Category Archives: History

How the spread of Christianity informed state responses to poverty

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Dr Karen Lyons, emeritus professor of international social work at London Metropolitan University, reflects on a Social Work History Network webinar (24 April 2024) examining the development of ‘global’ social work values. (748 words)

Social work is generally understood to be a ‘local’ activity, particular to the society and communities within which it is practised.

It is also increasingly identified as a global profession with common values. But is this supposedly global nature in fact a construct prescribed by Britain and the US in the development and the dominance of a particular form of Western thinking?

These questions were recently explored at an event organised by the Social Work History Network. Mark Henrikson, of Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand, took us back a great deal further than the commonly understood origins of social work. He showed how the Church has played a significant role in how societies have viewed people who were poor or ‘different’ in some way.

Henrikson traced the origins of ‘Western’ social work thinking and values, with its current emphasis on individual choice and responsibility, through biblical texts to Calvinism, which took hold in some parts of Europe from the 16th century and spread to North America. Continue reading →

Liberty, social care detention and the law of institutions

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Stephen Martineau, Research Fellow at the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce at King’s College London, reviews Deprivation of Liberty in the Shadows of the Institution by Lucy Series (University of Bristol). Page numbers in brackets refer to the book, which was published in March 2022 (and is available for free). (2,642 words)

Introduction

One of the more familiar stories from recent UK history about the lives of people with longstanding serious mental illness or intellectual or cognitive disabilities is their move from large-scale institutional accommodation to living arrangements beyond the walls of such places. The extent of this ostensible deinstitutionalization is illustrated by the decline in hospital beds for ‘mental illness’, ‘geriatric’ patients and people with intellectual/learning disabilities—from over 200,000 in 1955 to under 20,000 in 2020 (Series, 2022: p.53). Much of this shift was to do with the closing of survivals of the Victorian era (which started out being called asylums, subsequently renamed mental hospitals) that took place through the second half of the twentieth century.

As Lucy Series describes in her book, Deprivation of Liberty in the Shadows of the Institution, these newer smaller-scale living arrangements may take the form of ‘quasi-institutions’ (residential care and nursing homes) or ‘quasi-domestic’ arrangements (‘supported living’, ‘independent living’, sheltered housing), or indeed ordinary homes.

Series describes this development as a passage from a ‘carceral’ to a ‘post-carceral’ era (after Unsworth, 1991). But in making the physical move away from institutions, to what degree have some less tangible aspects of the old institutional life been carried over to those new living arrangements, as far as these individuals are concerned? To what extent, Series asks, are they still living in ‘the shadows of the institution’?

This question was brought sharply into focus in the UK Supreme Court case of Cheshire West, the litigation that forms the dramatic fulcrum of this book. The court’s approach meant that its definition of deprivation of liberty applied to a much wider array of living arrangements than had hitherto been the case, extending to private homes, where family members were the carers (or custodians?) of the person concerned. It is the socio-legal ramifications of this move (which Series views as transgressive) that are the main concern of the book. To put it briefly and in human-rights terms, in its approach to concerns about liberty in the area of social care detention—under article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights—the court seemed to set up a clash with a set of questions belonging more under article 8 (respect for private and family life), to do with the distinction between institutions and homes.

This review is split into five short sections: 1. Social care detention. 2. The acid test. 3. Liberty. 4. Home. 5. Out of the shadows? Continue reading →

Common causes: the origins of the Child Poverty Action Group and its relations with social work

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Caroline NorrieCaroline Norrie is Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit in the Policy Institute at King’s. (1,049 words)

The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) is 50 this year. As part of the celebrations, last month the Social Care Workforce Research Unit jointly hosted a seminar with the Social Work History Network to highlight the history of CPAG and its links with the social work profession.

CPAG is the leading national pressure group working to end poverty among children, young people and families. It campaigns to influence policy; produces information about access to benefits; and provides training for professionals across the UK about welfare rights (including tax credits, and universal credit). Continue reading →

Social workers speak out: Remembering our beginnings

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Katie Graham, Research Associate at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit, on why we should listen to the recordings of a group of interviews with social workers from the early 1980s.

The Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s recently hosted the launch of The WISEArchive Cohen Interviews, a fascinating collection of conversations with 26 social workers reflecting on the early days of the profession. We heard how Alan Cohen during the 1980s had sought out social workers he felt to be pioneers of the profession charting social work activity as early as the 1930s including well-known members of the profession, such as Clare Britton (later Winnicott), Eileen Younghusband, Rose Mary Braithwaite, Enid Warren and Margaret Simey amongst others. These tapes have thankfully been revived, transcribed by volunteers at WISEArchive and edited by Tim Cook and Harry Marsh after 30 years in storage.

Maggie Cohen, herself a social worker, Alan’s partner, shared Alan’s journey through social work, Family Service Units, Social Work lecturing and returning to full-time social work before retiring in 1996. Alan Cohen undertook the interviews with the intention of developing a book, but this did not materialise. Tim Cook described how he and Harry Marsh were invited by WISEArchive to edit, annotate and add context to the interviews with the aim of beginning to realise Alan Cohen’s vision. This work, along with all of the interviews, have now been archived by the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick and published online together with the original tapes.

Speakers at the launch of the Cohen Interviews

Participants at the launch on 28 November at King’s (left to right): Olwen Gotts (volunteer transcriber), Harry Marsh (editor), Maggie Cohen, Tim Cook (editor), Barbara Prynn, Helen Ford (Modern Records Centre), Pauline Weinstein (WISEArchive), Professor Jill Manthorpe (King’s College London)

One of the first questions Alan Cohen asked of his interviewees was how and why they chose social work. At the launch event, Pauline Weinstein, the director of WISEArchive, posed the same question to Barbara Prynn. The answer given by Barbara, as I suspect to be the case for many social workers both now and then, is not entirely straightforward and prompted many questions and comments from the audience. Remembrances of social work’s foundation as a negotiation between common sense, practical social work and the ‘psychoanalytical fringe’ and the cycles of policy making and changes in perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘oppressive’ practice. These interviews narrate the forming of ‘Social Work’ as a profession from the formative social sciences course at the London School of Economics (amongst others) and disparate professions of Psychiatric Social Work and Almoners. The coming, going and perhaps coming again (in Scotland at least) of community work, genericism versus specialism in practice as well as more foundational perspectives of the social work role and analysis of the individual and of structural inequalities were also areas of discussion and comment.

Listening to some of these interviews whilst writing this blog I would urge social workers and anyone interested in social work to play the tapes (very easy to do).  When Alan Cohen asked Enid Warren why she became a social worker she described it as, not an active choice, but the result of a ‘process of elimination’.  Geraldine Aves said ‘I had no intention of being a social worker’, but became a social worker ‘very much by the backdoor’ and Clare Winnicott took a long pause before she cited her family’s influence. Although the route into social work may not have been clear, there seemed to be a common thread amongst the interviewees of a determination to do something that could be useful.

Entry into social work is probably rarely uneventful and neither is the career. For myself, the daughter of two social workers, my choice may have been unimaginative. As a social worker I have experienced ambivalence about statutory social work practice this event and these archives offered the opportunity to look back, hear social workers talk about their experiences and dilemmas, and reflect on them in our current situation. The history of social work is a history of change, within, outside and hopefully because of the profession. Drawing on this history during the introduction to the launch of the archives Professor Jill Manthorpe of the Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s College London, the host of the launch, positioned this as its strength, adding her personal view that ‘all social workers are pioneers’, members of an evolving and hopefully responsive profession. I left this event in a reflective mood, keen to listen more and would like to thank all involved in making these archives accessible to us all.

Katie Graham is Research Associate at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s College London. The launch event took place at King’s on 28 November 2013. Those with an interest in social work history may also like to join the Social Work History Network.

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