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.
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.
Julie Peake is a social worker whose career spans many roles primarily within the field of child protection in Aotearoa. Most recently she was appointed as child protection technical assistant in Vanuatu, a role developed collaboratively by Volunteer Services Abroad (VSA) and UNICEF, and which saw Julie working alongside a local team to develop their child protection systems. She arrived in Vanuatu in February 2020 after many months of preparation and consultation, only to return to Aotearoa when the pandemic necessitated closing of international borders. In this podcast Julie reflects on the task she was invited to undertake, and her learning from this post, albeit brief, about what it meant to be a New Zealand social worker in Vanuatu, how she carried her child protection experience into this small Pacific nation, and some initial thoughts about what the global Covid crisis might mean for social work.
Resources referred to by Julie in the podcast
Family Violence Death Review Committee. (2020). Sixth report: Men who use violence | Te Pūrongo tuaono: Ngā tāne ka whakamahi i te whakarekereke. Wellington, NZ.
Ravulo, J., Mafile’o, T., & Yates, D. B. (Eds.). (2019). Pacific Social Work: Navigating Practice, Policy and Research: Routledge.
Photo credit: Bruce Tuten
Words matter. Maybe social workers know this better than most. They are often the tools of our trade after all. How we describe the world – how we communicate our analysis of ‘the social’ – helps to construct our belief systems in subtle and important ways. Language use is influenced by changing political, economic and social systems, although much of this is only obvious looking backwards.
Categories
The tyranny of distance
Humans adapt. You don’t have to be a dedicated evolutionist to see that when social conditions change, humans change too. Our adaptations may not be uniform, but we are shaped by the social condiitons and rules we are embedded in. How have the social distancing rules affected our social lives? Are we affected equally? And will we want to go back when it’s over?