My PhD supervisor asked me an interesting question the other day. She was referring to the participants in my study and she asked, ‘do you think they have value?’. I answered way too quickly to give anything other than the acceptable answer in my profession. I said I believed all humans have value. Mulling it over in the last little while, I’m not really sure that question can be answered that simply. Certainly it’s one of the central ideas of the profession of social work and when asked, most of us would be in agreement with it. But I’m not sure we can make anything solid of that. Because what you believe is ‘value’ might be pretty far from what I agree has ‘value’. And then again, who cares what we believe, if how we act runs counter to our belief? Do you think every human has value for the fact that they are of your species? Do you think that every human has value because God gave it? Or is it that you value the productivity of that human? Or maybe you just value them because you think it sounds like a good idea in principle?
And then what about ‘maximising human potential’? Social workers are meant to do that do. What are we talking about here? Humans as a whole? Because if that’s the case then we might need to make some tough decisions about individual humans who might get in the way of our grand plan for humanity’s maximisation. And what grand plan is that?
Or are we talking only about maximising an individual’s potential, maybe the one right in front of us at work? How can we do that? What is the maximum of an individual’s potential? Nobody knows the answer to that. Social workers have some ideas about communities of empowered folk joining together to adjust well to their world. But is it healthy to be well adjusted to this world? Maybe maximising potential is less about walking alongside people to assist them to fit into society and more about finding methods and means of waking people up from the slumber of modern life? Take your medication, join a book club and do a parenting class or two. Feeling better? Feeling ‘maximised’?
And if we think maximising potential is just a good idea anyway, then why are we stopping only at humans? Surely this is not sound, admiting that we are concerned only with our own species. Surely we should be concerned with the potential of all species? How about the environment? We have a nice phrase in our business called ‘person-in-environment’, only I don’t think they meant giving a second thought to trees when they came up with that one. I think we might have meant the living room? Or maybe your friends and family? For that matter, we don’t maximise potential when we buy coffee that isn’t fair trade, or clothing that we are uncertain of the conditions it was made in, or food that involved unspeakable levels of suffering just because we like to eat it.
This line of thinking led me to take a look at the other words our profession is based on. Around the globe, social work has a few values that they all agree should serve as the foundation of the profession. The two big ones are 1. Human Dignity and Worth and 2. Social Justice. These were my calling to the profession and the reason that I believed doing this work mattered. When I first started studying, they were mighty welcoming words. They told me that I was not alone, that there were others who also believed. But I don’t think I had really explored what it would mean to deliver on these values. I thought I wanted to and I suppose I even thought I could. It was a nice idea at the time. When I’ve asked other social workers, they also speak about the way the values of the profession called them. Certainly, as a group, we enjoy the nobility of pointing to these core values as evidence that we are somehow different, and maybe once-upon-a-time were, but it’s different now. Today’s world doesn’t want you to mess with the system. Everyone’s just getting along best they can. Start talking about social justice and affording everyone some dignity and then start trying to do something about it and see what happens to your career. Or your place in society for that matter. Or your health. If you can forget about the fact that we’re probably not even sure what these values mean, beyond a sense of rightness about them, how can we know what we’re supposed to do about it as social workers? Learning about evidence based practice and crisis intervention and filling out pscyho-social assessments will earn you a living, and doing one subject in Ethics is probably a start, but shouldn’t we be teaching our social work students how to break the system? If it truly is social justice we’re after and if we want to afford dignity, then by anyone’s account, the society we live in runs pretty counter to giving anything other than a tick box approach to those lofty plans. No more so than in some of our big ‘welfare’ agencies. So how fair is it to put pretty words in a code of ethics and charge each other with a modern day quest of delivering? Downfall anyone? Why are we surprised when we can’t do this when the system that we live in does not want us to and furthermore, we’re not really sure how to do it anyway. If we can’t all know what we all mean by these values and principles, and we are fairly uncertain on how to deliver on them in a system that doesn’t support them, and the times that we’ve tried we don’t really get anywhere, then aren’t they a little meaningless? A little misleading?
If the profession of social work wants to continue to use these values as some kind of banner, then it needs to get a whole lot more critical of the world we live in. If we are to avoid being nothing more than band-aids for the wounded, patching them up and sending them on their way, providing a useful service to the system in re-habilitating folk that don’t seem to fit in, we better face the reality that our society is not about to turn around now and decide that we really all should be nice to each other. It’s not going to roll over. It’s going to take a fight to change things and I remain sceptical if the job is even do-able. And if it is, it’s going to take more than words of encouragement. It’s going to take outrage and action and possibly destruction. Given that I don’t think the professional association is really gearing up for that battle, I don’t think we have much integrity when we bleat about social justice, human dignity and maximising human potential. And without these intentions, I’m not sure I can continue to feel at home in the profession of social work.
This isn’t to suggest that social work shouldn’t continue as a professional qualification. I just think we need to be honest about what we really mean by a social worker. Maybe we should acknowledge the band aid model and put aside those values for another day. If that’s the profession, than it’s undoubtable that delivering on this kind of service helps some folk. But if that’s the case, then it’s not for me. When I talk of social work, I talk of critically examining the world, our place in it as humans, the way our society functions, the potential for evolution for ALL systems and most importantly, what we intend to do about it. And then I’m talking about doing it. Alongside each other, gaining strength from our resistance and sustaining a movement that tugs and pulls at a world gone mad.
Five years after deciding to be a social worker, pretty much called on the basis of the values of the profession alone, I’m not so sure I’m in the right place anymore. On carefuller consideration, I’m not sure the reality of the job is at all like what I thought it would be. It would be grand if it was, but I think it’s stuck too far inside the system to be able to do what it really needs to do to embody the values it wants to claim. I’m not sure if it wants to try.
