Reimagining Social Work in Aotearoa
“It appears that FACS may regularly omit evidence such as evidence of a parent’s ‘strengths’, the effort a parent has made to address substance abuse issues, or the positive parenting approach of the parent. This has occurred despite there being numerous policy documents that indicate that this approach is not permitted,” (Davis, 2019, p.13).
This was a key finding, not of the Hawkes Bay case, but of the ‘Family is Culture’ review, released in New South Wales last week.
In a recent post on Facebook we reported on some recent research published in England about social workers in children’s services viewing service users’ Facebook pages to gain access to information.
It seems timely to examine the Social Workers Registration Board Code of Conduct for social workers in Aotearoa New Zealand. This Code also applies to social workers who are not registered, as Section 105(1)(b) of the Act states that it not only applies to Registered Social Workers but also ‘should apply generally in the social work profession.’ Some individual employers require employees to comply with relevant professional codes of ethics or practice and if so, this Code applies.
This one is about the politics of dispossession, poverty and incarceration in neoliberal New Zealand. It is no secret that Māori, Pasifika and working-class families generally carry a disproportionate burden of social suffering in our society. Look around you if you don’t believe me. We need to dismantle the structures that perpetuate social inequality.
This one is for the lawyers. Child protection and the appropriate legal framework to facilitate ‘best practice’ is a subject which has been vigorously contested across Anglophone societies over the last forty years. These debates reflect differing disciplinary perspectives and differing ideological influences such as the tension between the discourse of individual children’s rights on the one hand and claims to collective cultural autonomy for whānau Māori on the other. Much of this friction is generated by, and reflected in, the economic and political changes that have developed since the 1970s, when the so-called ‘Welfare State consensus’ started to unravel. Parton (2014) argues that changes to child protection practice over time are best understood as responses to changing (and contested) constructions of the preferred relationship between the state, the family and children; and more specifically the children of the poor.
In 2018 we published a guest blog by Eileen Joy about the growing use of viewing Facebook to gain information about individuals and families. We were interested to start some discussion about the ethical issues in social media use in social work. Our review of literature and codes of ethics/ conduct didn’t provide us with much help. Eileen commented :
most codes of conduct and discussion of the use of social media by social workers seems to be more concerned with how social workers might protect themselves against clients, not how clients might protect themselves from social workers.