Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

Many services and professions are concerned with women, social work
being among them. Feminist social work 29 has contributed significantly to our
understanding of how social inequalities can be reproduced, which is of central
importance to social work. Gender inequalities reveal that sexual difference is
determined by power relations, in accordance with which women are simply
considered to be inferior. In this sense, knowledge about the relations between
the genders informs our knowledge about how social inequality is reproduced.
An awareness of power and authority has influenced social work in a manner
that enables it to realise its professional potential in the process of regulating
people’s lives on both collective and individual levels. An understanding of
the relation between the genders and the patriarchal structure of society has
contributed to an awareness about the relations between professionals and
users. The power is on the side of the professionals and is manifested in the
fact that users are often deprived of the opportunity for self-representation.
As people with problems they also lack the competence to make decisions
about themselves, which is thus assigned to the professionals. The knowledge
of professionals is privileged, whilst that of users is disregarded.
Awareness of such relations has lead to a radical criticism of institutions
and to a demand for the participation of users in the process of setting up social
services. Women who were victims of violence themselves have started creating
their own services (women’s shelters, advice centres) and establishing new
women’s spaces which have also become places of safety. They have advocated
for establishing community services and pointed to the areas neglected by
traditional social work: domestic violence, sexual abuse, rape, etc. Community
social work has therefore become a new response to human distress, which
is capable of bringing professionals »from the offices to the field« – into the
community, which is where the problems emerge. The manner in which a
problem is embedded within a certain set of relations has become more
important than the problem itself. Individual treatment no longer sufficed for
the solving of the problem, and the new situation has called for social action
which, instead of just focusing on people with problems, should also be aimed
towards the changing of the system.
As regards the relations between professionals and users, it was revealed
that it is the existing relations of power and the understanding of human distress
29
Lena Dominelli, Feminist Social Work Theory and Practice. (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002).
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