star-anise:

maddie-pryor:

lunarisims:

maddie-pryor:

wahooanswers:

wahooanswers:

listen, my social worker “woke” gay roommate called the cops on me when i had a psychotic break. that was his first reaction. he didn’t attempt to contact my friends or family first. he also illegally prevented me from entering our apartment to pick up any of my furniture or personal belongings. at that point, he knew more about psychosis than i did because it was first episode psychosis. social workers are absolutely violent to people with psychosis. i don’t want to see that post supporting them replacing police or other services again.

you can reblog this

As far as I know about social workers, many get paid poorly with few resources to help them deal with the emotional trauma they deal with regularly so I can imagine the good ones dont last long and you’re left with mostly the ones that don’t empathize much with people in crisis and are not bothered with the violent systems in place.

There are so many people in the notes saying stuff like “well this is my field and I’m not like that!” And completely missing the point. The system on a deep, structural level is failed. It is built upon the exact foundations that police work is and therefore falls into the exact same pitfalls I.e racism and reliance on institutionalization. Individuals cannot change the system from within. It is just giving the police a face lift. New Zealand is currently in crisis over how horrifically social workers treat children and families, particularly maori. When you suggest simply having social workers who are agents of the same government the police force was under, you wil get the exact same results https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/418477/maori-mothers-describe-child-welfare-system-as-dangerous-and-brutal-in-new-report

Māori mothers describe child welfare system as dangerous and brutal in new report

Māori mothers of newborns involved with Oranga Tamariki say the child welfare system is dangerous, brutal and racist.

RNZ

Same thing happened in Canada with the ‘sixties scoop’. It was (is!) social workers having indigenous children taken from their families. Social workers absolutely enact cultural genocide this way today as well with the proportions of indigenous children in foster care being totally out of wack. Give racists any power and they will use it.

From a practical point of view, this is why police abolition will take some time. Like yes, we should start right away! But it will take decades to complete the work. You can’t just swap out one power structure for another in an inherently racist system. All of the helping professions right now are designed to work in a police state. Social workers might be one step less violent and more useful than the police, but we cannot stop there.

As a mental health therapist, I know that if I don’t call the cops on an imminently suicidal person, or don’t call Children’s Services on an abusive parent, I could lose my job and my license. It is literally illegal for me to fail to make those calls. My entire professional education grew along the backbone of the fact that I must comply with state power that can institutionalize and imprison people, that can force families to stay together or come apart.

So we need to take a deep collective look at how we as a society treat things like mental health or abuse in families and find ways of approaching these things that are less shitty. Everything has to change, from our laws to our hospitals to our professions to our funding models. We’re just getting started.

We don’t currently have a huge workforce of people with better theories, training, and praxis than social work. Some people are doing much better work in small limited ways, but it isn’t immediately scalable. We need to find better theories, train a bunch of people, pass legislation to let them work, fund them adequately, and send them out. That’s work that will take a lifetime. So we should start right away, but not expect to be done by Christmas.