What’s so special about social work and social justice?

Social work uniquely sets out to improve relationships between people, by Malcolm Payne

Social workers are always talking about social justice. The agreed international definition says:

• Principles of human rights and social justice are fundamental to social work.

At the world social work conference in Stockholm this month there will be a lot of claims about social workers around the world tackling inequality, oppression and injustice.

But isn’t this presumptuous? Other professions have roles that are also important to social justice. You can deal with injustice in two main ways: doing something for individuals who are affected by injustice and doing something to equalise the position of different social groups.

The classic profession for righting individual wrongs is the law, and campaigners, journalists and politicians make the running in gaining public support for the needs of particular social groups. Educationalists are the main profession aiming to increase social mobility.

What’s so special about social work, then?

Social work makes three main contributions to social justice, which are very distinctive.

First, it is concerned with the ‘social’: to improving social relations between people. Doctors deal with illness, lawyers with crime and individual injustices, teachers teach their pupils: social work uniquely sets out to improve relationships between people individually and collectively. Teachers or counsellors might help a child think through their worries, but it’s social workers who visit the house, sit down and join with other members of the family to help sort out home problems.

Second, it focuses on people who lose out because they need housing or financial support but don’t fit the criteria. Social workers try not to give up on people just because they don’t fit in with the bureaucratic categories. Research over several decades shows that the people using their services value social workers trying to understand their problems and sticking with trying to get the best for them.

Third, social workers have always been prepared to intervene in social relations. It doesn’t make them popular. Nineteenth century campaigners complained about early social workers interfering in other people’s lives with their own moral agenda (or at least the moral agenda of the churches and the middle classes who funded early social work).

Complaints about social workers not intervening with an abused child, or a violent mentally ill man, or an isolated disabled or elderly person without family support just shows how useful it is to have a profession around prepared to have a go at helping to sort things out.

In this way, social work helps to maintain the social fabric. That’s why most countries have a social work profession.

But many people think these positives are hard to find in British social work. One criticism is their responsibility for assessing and rationing their services, for older and disabled people for example. That’s part of being focused on the ‘social’ too. Assessing and reporting on social issues and relationships makes sure that social care bureaucracies take these matters into account when they make decisions.

Another common complaint is the way social workers seem to be softies representing an overindulgent state letting too many get something for nothing, and not keeping the troublesome in their place. The reason for this perception is that the British state doesn’t want to use social work’s social justice values. Instead, the British state wants to see it intervene to assess when people are not fitting in with an economic system that excludes them from the possibility of living a fully human life.

Malcolm Payne is a writer, blogger and consultant on social work and end-of-life care, and will be a plenary speaker at the global social workers’ conference in Stockholm on 11 July 2012. The Guardian social care network is international media partner for the conference in Stockholm.