Radical Social Work in the Real World By Colin Turbett

INTRODUCTION Roza Salih arrived in under the UK Government’s Asylum Seeker dispersal scheme in 2001 as a 12 year old with her family who had suffered murderous state persecution in Iraqi occupied Kurdistan. She went on to achieve fame as a school student when she banded together with other girls from Drumchapel High to highlight the plight of a close school friend detained in a dawn raid and facing immediate deportation – the ‘Glasgow Girls’. Their actions brought the plight of asylum seekers to national attention, ending the practice of detaining children in and changing attitudes at government level and within communities.

In an interview as a 27-year-old adult (Mitchell, 2017) Roza recalled their early time in a city housing scheme speaking little English. One of the family’s first contacts was with a social worker from Glasgow City Council, who helped in practical terms but also demonstrated an interest, kindness and support that gave the family hope and aided their integration, leaving a permanent and very positive mark. This inspired Roza to help others and seek change as she grew into the political activist she remains today. Whilst detail is scant in Roza’s recorded recollections there is no doubt that the interventions of this social worker made a significant impact. It seems doubtful, given the restraints on the time social workers are allotted for non- statutory cases in settings like Glasgow, that such outcomes were part of any agreed strategy and rather that they were a tribute to the commitment and attitude of the worker concerned and perhaps the team of which she was a member. That is the very kernel of the radical social work that will be described in this chapter. This is suggested as a necessary approach to work with those who end up in the UK as a consequence of the upheavals that are now the experience of millions from the areas of the world at the cutting edge of climate change and proxy-conflict between global powers over the world’s dwindling resources.

The focus in this paper is intentionally on social workers who are located in statutory local authority settings – they are the majority, they are on the front line, and they are the ones tasked with interpreting and implementing locally and nationally determined government policy – a hard task in a period of austerity and its reaction in terms of Brexit and the rise of popular right-wing nationalism. In the wake of Covid-19, the Grenfell Tower fire in London seems almost a distant memory: a large number of people who mostly came to Britain as refugees and migrants, were killed in an avoidable disaster. This was characterised by poverty in the midst of great wealth, with a local authority who, according to contemporary press reports, prided itself on spending as little as possible; this to the extent that its actions may have contributed to the fire’s causes, and in the aftermath, its lack of any resilience or infrastructure for coping with displaced and traumatised people. There is no doubt that working for such employers whilst maintaining the values of social work learned as a student, is challenging, but that should not mean that good social work (which is radical because it defies their neoliberal driven outlook) is not possible.

Since Grenfell the Covid-19 pandemic has again thrown up inequalities in sharp relief – the communities that have suffered (outside older vulnerable people in residential social care - which is typically staffed by migrant labour) are those where overcrowding and poverty are endemic – communities with large ethnic minority populations. In Glasgow, host to 10% of Britain’s asylum seekers, those housed by the Mears Group (who took over from the discredited Serco operation), were forced to move out of their housing and into sub-standard hotel accommodation where pressures reached boiling point over the Summer of 2020. The commitment of the Conservative Government elected on a wave of popular anti-immigration reaction, to harden borders, remains unwavered. Services continue to be outsourced to profit-making enterprises whose links with the ruling party confirm in whose interests they are governing (Guardian 2020); this includes some social work training under the “Frontline” scheme.

This paper is written from a perspective stemming from the author’s working life as a social worker, children and family team manager, and trade union activist in the West of Scotland; it is based on self-experience and the observations of good practice by others. It is hoped that it will help the reader find opportunities in everyday work settings. It is an attempt to find forms of practice and underlying theory that fit with humanitarian and progressive values, and that enable survival in an environment that is far from friendly to either service users or the people who strive to meet their needs in Social Services settings. As detailed elsewhere (Turbett 2014) such forms of practice protect workers from burnout on the one hand, and accommodation to an unjust system on the other. Neither should such practice be seen as the preserve of committed left-wing activists: Jane Fenton (2019) demonstrates that radical practice can be made attractive for those social workers who simply want to do a good and worthwhile job: an approach to the social work task can happen through a combination of relationship building, critical thinking and moral courage. This will lead to work that does not simply collude with bad and oppressive systems and practices.

It is not the purpose of the paper to go into complex legal areas and outline entitlement in respect of asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants – advice and guidance are available and easily accessible: the writer would commend Wroe et al (2019), Unison Scotland (2017), Unison (2019) and BASW (2020) for material written for social workers. Campaigning organisations like MRN (Migrant Rights Network), JCWI (Joint Council for Welfare for Immigrants) – Free Movement, Project 17, and others, host websites with excellent resources.

THE STATE, OPPRESSION AND SOCIAL WORK

An important pre-condition for a ‘radical’ rather than simply ‘good’ approach, is to understand the place of social work systems in the United Kingdom and indeed, other Western societies. All these societies, to a greater or lesser extent, are based on economies dominated by private markets trading in order to produce wealth at national and international levels. Naturally enough there are winners and losers, especially where such markets enjoy freedom unbridled by regulation and restriction on personal wealth. This results in inequality – with poverty and disadvantage for those at the bottom. This, in essence, is the Marxist view of capitalism developed over 150 years ago: although not always accurate in its predictions, Marx’s analysis remains remarkably cogent today (Mason 2015).

Social work developed as an essential welfare state function after World War Two. As explained elsewhere (Turbett 2014) this had the dual purpose of policing the poor but also looking after them to the extent that they remained acquiescent and unlikely to rebel. Social work’s role has always been ambiguous: containing wonderful opportunities to ‘make a difference’ (for the better!) to the lives of the disadvantaged, but also having at least the potential for oppressive aspects such as those encountered in the hugely important function of child protection. Nowhere are such contradictions and dilemmas more apparent than in social work with asylum seekers and migrants: on the one hand there is Roza Salih’s experience, on the other the officially ascribed and controversial social work function of ‘age- testing’ to determine the age of those claiming, without documented proof, to be children. As Hardcastle et al (2011, p71) note: ‘Solutions to social problems contained in social policies generally reflect the construction of the social problem.’ This is certainly the case with all aspects of immigration policy and law: they reflect the popular perception that the country is ‘full up’ and that immigration requires curbing above all other considerations. Social workers therefore become a part of such systems whether they like it or not.

Oppression has to be understood in order for it to be addressed. Oppression is based on difference – either its crude exploitation through the use of division and racism, or its more subtle denial through a false belief that equal rights in law equate to the eradication of inequalities – both are used to the disadvantage of marginal groups in society (Mullaly 2010). Difference of course does not necessarily lead to the oppression of one group by another – societies can promote and celebrate difference in order to make tolerance and diversity the norm – aspirations which chime with social work’s alleged commitment to social justice for its service users.

Mullaly (2010 p42) suggests that a prime function of oppression is to enable society’s dominant groups to control classes and groups who might otherwise threaten their stability. Social workers should recognise his list of the myths that accompany this aim: scarcity (there’s not enough to go round); objective information (it is possible for one group – typically Anglo Saxon white bourgeois males – to observe humanity objectively and to therefore hold authoritative and truthful opinions); might is right (the majority rules even if this is to the cost of the minority), stereotyping (all members of a group are the same); blaming the victim (people, e.g. refugees, are responsible for their own situation); human nature (human beings are competitive and aggressive by nature); the supremacy of Western democracy and civilization (perpetuated by the education system); myth of class (most people are middle class and this is the aspiration of many others – thus mandating and sanctioning the presence of both dominant and subordinate classes); society as a meritocracy (as civil and political rights are equalized by law all it takes is hard work for success to be achieved and failure is the fault of the individual who should not be helped). These myths, which are recognizable because they clearly reflect popular opinion and culture (and at the time of writing, the outspoken views of certain populist international political leaders) drive political party manifestos and government commitments. These of course work their way into the law and procedural context of social work. No thinking individual, never mind an educated and trained ‘professional’, would admit to perpetuating such myths, but that is exactly what social workers are asked to do every day. To counter them requires conscious thought and action – a radical approach.

DISCRETION AND ITS PLACE IN SOCIAL WORK

Some progressive activists talk of a social work that is ‘within and against the state’ (originally discussed in Holloway et al 1980). Such a description of how a political activist with a progressive outlook might operate within a local authority work setting has been borrowed from the language used by their forbears including those inspired by the radical outlook of Bailey and Brake’s Radical Social Work (1975). However radical social work has moved beyond these 1970s descriptions of trade-union based activism that was possible in an environment where solidarity and collectivism were not the rare manifestations they seem to be today. Social work is now heavily regulated, constrained by laws and procedural approaches and subject to close managerial control and scrutiny. This has inspired many to ‘run for the hills’ - away from difficult and contentious front-line settings and into areas where they believe their skills might be utilised and their values not compromised. However, those who commendably remain can adopt everyday practices that are driven by the aspirations that brought them into social work. Nowhere is this more apparent than in work with asylum seekers and refugees. Given pressure on resources and, in some workplaces, an atmosphere of resignation and compliance, such approaches will be difficult in isolation and might depend on building a culture amongst colleagues in the workplace and team that gains respect from without as well as satisfaction within. This will be covered in more detail later.

Demoralisation amongst front line workers is particularly apparent for those who face the hardest tasks: child protection and, of relevance to this chapter, work with vulnerable and disadvantaged migrants will feature prominently. Growing numbers of individuals (often with family responsibilities) with NRPF status are approaching social work teams for practical assistance and meeting a very mixed response (Farmer 2019, Guardian 2017). These victims of British immigration laws and the attitudes that create them are entitled to life-sustaining financial and practical help under child care and vulnerable people legislation; their numbers are growing at a time when public budgets are under severe strain. Hence the tensions and dilemmas - and practices that are designed to spend as little money as possible.

So, is discretion to practice in a non-oppressive way, in the face of managerialism, financial constraint and restrictive procedural practice, possible? This is precisely the area addressed by Lipsky (1980) based on the practices of various public sector workers (whom he termed ‘street-level bureaucrats’) in New York City in the 1970s; a setting and period, according to campaigner, writer and journalist, Naomi Klein (2017), when publicly provided services were under attack from the type of market driven neoliberalism we see at work today under the guise of ‘austerity’. Lipsky’s findings were revived and brought into a 21st century UK context by Evans and Harris (2004). Their observations and conclusions about discretion were adopted by the writer as a central theme when writing optimistically about the possibilities for a radical social work (2014). I shall refer to these generically as the ‘discretion literature’.

The core premise of the discretion literature is that complex services are designed (typically by those far removed from the front line) to ration services so that there are enough resources (in simplistic terms) to go round. They are, however, operationalised and implemented by front line workers who have to redesign them in order to fit procedures with day to day realities, make them manageable and their own experience bearable. This might work in a manner counter-productive to the interests of the client group by avoidance and camouflage. In Social Services settings the writer has seen this achieved through under-recording, reframing of the ‘problem’ to make it manageable to the agency, or procedural approaches into which service users are slotted, all of which are made to fit so that the worker’s life is made as easy as possible. A recent example passed on by a colleague concerns how waiting lists for social care services are ‘managed’ by deferring dates of referral through awkward and time consuming form filling so that performance indicators look good.

Conversely the worker can be motivated by what used to be referred to as ‘the public sector ethos’ to provide a good service and meet as much need as possible. One would hope that as social workers are known to come into the profession with high ideals and a wish to help people, that such considerations would apply as much if not more to them than other public sector working groups. Evans and Harris (2004, p892) state that the more rigid the rules, the more uncertainty there can be about their interpretation and implementation at operational level. These uncertainties will not be understood by strategy-determining senior managers – in my experience senior managers of social services organisations typically have little understanding of how their policies are implemented at local level. Rather than take the time and trouble to visit the front line and talk to staff and service users, many prefer to base their views on performance-indicator and other computerised data. Importance is also placed by such senior managers on what their more junior management colleagues prefer to tell them – information inevitably skewed and filtered by their interests and whatever mantra is currently popular at such levels. This sounds cynical but is based very much on experience listening to the type of jargonised language used by senior management and how alien it is from the typical framing of issues at the front line. I generalise here and clearly we all know some ‘good’ managers, but my basic premise is that senior managers cannot be relied upon for support and understanding, preferring to leave such matters to front line managers and supervisors. This gap means that much is left to teams and their members to develop workable and useable operational methods that help the workplace function properly. Whilst the organisation might expect these will work in the way intended by the aims and aspirations of their high level strategies, workers standing together can actually use discretion to make their practices friendly to the needs of their client group - as well as their own values and group determined goals. The discretion literature offers important reassurances for those who believe that work in oppressive seeming statutory settings offers neither choice nor opportunity.

The Case Study below is based on what, for the writer, seems like a basic relationship-based premise for a social work intervention. Its radical nature comes from the individual effort the worker made to ensure that her practice met the needs of the family and young person involved. Alternative assessment based risk-averse approaches based on short term interventions would probably be the norm in most front line children and family teams today, and might have happened in this case. However the tenacity and determination of the worker to adopt an upstream and preventative pedagogical approach, probably stemmed deterioration and inevitable reactive statutory interventions that might have broken up the family with negative consequences for all involved.

Case Study - Khalil The Khalifa family fled from the rubble of Homs in Western Syria across the border to Lebanon after mother Nawara’s husband, a taxi driver, was killed in a bomb attack. The three children were all old enough to contribute in some way to survival there: the two boys Khalil (8) and Youssef (10), and older sister Malua (12), worked in the supermarket whilst their mother, Rasha, cared for baby Samar, and maintained a home of sorts in a single room behind the shop. Through Rasha’s brother, whose family lived in the same neighbourhood, they applied for asylum in Britain, a country they knew little about and whose language was unknown to any of them. They arrived in Scotland as part of the first wave of refugees accepted by the Government for re-settlement, being accommodated by one of the 31 local authorities who agreed to accept Syrian refugees and support their relocation. Their home in a small west of Scotland town bore little resemblance to anything they had previously experienced. The locality, had only a very small ethnic minority population.

Khalil and his older brother and sister learned English quickly, but mum Nawara was weighed down with other worries and found it difficult to engage with the learning opportunities offered, preferring the company of other refugees from Syria who lived nearby. When challenged she would say that she was ill but details were never verified. People from the support services that met her regarded her as quite flat emotionally but no one was in much of a position to look at why – her care of the baby seemed good enough: Nawara was a young woman in her early thirties and should be able to adapt to the new situation her family found themselves in. However Social Services were alerted within months of the family’s arrival to issues of concern to neighbours and school: the children were thought to be left alone for periods and were often out on the streets playing late at night and poorly clad.

This apparent absence of supervision began to draw attention to Khalil: he was regularly involved in fights and scrapes with other children in the neighbourhood and was building a reputation for being a reckless daredevil who was up for any challenge. Other children found it easy and entertaining to provoke him and then see the fun that could arise as a consequence. After several visits the local Social Work Children and Family team decided to become involved when it became clear that some work was required if this family were to settle and stay together: the final incident that sparked the allocation to a social worker was when the children were found alone whilst their mother was away shopping in Glasgow. Khalil was a sociable child and loved the local primary school although his behaviour was found to be challenging by his teacher. Social work engagement with the family was informal although it was recognised that family relationships were deteriorating and statutory involvement seemed a likelihood. Whilst the social worker, Mary, tried hard to engage with the mother, she focused a lot of her attention on Khalil. Through discussion with others he was referred for specialist trauma counselling with an Arabic speaking professional. Mary was responsible for arranging this and taking him the considerable distance to the weekly counselling sessions in Glasgow. This gave her the opportunity to spend a lot of time with Khalil and win his trust and engagement. Much of this involved “car social work” (see Ferguson 2011) – basic relationship building through close physical presence but without the pressure of eye contact. This led to other things – Mary was able through colleagues to engage Khalil in formal boxing lessons two nights a week, and made it her personal responsibility to get him there and show interest in his progress. She also found funding for this when it became clear that his mother was unable to do this herself. He was also taken by one of Mary’s colleagues to watch a major premier league football team he supported, and presented by her with a team shirt.

Mary found herself quite unprepared for engagement with a family from a Moslem culture and country about which she knew little. She struggled with her lack of understanding of what normal family life meant for this family, and what were the cultural norms. She was acutely aware of her own shortcomings and tried hard to avoid giving offence, and on several occasions had to deal with the consequences of misunderstandings and misconceptions in the community – both from other agencies, and neighbours. She found out what she could through her own reading, learned some common Arabic phrases in her own time, and eventually secured a place on a cultural awareness course for staff working with Syrians which she found really helpful. Mary was struck by the manner in which Khalil was driven by the negative experiences of his life to fulfil the low expectations of those around him - including other children and adults in the community, and even in some agencies. This led him into behaviours like drinking, smoking and school avoidance that were contrary to what he could remember of his own Muslim values. Mary made a very conscious and sustained effort to use their relationship to counter this and bring out the positive features of his character and potential. She gave of her time on a reliable regular basis without condition, and established a relationship where Khalil could discuss anything and test out matters without fear of the reaction. This gradually helped him settle alongside the supports he was receiving in school, which she was closely involved in.

Along the way there were other issues within the family, some of which might have been regarded as safeguarding or child protection matters, which she was able to help manage sensitively and without making matters worse for the family: they were committed to one another despite the ups and downs. On one occasion this resulted in a short admission for Khalil to a children’s house. This proved to be a positive experience: the staff had previously accommodated Syrians and unaccompanied asylum seekers from elsewhere, and were able to make his short stay an enjoyable period of respite rather than either a punishment or exposure to other dangers. Mary was also able to assist the efforts of other agencies, including the police, education and housing, and advocate effectively on the family’s behalf. Had she not done so she is certain that language and cultural barriers might have prevented them getting the services which they required. Throughout the period of involvement Mary argued for continued ongoing allocation of the family, with associated time commitment, on the basis that her ongoing presence and activity, despite the informal nature of social work involvement, would result in a productive relationship that might prevent escalation in the family’s difficulties. Mary’s support for the family took place over a period of some three years, a year of which involved very intensive activity.

BUILDING A RADICAL CULTURE IN THE WORKPLACE

Literature on working with asylum seekers and refugees from the early years of the new millennium when issues first began to come to the fore, suggests that good and innovative practice by workers in statutory settings prepared to challenge the more oppressive aspects of their role, could be found (Jones 2001, Cemlyn and Briskman 2003). However in ‘... authorities with minimally resourced and trained teams, such approaches seemed absent, with little evidence of resisting the oppression and racism inherent in the wider treatment of asylum seekers.’ (Cemlyn and Briskman op cit: 174). These authors believed that social work. had been ‘…. co-opted by state policies and practices into upholding an oppressive system of asylum and immigration control’ (p174). Similar criticisms are still being levelled at practitioners today – many years later. Whilst some progress has been made (for example successful lobbying by social workers and others to end the practice in 2010 of detaining asylum seeking children awaiting removal from the UK), we do not seem to have come very far in other respects, and under successive populist policy driven governments, the whole immigration system has become harsher as noted earlier. This whole matter therefore raises serious questions for those who wish to do things differently.

So how might radical practices be put into place within the workplace? Carey and Foster (2011) note (and by implication, support) ‘guerrilla’ methods that are subversive and hidden. These involve bending rules, being selective (or even dishonest) when presenting cases for resource allocation, and practice generally that is highly individualistic, secretive and certainly not shared with colleagues. Such methods involve the risk of transgressing employer’s rules and, debatably, professional codes of practice. They might salve the revolutionary conscience of the individual practitioner but are unlikely to change anything because by definition they are not made known to managers, colleagues, or the public generally. Once caught out by managers for procedural or other transgression, the individual practitioner is unlikely to win the active support or sympathy of colleagues and, sadly, career ending might follow. Radical social workers are too valuable a commodity to waste on such rapidly forgotten gestures.

I would contend a different approach to radical activity – one whose avowed aim is to change workplace culture and build a sense of solidarity and purpose within the workplace – none of which, granted, will be easy. It involves firstly seeking out workplaces where possibilities might exist; these will be ones with sound basic practices: regular supervision from experienced local managers, systems of workload management and committed colleagues. If these are in place quiet challenges can be made to prevailing or reactionary cultures: this might start in the tea room rather than the team meeting – perhaps a debate about how the reactionary and essentially racist right wing newspaper read by a colleague runs counter to what should be basic values of human decency in the workplace; or a challenge to oppressive language and sexism; a challenge to victim blaming whether that relates to a widely discussed daily news item or attitudes towards service users. To put this in the context of theory we need only look to the ideas of the Italian Marxist philosopher Gramsci, whose notion of cultural hegemony explains how the ideas of the dominant classes in any society become popularised and common currency through their exposure in the mainstream media (Gramsci 1992). Countering hegemony requires challenge and debate based on a considered strategy.

Naturally, allies are needed to undertake such culture-building effectively – they should not be hard to find in any social work setting because of the type of individual who tends to be attracted to such work. Once this task has been shared with others – even one person – strategies can be agreed to build both strength and purpose. Humour is a good tool here: an overly serious approach might be perceived as arrogant and lose potential allies. If an individual finds they have to challenge oppressive behaviours encountered in their actual work they should ensure they have support and a lifeline before launching into battle. The road to individual martyrdom is a fairly short and ultimately pointless one if it leads to removal or dismissal.

The broadening of debates with colleagues to include a contextual background to the issues of service users can help reflection on why and how people come to need a service in the first place. This requires subtlety and skill – not beating someone over the head with the activist’s choice of left-wing newspaper! Such dialogue can take place anywhere, including with other parties in inter-agency meetings. An article by British critical social work writer Steve Rojowski (Professional Social Work June 2017) cites a worker who complains that their manager has barred them from mentioning a family’s poverty and its implications in a legal meeting for fear that a Judge might ultimately ask the local authority to do something about it! That, however, is very much the point and shows how discretion might be exercised. Similar scenarios will arise in official meetings concerning asylum seekers and refugees – especially those in the No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) situation.

Eventually a culture that puts the service user’s place in society at the forefront of any discussion will result in polarisation in the workplace based around broad political beliefs – put bluntly, between those with positive and progressive views, and those with reactionary ones. The idea that such splits are divisive in a workplace should be dismissed: the reactionaries will be in a minority (or should be if the culture-building is effective) and a sharing of ideals and aspirations will result in better morale and a workplace that seems attractive to outsiders – a very desirable objective for the radical practitioner. Similar warnings about division have always accompanied the building of strong unionised workplaces (they were central to the Thatcher-era attack on trade unions in the 1980s), a feature that should be part of such culture-building anyway.

The radical activist will join the majority trade union and encourage participation in activity and meetings – especially workplace based ones. Trade unionisation is known to accompany better treatment of workers and better conditions of work – atomisation and individualism breed the opposite (Brady 2009, Venton 2015). Good union representation (which needs to be built from the bottom up) results in protection of workers individually and collectively. A strong trade union branch will influence employers and can act as a progressive beacon in the local community. With the general demise of trade union power and influence since the 1980s, none of this is offered to the reader lightly or naively – very often trade union presence is well-nigh invisible; however the reality is that without trade union organisation in the workplace the effectiveness of building a radical culture will be diminished. Local Government and Health remain one of the bastions of trade unionism in the UK, with trade union membership remaining high, if not at the levels seen in the past. Local trade union branches tend to reflect the views and activity of their local leaders rather than the trade union nationally so if the majority union seems to lack perspective, visibility or volume locally, the chances are that it can be changed. Obviously not everyone can do everything, but the identification of someone in the workplace willing to commit to becoming the ‘shop steward’ or ‘office rep’ is fairly essential and all activists should ensure such individuals have support and are given every encouragement to become involved in the union.

An absolute must for all that has been said so far in this section is that the radical activist builds a base for themselves built on personal credibility. This is not just about being popular within the workplace, but also about respect earned over a period for work output and quality. This cannot be understated: the views of a dependable and trustworthy individual whose work is of a high quality will carry more power with colleagues and more authority with front line (and even senior) managers. That is not to say that such a radical social worker will take on bulletproof, superhuman qualities, but they will make themselves far less of a target for attrition. The reader might want to refer here to Donna Baines’ ‘six principles’ for the social work activist: being good at the job, being likeable, using privilege, remembering that we are instruments, remembering that we did not create the system and are not obliged to prop it up, and building alliances (2007 p61). The writer has also described such strategies elsewhere (Turbett 2013, 2014).

Strength and influence can also be built through alliance with other campaigning and progressive organisations. Those in power can be made to listen when pressure is applied coherently and consistently. It all starts, however, in the workplace.

COMMUNITY SOCIAL WORK APPROACHES

It follows from everything else in this paper that the issues and problems that create social work referrals and interventions should not be pathologised as the result of an individual’s dysfunction. Whilst damage caused to individuals can manifest itself in many ways, including those that are harmful and even life threatening to others, the starting premise for a radical approach should see the context of poverty and inequality as common factors to most social work practice. This should be obvious, but it is not - to the extent that victim blaming results in individualised assessments and plans that almost ignore the roots of issues, or, at best, see them as someone else’s responsibility. This really is at the heart of social work’s main problem: the virtual impossibility of changing the lives of individuals who are subject of widespread oppressions that are common in the communities in which they live, which leads to frustration, disappointment and burnout, causing social workers to leave the front line and even the job.

An answer to this is to view upstream or early intervention, community based responses, as fundamental to practice – community social work which has a long if somewhat contentious history (Turbett 2018). Such responses cannot be prescribed in a paper like this: they should be developed from the bottom up, in partnership with communities and community activists, by workers empowered by enlightened managers (see the “ABCD” approach in Russell 2020). Their focus should be on commonalities and the building of supportive community networks. This approach should not be hived off to the periphery of social work but should be central to the activities of statutory teams – only then will they really engage in the social justice role for which they are trained. Communities of course are diverse and sometimes very oppressive. However many contain the seeds of positive change and challenge to adversity. Asylum seekers and refugees are often attracted to the UK by knowledge that they might be welcomed into familiar communities once here, and many try, against all the odds to both seek them out as well as make a place for them in the communities and localities in which they find themselves. The 2020 Black Lives Matters movement highlighted not just historical injustices, but also how powerfully and quickly people from the most disadvantaged communities could come together (as they have so often in the past) to campaign for justice and fair treatment. Social work does at least have some history of anti-racism being embodied in both training and practice. Community social work approaches can seek to work on tackling racism and its roots, although Pierson (2008) notes that a policy emphasis on social integration and cohesion tends to play down racism and, in particular, downgrade the institutional racism that concerned Black Lives Matters protestors 27 years after the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent public enquiry. Again prescriptive solutions are not offered here: the purpose is to raise the question and suggest a means of finding solutions within the diverse communities that make up a rich culturally and ethnically diverse nation. The argument here is that social workers need to move out from behind their computers, and practice concerned mainly with individual assessment and risk-aversion, and confront the challenges that face the communities they work within and across. Anti-oppressive practice has to become more than just a token tick in an assessment toolkit, and community social work offers a means of preventative and co-productive practice that is both meaningful, rewarding – and radical.

SUMMARY

This paper has argued that it is possible to practice in a way that upholds the values of social justice and service to human beings that encouraged many to enter social work in the first place. These values are reflected in the codes of the vanguard of the social work profession: BASW and its Code of Ethics (BASW op cit) and the International Federation of Social Work Principles (IFSW 2012) which includes a commitment to social justice on an international level and the right to challenge unjust policies and practices. Practice based on such broad principles is under attack: no commitment to social justice lies in the Knowledge and Skills Statements that the UK Government have published for children and family and adult social workers (Department of Health 2014, Department of Health 2015) implying that it is therefore unnecessary in social work education settings. It will require effort by practitioners and their educators, such as that suggested in this chapter, to retain such principles.

Radical practice is entirely possible within statutory settings that provide services to refugees and asylum seekers and other vulnerable migrants. Such a bold statement is not a suggestion that it will be easy to find, build or maintain - merely that it is possible. This is because of the discretion that is always to be found in public bodies and their policies and processes – much of which is operationalised at front line level and therefore open to creative interpretation. As with any contentious area of public policy it is also open to protest and political pressure which can be achieved through patient workplace based activity and the forging of alliances with other progressive forces – whether through trade union activity, professional association effort, or joining in with the activities of campaigning groups. To give up on such tasks is effectively to hand power over to those in society whose actions are oppressive. Such good practice in social work generally, as we saw with the examples of Rosah Salih and the case example, might be small and discreet, but can make a world of difference to those for whom we provide services.

To paraphrase the Canadian social work writer and activist Donna Baines (2007), we do not have to subscribe to the historical and sometimes popular view that sees social workers as do-gooders, bleeding hearts, baby snatchers or public-purse guardians; we can instead follow others who have seen the role as offering opportunities for resistance and transformative change in solidarity with those we work with. Power imbalances in society based on class and opportunity include divisions along racial grounds which define citizenship and rights according to ethnicity and accident of birth. These can be challenged through non-oppressive professional relationships based on honesty, respect and appreciation of difference. Such practices and the creation of workplace cultures within which they are celebrated, is very much what radical social work is all about.

REFERENCES Bailey, R. and Brake, M. (eds) (1975) Radical Social Work London, Edward Arnold

Baines, D. (2007) Doing Anti-Oppressive Practice – Building Transformative Politicized Social Work Halifax, Fernwood

BASW (2017) Code of Ethics https://www.basw.co.uk/codeofethics/ (accessed 10th October 2017)

BASW (2020) NRPF – Statement and Guidance https://www.basw.co.uk/resources/basw- no-recourse-public-funds-nrpf-statement-and-guidance (accessed August 2020)

Brady, D. (2009) Rich Democracies, Poor People – How Politics Explains Poverty Oxford, Oxford University Press

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