From tenuous to tenacious: Strengthening social justice practice in child welfare

Child welfare work is complex and challenging. Social work, with its historical micro/macro dual focus and its ethical commitment to social justice, is the profession best suited to take on those challenges. This paper... [ view full abstract ]

Child welfare work is complex and challenging. Social work, with its historical micro/macro dual focus and its ethical commitment to social justice, is the profession best suited to take on those challenges. This paper examines how, overtime, social workers develop a social justice focus in practice.

We conducted in-depth interviews, in two different provinces in Canada, with 25 child welfare workers, who held either a BSW or an MSW. We employed grounded theory strategies for data collection and analysis to uncover how social workers understood social justice and enacted it within the child welfare arena.

Popular wisdom suggests that new workers, having greater stamina and ideological zeal, are more likely than more experienced workers to take on issues of social justice. Our findings, however, suggest that the reverse may be true: in this study, those workers indicating a strong commitment to social justice tended to be more senior workers. In exploring why this might be the case, we noted that senior or experienced workers in our sample were more likely to have solid knowledge of systems, to demonstrate critical and structural thinking about reported child abuse and neglect, to rely on reflective practice, and to demonstrate an ability to think and work collaboratively with both parents and communities. Novice workers were more likely to express a lack of confidence in their ability to incorporate social justice into practice, and to tell us they struggled to find their voices.

Our study highlights the need for employers and educators to recognize and acknowledge that, contrary to expectations, recent graduates and social workers new to child welfare practice require additional supports and time to grow into their role, with particular support in relation to the cognitive and practical skills needed to understand and organize their practice around principles of social justice.