Tag: injustice

By Kendra Cox

Recent elections around the world have shown a groundswell in popular support for right-wing, nationalist politics (Griffiths, 2019). This should concern social workers both personally and professionally. The social work profession, though espousedly dedicated to empowerment and liberation, has always been wielded as a mechanism of social control by the powerful. The grim record of social works complicity in destructive state policy is often framed as a set of historical aberrations, tragedies that could not be repeated—but is this really the case?

As part of the British settler-colonial project, aid organisations across the empire helped advance individualist Western ideas about moral responsibility and citizenship. Charity and religious aid workers dispensed welfare relief to the colonists and indigenous communities they considered deserving (Fortier & Hon-Sing Wong, 2018; Tennant, O’Brien, & Sanders, 2008). This relief was often used as a mechanism of control over populations in the colonies—particularly indigenous people, where it also acted as a means to remove and relocate children to mission and boarding schools, institutions, and respectable white middle class families (Haskins & Jacobs, 2002).

Social workers have also forcibly excluded people from societies with the rise of eugenics in the 19th century. Influential early social workers Mary Richmond and Jane Addams were both prominent advocates of “social hygiene”, though otherwise their political views and practice were wildly different (Kennedy, 2008). Social workers in the eugenics movement in the US assessed people for poverty, deviancy and degeneracy, and it was likely the same here in Aotearoa (McClure, 2017). In Nazi-controlled Germany, social workers who administered welfare performed functions crucial to the regime by reporting children and families they deemed “unfit” (Johnson, 2011). Though they didn’t carry out the most horrific work themselves, practitioners were complicit in the systematic sterilisation and murder of adults and children.

We rightly look back on these darkest periods of social work’s professional history with shame. And yet, cruel practices continue globally, with social workers in the US involved in the removal and indefinite detention of migrant children attempting to cross the Mexican border (Nilsen, 2018). Social workers also staff offshore Australian asylum-seeker detention camps, which are characterised by their ‘systemic abuse, torture and secrecy’ (Maylea & Hirsch, 2018, p.161). Indigenous, Black, and brown people across the global North remain subjected to hugely disproportionate rates of child removal and incarceration—a clear continuation of the effects of colonisation, imperialist violence, and systemic racism. These are processes with which social work is intimately intertwined, and has been since the earliest beginnings of the profession. Here in Aotearoa, there are more children and young people in state care than ever, and more and more are tamariki me ngā rangatahi Māori (RNZ, 2019). Though the language, policies, processes, and care are different than during the historic institutionalisation of children from the 1940s-1990s, the unjust outcomes for poor and brown families continue.

The risk-averse neo-liberal state, obsessed as it is with future cost and forward-liability, has forced much of statutory social work into increasingly technocratic practice. The uncomfortable reality of how the work adds to oppression and marginalisation becomes obscured through proceduralism, excessively high caseloads, and surveillance. Drawing a line in the sand about what work is too much, too far, or too destructive is difficult when the work itself is broken down into a series of boxes to be checked. This is dangerous when paired with a global tendency to celebrate the supposedly unwavering progression of human rights while forgetting the horrors of the past (Younge, 2019).

Social workers should not be technicians, uncritically enforcing the will of the state. Courageous social workers of the past (Hayes, 2007) and present (Armitage, 2016) have subversively and openly challenged injustice where social work has otherwise been in the service of it. The march of history rarely proceeds in a straight line, as the familiar global rise of xenophobia and neo-fascism shows. After all, it is unlikely that social workers in pre-Nazi Germany’s Weimar Republic, who worked in a relatively progressive social democracy (Ross, 2015), could have foreseen the abhorrent work that many would eventually carry out. We must be mindful of social works complicit past—and our collective power to challenge injustice—as we walk into the future.

References

Fortier, C., & Hon-Sing Wong, E. (2018). The settler colonialism of social work and the social work of settler colonialism. Settler Colonial Studies, 1, 1-20. Retrieved from: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2201473X.2018.1519962.

Tennant, M., O’Brien, M., & Sanders, J. (2008). The history of the non-profit sector in New Zealand. Retrieved from: http://www.communityresearch.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/formidable/sanders4.pdf.

Haskins, V., & Jacobs, M. (2002). Stolen generations and vanishing indians: The removal of indigenous children as a weapon of war in the United States and Australia: 1870-1940. In J. Martens (Ed.), Children and war: A historical anthology. New York, NY: New York University Press. Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=historyfacpub.

Kennedy, A. (2008). Eugenics, “degenerate girls,” and social workers during the progressive. Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, 23(1), 22-37. Retrieved from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249685513_Eugenics_Degenerate_Girls_and_Social_Workers_During_the_Progressive_Era.

McClure, T. (2017). The dark, unknown story of eugenics in New Zealand. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_nz/article/7xw9gb/the-dark-unknown-story-of-eugenics-in-new-zealand. Accessed June 2019.

Johnson, S. (2011). Social eugenics practices with children in Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the role of social work: Lessons for current practice. Journal of social work values and ethics, 8(1), 1-10. Retrieved from: http://jswve.org/download/2011-1/spr11-johnson-Social-Eugenics.pdf.

Maylea, C., & Hirsch, A. (2018). Social workers as collaborators? The ethics of working within Australia’s asylum system. Ethics and Social Welfare, 12(2), 160-178. Retrieved from: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/ 17496535.2017.1310918.

Ross, A. (2015, January 19). Berlin story: How the Germans invented gay rights-More than a century ago. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/ 01/26/berlin-story. Accessed June 2 2019.

Armitage, M. (2016, August 23). ‘Stop horrors on Nauru’, Lismore social worker pleads. Northern star. https://www.northernstar.com.au/news/stop-horrors-on-nauru-lismore-social-worker-pleads/3080596/.

Nilson, E. (2018, June 19). Kids who cross the border meet with social workers. What they say can be used against them. Vox. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/kids-who-cross-the-border-meet-with-social-workers-what-they-say-can-be-used-against-them/ar-AAyOvbW. Accessed 2 June 2019.

RNZ (2019, April 4). Young Māori over-represented in state care and detention. RNZ. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/386318/young-maori-over-represented-in-state-care-and-detention. Accessed June 3 2019.

Griffiths, J. (2019, May 28). Elections in EU and India tilt the world’s largest democracies toward populism. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/27/india/european-union-india-populism-intl/index.html. Accessed June 3 2019.

Younge, G. (2019, May 31). Our glorious past is what we remember. The brutality behind it we’ve forgotten. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/31/glorious-past-remember-brutality-forgotten. Accessed June 3 2019.