Ethical Practice in Social Work

An applied approach

Michael Collingridge, Steven Curry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000256161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Aspetti sociali nell'informatica

This innovative text shows why ethics is so important for social work practice, that it is not simply a way of defining and understanding what is good in practice, but is a means by which social work and other caring professions can actually achieve good practice.' Professor Richard Hugman, University of NSW This book integrates ethical theory and political philosophy into a clear yet challenging framework for ethical action in social work. Firmly grounded in practice examples, it will be of great interest both to students and practitioners in the field.' Professor Sarah Banks, Durham University In an increasingly fragmented and regulated world, the authors of Ethical Practice in Social Work argue that social work has become detached from its ethical roots. Their aim is to reinstate ethics as the driving force of good social work and welfare practice. Ethical Practice in Social Work provides the tools to develop essential ethical decision-making and problem-solving skills. Taking an applied approach with case studies in each chapter, the authors demonstrate how ethical principles can be used to transform practice into an effective, inclusive and empowering process for both professionals and their clients. They discuss the ethical principles social workers have traditionally adhered to, the role of the good social worker' in the contemporary context, professionalism, and the way in which ethics can be used to reconcile the often differing demands of employers, community groups, clients, the profession and their own personal values. Ethical Practice in Social Work is a valuable professional reference and student text.

Part one Challenges for ethical practice

1 Social work in its environment

Gina and Harry are two friends who have recently achieved a lifelong ambition to become social workers. Gina had previously worked part-time as a voluntary counsellor with a telephone crisis service, while bringing up her two children. Harry had transferred from studying a degree in science into the social work degree. They became firm friends after meeting in a tutorial in first year, discovering they lived near each other, and sharing transport to the university over the next few years. At graduation they decided to keep in touch.

Several months after graduation they arranged to meet for their first coffee and a catch-up. They had planned to meet earlier, but could not organise a time to suit them both. Gina now works close to home at her local council as a community development officer. Harry is employed as a caseworker for the state welfare agency. Harry is an hour late for the meeting. He rushes in just as Gina is about to pay for her coffee and leave.

Apologising profusely he explains that he had gone out to investigate a report of suspected child abuse. Neighbours had telephoned the office about incessant crying they heard from the house next door. When Harry arrived, he could hear the crying but no one answered his knocking. The neighbour appeared and told him she thought that the couple who lived next door had driven away early that morning. She had heard the car go, but not seen them leave. They had three children aged four, two and nine months. The crying had started about midday and she was worried the baby had been left in the house without supervision. Harry called the police. They broke into the house and found all three children but no adults. In the lounge room the television was hissing white static, plates of half-empty food lay on the floor and mess was trampled through the house. They found the four-year-old and two-year-old hiding under a bed. The baby was in a cot together with several bottles of milk. The baby’s room smelt of sour milk or vomit and dirty nappies.

The police took all three children to a local hospital for a medical check, while Harry tried to arrange emergency respite care until the parents were located and the situation sorted out. Thankfully, he found a foster family willing to have the children for the weekend.

‘In my six months with the department, this is the worst I have seen,’ Harry said. ‘Nothing we learnt at uni prepares you for what people can do to their own kids. I tell you, Gina, finishing my science degree would have been easier than this. I wouldn’t want to be in those foster parents’ shoes this weekend. The four-year-old bit the police officer on the arm when she was trying to get him out from under the bed. The baby screamed when I reached out to pick her up. The smell was still in the car after we dropped them off, and they had been bathed at the hospital. Lucky those foster parents are so experienced. I wouldn’t know what to do with kids like that. I hope they don’t ring me for advice.

‘The worst thing is, it seems like it’s only downhill from here. What chances have those kids got once they’re in the system? They’re likely to get more difficult, get moved around, maybe split up. You know the statistics on abuse once kids go into care. How much more will these kids have to go through? It’s pretty much out of my hands now. What if I have only made things worse in the long run? But I couldn’t have left them where they were either.’

Gina nodded. ‘The politics of community committees and submission writing seem like a picnic compared to what you are telling me. At uni I thought we were being trained to make a difference. When you’re out there in the real world, though, it’s more like just a fight to survive. So much work, so many expectations, so much paperwork to justify your own position. If I could just stop writing about what I want to do and get on with doing it, things would be a lot easier.’

‘Yeah,’ Harry responded. ‘If you think red tape is bad in a council, you should try child protection. Even the questions you ask are pretty much pre-written for you, unless of course there is no one around to ask, like what happened today. In my job it’s mostly a policy for this, a protocol for that, and so on. Quite a few of my colleagues don’t even have a degree. Sometimes I wonder what all that education was for.’

To think about ethical practice in social work, we first have to consider what social work is, and the impact of the environment. In this chapter we argue that it is fundamentally important to understand the environment in which social work operates. Further, we argue that if we are to understand our environment, and to practise ethically, we need to have an open mind, be able to critically analyse a situation, recognise a sound argument and understand the importance of a teleological approach to ethics.

The situation in which Harry and Gina find themselves is quite common, especially for new graduates in the field. Overburdened with the amount and type of work being employed in organisations in which they are still learning how systems work, new social workers can feel overwhelmed and as though the social work they are experiencing in the real world is nothing like they expected to find while they were studying at university.

From their conversation, Gina and Harry do not seem to be at all clear about who they are as social workers or what their primary purpose is. They appear to be instinctively reacting to the demands placed on them by their environment, rather than offering a measured response informed by a clear set of values or being proactive in other ways. The very different types of work they do—submission writing and community development on one hand, and working with individuals and families involved in the child protection system on the other, illustrates just a little of the huge variety social work encompasses. To begin our book on ethical practice in social work we need an idea of what social work is, before we examine the environment in which social workers work, and some of the challenges they face.

What is social work?

One of the difficult questions social work students face is ‘What do you do?’ Whereas most people seem to know what teachers, nurses, doctors or lawyers do without having to ask, there does not seem to be this general understanding about social work. Social workers themselves find it a hard question to answer. Why is this so? Partly, it is difficult to encapsulate the variety and complexity of social work in a few phrases. There is not one readily identifiable function that all social workers perform such as teaching or curing the sick. Partly it is because social work itself can be invisible—social workers work in partnership with people, systems and organisations to tackle problems at various levels. It is rarely the social worker alone who does something that can be identified as being ‘social work’, except perhaps in notorious situations such as the removal of children. Lastly, social workers do things that many other professions also share. Counselling, working in groups, solving organisational problems, working with communities, all these are activities that other professions perform, although we argue, in different ways.

Let us see how the profession itself defines social work. In July 2000, the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) adopted a new definition of social work at its general meeting in Montreal, Canada:

The social work profession promotes social change, problem solving in human relationships and the empowerment and liberation of people to enhance well-being. Utilising theories of human behaviour and social systems, social work intervenes at the points where people interact with their environments. Principles of human rights and social justice are fundamental to social work (IFSW 2002).

Liberating people, empowering them, solving problems, enhancing wellbeing, promoting social change—exciting stuff. You would expect social work courses to be crammed to bursting with people keen to learn how to do these things. A profession fuelled by principles of human rights and social justice that strives for social change and liberation sounds powerful and proactive; it is the source of this power, and ways to enhance it, that we will be exploring in this book. Yet so often social workers experience the reverse: feeling disempowered, lost and at the mercy of forces much greater than themselves, as we see in the case study of Gina and Harry. Even Gina’s forlorn memory that she had been trained to ‘make a difference’ is a pale reflection of the 2000 IFSW definition.

Ideas such as liberation, social change or empowerment are complex and abstract. Even the more moderate and often cited response, also appearing in the definition above, that social workers intervene ‘between people and their environments’ does not adequately capture the complex enterprise that is social work, nor the vision that drives it. However, being abstract and complex is not sufficient to explain why it is so difficult for social workers to explain what they do. The environment has an enormous impact, as implied in the quote from the definition, because social workers work between people and their environments. Indeed Healy asserts:

The deeply contextual nature of social work differentiates it from other professions. Our professional practice foundations— our knowledge, purpose and skills bases—are substantially constructed in, and through, the environments in which we work (Healy 2005: 4).

In order to understand the nature of social work, including the apparent contradictions between its visionary aims, the work-day realities which many social workers experience and their consequent inability to articulate what they do, we not only need to understand the environments in which we work, we need to be able to work with these environments. Fook (2002: 161–2) argues that by accepting the importance and strong influence of environments (‘reframing our practice as contextual’), social workers no longer need to treat their environments as givens. Instead they can learn to work with their environments, taking responsibility for some parts and seeing possibilities for change within them, even in small areas. She argues:

Our practice is simply defined as working with the context,no matter what that context may be. If we perceive our environments as hostile, then we simply work to change this, rather than trying to work in spite of it. The focus becomes one of changing the environment, or aspects of it, rather than seeing ourselves as a ‘crusader’ or ‘victim’ role, as the lone person prevented from doing their job because of their environment (Fook 2002: 161–2).

Neither Gina nor Harry seems to have this idea of working with their environments. Instead they see themselves as victims, each alone in their hostile circumstances. Working alone can be lonely and exacerbate the sense of futility—why bother trying to change something that cannot be changed? However, if we appreciate that other social workers are in the same position and if each of us tries to address the context of practice, our collective efforts can produce change.

The first task of our book, then, is to examine social work in its environments. Payne argues that three arenas are particularly important in influencing what social work is. One is the ‘political-social-ideological arena, in which social and political debate forms the policy that guides agencies and the purposes they are set or develop for themselves’ (Payne 2005: 17). The second is the agency-professional arena, in which employers and employees influence each other about the more specific aspects of how social work operates. The third is the client-worker-agency arena in which clients, workers and agencies all influence each other to produce the activity known as social work. Payne emphasises that each of these arenas influences the other two and gives examples of how clients and social workers can influence all three arenas.

In Part One of this book we examine the political-social-ideological arena (chapter 1) and the agency-professional arena (chapter 2), looking at the challenges social work faces and the notions of power that go with them, before we explore in Part Two (chapters 4 and 5) the heart of social work and the source of power it can draw on to become the profession pictured in the IFSW definition. Part Three examines in more detail the client-worker-agency arena as we consider ethical practice in social work.

The political-social-ideological arena: Postmodernism

Gina and Harry are not alone in their doubts about social work, and in their questioning of what impact individual social workers can have. Many authors have identified how the social work profession is facing new challenges and opportunities in the globalised, postmodern world in which we find ourselves (Adams, Dominelli and Payne 2002; Fook 2002; Hugman 2003; Ife 1997; Alston and McKinnon 2001, 2005). The term ‘postmodern’ is used in two ways that are closely related. On one hand it refers to a family of theoretical approaches, or methods, for understanding and analysing the political-social-ideological arena in which we live. On the other hand, ‘postmodern’ is a term that identifies our current times, as against previous eras.

Drawing on the work of Bauman (1995), Hugman (2005: 2–10) describes four main periods in the history of social and religious thought, all of which influence our postmodern era in some way. The first was the classical era, during Greek and Roman times, during which the foundations of western philosophical thought were laid down. The second was the medieval period, in which the ideas from the classical era were interwoven with Christian and Judaic religious threads (monotheism). The third period was modernity, or the ‘age of reason’. It was then that scientific thought began to replace a religious understanding of the social world—‘the era of classic liberal philosophy in which ethics started to become the science of moral life, in the context of the rapid development of industrial society’ (Hugman 2005: 3). We will explore some of the ethical theories from the modern era in more detail in chapter 3. Social work is a product of modernity; it is one of the secular replacements for the welfare role of the Christian church in western countries and, reflecting its liberal underpinnings, it is based on the modern idea that we can reach a rational understanding of people and societies, and take rational action to deal with the problems we see (Payne 2005: 15).

The fourth era is ‘postmodernity’. In contrast to modernity’s certainty about the world, and its use of scientific proof to test competing theories, postmodernity is a time of uncertainty, fragmentation, plurality and diversity (Hugman 2005). In social work one example is the fragmentation and increasing specialisation of social work that we discuss later in this chapter. There are many families of postmodern approaches, just as there are competing modernist approaches. Whereas all modernist approaches require a notion of objective ‘truth’ as the standard by which we can judge whether one state of affairs or idea is better than others (Hugman 2003; Ife 1997), all postmodern approaches share a belief that there is no such thing as objective ‘truth’. Instead of using scientific method to know about our world, postmodernism views knowledge itself as constructed by human beings through language, and so is more interested in understanding language and how it creates meaning and relationships of power and dominance. Hugman (2005) points out that the scepticism and uncertainty of the postmodern era are leading to a rediscovery of earlier periods, plus attempts to synthesise competing ideas from other eras. He highlights the ‘rediscovery’ of the ancient Greek tradition, particularly the work of Aristotle with a new emphasis on virtue ethics, in professional ethics writings of the 1990s. Indeed, virtue-based ethics form an important foundation for the approach to ethical practice in social work in this book.

Discourse

One of the most useful tools to emerge from postmodern analysis is the notion of discourse. Fook defines discourse as ‘the ways in which we make meanings of and construct our world through the language we use (verbal and non-verbal) to communicate about it’ (Fook 2002: 63). Drawing on the work of Foucault, Fook explains that the notion of discourse includes not only beliefs and ideas, but also social practices, our ideas of who we are and power relation...