Can Social Workers Fight for Social Justice?

a post by Career Geek for his/her blog



Social workers are the ultimate altruistic professionals. They work long hours for little pay with the goal of making other people’s lives better. Studies on American society have found that at least one in 10 Americans rely heavily on social workers, making their efforts essential to the success of America as a whole.

Inherently, social workers work for social justice; they are devoting their lives to improving others’. However, many social workers want to do more to change the system that disadvantages not only social workers but also their clients. In short, some social workers want to become social justice warriors.

Unfortunately, many social workers are employed by the government, and thus, they feel uncomfortable (or in some states are directly prohibited from) speaking directly about their interest in perpetuating social change.

Continue reading [noting that the suggestions are aimed towards social workers in the USA]

---

A Marriage Counselor Gets Personal

a post by Marcia Naomi Berger for the World of Psychology blog

I think I was put on earth to write about marriage. But no one who knew me when I was single would have guessed it. After a couple of decades of looking for the one and meeting many men, I finally married. At my wedding, a friend said, “It’s the end of an era.”

Long before becoming a wife, I was a marriage expert — for other people. A licensed clinical social worker, marriage counselor and psychotherapist, I helped couples transform their relationships. My clients helped me too, probably without knowing it.

During a session with a husband and wife I saw for couple therapy for some time, they said I must think they were totally messed up. They noticed my eyes tearing up. I blurted out how touched I was by their caring and commitment. I hadn’t grown up seeing that and wished my parents had that kind of connection instead of divorcing when I was 13.

Continue reading

---

In pursuit of “the welfare trait”: recycling deprivation and reproducing deprivation

an article by Michael Lambert (Lancaster University) published in People, Place and Policy Volume 10 Issue 3 (2016)

Abstract

Adam Perkins’ The Welfare Trait outlines the most recent attempt to provide substance to the existence of an underclass, based on the idea of a shared ‘welfare-induced’, ‘employment-resistant’ personality amongst benefit claimants.

Following in the footsteps of historian John Macnicol who went ‘in pursuit’ of the underclass, this article travels ‘in pursuit’ of the welfare trait by situating its claims in historical context through a comparison of the post-war study by William Tonge, Families without Hope, which sought to identify a common psychological maladjustment in ‘problem families’.

The common intention, methods and recommendations of the two studies underline their shared purpose: to transfer the social and policy problems associated with poverty from their socio-economic context and the culpabilities of the state to finding the problem in individual families, identifying their behaviour as problematic and proscribing solutions rooted around cultivating personal responsibility. in historical context

Full text (HTML) also available as downloadable PDF

---