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Social work and the un-justice system

This is a guest post from Bex Silver. Bex graduated the MSW(P) Programme, University of Auckland, in 2018. She has worked as a housing social worker in South Auckland and as a Family Start social worker with a kaupapa Māori NGO. Bex now works in a male prison, delivering rehabilitation programmes. She also sits on the Labour Party Justice Policy Committee, advocating for changes within the Justice and Corrections systems.

I have been working in a men’s prison for almost two years now. There is something unsettling about working within a Justice system that remains so fundamentally unjust. Many people have asked me why I choose this line of work. The answer is that I purposely chose to move towards my fear rather than away from it. I already knew, from international research and national recidivism rates, that the prison system doesn’t work – for perpetrators or for victims.

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The Prevention Project – a conversation with Emily Keddell

In this episode, Deb Stanfield interviews Emily Keddell (University of Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand) for the RSW collective. Emily speaks to The Prevention Project: Supporting Whānau and Reducing Baby Removals, a project undertaken with colleagues Luke Fitzmaurice and Kerri Cleaver. 
Emily explains the background to the project and shares its key findings, which include the important mediating role of community social workers and other professionals, the value of a poverty-informed perspective, and the role of community building initiatives to improve social networks of whānau. Improving the pathways into, and availability of, early, intensive, culturally responsive services and enabling a whole of whānau orientation to practice are key promoters of preventing entry to care. 

Devolving power and resources to build the availability of such services, particularly by Māori, for Māori services, was suggested as a way to help build the capacity of these kinds of services. Whānau involved with Oranga Tamariki around the time of birth reported the trusting, non-judgemental and supportive relationships with community-based workers, and focussing on intrinsic motivating factors such as love for children, helped them navigate Oranga Tamariki intervention, and their own personal struggles, to retain care.
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On representation: voice, trauma and evidence in decision-making

The Child Youth and Family reforms announced a week ago are wide-ranging and contain a mixture of potential pros and cons for different populations in contact with the whole child welfare system: by which I mean statutory child protection, the wider domain of NGOs, targeted and universal services, and macro social protections. I offer this post as my first reflections, and (as these reforms provide some hearty discussion topics) look forward to the developing policy debates that will ensue.

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Lies, damned lies and child protection statistics

Lies, damned lies and statistics: so the famous saying goes. The problem is, in the counting of social phenomenon (as opposed to physical entities), the way we choose to count things always reflects underpinning social processes rather than objectively verifiable realities. So, the issue is not so much a matter of calling out ‘lies’, but one of discerning the social priorities and concepts driving the categorisation processes used to sort the things at hand.