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.
Tag: surveillance
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.
By Liz Beddoe and Tarsem Singh Cooner
We presented this short video at the recent Social Work and Social Development conference in Dublin, July 2018: Facebook: An unethical practice or an effective tool in child protection.
A guest post by Eileen Joy (PhD candidate, University of Auckland)
You’re a busy social worker…. you have a client, you are worried about them, they have missed two of their most recent appointments, in the past they have talked about suicide ideation and you know that their current living arrangement is precarious. You try texting them, there is no answer. You try phoning them, there is no answer. You try an email, and get no reply. You even might try visiting where they live, and nothing.