Volunteering at Calais’s now dismantled migrant camp, Dr Lauren Wroe discovered a new kind of social work. She won the inhabitants’ trust through her work supporting children’s claims for asylum in the UK, but admits that it was a steep learning curve.
“To support liberation in others we really need to liberate ourselves,” she says.
“Migrants are escaping wars and entrenched poverty, brought about by conflicts, state policies and religious extremism, yet when they arrive at our borders they are treated as unwanted trespassers bringing these problems to our doorstep. This is victim blaming at its absolute worst.” Her conclusion – that social workers could be political activists – led her to help found Social Workers Without Borders as part of her campaign for refugee justice.
Israeli social work academic Orit Nuttman-Shwartz believes the social work curriculum needs to adapt to the impact of globalisation on marginalised populations. “This is a very different vision of social work that I’m advocating,” she says.
“The curriculum should offer not just the knowledge and interventions that migration challenges us to provide, but also address the social mindset of the educators and their trainees.”
But Lisa Hackett, West Midlands regional head for the fast-track children’s social worker training programme Frontline, says social workers have always required self-knowledge: “Social work education offers a lens through which students examine their own values and beliefs and how they feel about social differences and the factors that underlie them,” she says.
“Social workers are in a privileged position because they get to examine their values and beliefs in a way few people can.”
Such self-scrutiny informs their response to cases like that of Kurdish-Iranian teenage asylum seeker Reker Ahmed, attacked by a gang at a south London bus stop in March.
“You can say it’s just mindless violence, but the important thing is to explain it,” Hackett says. “If we just remain outraged, we don’t have any understanding. Why do young people feel compelled to take that action? It may be that they feel on the periphery of society in terms of their own life chances.”
