Listen to thisLast month I used my recent experience of a teaching exchange to North Carolina to draw some comparisons between approaches to youth justice in Scotland and the USA. This month I want to reflect on another experience in the States.
One of the university faculty took me and a couple of Scottish students to visit a local welfare reform agency he is heavily involved with. It had grown from small beginnings in one of the black churches to become a multi-million dollar enterprise. Basically, it warehouses excess stock from large businesses and distributes this among the poor. It also provides work experience opportunities in warehousing and distribution. It is the kind of faith-based initiative that the current political administration in the US is seeking to encourage. Now, there are compelling arguments that can be made against a welfare system that exists on the scraps from the table of corporate America and those involved in this project know that. However, there is a vitality about the project that challenges some of the torpor and complacency that I’ve seen in our state run welfare services here in Scotland.
We met with the director of the project, who was also a pastor in the church. Prior to entering the church he had a background in trucking and was able to use his expertise in this area put the charity on a sound business footing. In the course of discussion he shared with us his dislike of social work; a bit disconcerting maybe for social work students setting out on their careers but salutary nevertheless. His view was that, by focusing on individual pathology and applying “expert” therapies, social work “stuck” his people in a plantation mentality. His philosophy was to give people the opportunity to take control of their own lives. This involved concrete steps such as giving them jobs and education and a way to move out of poverty and oppression.
I found myself agreeing. One of the things that strikes me about teaching social work in the States is the focus on therapy, often at the expense of structural analysis of the impact of poverty and discrimination on people’s lives and problems. Social work in Scotland has not gone quite so far down this line but the political thrust in recent years has been pushing it in this direction. Irrespective of what they might claim, governments don’t want a social work profession that challenges the status quo. They want one that keeps people in their place, and which maintains a plantation mentality. This is evident in the focus on individual deficit that has permeated social work over the course of the last 20 years.
One area where this has become increasingly apparent in recent years is the direction in which work with young offenders has taken. The whole focus is on delivering programmes to iron out supposed cognitive distortions in youth who offend. Or to subject them to anger management programmes. Both of these positions make assumptions about the nature and the causes of behaviours and apply normative definitions and values to these. But what if these supposed cognitive distortions aren’t distortions at all but perfectly adaptive ways of responding to (and perhaps challenging) the social conditions in which kids exist? What about the fact that many of them have good reason to be angry? Counting to ten isn’t going to make that go away.
We take another tack with those kids we deem to have been traumatized. We want to give them therapy or treatment, although the truth of the matter is that most social workers aren’t really very good at this. The result is that we patronize kids and, assuming them to be victims we re-victimise them, this time as victims of our welfarism. It’s an approach that offers them little, least of all hope of a different future.
We only offer nice welfarist services until kids offend of course. Then it’s back to the programmes and them having to take responsibility for their actions, responsibility that our previous welfarist interventions have often denied them. One way or another we stick them in a plantation mentality.
When we run short of victims or syndromes we can always rely on a charity or non-governmental organisation to conduct some advocacy research to uncover a hidden seam; to react with indignation and surprise, surprise to come up with a programme to address this newly found need. As the old question goes, “whose needs are being met here?”
Against this backdrop it was refreshing to come into contact with an individual who had enough fire in his belly to challenge the inherent conservatism of current social work and to get off his backside to do something about it. One of the things that struck me was his sense of “these are my people.” A sense too that he was prepared to slog it out with those of his people he thought were selling themselves short. Such an orientation calls for a very personal connection, requiring a level of affinity and direct engagement between self and other. Instead, social work engages with “clients” or “service users” and their problems through a proliferation of systems, as though workers somehow stand apart from it all.
Increasingly, social work needs to reclaim a vision that is about raising people up rather than keeping them in their place. One of the ways that might happen is for us academics to get off the fence, to stop kidding ourselves on that we’re in pursuit of objectives and rarefied knowledge, and to work with agencies to promote change. That was the kind of partnership I witnessed in the collaboration between this project and the university. It has honourable roots in social work in the settlement movement. The alternative may be complicity in maintaining a plantation mentality.
