Stripping the Wallpaper of Practice: Empowering Social Workers to Tackle Poverty

Abstract

The relationship between deprivation and health and educational inequalities has been well evidenced in the literature. Recent UK research has now established a similar social gradient in child welfare interventions (Bywaters et al. 2018) with children living in the most deprived areas in the UK facing a much higher chance of being placed on the child protection register or in out-of-home care. There is an emerging narrative that poverty has become the wallpaper of practice, “too big to tackle and too familiar to notice” (Morris et al. 2018) and invisible amid lack of public support and political will to increase welfare spending. This paper will examine poverty-related inequalities and how these affect families. It will discuss the importance of recognising that poverty is a social justice issue and a core task for social work and outline the range of supports that may be available for families to help lift them out of poverty. Finally, it will describe the development of a new practice framework for social work in Northern Ireland that challenges social workers to embed anti-poverty approaches in their practice. The framework emphasises that poverty is a social justice issue, seeks to provide practical support and guidance to re-focus attention, debate, and action on poverty in times of global economic uncertainty and give social workers the tools to make it central to their practice once again. It reinforces the need for social workers to understand and acknowledge the impact of poverty, and to advocate for and support those most in need. It aims to challenge and empower professionals to tackle poverty and inequality as an aspect of ethical and effective practice.

Supporting Children, Blaming Parents: Frontline Providers’ Perception of Childhood’s Adversity and Parenthood in Indonesia

“…This condition calls for immediate structural reforms. Similar conclusions been drawn from other studies, which have made calls for the better provision of food security, childcare, financial and housing support, more work options, and inclusive schools (Hennum 2014;McConnell and Llewellyn 2005;Romagnoli and Wall 2012) as well as an improved understanding among professionals around the structural issues affecting families (McCartan et al 2018) Findings from this study should be considered alongside a few limitations. First, most of the participants for our FGDs were also parents.…”

“Essential” services, risk, and child protection in the time of COVID-19: An opportunity to prioritize chronic need

“…So far, however, they are reifying certain challenges already evident in child protection: that chronic need is present in an overwhelming portion of child protection-involved families, and that risk is often too narrowly conceived. The current narrow conceptualization of risk prioritizes physical and public health concerns over long term financial and mental health outcomes, paralleling an ongoing critique of child protection responses being inadequate to address chronic gaps in families' socioeconomic needs (e.g., Gupta, 2017;Hyslop & Keddell, 2018;Mason, 2019;McCartan et al, 2018;Saar-Heiman & Gupta, 2019).…”

“…The benefits resulting from such a shift are difficult to predict, but would likely be desirable for both clinical and fiscal reasons. A guaranteed universal income scheme has been endorsed by social workers themselves (e.g., CASW, 2020;Hamilton & Martin-West, 2019;Hyslop & Keddell, 2018;Kennelly, 2017;McCartan et al, 2018) as a first line of prevention for families who so often end up in child protection systems as a result, at least in part, of poverty and precarity, and stress that comes with it. This, in turn, could reduce the number of families for whom the main driver to become involved with child protection systems is poverty, enabling services to be more effective for those who come in contact with the system for other reasons.…”

Screening for economic hardship for child welfare-involved families during the COVID-19 pandemic: A rapid partnership response

“…Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were mounting concerns reflected in the international literature about the inadequacy of the child protection system’s response to families facing economic hardship (e.g., Bilson & Martin, 2016 ; Davidson et al, 2017 ; Drake & Jonson-Reid, 2014 ; Hyslop & Keddell, 2018 ; Keddell & Davie, 2018 ; McCartan et al, 2018 ; Rothwell et al, 2018 ; Saar-Heiman & Gupta, 2019 ). Several scholars have proposed that practice frameworks and tools are necessary for effective child welfare service delivery for families facing economic hardship ( Hyslop & Keddell, 2018 ; McCartan et al, 2018 ; Saar-Heiman & Gupta, 2019 ). Given this and the knowledge that child welfare-involved families were particularly vulnerable to the economic impact of the pandemic led to the development of a clinical tool to assist workers to respond to families during the pandemic which explicitly assessed economic hardship concerns.…”