Reimagining Social Work in Aotearoa

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.

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.