work in a Changing Europe, London: Routledge
Mahamdallie, H. (ed.) (2011) Defending Multiculturalism: a guide for the movement, London: Bookmarks
Richardson, B. (ed.) (2013) Say It Loud: Marxism and the Fight Against Racism, London: Bookmarks

Race, racism and social work, edited by Michael Lavalette and Laura Penketh, is available to buy with 20% discount from www.policypress.co.uk.

Seeing social work through narrative

Clive Baldwin

by Clive Baldwin, author of Narrative social work: Theory and application

Narrative is becoming increasingly a focus of interest across disciplines and professions – philosophy, sociology, psychology, medicine, nursing, psychotherapy, theology, women’s studies, law and so on have all taken up narrative in some form or other.  Social work, too, has taken up narrative, albeit to a lesser extent – social work interest in narrative seems to cluster within three main areas: narrative as an intervention (usually a version of narrative therapy), narrative in social work education and personal narratives of practising social work.  While these three areas are interesting and important, to my mind they do not engage deeply with narrative as an approach to social work per se and as such miss some important insights and opportunities for developing a truly narrative-based social work.

The difference, I think, lies in what I distinguish as the stronger and weaker programs of narrative.  The weaker programs see narrative as something that casts light on a reality that is out there, whether that be the reality of service users’ lives, the reality of practising social work, or the reality of wider social and political movements.  Narrative, in this program, is but a window onto the world of social work.  Alternatively narrative is seen as a tool, an intervention – as in narrative therapy – to be brought to bear when the occasion is apposite.

The stronger program, on the other hand, uses narrative as the lens through which we see all of social work.  In this stronger program narrative is taken as a way of knowing about the Self, others and the world; a way of communicating; a way of acting – narrative does not simply reflect the world, but constantly makes and remakes the world.  In this program, social work, as an activity that seeks to understand individuals in context and work with them toward individual and societal betterment is, through and through, a narrative activity.  Supporting this view is a wide literature on how the Self is constructed in and through narrative; another on understanding policy-making as a narrative process; yet another on how social movements rely on and play out certain stories; and still another on how narrative acts as a means to ethical reasoning and decision-making.  The stories we hear and the stories we tell make up the world of social work. To understand narrative is to understand social work.

Narrative social work is available with 20% discount from www.policypress.co.uk

Neoliberalism and social work: facing the challenges

Steve Rogowski

by Dr Steve Rogowski, a social worker (children and families) with a local authority in NW England. His new book Critical social work with children and families is publishing this month.

Neoliberalism has impacted significantly on social work over recent decades. In particular, the profession has been subjugated to the demands of managerialism with its focus on ensuring practitioners complete bureaucracy speedily so as to ration resources and assess/manage risk.

Neoliberalism itself is a political ideology/philosophy which aims to transform the welfare state and in turn social work by liberating markets and corporate capital from the constraints of post-war social democracy (Clarke J. 2004 Changing Welfare, Changing States: new directions in social policy London: Sage). Processes of privatization and marketization now dominate, with the ideal of social citizenship being eroded in favour of incentivizing employment and abolishing so-called welfare dependency. New inequalities and vulnerabilities have been created, with, for example, the Welfare Reform Act 2012 introducing drastic benefit cuts to the most vulnerable. The forms of social support from the state, not least by and through social workers, have been and are being vastly reduced, and involve an authoritarian turn.

Those in need have to be self-responsible; if they get into in difficulties they have to rely on themselves, family, friends or charity (the emergence of food banks being a prime example) rather than the state. That is, unless they are deemed to be a risk to themselves or others, in which case they are dealt with harshly. Such authoritarian stances can be seen in relation to social work with children and families, particularly child protection/safeguarding, whereby parents are increasingly told to change their behaviour and lifestyles or face the threat of losing their children.

As indicated, within organizations social work policy and practice is dominated by managers who shape the daily experience of social work. They control what social workers do and how (and often when), demanding that social workers exercise control over resources and in turn users. Rather than engaging in relational work, let alone anything more radical or critical, social workers are forced into being ‘people processors’ or ‘e-technicians’, inputting data onto computer templates.

Nevertheless, and despite real challenges, critical social work is both possible and necessary, simply because otherwise the way is left open for those who support the status quo.  Such practice, often involving quiet challenges to managerial diktats, can combine the role of protection with prevention (Stepney P. (2006) ‘Mission Impossible: Critical practice in social work’ BJSW 36:8 1289-307). It also provides practitioners with a means for critical engagement with the real issues that lie at the root of social injustice, namely growing inequality in the neo-liberalised world. Additionally, it includes approaches that resist pressures for more authoritarian control.

In brief, practitioners need to work individually with users and act collectively so as to challenge inegalitarian social relations. The British Association of Social Workers, (perhaps) the nascent College of Social Work, and the Social Work Action Network, trade unions and political parties are obvious examples of where collective action can occur. More broadly, the anti-capitalist/globalisation protests, including the Occupy movement, have a role to play. All such endeavours help ensure that critical social work remains true to its social justice and emancipatory potentials.

Critical social work with children and families is available with 20% discount from http://www.policypress.co.uk