Social Justice and Social Work

Rediscovering a Core Value of the Profession

Michael J. Austin

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781452274201
• eBook ISBN: 9781483324418
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Counseling
• Index: Social Sciences

This unique and timely book, edited by Michael J. Austin, introduces and connects social justice to the core values of social work across the curriculum. It presents the history and philosophy that supports social justice and ties it to ethical concepts that will help readers understand social justice as a core social work value. The book further conveys the importance of amplifying client voice; explores organization-based advocacy; and describes how an understanding of social justice can inform practice and outlines implications for education and practice.

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SEARCHING FOR THE MEANING OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

MICHAEL J. AUSTIN, CHRISTINA BRANOM, AND BRYN KING

The meaning of social justice is not self-evident

(Gil, 1998)

Stepping around a homeless person lying on the sidewalk in front of a downtown restaurant could be enough to ruin the evening if you allow your mind to wander. The flood of questions can overwhelm those of us who care about the needs of others:

How is it that in one of the richest countries in the world, we can’t find acceptable ways to help those in greatest need?

What is the story behind this homeless person, this son or daughter, spouse or parent? Is this person suffering from some form of mental illness?

Are we deluding ourselves as social workers to think that the challenges of caring for the homeless are unique in comparison to other helping professionals in hospitals, jails, or mental health clinics?

Why has homelessness and poverty become such a political football with liberals arguing for collective responsibility to help the vulnerable in our society and the conservatives arguing that we are individually responsible for our own needs?

What are the sources of my personal sense of moral indignation? Was it the influence of my parents or a family member? Was it the impact of my religious upbringing? When did I first become aware of the reality that others in our society were suffering from poverty, discrimination, oppression, and social injustice?

Why do I feel guilty about the privilege of social class when so many homeless people of color suffer from discrimination based on the color of their skin?

Why do I feel so outraged by this situation and helpless at the same time? Why do I feel so agitated upon entering the restaurant when someone outside sleeping on the sidewalk may have so little to eat?

These are a few of the questions that flood our minds as we confront a homeless person on a downtown street and provide a wake-up call to think about one’s personal connection with social justice and injustice. These personal reflections can also help us explore more existential social justice issues that social work practitioners are called upon to face. The following questions provide a context for this book and are adapted from Gil (1998):

• To what extent does the search for meaning in one’s life include engaging in the struggles for social justice?
• How does one’s religious faith or secular beliefs (humanistic values and ethics) inform one’s social justice commitments to the survival and development of all people?
• How does the blending of the scholarly logic (historical and philosophical) associated with understanding social justice combine with one’s personal commitment to promote social justice?
• If we are all part of “the problem” (both agent and recipient of exploitation and oppression), how do we become part of “the solution” by promoting social justice?
• To what extent does the transformation of consciousness related to human relations, personal behavior, lifestyles, and professional practices call for self-transformation?
• How does one’s newly acquired understandings of social justice inform efforts to make the transition from focusing on the symptoms of social injustice to identifying and addressing the underlying causes of injustice related to exploitation and oppression?

All of these questions call for an increased understanding of social justice as well as the implications of social injustice.

The goal of this volume is to identify the variety of ways that social justice is viewed in the humanities and social sciences in order to develop frameworks that can inform social work practice. Social justice is a core value of the social work profession and calls for an understanding of its intellectual foundations within the context of multiple definitions and perspectives. The definitional complexity can be seen in the following examples of efforts to define social justice: Social justice can refer to a system of belief (liberal and conservative), a substitute for the term social injustice (oppression, discrimination, exploitation, etc.), a form of advocacy or intervention (doing social justice work), a value of a profession (Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers [NASW], 2009), and/or an organization (social justice nonprofit).

ONGOING CHALLENGES FACING THE PROFESSION

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The definitional complexity of social justice can be seen in the approaches of social work scholars to social work education and practice. For example, Longres and Scanlon (2001) look for social justice in the research curriculum, Hong and Hodge (2009) analyze the social justice content of course syllabi, Carroll and Minkler (2000) locate Paulo Freire’s message in social work practice, Reisch (2011) notes the historical and policy dimensions of social justice, and Morris (2002) alerts social workers to the human capabilities perspective of the economist Amartya Sen and political philosopher Martha Nussbaum.

Gil (1998) in his pioneering book, Confronting Injustice and Oppression: Concepts and Strategies for Social Workers, frames the tension between the role of social work as social control (representing the interests of the taxpayers as reflected in social policy) and social reform (representing the interests of the oppressed, marginalized, and poor as reflected in advocacy). He uses five concepts to describe how the members of the profession vacillate between and among the following dimensions of practice: (a) amelioration, (b) control, (c) adaptation, (d) reform, and (e) structural transformation (pp. 68–69).

Amelioration refers to the individual and collective support of people in need. Alleviating the suffering of those in society with low status involves the provision of assistance to meet essential needs (e.g., food, clothing, shelter) in the form of services (e.g., meals, homeless shelters, medical care) without focusing on the causes of poverty, disability, immigration, homophobia, race, gender, or age. Control refers to the provision of minimal public assistance (e.g., welfare for the poor, supplementary security income for the disabled, and health insurance for the poor and near poor). In the marketplace, control is reflected in laws regulating public assistance (e.g., work-related behaviors reflected in the 1996 federal legislation called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF) and worker–employer relations. Adaptation involves a more humane version of control that is often provided by nonprofit charities that tend to focus on addressing personal vulnerabilities (often related to poverty) and the related social interventions needed to process, maintain, and/or change people.

The last two concepts are reform and transformation. While control and adaptation tend to conform to societal expectations, reform seeks to reduce injustice and oppression without necessarily confronting existing institutions, frequently promoted by the “enlightened” privileged classes in response to “social unrest caused by long-standing injustice and oppression” (e.g., New Deal in the 1930s, urban riots in the 1960s, and welfare reform in the 1990s). Social reform is often a core value that an advocacy organization can use to document social conditions or a human service organization can include in its service provision and advocacy (Kaseman & Austin, 2005; Kimberlin, 2010).

Structural transformation, while connected to reform, seeks to address the systemic roots of social injustice and oppression rather than simply reduce their intensity. It is based on the development of a critical consciousness on the eradication of social injustices by not “masking the symptoms.” The consciousness is rooted in the moral dimensions of social justice that, most frequently, are reflected in the humanities noted in the next section. As Gil (1998) observes, “Though social workers abhor social injustice, they generally do not challenge the systemic sources. Practice is typically considered politically neutral and thus separated from the philosophical rejection of injustice and oppression” (p. 85). To address this dilemma, Gil (1998) calls for exploring everyday encounters with social injustice and oppression by (a) initiating political discourse that challenges the status quo, (b) promoting both reflection and consciousness raising that is critical for deviating from system-reinforcing behaviors, and (c) using challenging questions about the consequences for client well-being and quality of life. As Gil (1998) cautions, successful discourse is based on a readiness to engage as well as sensitivities to the thought, feelings, and circumstances of those engaged in the dialogue (e.g., discussing flaws in the research on rape victims in a room that includes people who have been raped calls for this type of sensitivity). The process of challenging assumptions, values, and practices can generate significant discomfort and reluctance to engage in discussions about social injustice and oppression. According to Gil (1998), the use of discourse can also reduce the individual sense of alienation when social workers experience the daily contradictions between their agency experience rooted in supporting immediate short-term goals rather than long-range visions of fundamental social change (e.g., “We get paid to serve clients, not change the world.”). As Gil (1998) notes, the goal of activists is to make the connections between seemingly disparate issues in order to identify common ground in the dominant social order (e.g., poverty and crime, gang violence and unemployment, toxic waste sites and health issues, etc.). In addition, the process includes amplifying client voice, organizing to promote clients’ right to vote, and democratizing the governance structures of our agencies. Gil (1998) concludes that the meaning of social justice is not self-evident and that social injustice “coercively establishes and maintains inequalities, discrimination, and dehumanizing, developmentally-inhibiting conditions of living… (because) equality is not a continuum but a zero point on the continuum of inequality… (where) there can be varying degrees of oppression and injustice but there are not varying degrees of equality—it exists only in the absence of oppression and injustice” (p. 15).

Gil (1998) calls upon social workers to make the transition from the emotional and intuitive concerns about injustice and oppression experienced by clients to the process of acquiring a historical and theoretical understanding of social justice and social injustice. The goal of this book is to facilitate this transition.

MORAL INDIGNATION AND SOCIAL EMPATHY

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Moral indignation (or outrage) often emerges from the perceived gap between what is happening and what should be happening. It involves our assumptions about how people should be treated and what we mean by “doing the right thing” (fairness). As Folger (2001) notes, the perceptions of injustice can be viewed as the product of “evolved moral intuitions that can be automatically elicited when people witness or learn about harm-doing” (p. 4). The field of moral psychology provides us with an understanding of the role of intuition in the process of experiencing moral indignation associated with promoting social justice. Haidt (2001) defines moral intuition as “the sudden appearance of consciousness of a moral judgment, including an affective valence (good–bad, like–dislike), without any conscious awareness of having gone through the steps of searching, weighing evidence or inferring a conclusion” (p. 818). In essence, immediate reactions in the form of moral indignation emerge without identifying the reasons for the feelings of injustice. The heart responds, while the head attempts to understand (e.g., “It is just not right that the richest country in the world has homeless people sleeping on the streets!”).

Once the head catches up with the heart over the occurrence of a moral violation, moral anger sets in. As O’Reilly and Aquino (2011) note, “Moral anger consists of a set of discrete emotional reactions that are related because they can lead people to think negatively about the perpetrators of injustice and want to see them punished” (p. 531). The greater the degree of perceived harm, the more likely it will be for people to judge the injustice and respond (Bradfield & Aquino, 1999).

So what does it take to respond to a situation that seems unjust? The evolving research on social empathy provides part of the answer, given that the social work profession is situated between the marginalized and those with power in our society. A central tenet of social work practice is the capacity to empathize with clients and the dilemmas they face. As Segal (2011) notes, “Social empathy is the ability to understand people by perceiving or experiencing their life situations and… gaining insight into structural inequalities and disparities” (p. 266). According to Gerdes and Segal (2009), the social work framework for empathy includes (a) mirroring another person’s emotions, or affective responses; (b) cognitively processing the meaning and context of the mirrored emotions using self–other awareness, perspective taking, and emotional regulation; and (c) conscious decision making or action taking based on the collected information (p. 116). In essence, social empathy reflects the connection between the capacity for individual empathy and the capacity to acquire a substantial understanding of inequalities and disparities. One way of acquiring this understanding is to learn about the connection between social problems (homelessness) and public policies designed to address them. This is one example of the importance of studying social policies as a way to inform social work practice. Another way to acquire social empathy, according to Segal (2007) is to “1) gain exposure by visiting places and people who are different from you, 2) strive to understand those differences, and 3) put yourself into the life of the person of different socio-economic class, gender, ability, age, sexual identify, race or national origin” (pp. 333–337).

The psychology of moral indignation and the social psychology of social empathy provide an important context for understanding of social justice. The intersection between these two domains also provides fertile ground for further research; namely, what is the relationship between individual empathy and social responsibility? What is the connection between social empathy and social policies and programs? How does one’s individual background inform the level of moral indignation and social empathy? How do moral indignation and social empathy contribute to promoting social justice? How well do social workers understand the connection between their religious backgrounds and social empathy? Is there a way to measure the varying levels of social justice and social injustice? How does the profession cope with both liberal and conservative views of social justice? These questions not only promote self-reflection but also lead to the search for definitions of both social justice and social injustice.

DEFINING SOCIAL JUSTICE

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We all have our own working definition of social justice. While some refer to equal opportunity or access to resources, others refer to equity dimensions of social policies. For example, to what extent is economic justice as might be reflected in a living wage policy or the growing inequality between the rich and the poor reflected in the occupy Wall Street movement an issue of equality or equity? Others view social justice in the context of action as in a social movement or doing social justice advocacy work that involves speaking truth to power. And still others view social justice through the lens of empowering the marginalized by searching for ways to amplify client voices. The umbrella of social justice can also be used to call for the rights of everyone to live in safe environments that promote the well-being as well as the worth and dignity of all.

While scholars in social work and in other fields have sought to define social justice, Banerjee (2011) captures the definitional struggle in social work as follows:

Social work scholars commonly suggest that social justice means arranging social, economic, and political institutions in such a way that all people, especially poor, vulnerable, oppressed, and margin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Editor
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Searching for the Meaning of Social Justice
• PART I. THE HUMANITIES PERSPECTIVES: THE MORAL IMPERATIVE—SHOULDN’T WE DO SOMETHING?
• PART II. THE SOCIAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVES: SOCIAL EMPATHY—WHAT DO WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND?
• PART III. SOCIAL INJUSTICE OUTSIDE AND INSIDE HUMAN SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS
• PART IV. EMBEDDING SOCIAL JUSTICE IN SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE
• Index