a flower and a feast

As a social worker, let me tell you: we are trained and employed to be agents of social control, not social justice and transformation. 

Yes, we don’t carry guns. We get a hell of a lot more training. We are actually held accountable if someone dies on our watch (unless you work for child protective services, in which case you just might get away with letting a bunch of kids die because you’re too busy to check on them all!). But we are taught to work within the system, to accept its abuses and its denials of care, to advocate for individual clients rather than systemic change. 

We diagnose clients and prescribe their treatment based on a DSM that is methodologically and morally flawed. Many of our jobs *require* that clients meet diagnostic criteria before they can receive services - and this leads to people who are desperately in need being turned away, or a false diagnosis being added to their medical records that will follow them for life so that they can receive services at that moment! And yeah, a diagnosis of Generalized Anxiety Disorder seems like a decent trade off for access to housing resources you can’t get on your own, but it’s still something that will be in that person’s records forever! That is a lot of power and it is not a good thing to have to pick and choose how to do the least harm!

In our professional capacities we are encouraged and often forced to ally with police against the clients and communities we serve. They are supposed to be our colleagues. (Most social workers I know don’t like or trust the cops, because how the fuck can you, after seeing the way they treat your clients, even if you’ve never had a bad experience with police yourself. But that does not mean they still don’t get called when someone shows up at the office with a gun and starts threatening to kill their therapist, or a client having a psychotic episode is running in traffic!)

The funding structures that support social work are absolutely fucked and are the reason for a lot of these things, but so is the educational system that produces social workers. Top programs still have faculty and staff that are still majority white (and even majority male sometimes in a field that skews toward female), admission requirements are just as biased to favor white students as any other academic field, and we love courses on diversity and equity and justice but those things rarely reach beyond the single mandatory course and into the majority of the classrooms. The racist, sexist, homophobic things I heard from faculty and other students that went uncorrected and unaddressed when complaints were made were absolutely horrifying, especially considering the client populations I know those people work with! And it is acceptable and it continues because our whole field is founded on a white colonial concept of care in which we are entitled to decide who is deserving and undeserving of assistance.