Telling the Truth about Social Work History is a Human Rights Practice

Overview: This presentation examines social work history through a human rights lens, acknowledging that we have participated in violating human rights. Human rights principles of human dignity, participation, anti-discrimination, transparency, and accountability will be presented as tools to help social workers respond communities seeking reparations from harm that we have caused.Proposal text: This presentation will look at social work history through a human rights lens (McPherson et al, 2017), examining how—though we call ourselves a human rights profession (Mapp et al, 2019), U.S social workers have not always lived up our ideals; indeed, we have participated in violating of human rights, for example, by excluding Black Americans from White social service systems (Carlton-LaNey & Hodges, 2004); facilitating settler colonialism (Fortier & Hong-Sing Wong, 2018); taking part in the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans (Park, 2008); and creating a child protection system that disproportionately targets families of color (Detlaff et al, 2020).

The presenter will describe how applying the human rights principles of human dignity, participation, anti-discrimination, transparency, and accountability can lead social work educators, practitioners, and our profession as a whole to recognize destructive professional practices, to encounter client communities with greater humility, and to begin the process of reconciliation with those whom social work has harmed. To illustrate, the presenter will use an example from her home university and city.

Between 1962 and 1966, the university contracted with the city to demolish an early 20th-century Black neighborhood in order to build three high-rise dormitories. Former residents of this community and their families are now arguing for reparations from the city. Using archival documents, the presenter will explore the role that social work played in this “urban renewal” project, and show how a graduate of the university’s social work program used her expertise to facilitate moving these “multi-problem” homeowners out of their homes and off their land. Looking through a rights-based lens, this presentation will explore how social work can be participatory, anti-discriminatory, and transparent when observing our past, and particularly question how we should be accountable now. This process is not easy, but applying rights-based principles to our past will allow us to live up to our ethical commitments in the present.

Bibliography

Carlton-LaNey, I. and Hodges, V. (2004) African American reformers’ mission: Caring for our girls and women, Affilia, 19(3): 257-272. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886109904265853

Dettlaff, A. J., Weber, K., Pendleton, M., Boyd, R., Bettencourt, B., & Burton, L. (2020). It is not a broken system, it is a system that needs to be broken: The upEND movement to abolish the child welfare system. Journal of Public Child Welfare, 14(5), 500-517.

Fortier, C. and Hon-Sing Wong, E. (2019). The settler colonialism of social work and the social work of settler colonialism, Settler Colonial Studies, 9(4): 437-456. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2018.1519962

Mapp, S., McPherson, J., Androff, D.A., Gatenio Gabel, S. (2019). Social work is a human rights profession. Social Work, 64(3), 259-269. doi:10.1093/sw/swz023

McPherson, J., Siebert, C.F., & Siebert, D.C. (2017). Measuring rights-based perspectives: A validation of the Human Rights Lens in Social Work scale. Journal of the Society for Social Work Research, 8(2), 233-257. doi:10.1086/692017

Park, Y. (2008) Facilitating injustice: Tracing the role of social workers in the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, Social Service Review, 82(3): 447-483.