The Roots of Conflict and Conflict Resolution:Social Work Section Part 1 15'11'2002

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The Roots of Conflict and Conflict
ResolutionSocial Work SectionPart 1 (15.11.2002)

• Kris Clarke, instructor
• spkris_at_uta.fi

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What Is Social Suffering?(Kleinman et al. 1997,
ix)

• Social suffering is an assemblage of human
  problems that have their origins and consequences
  in devastating injuries that social force can
  inflict on human experience.
• Social suffering results from what political,
  economic and institutional power does to people
  and how these forms of power themselves influence
  responses to social power.

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Traditional Views of Power

• Power is a property or commodity and can be
  possessed.
• Power is located in a centralized source (the
  state, the law, etc.)
• Power is negative and based on prohibition.

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Foucaults View of Power

• Power is everywhere it is not an institution or
  structure it is a relationship that constantly
  changes, it is exercised not possessed.
• Power is not centralized but is woven within
  social life.
• Power is productive, not repressive.

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Some Foucauldian Terms

• Disciplinary power (since 18th century)
  transformation of power from domination to
  discipline. Exercised on bodies to create docile
  bodies.
• Micro-physics of power based on classification,
  surveillance and control of individuals.
• Discourse governs ways of talking about a
  subject. Discourses sustain regimes of truth.
• Panopticon model prison metaphor for
  disciplinary power. Effect is to make the
  prisoner conscious of permanent and constant
  visibility which assures power is exerted. Each
  prisoner becomes his own jailer. Self-policing
  subjects.

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Definition of Violence

• Violence can be broadly defined as an act or
  situation that harms the health or well-being of
  oneself or others.
• Gandhi two distinct aspects of violence.
• Passive discrimination, oppression, exploitation
• Physical direct harm
• He argued that passive violence leads to physical
  violence. Research tends to support this.

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Levels of Violence(Van Soest and Crosby 1997)

• Structural avoidable deprivations built into the
  structure of society based on norms and
  traditions that subjugate one group in favor of
  another (e.g. poverty, hunger)
• Institutional harmful acts by organizations and
  institutions (oppression, unequal treatment under
  the law, police brutality, torture). Official
  forms of violence (state repression, war,
  invaion)
• Personal interpersonal acts of violence against
  persons or property (rape, murder, mugging).
  Harmful acts against the self (substance abuse,
  suicide). Acts by organized groups or mobs (hate
  crimes, looting, rioting)

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Legacy of childhood trauma in the
Israel-Palestine Conflict

• continuing traumatic events over a decade, no
  experience of feeling security, increase in
  trauma symptoms (anxiety and fear)
• impaired behavioral, social, physical, and
  psychological functioning
• trauma passes through generations and tends to
  continue the cycle of hate

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Statistics on Deaths of Minors

• Between 10/2001-5/2002
• Israelis Minors Killed by Palestinians in the
  Occupied Territories 14 (ages 5 months to 17)(1
  by stoning, 2 by beating and stoning, 7 by
  gunfire and 4 by suicide bombing)
• 12 percent of total civilian fatalities (117)
• Israeli Minors Killed by Palestinians in Israel
  37 (ages 7 months to 17) (2 by gunfire and 35 by
  suicide bombing)21 percent of total civilian
  fatalities (178)
• Palestinian Minors Killed by Israeli Security
  Forces in Occupied Territories210 (ages 4 months
  to 17)22 percent of total civilian fatalities
  (956)
• Palestinian Minors Killed by Israeli Citizens in
  Occupied Territories1 (age 2 months) (by
  gunfire)6 percent of total civilian fatalities
  (17)
• Palestinian Minors Killed by Israeli Security
  Forces in Israel1 (age 14) (by Israeli police
  force)5 percent of total civilian fatalities
  (22)
• Deaths of Palestinian Minors Caused by Delay in
  Obtaining Medical Treatment Due to Israeli
  Restriction of Movement8 (stillborn to age
  11)35 percent of total civilian fatalities (23)
• Source B'Tselem, Israeli Information Center for
  Human Rights in the Occupied Territories

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Knowing and Not Knowing(Cohen 2001)

• Lies and Self-Deception
• Cognitive Errors
• (perception without awareness, perceptual
  defense and selective attention, inferential
  failures, mystery of consciousness)

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Types of Denial

• Literal denial
• Interpretive denial
• Implicatory denial

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Mechanisms Rhetorical Devices

• Normalization
• Defense mechanisms and cognitive errors
• Accounts and rhetorical devices
• Collusion and cover-up

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Everyday Bystanders

• Numbers
• Ambiguity and Interpretation
• Anticipated Reaction of Others
• Expected Rewards, Utility and Risk
• Social Justice and Equity
• Guilt and Responsibility
• Sympathy and Empathy
• Identification

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Perpetrators and Atrocities

• Accounts as denials
• denial of knowledge
• not wanting to know, refusing to know
• compartmentalization
• moral ambivalence, moral indifference or moral
  blindspot?
• memory

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Denial of Responsibility

• Obedience
• Conformity
• Necessity and Self-Defense
• Splitting
• limited or situational morality
• means-end dissociation
• moral balance
• bad faith and role distance

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Denial

• Denial of Injury
• Denial of the Victim
• Condemnation of the Condemners
• Appeal to Higher Loyalties
• Moral Indifference

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Denial

• Personal denials, public histories
• literal innocence
• not-knowing
• forgetting
• admission

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Denial

• Collective denials, public histories
• classic cover-up
• state-organized denial
• ideological denial
• cultural slippage

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What Is Social Work?

• The social work profession promotes social
  change, problem solving in human relationships
  and the empowerment and liberation of people to
  enhance well-being. Utilizing theories of human
  behavior and social systems, social work
  intervenes at the points where people interact
  with their environments. Principles of human
  rights and social justice are fundamental to
  social work.
• (International Federation of Social Workers)

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Values of Social Work

• Developed out of humanitarian and democratic
  ideals. (Approximately 100 years old as a
  profession)
• Based on respect for the equality, worth and
  dignity of all people human rights, social
  justice and the development of human potential.
• Works in solidarity with poor, vulnerable and
  oppressed people.

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Social Work Theory

• Evidence-based knowledge based on research and
  practice evaluation.
• Recognizes complexity of interactions between
  human beings and their environment.
• Draws on theories of human development and
  behavior and social system to analyze complex
  situations and to facilitate individual and
  community change.

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Social Work Practice

• Addresses the barriers, inequalities and
  injustices that exist in society.
• Uses a variety of skills, techniques and
  activities from person-focused to policy (e.g.
  counseling, family therapy, group work, community
  organizing, policy formulation)

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FUNCTIONS OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

• Help people enhance and more effectively utilize
  their own problem-solving and coping capacities
• Establish initial linkages between people and
  resource systems
• Facilitate interaction and modify and build new
  relationships between people and societys
  resource systems
• Contribute to the development and modification of
  social policy
• Dispense material resources
• Serve as agents of social control

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Critical Questions regarding Social Work

• Is social work a state-centered or
  client-centered activity?
• Social workers are both helpers and controllers.
• Social workers can enforce dominant power
  relations

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Community Work Models

• Linked to theories of development (in the
  developing world) argument that the community
  needs to be mobilized to deal with social
  consequences of socio-economic problems. Linked
  to participatory approaches and grassroots
  organizing. Often linked to social pedagogy which
  has had a strong role in education and social
  welfare (term not used so much in English
  speaking countries).
• Social development as a theory attempts to affect
  wider groups (eg communities) not just
  individuals to enhance social change. Social
  development is seen as a process and its
  preconditions may include the removal of
  obstacles (eg anti-discrimination laws or
  redlining practices). Economic factors must be
  considered.

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Community Work

• These theories provide a wider, community focus
  for workers to work with oppressed people. But do
  they work to confirm the existing social order?

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Radical Social Work

• Problems are seen as social and structural rather
  than individual. Inequality comes from lower
  socio-economic position. Social work can
  therefore be an agent for change.
• These theories provide a critique of the social
  control that social work has wielded. Does
  professionalism work against the interests of the
  poor? Is radical practice really possible as a
  bureaucrat?
• Radical social work started in the UK in the late
  1960s early 1970s.

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Radical Social Work

• Main goals
• Social work should be relevant to social causes
• Practice must be tailored to the situation in
  which social workers work
• Social work should be concerned with humanity,
  not a certain set of values
• Critical thinking should lead to action

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Radical Social Work

• Critique of conventional social work because it
  is conservative, and workers do not try to change
  social institutions for clients benefit.
• Radical social work believes in political
  engagement on a micro-level. The goal is social
  transformation and conscientization (Freire).

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Critique of Radical Social Work

• Some of the problems associated with these
  theories are that they tend to ignore the
  immediate personal needs of clients. They are
  also quite weak when dealing with emotional
  problems. They do not tell what to do but provide
  an approach to problems. These theories have a
  limited approach and consider power to be equal
  to control. Radical social work tends to be an
  ideology rather than a theory.

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Empowerment and Advocacy

• Empowerment seeks to help clients gain power of
  decision and action over their own lives by
  reducing the effects of social or personal blocks
  to exercising existing power, by increasing
  capacity and self-confidence to use power and by
  transferring power from the environment to the
  clients.
• Advocacy seeks to represent the interests of
  powerless clients to powerful individuals and
  social structures.

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Five essential ideas about empowerment

• Biography is an easily understood way of
  analyzing experience and understanding the world.
• Power needs to be understood as potentially
  liberating as well as oppressive.
• Political understanding needs to inform practice.
  Social work acts always involve accepting or
  changing an existing way of organizing power
  relations.
• Skills can empower.
• Interdependence of power and practice must be
  established.

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Workers help with problem posing

• Description what do you see happening?
• Analysis why is it happening?
• Related problems what problems does it lead to?
• Root causes what leads to these problems?
• Action planning what can we do about it?

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References

• Cohen, Stanley (2001) States of Denial Knowing
  about Atrocities and Suffering. London Polity.
• Kleinman, Arthur et al. (1997) Social Suffering.
  Berkeley University of California.
• Van Soest, Dorothy and Jane Crosby (1997)
  Challenges of Violence Worldwide A Curriculum
  Module. Washington DC NASW Press.