FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE; Friday 13 November 2009

Social Development ‘Double-Speak’ Challenged By Social Workers

The Asia Pacific Social Work Conference, which finishes today in Auckland, has provided a snapshot of a wide variety world social work issues and a renewed set of challenges for the 400 plus social workers from 29 countries who have attended.

Chief amongst the challenges, as spoken to by Professor Bob Lonne of the Queensland University of Technology, is the risk that social workers - and the wider public – are captured and caught out by slippery terms such as “social inclusion” – which has become a hot topic in Australia where it has been described as ‘Social policy as Tough Love’.

Professor Lonne said that terms like social inclusion tend to be “hazy, motherhood statements” which actually have more of a neo-conservative economic base and motivation than a social change agenda to them. This echoed another conference paper from the United Kingdom that was critical of government campaigns that over-individualise social issues by promoting them in the form of “modern morality tales”, occurring only at a personal and not a societal level.

Professor Lonne suggested that the Australian government’s agenda for social inclusion has some positive aspects but is an untested approach that runs the risk of “neatly glossing over underlying structural issues of poverty and need if it isn’t constantly challenged. He said that any agenda that targets groups and sees them as problematic has to be treated warily and with caution, given this can just magnify the problem rather than magnify solutions. “As social workers we know that social policy is only as good as the lived experience of people,” he said.

Professor Lonne suggested that as government social development policies change, social workers are often left with the questions of “whether to jump on the bandwagon or not?” He said that a social inclusion agenda, by its very name, was of course a rare opportunity for social workers to get on the same political page and to talk about social disadvantage within the confines of that framework

“At least we can put our hands up (as social work professionals) and let it be known that we can peal back the layers of complexity around these policies, we can join the dots and we can do that knowing both our own limitations and the limitations of the welfare system and welfarism,” said Professor Lonne.
“If we don’t get to know and understand and, in some instances, embrace the language and discourse (being used by governments) – even though it’s like playing with fire - then we risk being further excluded and marginalized ourselves”.

Speaking after Professor Lonne, Dr Marie Connelly, Chief Social Worker at New Zealand’s Ministry of Social Development, said it was becoming increasingly difficult for social workers to have an impact and bring about change, and in that regard social work has “lost its way a little”. This erosion could be attributed in part to a dominant managerial culture which has over time curtailed the professional discretion of social workers, to a point where more radical social work has almost become an historical artefact.

Dr Connelly advocated the use of a rights-based approach to “humanize our systems” and made a call for social workers to “unify around the core value of securing social justice”.
Other speakers at the conference also expressed concern at the marginalization of social work and social workers. Lack of professional identity has been an issue for social workers as well as for anyone engaged in what was once called community work, but which now occupies a fuzzy “occupational domain”.

In many important aspects the profession of social work is experiencing what Australian academic Joselynn Baltra-Ulloa described as a “crisis of relevancy , where we need to ask is what we know and what we do as social workers enough?”
Professor Carolyn Noble, of the School of Social Sciences at Melbourne's Victoria University, argued that social workers need to envision and actively pursue a future which changes their “present acquiescence and silencing (back) into the loud activism characteristic of the 1970s”.

Terry Leung of the University of Hong Kong noted a helpful trend that sees social workers positioned less as “experts with an answer” and more as “resources to be used by people who are experts on themselves”.

Key topics at the conference included disaster social work, the status of refugees and migrants, social work education as well as social work for indigenous populations and by indigenous social workers.

The programme of 90 plus social work papers covered topics as varied as remote village life in Cambodia, adoption, life stories of youth in Papua New Guinea, working with survivors of cancer, social work in secondary schools, the needs of mentally ill offenders, social work and obesity, planning for ageing populations, and the view that young people leaving care are arguably one of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in society.

Papers at the conference directly presented a social work perspective on the large-scale Sichuan earthquake in China just last year and a major earthquake in Taiwan in 1999. Research was presented on factors that had a positive and direct impact on disaster recovery from the perspectives of affected people and social service agencies.

One response to the Sichuan earthquake that was discussed in depth was a “twinning policy” that saw a rallying from provinces and municipalities not physically affected by the disaster to provide immediate and long-term support to those parts of Sichuan that were hit hardest by the disaster, such as directly matched support for rebuilding infrastructure. The twinning aspect to this process of recovery and reconstruction has also included relocation of schools to different parts of China.

Several papers have addressed principles that can provide a richer ethical response to refugees and forced migrants, drawing some comparisons with other disadvantaged and vulnerable groups.

Hong-Jae Park of the University of Canterbury focused on how little is known about older settled Asian migrants and their cross-cultural experience despite the fact that the population has been growing rapidly in New Zealand.

Speakers on social work education recognized a need to equip social work students with an enhanced understanding and more cross-cultural skills related to a widening variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and doing more to explore the application of human rights to everyday situations.

On the topic of indigenous social work, Balaraju Nikku of Nepal – one of the poorest countries in the world - made the point that if social work is not indigenized in Nepal it is bound to fail to respond to the major social problems confronting the country. A common issue for indigenous social work service providers is a high turnover rate, which has a negative impact.

ends