Emerging Perspectives on Anti-Oppressive Practice

Abstract

How can child protection workers address issues of child abuse and neglect with families in a way that is anti-oppressive? My struggles with this question, both as a practitioner and as an academic, have consistently led me to one conclusion—answers to working anti-oppressively do not lie in social work ideas but in the ideas of those receiving social work services. Acting on this conclusion, I have sought “client” ideas about how to work anti-oppressively. Before I present the results of this research, I will examine the challenge of working anti-oppressively within the context of child welfare. I begin by outlining the nature of anti-oppressive practice (AOP) and the ways it attempts to dismantle systemic inequalities that underlie social injustice. I then suggest that child welfare is a nemesis of such practice because modern child welfare’s origins lie in the efforts of society’s privileged to control those they perceived as a threat to their dominance. I will show that such control is not just historical—current child welfare practice continues to preserve systems of dominance. Child welfare, therefore, presents AOP with a poignant challenge: How can child welfare be transformed into an activity that challenges the dominant discourses that gave it birth while also protecting children? I contend that social work has no answer to this challenge because remedies formulated within social work simply perpetuate the discourses of domination in which child welfare is steeped. Instead, transformation lies in remedies formulated by service users—it lies in social work giving up speaking about what child welfare “clients” need and listening to what service users themselves say they need. I demonstrate the viability of listening to child