Social work exists in a constant tension between caring and protecting vulnerable people, and the control mechanisms within the broader context social workers operate in. Where are the lines drawn in its dual role as an instrument of the state and an advocate for social justice?
In this episode Malcolm Carey and Gurnam Singh, guest editors of the Critical and Radical Social Work special issue on social work and social control, speak with Richard Kemp about this paradox of care and control.
They discuss the extreme scrutiny faced by unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, the higher standards parents with a learning disability face and the many ways social workers exercise empathy to work both with, and around, the system to help those who need it the most.
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Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Dr Malcolm Carey is Associate Professor in Social Work at Liverpool Hope University. Dr. Gurnam Singh is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick.
The Critical and Radical Social Work special issue ‘Social work and social control’, guest edited by Malcolm Carey and Gurnam Singh, is available on the Bristol University Press Digital here.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
1:20 – What do you mean when you say these articles are a comprehensive exploration of how social work operates at the intersection of care, control, governance and resistance?
3:39 – How has the hollowing out following austerity affected the working classes?
6:33 – How does the lack of training for assessing parents with learning disabilities play out in day to day life?
11:33 – Where does the culture of holding parents with learning disabilities to higher standards come from?
13:15 – Are the demands on social workers effecting whether people want to get into social work as a profession?
16:05 – What’s fuelling the narrative of the deserving citizen and the undeserving migrant?
23:27 – What are support workers doing to support young people against this hostile system?
30:00 – How can we ensure that social work is focused on safeguarding and not on perpetuating prejudices over vulnerable people?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Richard Kemp: You’re listening to the Transforming Society podcast. I’m Richard Kemp, and on this episode I’m joined by Malcolm Carey, associate professor in social work at Liverpool Hope University, and Gurnam Singh, associate professor of sociology at the University of Warwick. Malcolm and Gurnam are guest editors of a new special issue of the Critical and Radical Social Work journal, published by Policy Press.
The special issue, titled Social Work and Social Control, includes research articles that discuss the delicate tightrope that social work walks between safeguarding vulnerable adults and children, and existing within the confines of social, political and legal systems that exert control over those same vulnerable people. The articles share stories from older people living in care homes, parents with learning disabilities, unaccompanied asylum seeking children and many other communities.
The authors detail how systems meant to safeguard vulnerable people often oppress and obstruct them instead, with some having to negotiate their very existences. They discuss the devastating impact this has on people’s lives, but also the hope that is coming from resistance. Malcolm Carey and Gurnam Singh, welcome to the Transforming Society podcast.
Gurnam Singh: Thank you very much, Rich.
Malcolm Carey: Thank you.
RK: Thanks so much for coming on. This special issue really hit so many areas. In your introduction to the special issue, you call these articles a comprehensive exploration of how social work operates at the intersection of care, control, governance and resistance. What do you mean by this? And can you give us some examples? Malcolm, would you like to go, please?
MC: Well, I feel that the authors are touching upon in different ways, the point that social work has become more authoritarian and control orientated, and that its regular claims to offer support and altruistic care have significantly reduced. But at the same time, as Foucault pointed out, there are always forms of resistance which emerge, and I’ve heard plenty of stories of social workers challenging more reductive interventions and also looking for alternatives.
I was a social worker myself for many years, first in London in Southwark, and then on Merseyside. I regularly found housing or accommodation for older or disabled adults, access benefit, advocated for families facing eviction and so on. But I wonder if social workers have the time or the resources to do this now, because so much focus is placed on investigations and also commissioning as well.
The social work business, as it’s been termed. Crucial also is that so much of the limited support which was present in the past and it’s never enough, has been stripped away following austerity. So as the welfare state has become hollowed out, so priority is given to more serious cases, which so often lead to the outcomes we and other authors in the special issue have discussed.
What’s left is a focus on investigations, removal of children, sectioning, placing older adults into care homes and so on. And this is not the reason why most people entered social work. Essentially, social workers are now responding to the crisis of the hollowed out welfare state.
I think the other point I want to make is that social work is also the most class specific welfare profession, although the police and youth workers also engage predominantly with the poor, and also finally that there is resistance. But it tends to be occasional and quite limited.
RK: You say about it being hollowed out following austerity. How how is that- and about how it’s a class, it greatly affects class. How has the hollowing out affected the working classes?
MC: I guess that there’s kind of people, maybe they become more desperate. Maybe there’s more stress in families. Maybe some people turn to crime. There’s a whole range of different things that can happen. But if somebody is living in poverty, they’re likely to become more desperate. And I guess that also, crucially, in social work, the support that that’s really important to people.
And people only ever turn to social work for support as a kind of a last desperate measure. It’s not something that people really choose to do, because there’s always been a stigma attached to social work, which there isn’t necessarily in other countries. So I think those types of stress, social stresses and so forth is, is is part of the reason why it kind of.
And the other point I want to make is about the fact that social workers are under significant legal pressures as well. You know, the Children’s Act and so forth, which means if they don’t intervene, there is the risk of, of of, of kind of shame or further investigations beyond social services. So that again, is not a helpful scenario.
GS: If I can just come in there, Rich, maybe just to pick up on I mean, Malcolm’s really kind of set out the kind of terrain in which we approached this special edition. I mean, you know, social work is an intensely political profession with a small P in the sense that it functions within the intersections of power, control, coercion and ideology.
And what I mean by that is even the idea of the welfare state, the idea of welfare itself has always been shifting according to political currents. So you know, you know, from its inception, I think social work always had to deal with these kind of challenges. But I think it’s been particularly kind of become more challenging under what you could call the kind of neoliberal reforms that took place throughout the 80s and 90s, where not only were social workers demonized partly because the people that they work with were demonized, but also the idea that somehow care needs to be privatized, taken away from the state.
And so you’ve got this kind of slightly confusing thoughts about what is the role of the welfare state itself, within which social workers are, you know, trying to, you know, practice their professional ethics where, you know, you’re often pushed in a different direction. I think it’s kind of it’s almost like kind of a, you know, kind of Hobson’s choice.
And we do try to explore how social workers creatively and in other ways, are trying to, you know, balance these two kind of pressures on them.
RK: Malcolm, in your in your article with Lyndsey Constance, you say as of as of 2021, 80,850 children and young people were in care in England, a recorded high, and that parents with learning disabilities are the most likely to have their children taken away. You also say, say, in that article you describe, an environment where social and and support workers receive little or no training for assessing parents with learning disabilities. How does this environment play out for parents and their children in day to day life?
MC: I guess as I mentioned before, social workers are under significant pressure to safeguard children due to policy based and legal requirements and also, the impact of the media as well. And they have limited time and resources. There is a fear of any consequences of what might happen if the child is not brought into care or if something goes wrong.
And obviously, I think also it’s a moral instinct to want to protect children who appear to be vulnerable. But I guess what emerged from the research, and this echoes the international evidence, is the lack of resources for families and for social workers, the lack of training as well, and the general support given to parents with learning disabilities to keep their children.
There is also evidence of assumptions that not just social workers, but also more generally among other professionals, that parents with learning disabilities are not going to be able to cope with the demands of parenting, and that family support can help. But one of our key arguments is that many parents with learning disabilities, especially if they have significant support from the state and also they have a good family around them, are likely to be able to do a good or good enough job as parents.
It’s a very complex issue, however, because every family and child tends to be different and it will differ from family to family and child to child. But also class is important in terms of the role of the social worker, as I said earlier. But the reality is that children who come into contact with social services, you know, will more likely be working class and economically disadvantaged.
But we also know that class is important as you’re more likely should be brought into care the lower down the class structure you are. And also section 47 inquiries when social workers investigate possible child neglect or abuse increased significantly from 111,700 in 2011, to 198,790 in 2021. So the investigations have, I believe, they have leveled off more recently.
But this is the environment in which social workers are working and with very limited resources and such significant pressures. It’s no surprise really, that so many children who have parents with learning disabilities are brought into care, sometimes even before they’re born.
RK: Wow. How does that work?
MC: Well, I suspect it will be a health professional in a hospital will alert social services. Normally there’s a social work department in a hospital.
GS: And can I just add to that as well? Again, in terms of the deeper if you like, the ideological kind of environment, not not too long ago in terms of human history, you know, we had policies of eugenics, which was basically, you know, how can we not even take into care but erase, you know, even the birth of people with learning disabilities.
And, you know, we know that, you know, we just recently commemorating the Holocaust and, you know, part of the policies of Nazi Germany was to get rid of defective individuals. And, and those ideas came, you know, came through from the States earlier on. And, you know, there were clinical and social workers were involved in this and there are writers out there who’re saying that the kind of the the broad kind of philosophical thrust of eugenics hasn’t gone away, this idea that somehow we can, by all kinds of medical interventions, maybe not the kind of brutal ones that we, you know, we witnessed during the Holocaust.
But, other, you know, more selective, you know, we think about epigenetics and things like that. The genetic screening that we can get rid of this problem. So when you’ve got this narrative then it becomes even more challenging to make a case a positive case for people with learning disabilities. And I think that’s and I’m very fearful of the way in which the Trumpian kind of logic now and across Europe as well, the right wing, you know, who are saying we haven’t got money, we haven’t got money for welfare, whether we might see the kind of, you know, the targeting of of these kind of client groups themselves, and I think, you know, clearly social workers again, are on the front line there.
RK: Malcolm, staying with your and Lyndsey’s article, you quote some adult social workers as saying they hold parents with learning disabilities to higher expectations than parents without disabilities. It’s not enough for a parent to say I can cook. They need to prove it. Where does this culture of holding parents with learning disabilities to higher standards come from?
MC: I think the parents with learning disabilities have to have to prove that they can cope with the demands and complexity of parents, but the social workers are under a, as I mentioned, incredible legal and policy based pressures to ensure the safety of children. It also depends very much upon the case, but so little support and training is now available and the benefits being reduced.
All the time, and so forth. It is likely to be a real challenge for parents with learning disabilities to be able to cope. So, family support will help, as I also mentioned, but more and more formal support provided to people, is being privately funded as well, which is another issue in the in the background, so to speak.
So the class divisions, which have always been there and present are becoming harder and more intense really in terms of the support provided. But I seem to remember the, I think David Cameron had, a child with a learning disability. And I’m confident in believing that the the social workers would not likely be investigating the family possible removal and the child being brought into care.
So the class dynamic is so important in social work as are other other kind of influences around things like gender and race.
RK: All these legal and, political pressures that social workers are under having to meet all these, all these demands while also presumably trying to do their work as a social worker. What effect is that having on kind of the social workers of the future, the ones like, is it having is it having an effect on whether pupils and students want to get into the profession of social work?
MC: I mean, the the trends that I’ve noticed over the years are that we don’t have any problems with applications. We don’t have any problems maintaining students on programs. The eagerness is there. But what you do notice is that when students return from placements, there is a change. And I think that they kind of some of the the negativity out in the environment, the working environment, some of the optimism, some of the idealism was evaporated when they come back.
There’s also strong evidence that recruitment isn’t the problem out in in the working environments as well with the, you know, the social services departments receive plenty of applications, but retention is an issue for the the very reasons I’m talking about, you know, the excess bureaucracy that the regulations, the lack of resources and so forth means that retaining social workers become quite a critical issue around the country. And that’s been the case for some time now.
GS: Can I just add to that as well, Rich, I think. Well, I mean, when I came into the profession of social work back in the 80s, it was a wholly white, middle class profession. It has changed now, it’s much more diverse. And that’s a good thing. You know, the more working class people like myself in the profession and the more kind of people from different ethnic minorities, which is brilliant.
However, I think what we also have is it’s a bit like kind of almost replicating the kind of patterns within the NHS. We tend to find a lot of, workers who are from overseas, maybe, some, some, some authorities have been recruiting from overseas, but also, you know, maybe staff who have come over as asylum seekers or refugees, immigration.
And it’s almost like a second career. So that’s been a boon for social work because, you know, a lot of social workers come from say Zimbabwe, from Africa and from other countries, India. They’re actually highly qualified and highly motivated. So that’s a good thing. But it does. I think it has become a bit of a Cinderella profession as well.
It’s becoming a neglected profession, I think. As Malcolm says, I think the fact that it’s no longer a kind of white, middle class profession, I think it’s become vulnerable to all kinds of attacks, particularly from the kind of gutter press, I think, from the tabloid press. And, you know, it’s a kind of like almost a kind of a, you know, heads, heads I win, tails you to lose. But that’s the reality that we’ve got to deal with.
RK: Gurnam, in your in your article with Deborah Hadwin, you discuss unaccompanied asylum seeking children, many of whom arrive in the UK in urgent need of support. But the support workers meeting them, you describe as in a culture of scepticism and mistrust, even believing without evidence that many children look too old and are not children at all.
Looking wider, there’s this narrative in the UK of the deserving citizen and the undeserving migrant. What’s fuelling this narrative so much so that even our support workers are influenced by it?
GS: That’s a really complex question. And we try to kind of deal with that within within the chapter. And just to let you know, the chapter was based on primary research that Deborah had done for her PhD. So, so lots of really interesting stuff. But before I go into that, I think it’s probably worth just setting out what this notion of the deserving and the undeserving citizen is a kind of it’s a public policy narrative that’s been framed around government policies regarding social welfare, access to resources and allocation of benefits.
So this idea that really public welfare should only be given to those people who deserve, typically somebody who’s perceived to have earned or is worthy of public support. Yeah. Often portrayed as, you know, they deserve because the factors that have led them to the need for welfare weren’t their creation. Yeah. It could be that they were just vulnerable, like young children, but even adults that they’ve kind of just fallen into this kind of, into this situation.
And of course, on the contrary, the undeserving is somebody who, you know, who has created their own problem themselves, maybe, and therefore they don’t deserve to be supported. And the kind of policy implications are there and of course, the undeserving citizen is the one that’s going to be subject to social control, surveillance and the kind of things that we’re talking about and even incarceration.
And, you know, if we now turn to the kind of experience of unaccompanied asylum seeking children, we do we can see both narratives at play here. So, for example, if we think about the the deserving and so, you know, the social workers very much were using these kind of arguments that these are innocent victims of war, of persecution, of trafficking children and because of their age, you know, that that they’re exposed.
And, you know, we have a moral duty. And here, you know, reference is made to the UN convention on the rights of the child and also the 1951 Refugee Convention that mandate that children should not be turned away if they’re fleeing danger. Yeah. So you’ve got this kind of powerful mandate to support these young people, but then you’ve got this kind of, other side.
And, you know, much of this is a kind of a media moral panic. That asylum seeking children, they’re actually young adults, maybe some of the stuff, age assessment and age disputes is a with a big kind of political football that these, these people are not really children, that they just pretend to be children, particularly maybe those that came from Afghanistan and places like that.
And of course, this then this then kicks into why should we be providing them? And you’ve seen all the moral panics around, you know, asylum seekers being housed in hotels and things like that. And so you’ve got this tensions. Now, the point that we were making and this is, this was quite interesting. You know, we we when Deborah did her fieldwork, she, she approached it on the basis that she was expecting maybe the managers to be a bit harsh, the kind of people who are controlling the purse strings because they’re kind of, as it were, under the cosh from government policy and the frontline workers being very sympathetic to the, the, the young people that they were working with.
But what we found was quite a mixed picture. You know, we did find many of those frontline workers being extremely sympathetic, using all kinds of creative ways to support these young people, to trying to resist the kind of, so, so they had to do these age assessments and, and how they could try to, you know, resist kind of being tempted into this kind of coercive approach.
But what we found also, others maybe they were also they were they were internalizing some of the wider rhetoric that, you know, because we’re all kind of subject to that. Those, you know, if you like, tabloid press kind of represent. And some of them were actually saying, look, you know, I don’t think this person really is the age that they claim.
And I’m not sure how to believe them. So there was, we did find a level of mistrust as well. And if we look at look at the managers, I think again, we found both those managers who said, look, you know, we have to allocate resources and we have to, you know, we have to try and allocate them according to who deserves the most.
So they might use these arguments to cut back on say specialist teams that were working with unaccompanied asylum seeking children. But what we found also were the managers who were, actually very sympathetic and were defending the rights of unaccompanied asylum seeking children and their social workers. And so they would use all kind of creative methods to be able to maintain those services, maybe by not designating it as a specialist team, but still having those workers, you know, working on those things.
So, I mean, Michael Lipsky back in the 80s wrote a book called Street Level Bureaucracy. And so these managers are what he calls street level bureaucrats. And, you know, they did actually have quite a lot of power and control, maybe less power and control than social workers do, but they still have that. So what you find is in the whole, you know, broader kind of debate around control and care, you find these professionals whether they’re managers who were controlling resources or were the frontline professionals kind of working in a minefield.
And, you know, some of them step on the mines and some of them find their way around. And and it’s quite a mixed bag really, but it’s a difficult, difficult area of work. And, you know, I think that’s what we were trying to kind of portray in the whole piece that, social work isn’t a common sense activity.
It’s not that, well, caring is just about caring, actually, when you look at the kind of terrain and you look at the context in which the caring is delivered against, you know, the most vulnerable in society, it’s a hugely complex task. And, you know, I think we do need to defend social workers as well. And the way they try to meet their legal obligations, the kind of policy.
And then they’ve got their own ethical frameworks. And what we found was in, in terms of unaccompanied asylum seeking children, that one of the tools that social workers were using, and this was really music to my ears, as somebody who’s been teaching social workers about the importance of professional, ethical frameworks, but they were more willing to use that as a way to defend their actions, even if that went against the policy that was being pushed by the local council.
And I think we can learn a lot of lessons from medical professionals here. You know, a medical professional will be working for a local hospital or a trust or wherever, but they will always say that my accountability is to my professional body and ethics, and if that means going against a local trust. I will do that.
And I think, but you do need a lot of confidence for that. And I think that’s where maybe some of the social workers were falling down, that they didn’t have the confidence to assert their own authority.
RK: Gurnam, also also from your article with Deborah, there are support workers who are resisting the norms of scepticism and mistrust towards unaccompanied asylum seeking children. What are these people doing to support young people again against this hostile system?
GS: Well, I mean, I think a wide range from practical support, you know, enabling them to, you know, get telephones, for example, really important, although I think you might recall some of these, the moral panic stories about they have mobile phones, these, you know, as if, you know, that’s a luxury. Often the mobile phone was the most important thing for them because that did enable them to remain in contact with people, you know, for them, maybe families and stuff.
So they would provide that kind of practical support. They would also be empathetic. And I think that’s really important because ultimately, I mean, many of those those did did achieve asylum. Yeah. They were. And in fact, some of the research was with those who had kind of gone through the system and, they kind of became adults and they were living and working and they were saying that, you know, that kind of that, that, that, that believing us was really critical to, to our survival, our mental health, this kind of, you know, accepting us as we are rather than, you know, maybe suggesting that we we shouldn’t have left our country or somehow we, we, e were choosing to come to England, which is where the kind of undeserving moral panic.
But that said, I think that, you know, as I was saying, you know, we’re all subject to those kind of pressures, aren’t we? And, you know, and that’s always a danger is that we, you know, we succumb to the kind of, you know, stereotypes out there.
And there were some social workers, well these were, if you like, a different kind of professional. They weren’t professional social workers, they were people working in a kind of more care function. Some of them were saying, look, you know, these people have got it better than I have. I can’t afford X, Y, and Z.
So I think there was that kind of personal other kind of, feelings coming in as well, which is kind of understandable. You know, it’s a bit like, I suppose, the impact that UKIP has, you know, the UK independent that they’ve had, that Reform have had on drawing in working class people, poor people into what might be the right wing kind of agenda. It’s populist and populism does, you know, impact professionals as much as anybody else.
RK: You were saying about the mobile phone, for example, that it could be seen as a luxury and, and, and you mentioned UKIP and Reform at the end there that, kind of the, the rhetoric, the, the heinous rhetoric that gets thrown around about, anyone migrating to this country through kind of seems like through any means.
They don’t just want to go for asylum seekers anymore. They seem to want to go for everybody. Is and you mentioned about class there at the end there is there is there a kind of the class struggle they see things like and an unaccompanied asylum seeker receiving a mobile phone and, and, and it kind of feeds into the the rhetoric machine that’s been building for years. Is there something in that?
GS: I think it’s important that we don’t see the working class as this kind of unthinking kind of lump and proletarian that somehow, you know, feed them something, they’ll react. In fact, what you find is in local communities, many kind of working because of many of these unaccompanied asylum seeking children and, you know, asylum seeking families more generally are placed in working class areas.
Yeah. So you get both narratives. You get those narratives where someone will say, I’ve been, you know, on the housing list for many years and I can’t get the housing these people come in. That’s a kind of Nigel Farage kind of moral panic. Yeah. But then you get others who who get to know those families. Naturally, they they become part of community.
And you find that they’re, they’re actually part of the resistance to support these unaccompanied asylum seeking children. Well, you know, and as they become adults, so you find that, you know, within the working class, you find both kind of reactions which is kind of natural, really, because, you know, that’s that’s how it is. You find both empathy and if you like, and some kind of antagonism as well.
But the kind of broader political climate is that we know that immigration, asylum is, is a kind of topic that’s constantly been used by, you know, policymakers and governments and, you know, at the moment it’s you know, we are in it’s in a really difficult situation. We’ve seen what’s happened with Trump in America, where he’s almost gone on the verge of having these internment camps, you know, any illegal alien.
I mean, we’re back to the aliens now. In Germany we’ve got reaction, you know, we’ve had in the UK, you know, the Tories and their Rwanda policy, which has failed. You know that somehow we’ve got to we’ve got to keep people out. Now, I’m not saying that, we, you know, we should just have an open door policy, but we need to understand both.
And in this sense, it’s I’m using the analogy of in the health service, we need to look at what the upstream factors and also what’s happening downstream. And of course, this is where I think for social workers and policymakers to have a an international perspective is really important because the truth is that, you know, people don’t choose to risk their lives to come across the channel or send their children across on these boats.
They do it because they think that their life is more secure, even on the, you know, the choppy waters of the channel or the Mediterranean than they are where they live. And I think that we we need to therefore, you know, think about international obligations and clearly conflict is a big issue. And, you know, so, so international social work has a crucial role to play, both in terms of how we can move away from.
I think Malcolm touched on it earlier on this, this, this, this, almost all that social workers do is downstream, you know, kind of rescuing or controlling people to social workers, influencing wider policies. I think that’s really important. And we do have the International Federation of Social Work that have been doing that. A good example of that, and it might be a slight digression, but the issue of Gaza at the moment, the, the and the kind of violence that has been, systematic violence against the children of Gaza has really kind of created tensions amongst social workers internationally.
And but I’m pleased to say that, you know, they’re still united and said, you know, we need to be united against all forms of oppression wherever they are, because the social work profession, in the sense that it’s primary raison d’etre.
RK: Your your special issue shows how social work is both an instrument of the state and also an advocate for social justice. You touched on this a bit earlier, and I’d like to hear more if I can please. How can we ensure that social work is focused on safeguarding and not on perpetuating prejudices over vulnerable people?
MC: Sadly, Rich, even even the safeguarding leads to further investigations as I kind of refer to, but I think that most I still believe that most pedagogues in social work and, and students and many practitioners still champion humanist and critical paradigms. But that those very approaches have very little influence in fields of practice, where neoliberal and more conservative values tend to prosper.
There are also acts of resistance, and that includes from service users themselves. And I still believe that free market capitalism is ultimately the problem, not service users as we’re led to believe in certain practice based environments. I guess the other point, which we haven’t had a chance to talk about because of time, is that there were two articles around older adults, and I think it’s important to bear in mind that older people are now the largest service user group, who are referred to social work departments because we have an aging population and, you know, people are being drawn into care, we have a situation where we have, you know, potentially more cases of people with dementia or Alzheimer’s and not enough carers to support those people.
We have people being kind of, you know, bunged into care homes against their will and so forth. So for me, a lot of the future around social work will be around the aging population. And it goes back to the same point about not responding to crisis, but making sure that there’s enough preventative care there to avoid the kind of the safeguarding investigations and very superficial acts of intervention.
GS: Yeah. I mean, Rich, I might just follow on from Malcolm there, I think that last point is worth kind of repeating. Social work should be working upstream as much as it’s working downstream. We’re not just here, as it were, to pull people out of the water that are drowning. We need to try and work at stopping them being thrown into, falling into the water in the first place.
And I think this isn’t just a debate around social work and social care. It’s a debate within health. Yeah, you know, the idea that we need to we need to focus on health rather than sickness. So that’s the first point. I think that’s really important and that means, you know, the reestablishment of community based social work. I was just, reflecting on some work that I’d done in Chennai, in India, Tamil Nadu state and how social work there, and child protection, most of the kind of stuff that we do here in terms of the safeguarding of children, they said that they wouldn’t actually intervene for those factors, like maybe where you’ve got low level chastisement of children, maybe even the use of physical violence and even emotional kind of abuse.
They said that that would be seen as a low level, what we tend to do, they said in there is we’ll work at the village level. We will work with communities through community education, through health education and through, you know, education on parenting. And they found and most of all, empowering of women.
Yeah, actually enabling them to have income. And they found that that had huge benefits in terms of child protection and safeguarding. And they said that if we were able to if we were to police every kind of behaviour of every parent, we just wouldn’t be able to do it. We need millions and millions and millions of social workers.
And that’s true if you think about it. You know, for every one case that comes to light to social workers, there’s probably another ten, 15, 20 cases that don’t come to light. So I suppose the question is does social work have a role for those people, and if so, how can we reach them? I think that’s a really important point.
And the other point, last point I would make is that, social work can’t be ambivalent about its moral and ethical duty. You know, social workers are working with the most vulnerable in society. By definition. These are people who have in a sense fallen through the net, who can no longer care for themselves. And then, you know, we social workers can’t go in that space and think, oh, well, did these people really deserve our care?
Once you get into that, you’ve lost the plot and you know, and then, you know, and I think that to thankfully, I think most social workers that I know of and are still, you know, steadfast on their, commitment to social justice and you know long may that continue.
RK: Malcolm and Gurnam, thank you so much for coming on the Transforming Society podcast today and discussing your special issue. It’s such a great issue. And, yeah, excited for everybody to to go and read it. Social work and social control. The special issue for the Critical and Radical Social Work journal guest edited by Malcolm Carey and Gurnam Singh, is published by Policy Press.
You can find out more about the special issue by going to bristoluniversitypressdigital.com or transformingsociety.co.uk.