Gender and social work: What matters? What works? – Opinion Piece by Prof. Jonathan Scourfield – A #SWSCmedia debate

Join us for a Special Evening with Prof. Brigid Featherstone & Prof. Jonathan Scourfield on Tuesday (17-July-2012) at 8:00 PM UK / 3:00 PM EDT @SWSCmedia.  

In advance of the Twitter debate on Tuesday 17th July, here are few thoughts on the theme of gender and social work. Sorry if some of these are blindingly obvious.

  1. Gender still matters - I guess if you don’t think it matters, you probably won’t be taking part in the debate, so maybe this doesn’t need saying. But in the wider world of social work, beyond those who are interested enough to join in a debate on gender, there is perhaps a job to be done to remind people about the salience of gender. There are ongoing and deeply entrenched inequalities, despite the gains made in some aspects of women’s social status in recent decades. There are enduring fixed ideas about what is appropriate behaviour for men and women which become deeply embedded in people’s identities. So, for example, social workers in the child protection field will encounter some profound inequalities in families which are often linked to maltreatment of children. Domestic abuse, for example, which is over-whelmingly perpetrated by men, can be found in perhaps the majority of child protection cases. And social work practice responses, whilst trying to help, can end up perversely deepening inequalities by making women (mothers) responsible for turning round grim family situations which are primarily caused by abusive men.
  2. Gender doesn’t mean women (obviously) - Again, people taking part in this debate don’t need to be told that men too have gendered identities and men’s behaviour is shaped by gender. But as with the first point above, in the general world of social work, people do need reminding of this. Working with men is still a fringe, specialist and marginal area within social work. People like @brigid39 and I have been banging on about it for some time but it remains a Cinderella topic. It would be a mistake to think that an interest in working with men need imply either (1) that you are a men’s rights advocate who thinks men are now the main victims of the gender order or (2) that men should always be thought of as potential abusers. This kind of dualism is in fact very unhelpful, which leads to my next rather obvious point.
  3. Gender’s complicated but feminism is still relevant - A crude feminism is no help to social work and neither is a crude men’s rights approach. Feminism is a broad church and includes a wide range of ideological positions. We need an approach to understanding gender relations which recognises that real life is more complicated than some simplistic sociological generalisations might imply. So, for example, we should recognise that there are several different kinds of domestic abuse, not all of which are about men terrorising women partners. But at the same time, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, as the core concern of feminism with unequal social relations and a world stacked in favour of men’s interests is still relevant in 2012. So, to use the same example, we need to recognise that most domestic abuse is indeed initiated by men and much of it is linked to the desire to control a woman partner.
  4. We need a better balance of evidence and ideology - Finally, I think that in relation to this issue of gender in social work, we need to spend a little less time on ideological assertions and a bit more time trying to find out what works. There is a tendency – for example in the domestic abuse field – for differences between approaches to practice to be based on what people believe rather than on evidence of effectiveness. The ideological debates are really interesting, I think, but we’ve had plenty of those and perhaps we’ve not had enough debate about which approaches to intervention actually help men and women – improve quality of life and material circumstances, change behaviour where necessary, make people happier. This is a complex issue of course, because there may be interventions which do well for men, but not women or vice versa. And that’s where we need some of the ideology to help us make sense of the evidence. So I’m not arguing the politics are not important, but just that evidence of effectiveness should play a greater role in academic and practice attention to gender in social work.

Join us for a Special Evening with Prof. Brigid Featherstone & Prof. Jonathan Scourfield on Tuesday (17-July-2012) at 8:00 PM UK / 3:00 PM EDT @SWSCmedia.  

Prof. Jonathan Scourfield (@ProfJScourfield) is a Professor of Social Work at Cardiff University and a member of our Expert Panel @SWSCmedia.

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