Liz Beddoe, Eileen Joy, Laura Chubb and George Guild Delusions of neutrality: “Abortion should be illegal (but I am) non-judgemental despite disagreeing with the decision”
Social workers represent diverse identities, values, and beliefs, playing a critical role in helping service users to obtain information and resources needed to make important life decisions including those pertaining to abortion. Abortion is considered by many to be a controversial issue however social work scholarship in recent years has focused on positioning abortion rights as essential to reducing health inequalities. In Aotearoa, New Zealand abortion has been decriminalised and our study sought to explore social workers’ knowledge and beliefs about the legislative change and how they manage their responses when supporting people who are considering terminating a pregnancy.
This presentation will draw on a qualitative survey that explored the thoughts, beliefs, and the meaning-making that social workers engage in when they consider abortion in their professional practice, following changes to the abortion law in Aotearoa New Zealand. The survey was completed by 122 participants with 14,000 words in open responses related to abortion. These data were explored within a reproductive justice theoretical framework using thematic analysis. While reported views varied from strongly anti-abortion to strongly pro-choice many social workers noted a clash between personal and professional values in relation to abortion. Generally, regardless of their stated personal positions participants called on professional ethical principles such as self-determination, neutrality and being non-judgemental to reconcile any tensions. Our findings suggest that social workers would benefit from more learning opportunities focused on the development of a more nuanced understanding of reproductive justice in order to be able to position abortion as health care.
Eileen Joy and Suzette Jackson Patriarchal motherhood discourses in social worker talk about mothers who use substances
Patriarchal motherhood discourses affect all women (even those who choose not to mother) by comparing them to an often impossible and idealised version of mothering. Patriarchal motherhood discourses represent an essentialised version of mothering, one which is deeply gendered and perpetuates inequality..
The presentation draws from a doctoral study that included interviews with child protection social workers (n=24) in Aotearoa. Critical discourse analysis was used to see how social workers upheld and/or resisted notions of patriarchal motherhood when talking about their work with mothers who use substances – mothers who are considered by many to be among the most deviant. Findings suggest that social workers predominantly used patriarchal discourses to position their practice as child-centric while leaving the mother with little support. Some practitioners resisted these discourses by articulating narratives including a more structural and intersectional analysis. These findings suggest that social workers need to think differently about motherhood and mothering through adopting a matricentric, intersectional and decolonised approach to their work with all mothers. This work includes recognising broader family networks and intergenerational oppressions in the lives of mothers who use substances.
Natalie Femia Social justice as sustainability: A post-structural critique of 'burnout' in social work.
In the current context of biomedical neoliberalism, to be a social worker in the mental health field is to be constrained by paradigms of individualism, hyper-managerialism, professionalism, pathologisation, and structural inequities. Inability to be complicit with these constraints can be pathologised as ‘burnout’. Drawing on preliminary findings from qualitative interviews and arts-based body-mapping, this research critically explores the concept of ‘burnout’ in this work, and suggests a complex relationship between perceptions and experiences of ‘burnout’ and the aforementioned constraints. These findings further suggest that this relationship is mediated by close or distant social work values and ethics, and whether people (‘clients’) are positioned through relationality or othering. This research demonstrates hopeful possibilities for strengthening values and ethics of social justice in particular as a method for resisting current constraints, sustaining social workers, and prioritising relationality and solidarity with people (‘clients’).
