Author: RSW Collective

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Feeling the tension: where to from here?

A guest post from Bex, Luis and Su:

‘Workers find themselves assigned substantially changed workloads and mandates and charged with enforcing definitions of need and entitlement with which they may be politically, professionally, and personally at odds.’                                  Aronson & Sammon, 2000, p.168)

What started just like any other ANZASW Facebook page post spawned a series of entries regretting the way in which social workers were, at times, forced to practice in ways which did not align to their beliefs and values. This got a few of us thinking as to why this may be the case. What powerful forces were in play that compelled some social workers to practice in ways incongruent to their value systems and, according to one entry, potentially against the law?  Why and how do skilled and passionate social workers end up in positions where they must compromise on practice integrity? What creates that tension and are there ways to resist?

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Appeal for support for a Hong Kong social worker sentenced to one-year imprisonment in the anti-extradition bill movement

This is an appeal published by the Hong Kong Reclaiming Social Work Movement

A registered social worker from Hong Kong, Mr. LAU Ka-tung, has been convicted and sentenced to one-year imprisonment for committing an offence in the Anti-extradition Bill Movement on 17 June, 2020.

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OK Social Work?

A guest post by Jude Douglas

For years when I was working in statutory child protection I didn’t easily admit to being a social worker. There was a sense of shame for me personally about the control aspects of the work and also, people’s ideas of what a social worker was were hazy at best and often just downright wrong. So I just put my head down and did the job. Several years ago and about the time I was moving to broader level roles and when the debates about registration and professionalisation were really ramping up I decided that there was an opportunity to reclaim the title of social worker and own it, and put out there what we did. This was without a strong media interest in issues around social care – it’s still that way unless of course there’s a disaster – then there’s a baying of hounds for a while and the silence resumes.

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Hey you! – A call for blog posts on RSW

This blog site has been up and running for a little over five years now. Time passes rapidly. The object of our collective has been to provide viewpoints on a broad range of issues relevant to social work in contemporary society and to provide a platform for information and analysis that troubles the status quo. In some ways it seems that social workers are more reluctant to publicly critique the practice and policy frameworks which surround them than ever. Politics and management are often all about controlling the narrative: mandating what can be said and by whom. Increasingly social workers have taken on the message that they can only be active citizens within strict ideological parameters.

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Imagining a world where we needed fewer social workers

A guest post by David Kenkel

One of the strange ironies of our profession is that the social and economic conditions that create the need for our existence are also what we all seek to change. Reading between the lines of budget 2020, it seems likely there will be more jobs for social workers and better resourced social services. The tragic part though is that little will happen to change the economic circumstances of those we work with. It is admirable that this government recognises the need for expanded social services at this time. It is not admirable that they seem unwilling to truly address the underlying structural issues which create this need.

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