Social workers need to acknowledge our own problems with racism
Over the past several months, as more and more people have come to understand the problem of racism in law enforcement and the deadly harm that results to Black Americans, conversations have centered on defunding the police, reallocating funds to communities and identifying alternative responses to certain crises as a means of ending police violence.
Social workers are often mentioned in these conversations as possible alternative responders as social workers have a unique set of skills that can be useful in responding to crises. Social workers are trained to de-escalate high-stress situations and to focus on resolving situations by referring those in crisis to needed services. Because of this training, social workers can be effective in resolving many crisis situations.
But before this can happen, social workers need to acknowledge that we have our own problems with racism.
We only need to look at the child welfare system to see the harm that social workers cause Black families. Social workers over-surveil, over-police and over-remove Black children from their parents. Black children are overrepresented in foster care at a rate nearly double their proportion in the general population. We have known about this for decades and have been unable to resolve this. We also know that separating children from their parents causes harm. As a nation, we’ve witnessed the harm and trauma that result when children are separated from their parents at the U.S./Mexico border. This same harm and trauma occur when children are forcibly separated from their parents by child protection authorities.
And although those decisions are supposed to be made in the name of safety, they are often based on racial biases among child welfare caseworkers, many of whom are social workers. To be effective in resolving crises, we need to examine our own systems, and begin to train social workers to not only respond to crises, but to do so in a way that doesn’t perpetuate harmful, racist outcomes.
Social workers also need to disassociate ourselves with other systems that cause harm to Black communities. The July 9 edition of the Houston Chronicle featured a story titled “The wave of the future: How police and social workers partner up to help those in crisis.” The article highlighted the Crisis Intervention Response Team, a unit of 21 social workers who collaborate with police to respond to certain crises, including mental health concerns, domestic violence and homeless outreach.
This is absolutely not what social workers should be doing.
Social workers cannot be effective in resolving crises if we continue to collaborate with an institution known for its racist and violent outcomes. Social workers have been collaborating with law enforcement for decades. We have tried to collaborate, we have tried to reform, but this has not led to meaningful change. At this point we are complicit. And we cannot continue to be complicit in what we know to be a harmful, racist institution.
This conversation also raises important questions about the need for crisis response. When we talk about who is best equipped to respond to mental health crises, we also need to ask ourselves, why are there so many mental health crises that require a response? Why do we live in a society in which so many people have unmet mental health needs that escalate to a crisis? And is there something we can do about that? The answer to this is yes. This is about how we as a society choose to allocate our resources. Right now, we choose to spend billions of dollars on a system of policing to respond to mental health crises, instead of spending those billions of dollars to prevent those crises from occurring in the first place. What if we thought about this differently and began to allocate our resources where they are really needed?
Conversations about defunding the police aren’t simply about reducing the impact of police violence. They’re about recognizing that it isn’t ultimately the police that keep us safe. What creates lasting public safety are well-funded public schools, housing for all who need it, employment, access to mental health services and expansions of the safety net. When we choose to make these investments, we can begin to imagine a society in which crisis response, and the police, are no longer needed.