When the professional is personal: Issues of identity and practice

Abstract

Within this paper the overlap of issues for lesbians who are also survivors, or survivors who are also lesbians, will be explored in relation t o the impact of mainstream conceptions of meaning around these two aspects of identity. The focus will be on the implications for practioners, who themselves share these aspects of identity with those who use social work services. The importance of engaging in reflexive practice will be highlighted if we are t o work with the tensionskontradications that may arise when personal and professional worlds overlap.ocial work practice is changing as people try to accommodate S shifts in organisational cultures and approaches to management which reflect wider politicalhdeological concerns linked to the rise of the New Right in British politics. The imposition of market forces (Clarke 1996) and hard human resource strategies (Legge 1996), from the private into the public sector, has fundamentally challenged established approaches to social work intervention. Within this context the focus is often on outcomes, in isolation from the processes through which they were generated, for social work practioners and managers (Everitt and Hardiker 1996). This instrumental approach is at variance with the hard won, but fragile recognition that who we are affects how we respond when occupying the social work role. Reflexive approaches to practice enshrine ackowledgement that the shape of our intra psychic worlds, inter personal relationships and the wider structural conditions within which they occur affect the naturehange of responses that are made at the individual and organisational level (Hugman 1992). To make real the intention to engage in anti oppressive practice requires an understanding of the importance of reflexivity, which includes a focus on wider issues than Practice Volume 10 Number 1

Child care social work and the role of state employees

“…# 1999 Blackwell Science Ltd services is dicult for those occupying other roles, whether as professionals or as academics, as others may then infer that we are unable to manage the duties and tasks of our current occupational role (Huntington 1998). However, from my perspective it is one way to challenge the construction of unhelpful distinctions that continue to legitimate a focus oǹ them' as if they are fundamentally dierent to`us'.…”