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This chapter looks back at the development of anti-racist social work and traces the intellectual journey that it has been through over the last 20 years. PCF domain 8 requires social workers to be aware of the changing contexts within which social work takes place and social work and social care organizations operate and function. The chapter looks at the recent history of anti-racist social work and ‘sets the scene’ for many of the debates that follow and argues that need to re-think understandings’ of anti-racism need too the rethought in the context of shifting politics and race, difference and diversity.
This chapter examines the role of the state in shaping the experiences of migrants working in an elderly residential care home. Based on ethnographic data from working alongside numerous care workers employed in an elderly residential care home it argues that immigration policies coerce migrant workers into this sector of employment. A number of stories are presented concerning individual migrants showing how policies bestow rights to migrants depending on their country of origin. It is argued that this is a reflection of older racialised hierarchies. The importance of immigration policies in searching and securing cheap workers for contemporary welfare services is emphasised.
This chapter addresses the development of anti-racist practice, cultural competence and anti-oppressive practice and its meaning for social work practice and education. It examines the shift from the use in practice of the approaches of anti-racism through to that of cultural competence and anti-oppressive practice. It explores what might have been lost along the route from anti-racism to cultural competence and makes the case for the capacity for anti-oppressive practice to produce inclusive and challenging practice. Using the case of the tragic death Stephen Lawrence as central to demonstrating the damaging effects of racism at the personal, organisational and political levels in the chapter reasserts the dynamic nature of anti-oppressive practice. It shows how the use of the principles in this approach can shift the discourse from dichotomous ways of thinking to providing ways of addressing the complex interconnections and intersections which social difference brings to the lives of individuals and communities. It argues that anti-oppressive practice reaches beyond any approach which focuses only on one aspect of difference.
For well over a decade there has been a marked increase in hostility towards Muslim communities in Britain, and Islamophobia has emerged as a particular form of modern anti-Muslim racism. This chapter draws on research that was carried out with Muslim women in the North of England to assess questions of Islam, gender and identity in modern Britain. It examines the impact of rising levels of Islamophobia on the lives of Muslim women, and their understanding of and responses to, rising levels of racism. There is a focus on issues of culture and identity, and the reasons why women choose to wear the hijab. The chapter also explores the ways in which social workers can, with insight and understanding, practise in a non-discriminatory and non-oppressive manner when intervening in the lives of Muslim women and their families.
Recent years have witnessed a focus on cases of ‘street-grooming’. The purpose of this chapter, primarily, is not to look at the complexities of child abuse (though, this is touched upon) but the way this has become a ‘moral panic’ that has focused on the ‘alien’ culture of Pakistani Muslim men and their attitudes towards women and children in general, and white women and children in particular. Politicians and media pundits have used the small number of cases where Muslim men have been involved in abusing young girls as ‘evidence’ of the incompatibility of Muslim and Western cultures. The case here is that the ‘grooming scandals’ are an example of a racially induced moral panic.
Agreeing to expose a young refugee person to an intrinsically racist procedure - the Merton Compliant Age assessment – is agreeing to function as quasi-immigration officials. If the social worker then fails the looked after young person, they, simultaneously, place the child at acute risk of deportation and save their Local Authority money. Recently, legal occlusion of the medical scientific opinion that assessment of age measures maturity, not chronological in age has reinforced the legitimacy of social workers to take this ‘appropriate approach’ that is actually an essentialist one. A real case study contrasts the actions of two social workers: one independent, one how the local authority. It examines how statutory efforts to make an orphan refugee child into an adult to be deported effectively resisted?
