Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

that ultimately make such distress problematic. As the employed professionals
are the ones presiding over the knowledge, the people in trouble often find that
their own power is completely lost once they enter the system providing help.
By using this privileged discourse, social workers themselves consolidate this
relationship. They often support it by categorising and labelling, both of which
contribute to the process of depriving a person of the ability to represent him/
herself. It sometimes happens that people accept such relationships as they feel
inferior, or ignorant and incompetent. They often feel responsible for their
situation despite the fact that they have no control over it. Hence the transfer
of the problems from the individual to the social level. Increasingly services are
emerging which are aimed at consolidating power, such as shelters, self-help
groups, advocacy services and the like. Today’s social work has adopted such
principles, and has started to integrate them as the most prominent elements
in its doctrine.
These changes have also been partly encouraged by another concept,
which is being developed by Selma Sevenhuijsen, 30 namely the concept of the
ethics of care, or a new culture of care. The author refers to it as a political
concept, suggesting that care in the Western cultures is unjustifiably attributed
to one gender only, women, and is thereby diminished and reduced to being
a private matter. Care is thus supposed to belong to the home and not to the
public sphere. The author claims that care is present in all aspects of everyday
life and is particularly significant because it involves values such as solidarity,
recognition of others, mutual dependency, and collectivity. It is precisely
these values that should provide a basis for policy in general and, in particular,
partial governmental policies aimed at ensuring equal opportunities for all.
This concept also changes the relations between the genders, which must be
based on the values of solidarity and mutual dependency in both private and
public spheres.
When one speaks about social inequality (this insight arises from the
understanding of dominant relations between the genders), one realises its
consequences, which are mainly manifested in discrimination and social
exclusion. Various groups of people are being discriminated against. Apart
from women, one must mention the poor, people with disabilities, members
30
Selma Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality and Politics.
(London: Routledge, 1998).
102