A presentation made by Ian Hyslop to the ANZSWWER symposium in Adelaide, Australia in 2018

1. R E C L A I M I N G O U R I M A G I N A T I O N S
D I S R U P T I N G T H E N A R R A T I V E !
C R E A T I N G A P R O G R E S S I V E
F U T U R E F O R S O C I A L W O R K
A N Z S W W E R
A D E L A I D E
S Y M P O S I U M 2 0 1 8
• I A N K E L V I N H Y S L O P
U N I V E R S I T Y O F A U C K L A N D

2. FIRST COMES HOPE – CHANGE HAPPENS!
‘If we look at unhappiness, misery, and suffering as products of the
social world, and we say that the social world can be changed, then
open the possibility that what has been done, can be undone.’
 Bourdieu (1999)

3. SOME BEGINNING PROPOSITIONS
The practice of social work and the identity of social work are contested:
sites of struggle
Social work is located in a contested socio-political context

4. TENSIONS:
IN & AGAINST THE SYSTEM?
 “ … it is common to state the
intentions of social work as
helping people to accommodate
to the status quo and as
challenging the status quo by
trying to bring about social
change. This dissonance is intrinsic
to social work, to its essence.”
 Epstein (1999, p. 8)

5. AMBIGUITY: CARE AND CONTROL
A particular
positioning that is
contested and
ambiguous in
character.
1
Social work is
(arguably) the only
professional
occupation that
specifically targets the
working class poor.
2
Social workers (the
social profession) have
been described as …
intermediaries, ‘go-
betweens’.
3
This location provides
opportunities to
exercise power in
ways that liberate and
oppress.
4

6. KNOWLEDGE FOR PRACTICE IS
CONTESTED
Social
understandings
Sociology
Medico - professional
understandings
Psychology
Family Support Child Rescue

7. SOCIAL WORK:
POSSIBLE FUTURES?
WHO CONTROLS
THE NARRATIVE?
WHAT ARE THE
CONSEQUENCES?
WHAT IS TO BE
DONE?
FRAMING
QUESTIONS:

8. GLOBAL DEFINITION
“Social work is a practice-based profession and an academic
discipline that promotes social change and development, social
cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation of people.
Principles of social justice, human rights, collective
responsibility and respect for diversities are central to
work. Underpinned by theories of social work, social sciences,
humanities and indigenous knowledge, social work engages
people and structures to address life challenges and enhance
well-being. The above definition may be amplified at national
and/or regional levels.”

9. SOCIAL WORK
AND SOCIAL
JUSTICE?
Is social work policy and practice focused on
social justice, equality, liberation from oppression?
Or is contemporary social work focused on the
control of ‘problem’ populations? (adjusting
‘failing’ citizens to the discipline of the market)
Is ‘saying’ that social work is about social justice
enough?

10. NEOLIBERAL REVOLUTION
FROM ABOVE
This ideological shift has accompanied the global acceleration
of capitalist development since the 1970s.
It has become the dominant political world view in
Anglophone countries and arguably throughout the
Western world. (Spolander, Engelbrecht & Pullen-
Sansfacon, 2015)..
The process has entailed a radical reduction in the power of
organised labour and an equally radical “upwards”
redistribution of wealth. (Callinicos, 2010).

11. A POLARISED WORLD?

12. PART OF PROBLEM OR SOLUTION?
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

13. CAUSATION AND REMEDY?
A QUESTION OF PERSPECTIVE , FOCUS AND METHODOLOGY:
Who holds the power of definition?
FOR EXAMPLE, IS CHILD MALTREATMENT THE PRODUCT OF
“PROBLEM FAMILIES” OR OF “FAMILIES EXPERIENCING PROBLEMS” ?
(Featherstone, White & Morris, 2014)

14. LOOKING
BACK IN
ORDER TO
MOVE
FORWARD ?

15. C19th
ORIGINS OF
SOCIAL
WORK:
The middle
class were
confronted
by the poor
in the
streets of
cities such
as Paris.

16. LATE 19TH CENTURY ROOTS OF SOCIAL
WORK AND CHILD PROTECTION
• Ferguson (2004) describes the relationship between
the urban poor and the European bourgeoisie:
• “ Faced with such stares, as well as the threat of being
literally touched by the ‘dangerous classes’, a major
social, moral, and political dilemma opened up
concerning how to deal with the poor. The decisive
bourgeois response was to contract out, mainly to
social work, the job of dealing with the ‘refuse’ of
modernity in order to try and sanitize these new spaces
and seal up these wounds that modernization was
creating. ” (p. 25)

17. WHERE DO SERVICE USERS COME
FROM?In the words of Domenach,
although initially ‘… developed as
volunteer assistance to
interventions aimed at eradicating
tuberculosis and venereal disease,
social work was later transformed
into a professional modality of
social assistance aimed at the
underclass or para-proletariat’.
(Chambon, Epstein & Irving, 1999,
p.88)
“Since its earliest incarnations,
social work has been inextricably
bound up with poverty and with
the complex and contradictory
attitudes towards people living in
poverty since the late 19th Century.
”
( Warner, 2015, p.46)

18. SO…
IDEAS HAVE A
LINEAGE…
This idea of a morally corrupt and threatening underclass is a
recurring public policy discourse that, unsurprisingly, is more
prevalent in times of economic liberalisation.
When we give thought to the popular contemporary notion of
vulnerable families, living beyond the margins of the respectable
classes - posing a danger to the health, safety and socialisation of
their children, compromising their right to normal development -
we might do well to be mindful of the history of this notion.
A note of caution:

19. THE WELFARE STATE
& THE 5 GIANTS
• In his report setting down the vision of
the post-war welfare state in Britain
William Beveridge spoke of taming the
five giants: associated with poverty:
disease, want, ignorance, squalor
idleness.
• The lofty vision for social work - the
‘fifth social service’ - was to “…provide
the personalised, humanistic
dimension of the welfare state, the
primary tool being the social
personality and use of relationships”
(Parton, 2014a, 2047).

20. WELFARE STATE & SOCIAL WORK
• Child and family welfare was part of a wide social work
remit applied within a public-sector structure that included
health, education, housing and income maintenance. Social
work sought to repatriate those pushed to the margins of
market society (Brodie, Nottingham and Plunkett, 2008).
• This involved a process of semi-structured interpersonal
connection; the development of trust and solution-building
(Parton, 2014; Smith, 2001).
 This is not to say that the ideals and the realities necessarily
matched up – particularly in relation to institutional sate
care – there is a fine line between ‘care’ on the one hand
and stigma on the other.

21. A NARROWING LENS:
• As welfare states have
retracted from the
1970s, social work has
become largely
associated - at least in
public discourse - with
a residual child welfare
mandate which has, in
turn, been centred
around a child
protection brief.

22. NEO-LIBERAL
WELFARE:
The poor are blamed for their poverty in the
contemporary policy context and the disadvantaged
are treated as less than equal citizens. Beneficiaries, for
example, are categorised as expensive and dangerous
social failures (Bauman, 1999; New Zealand
Productivity Commission, 2015).
As Parton (2014, p. 176) has observed in the English
setting, not ‘…only has the state become more
residualized, marketized and consumerized, it has
become more authoritarian for certain sections of
the population’.

23. THE AOTEAROA-
NEW ZEALAND
(A-NZ) CONTEXT
CHILD & FAMILY SOCIAL WORK HAS
POLITICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS:
A discourse of personal and family responsibility for
the reproduction of trauma has become associated
with both poverty and child maltreatment (Expert
Panel, 2015; New Zealand Productivity Commission,
2015)
Within a risk and protection focused paradigm
circumstances and behaviours associated with
poverty are potentially construed as indicators of
heightened danger and harm as opposed to a
means to a better understanding family
circumstance.

24. SOME REFLECTION …
Where have we travelled?
In Aotearoa-New Zealand, between 1989 and
the present, the racialized child protection
narrative has been transformed from a focus
on the damage done to Māori children by state
violence to the cost visited upon the state and
wider society by ‘dangerous families’.

25. SOCIAL WORK CONTINUES
TO BE SITUATED IN AN
ECONOMIC CONTEXT:
• Capitalism is exploitative and
hungry.
• It requires private ownership and demands
profit.
• Profit is obtained by the reduction of costs /
greater productivity / the generation of
commodities / the opening of new markets
new territories for profit.
Transformation grows from
beginnings.

26. The disjunction between what social workers see and know and an
increasingly punitive practice environment inevitably generates
resistant voices.
Social workers engage with the lived realities of multi-stressed families -
not with inventories of risk and future cost.
The social work voice is both more threatened by – and threatening to
– the state.
VOLATILE TIMES?

27. IDENTITY: THE ‘SOCIAL PROFESSION’??
This methodology potentially generates an awareness of the challenges faced by relatively impoverished people in
unequal societies, exposing the pervasive myths of choice and personal culpability which support contemporary risk-
driven and authoritarian child protection regimes (Featherstone, Gupta, Morris & Warner, 2016).
Social work practice is characterised by a close connection with the lived experience of citizens positioned at the
margins of the liberal capitalist socio-economic system (Parton & O’Byrne, 2000).

28. ELEPHANTS-
EXIT STAGE
LEFT:
Child protection social work generally services families who
are socially and economically marginalised (Pelton, 2015).
Indigenous people, ethnic minorities, and those classified
the underclass poor are disproportionately represented
(Perry, 2012; Office of the Children’s Commissioner, 2015).
Child ill-treatment is correlated with poverty in the form
inadequate housing, education failure, poor health, low
incomes and deprived communities.
What are the policy and practice implications of this

29. SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE
• What do social workers know?
• What do they see, hear and feel?
• Do you have anything special to say?

30. MEDALS FOR DISSENT?
“Good” social workers inevitably find
themselves swimming against the tide
at times:
Social workers who are concerned with
social transformation – who act in the
world as it is with a view to what could
be or should be – threaten the
institutions and power interests who
have a stake in the world as it is.

31. What do social workers do when social equality is no longer on the
political agenda?
 Efficient control of identified problem individuals and families?
Is this where your heads and hearts lie?
What was once main-stream ‘respectful relational social work practice’
is increasingly a practice of dissent.
Should we roll over or act in our own defence?
WHAT DID YOU SIGN UP FOR?

32. THE QUEST …
 The capacity to
operationalize our
awareness of the
relationship between
structural inequality
and private pain is
the unrealized
promise of social
work practice.
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

33. WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
Social workers must be informed, organised and active if social work is
to be the profession that it could be:
Role of unions.
Advocacy – Building alliances with other groups / organisations,
including political connections.
The third space – on-line advocacy and consciousness raising.
Educators must champion the dissenting social work voice.
Perhaps our strength has been our weakness – have we been a
mediating and conciliatory profession for too long?

34. Fight the good fight: Organise, educate, advocate!
“Social workers engage clients in exchanging knowledge about their life experiences
so that their voices can be heard and their stories can expose the inadequacy of
official constructions of their lives. By supporting the creation of counter discourses
social workers assist those outside their circles to understand the world from client
perspectives.”
(Dominelli, 2004, p. 38)
 Or are we a dying profession? - the answers are yours!
PUSH-BACK … RECOGNISE THE CONTEST!

35. FINALLY COMES HOPE – CHANGE HAPPENS!
‘If we look at unhappiness, misery, and suffering as products of the
social world, and we say that the social world can be changed, then
open the possibility that what has been done, can be undone.’
 Bourdieu (1999)

36. REFERENCES
• Bauman, Z. (1999). In search of politics. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
• Bourdieu, P., Accardo, A., Balaz, G., Beaud, S., Bonvin, F., Bourdieu, E., . . . Wacquant, L. (1999). The
weight of the world: Social suffering in contemporary society. Oxford, UK: Polity Press.
• Brodie, I., Nottingham, C., & Plunkett, S. (2008). A tale of two reports: Social work in Scotland from
social work in the community (1966) to changing lives (2000). British Journal of Social Work, 38(4),
697–715.
• Callinicos, A. (2010). Bonfire of illusions: The twin crises of the liberal world. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
• Chambon, A., Irving, A. & Epstein, L (Eds.). Reading Foucault for social work. New York, NY: Columbia
University Press.
• Dominelli, L. (2004). Social work: Theory and practice for a changing profession. Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press.
• Epstein, L. (1999). The culture of social work. In A. Chambon, A. Irving, & L. Epstein (Eds.), Reading
Foucault for social work (pp. 3–26). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
• Expert Panel—Modernising Child Youth and Family. 2015. Final Report: Investing in New Zealand’s
Children and Their Families; Wellington: Ministry of Social Development. Available
online: www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/work-programmes/investing-in-

37. CONTINUED …
• Featherstone, B., Morris, K. & White, S. (2014). Re-Imagining Child Protection—Towards Humane
Social Work with Families. Bristol: Policy Press.
• Featherstone, B., Gupta, A., Morris, M. & Warner, J. (2016). Let’s stop feeding the risk
monster: Towards a social model of child protection. In Families Relationships and Societies.
ISSN 2046-7443.
• Ferguson, H. (2004). Protecting children in time: Child abuse, child protection and the
consequences of modernity. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Ferguson, H. (2004). Protecting children in time: Child abuse, child protection and the
consequences of modernity. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Global Agenda. 2014. Global agenda for social work and social development: First Report—
Promoting social and economic equalities. International Journal of Social Work 57: 3–16.
• New Zealand Productivity Commission. 2015. More Effective Social Services. Available
online: https://www.productivity.govt.nz/inquiry-content/2032?stage=4
• Parton, N. (2014). The Politics of Child Protection: Contemporary Developments and Future

38. CONT…
• Parton, N. (2014a). Social work, child protection and politics; some critical and constructive
reflections. British Journal of Social Work 44: 2024–56.
• Parton, N. & O’Byrne, P. (2000). Constructive Social Work: Towards a New Practice. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
• Pelton, Leroy H. (2015). The continuing role of material factors in child maltreatment and placement.
Child Abuse Neglect 41: 30–39.
• Perry, B. (2012). Household income in New Zealand; Trends in indicators of inequality and hardship
1982–2011. Retrieved from Ministry of Social Development website:
https://www.msd.govt.nz/.../household-incomes-report-2011-main-report
• Smith, C. (2001). Trust and confidence: Possibilities for social work in ‘high modernity’. British Journal
of Social Work, 31(2), 287–305.
• Spolander, G., Engelbrecht, L., & Pullen Sansfacon, A. (2015). Social work and macro-economic
neoliberalism; beyond the social justice rhetoric. European Journal of Social Work.
doi:10.1080/13691457.2015.1066761
• Warner, J. (2015). The Emotional Politics of Social Work and Child Protection. Bristol: Policy Press.