For many service users and professionals in the field of social work, shame is an ongoing part of their daily experience.
Providing an in-depth examination of the complex phenomena of shame and humiliation, this book sets out key contextual issues and theoretical approaches to comprehend shame and its relevance within social work. It provides a broad understanding of shame, its underlying social and political contexts and its effects on service users and professionals.
The book uses innovative international scholarship and includes theoretical considerations, as well as empirical findings within the field of social work. It shows the importance of sensitive, reflective and relationship-oriented practice based on a better understanding of the complexity of shame.
The shame experienced by people living in poverty has long been recognised. Nobel laureate and economist, Amartya Sen, has described shame as the “irreducible core" of poverty. However, little attention has been paid to the implications of this connection in the making and implementation of anti-poverty policies.
This important volume rectifies this critical omission and demonstrates the need to take account of the psychological consequences of poverty for policy to be effective. Drawing on pioneering empirical research in countries as diverse as Britain, Uganda, Norway, Pakistan, India, South Korea and China, it outlines core principles that can aid policy makers in policy development.
In so doing, it provides the foundation for a shift in policy learning on a global scale and bridges the traditional distinctions between North and South, and high-, middle- and low-income countries. This will help students, academics and policy makers better understand the reasons for the varying effectiveness of anti-poverty policies.
welfare recipients as ‘dole bludgers’ and ‘tax burdens’ insists there is little comfort to be taken in social security. Being comfortable with receiving welfare payments would betray an unforgivable sense of entitlement or lack of aspiration. Reem offered her feelings of unease as testament that she did not take income support for granted and was not resting on her laurels. Like many studies of class inequality before it, shame ran through a number of my interviews. It was sometimes named outright, but more often expressed as failure, inadequacy, defensiveness
high priority in practice. In fact, the extant literature demonstrates that microfinance all too often harms participants physically and financially, as well as psychosocially ( Bateman, 2010 ; Fernando, 1997 ; Karim, 2011 ; Rahman 1999a ). However, this literature has not drawn on insights from research on emotions, specifically shame, to theorise the basis of harm. A growing body of literature has emerged on shame in recent decades, from psychology and sociology in particular, which we refer to as contemporary shame theory. The literature offers a reasonable
113 SIX Poverty: discrimination, stigma and shame Introduction Shame is taken to be externally imposed by society, via individuals and through social institutions, but internalized and experienced as a powerful negative emotion that results in social withdrawal and powerlessness. (Walker, 2014, p 2) “They are making people feel like they are not up to scratch. Stop putting out that propaganda about scroungers. Stop trying to put fear into an already unsteady person. Stop trying to drive people by fear. You are a valuable piece of society.” (Amanda, aged
Key messages This paper explores the notion of green shame, and its contribution to the greening of society. It understand shame as the emotion one feels when one believes to have sunk below the standards of dignity. It raises and replies to 3 possible objections to the value of green shame. It concludes that the sting of green shame can urge people to demand action at an institutional level. Introduction In Swedish there is a word for the shame one feels when taking an airplane: ‘flygskam’. In addition to flying shame, Swedes also speak of
PART II Experiences of shame: service user perspectives
PART III Shame and professionalism: social worker perspectives
1 Shame and social work: an introduction Liz Frost, Veronika Magyar-Haas, Holger Schoneville and Alessandro Sicora Shame is a powerful emotion in the context of social work. It affects individuals and attacks their subjectivity from within, and yet is also experienced in the here and now as a thoroughly social emotion that enmeshes the individual within society. It is therefore highly potent within the field of social work, both with regard to service users and in social work practice itself. People who become service users often live in social
