Practicing Social JusticePracticing Social Justice
WE HAVE DISCUSSED HOW THE VIRTUE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE involves skills, knowledge, and habits required to join with others for the common good. Social justice is the virtue particularly required for and developed by participation in civil society. It concerns how people exercise their initiative and creativity in the associations and groups that fill the space between individual and state. Brandon Vogt has shown how saints, practitioners of heroic virtue, have worked to make common life better on predominantly national and local levels, generally doing so in the space between the lone individual and the Leviathan state. He draws lessons from these saints about how ordinary Christians today who are neither professionals nor agents of the state may practice social justice in their own lives.1
But what of the efforts of those who seek to help others as their primary occupation? Can professional helpers like social workers exercise and promote the virtue of social justice in the course of their practice? The question seems absurd since social workers regard social justice as a core value and combating social injustice as a professional obligation. We have used examples of social justice in practice in nonprofessional, nonstate cooperative efforts like bridge building or barn raising. We had in mind, too, activities such as organizing young adults who were born to sperm donors and whose voices and needs were neglected in prior discussions of artificial reproductive technology. Or those who campaign against gendercide, the selective abortion and infanticide of baby girls. Or workers who organize and press for a just wage that enables them to live decently and support their families.
Social workers engage in such activities, but usually from the outside, as helpers. They practice in poor neighborhoods where they do not live. They work with impoverished and oppressed people but are not poor or exploited themselves. They provide psychotherapy for those with mental illness, but as professionals to clients, not as fellow patients or family members.
Professional Helpers and Social Justice
The concluding chapters on charity take up some of the issues involved in this kind of helping relationship. Here I want to look at examples of how the virtue of social justice may guide the practice of professionals, even those employed by or working under contract for the state. In the first case, the outside helpers are economists or people with financial expertise, helping women in poor communities and financially fragile circumstances. The other two cases involve social workers in their most regulatory, coercive role on behalf of the state, intervening in families to protect children from abuse or neglect. What does exercising the virtue of social justice look like in these situations? All three cases illustrate how a program may require and develop, in both its organizers and clients, the virtue of social justice as the personal disposition and habit of joining with others to promote the common good.
Grameen Bank
Like the Franciscan friars of the fifteenth century and Archbishop McGrath, C.S.C., (1924–2000) of Panama City in the twentieth, the economist Muhammad Yunus saw the importance of providing small loans at low interest to poor people (primarily women) so that they could use their entrepreneurial creativity and energy to build small businesses. As loans were repaid, new loans could be made to other borrowers in the community. A key aspect of the Grameen Bank model is the forming of groups of women who repay their loans via frequent installments in a group setting.2 Founded in 1976 as a research project in Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank (literally the Bank of the Villages in Bengali) was authorized by the government as an independent bank in 1983. Since then it has flourished and now has more than 2,000 branches, inspiring imitations and variations in over forty countries. Repayment meetings provide clients opportunities they did not have before, including “walking across the village to attend the center meeting, sitting in conversation with a diverse set of women, handling money for the group and receiving personal address.”3
When researchers compared the effects of the standard weekly meetings with an alternative of monthly meetings, they found that those in the former groups were 90 percent less likely to default on their loans and had substantially higher rates of interaction with each other and their families outside the meetings. The women held each other accountable and built community and democratic participation. The weekly meetings were important for both economic and social development.
The bank has grown to the point of having many thousands of employees, including loan officers and financial experts, and 3.5 million members. It has distributed more than $15 billion in loans. It is owned by its members, most of them poor women. The bank is an extraordinary example of people joining together—with outside help—to achieve a common purpose they could not have achieved on their own. The bank’s microcredit programs have many secondary benefits in terms of empowering women, enabling their creativity, resourcefulness, and initiative, and ensuring the education of their children. (It is a condition of membership to send your children to school.)
If those in dire poverty are to be helped, they need, at least for the children, education that will enhance their human capital and tap into their creativity and capacity for innovation. They need secure property rights and a business environment in which it is easy to start even a very small business, a setting more like that of Hong Kong than Argentina—or than the Peru described by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, where excessive regulation, bureaucracy, bribery, and corruption made the cost of starting a business prohibitive for the poor.4 And they need lines of credit at low and predictable rates. In Bangladesh, it is not government programs of redistribution or income maintenance but the Grameen Bank that provides most of these. An important role of the state is to get out of the way and not to hamper the economic and social development that wells up from below in civil society.
As wonderfully illustrated in the series of DVDs created by Poverty-Cure, Grameen Bank and its founder Muhammad Yunus have had an enormous impact in spreading these principles and the practice of microfinance in many forms through much of the developing world, where the lack of private property rights and the rule of law have kept the poor in poverty, stifling their creative energy and entrepreneurial spirit.5
Patch
“Patch” is an approach to delivering social services, including child protection and other forms of social care, that was developed in the United Kingdom and uses a locality-based integrated team of human-service workers.6 In the 1990s I was involved in adapting this approach for a distressed neighborhood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The Iowa patch team continues to operate in expanded and modified form, and other patch teams have sprung up in various parts of the United States since.
In the United Kingdom, a patch team would usually involve a single agency, the local authority social-services department responsible for statutory child welfare, mental health, aging, and other services. The agency’s social workers and other staff were redeployed from a central downtown office to a number of small, neighborhood-based teams and given responsibility for work within a locality of about 10,000 residents. The team contained specialists in various areas of practice but, as a team, offered integrated, comprehensive services.
In the context of a more fragmented American urban service system, the Iowa Patch Project integrated staff from five state or local programs—Iowa Human Services (four child-protection social workers), Juvenile Court Services (a probation officer), City Housing inspector, County Homemaker Services, and a community center—into a multiagency team located conveniently within the neighborhood. The idea was to take advantage of some decategorization of funding streams in order to offer more integrated and responsive services on the ground.
The team started with the recognition that most helping in communities is nonprofessional, involving extended family, friends and neighbors, churches and informal networks, schools and voluntary associations, beauty parlors and natural helping figures, and informal groups and systems. The task of social work, they concluded, was to identify who else was involved and close to the situation, to enable them to tap into their own knowledge of the situation and resources in order to interrupt problem-perpetuating patterns of relationship. Such an approach requires decentering both the service system and the professional-client relationship. It depends on teamwork among the patch members and the residents of the neighborhood.
The shift in practice—from case-by-case work to a shared workload, from crisis response to providing a little help when needed at an earlier stage, from professional responsibility for solutions to sharing responsibility among those involved and interweaving formal and informal helping—is best illustrated by an example. On visiting a house to inspect for code violations, the housing inspector (who despite her lack of any social-work education was one of the first to grasp the patch concept) found some frayed electrical wiring. In the past this would have been the extent of her professional concern. But she also noticed a single mother, new to the neighborhood, with several children and only one piece of furniture, a sofa. She reported this to the team, which sent out an MSW practicum student and a child-protective services (CPS) worker to talk to the woman. They put her in touch with a local church which set her up with needed furniture, and they invited her to join a moms’ group that the team had initiated. Thanks to “a little help when needed,” what might have become in a few months a formal case of child neglect never became an official case at all.7
Responding in this way depended on the role flexibility and shared work of the team members and their proactive approach. (Normally CPS would target only more serious cases where bruises were evident or a child had run away or committed a serious offense.) The team’s response to this situation depended on their prior work in the neighborhood. They were able to involve the church because they had already built relationships with the churches in the neighborhood. The moms’ group had developed out of a tae kwon do class offered free to local kids by the team’s probation officer. Moms would hang around during the class and chat with each other despite their own isolation or shyness, and a regular moms’ group formed naturally and continued under its own steam.
Family Group Conferencing
As an alternative to honor killings and vendettas between families, some form of restorative-justice practice seems to have been universal across time, place, and cultures prior to the development of the modern state, as a way of confronting and correcting injustices and making things right.8 Of the many adaptations across the world in the context of a bureaucratic-professional state, I want to focus briefly on the use of the Family Group Conference (FGC) in New Zealand and Hawaii.
The Maori whanau hui and the Hawaiian ho’oponopono are surviving indigenous practices of family group meetings. In both New Zealand and Hawaii, the state’s child-welfare system has drawn on (but not supplanted) this experience to develop a hybrid process that is traditional and modern, formal and informal, to address cases of child abuse and neglect among the whole population, indigenous and other. These processes are the FGC in New Zealand and the ‘Ohana Conference in Hawaii. The professional practice in both cases is to plan for and conduct a meeting of the extended family group (whanau, ‘ohana) to address concerns about children’s safety and to come up with a plan to ensure it. Meetings vary but typically include introductions, information sharing, private family time, and a decision about the plan, how to monitor it, follow up, and reconvene as needed. Professionals involved, such as conference coordinators, social workers, school counselors, and therapists, share their knowledge of the situation and answer questions. Then they leave the family alone to discuss the situation and formulate their own plan. That plan, which may involve extended family, community, and agency resources, is normally accepted after some clarification and negotiation. Families are usually far more creative in generating options and identifying family and community resources than social workers are.
The relation of family and community to state is one which John Braithwaite describes, by analogy to regulating business, as “responsive regulation,” and which Susan Chandler and I call “state-enforced family self-regulation.”9 In either case, the state does not abdicate responsibility for the “bottom line” (child safety in this case) and retains its full coercive power in the background, while widening the circle of responsibility for finding and implementing solutions and aiming to keep family self-governance and empowerment in the foreground.
Building Community
These examples mark a shift in professional-client relationships. Both professionals and families bring knowledge and expertise to the task at hand. And rather than substituting for the more proximate knowledge of local people, the professional task involves restraining oneself from imposing plans, solutions, or ultimatums (do this if you want your children back!). In these examples, outside helpers enable those directly involved in the situation to tap into their own wisdom, knowledge, resources, creativity, and initiative. They bring professional knowledge and expertise to bear, but at the same time rest on the assumption, as Gale Burford and Joe Hudson put it, that “lasting solutions to problems are ones that grow out of, or can fit with, the knowledge, experiences, and desires of the people most affected.”10
These practices fundamentally alter the relationship of professionals to the families and communities they serve. They both de-emphasize that relationship and also widen the circle of responsibility and decision making to include those whose relationship to the families and community is based not on professionalism but on caring and kinship.
In the case of child protection, the state’s statutory responsibility for child safety remains. The key shift in practice and legislation is from professional-dominated practice resting on a model of regulatory formalism to a process for decision making and planning that mobilizes and empowers children’s kin and community. It does not replace the formal processes of the court system, but—and this is surely the advantage of this kind of social practice—it enables both formal and informal care and control to enrich and constrain each other.
All three cases involve two basic changes in ways of doing business. One is a change of relation between professional and client. The other is a widening of the circle of responsibility so that the professional-client relationship is no longer at the center of the helping process, but is instead a part (though still an indispensable part) of a larger system of both formal and informal elements.
In each case, the professional intervention meets particular needs and builds community. But these processes are generally understood without reference to the virtue of social justice as discussed in this book.
The Grameen Bank approach to microcredit is discussed in terms of social capital11—trust, norms of reciprocity, and networks—that is, in terms of the forms of social organization the program develops.12
The patch approach is often described in terms of the shift in practice it requires, to what has been called “partnership practice” or “empowerment practice,” or in terms of the changes in service system, from crisis driven to prevention oriented, from fragmented to integrated.
FGC came to be viewed as part of the larger field of the theory and practice of restorative justice. It is about making things right, repairing harm, restoring community. It requires both restorative processes and restorative values. Braithwaite added the important element of responsive regulation, so as to incorporate the formal regulatory element into restorative practices when the state becomes involved. He drew on his experience in business regulation, where the response of the regulated business (a nursing home, say, or an insurance company or a nuclear power station), not the seriousness of the violation, defines the response of the regulatory body. Is the business both able and willing to come into compliance?
A similar approach prevails with accreditation of professional programs like those in social-work education. In areas like youth justice and child protection, the regulatory body (e.g., child-protective services) can see its task as closer to that of an accrediting body, helping the family meet standards and come into compliance, rather than that of a rescue operation or an emergency surgery, performing a “parentectomy” for the children. Except as a last resort, the aim is not the termination of parental rights (the equivalent to revocation of a license to do business or loss of accreditation). As with businesses and educational programs, the regulatory body requires that standards be met and that the family come into compliance. Seen from this perspective, the regulator does not dictate exactly how this must happen, becoming the boss of the family. Rather the government enforces the self-regulation of families, as it does of businesses.
In child protection, the coercive power of the state still lies in the background of even the most empowering or partnership-oriented professional practice. But coercion, which cannot be abdicated or wished away and of which parents are well aware, should remain as far in the background as possible. The empowerment of families and communities to protect their members by regulating themselves stays in the foreground as much as possible. Families are required to meet their responsibility to their children. The state’s coercive power comes into play to the extent parents demonstrate their continued incapacity or unwillingness, notwithstanding the help of kin, community, and professional services, to regulate themselves and keep their children safe.
What Does Social Justice Add?
In these three examples, practitioners have developed practices with theories for what they were doing, but without explicit reference to the virtue of social justice. They refer to social capital, empowerment, restorative justice, or responsive regulation. But what does a social-justice perspective add? What new light does it cast on these practices?
In these examples, the aim is not to supplant the decision making, self-regulation, creativity, resourcefulness, or caring capacity of families, but to strengthen and support them. It is not to squeeze out the space between individual and state, but to make it more capacious and competent. In line with the principle of subsidiarity, higher-level institutions intervene (but only as necessary) to ensure the capacity of lower-level groups to carry out their moral obligations.
Resisting the bureaucratic-professional temptations to assert their control unnecessarily and to usurp the proper functions of subsidiary groups, practitioners act with social justice. They help individuals to join with networks of others to further the common good of their families and communities. In doing so, they mitigate those social injustices embedded in cultural patterns and social practices that weaken individuals’ capacity to provide for and protect themselves and each other. Professionals’ help strengthens subsidiary groups of civil society, not the state. This help requires and develops the virtue of social justice—the disposition, habits, skills, and knowledge for association and democracy—in those being helped as well as those helping.
These examples challenge the binary oppositions into which social-policy discussions tend to fall. Neither state provision nor leaving those in need bereft of help exhausts the alternatives. In Catholic social teaching, individualism and collectivism are seen not as alternatives but as twin evils, the one reinforcing the other as they squeeze the life out of civil society.13 Providing professional help to people who are poor, weak, or oppressed does not have to create dependency and weaken personal responsibility. Professional help does not have to disempower, pace John McKnight, who shows in the famous example of a bereavement counselor how professional intervention isolates “clients” from circles of support provided by friends and neighbors who have nurtured the grieving for generations. In that example, the grief expert renders a competent community dependent on professional services.14 My examples, on the other hand, show how professional help, even when it is legally mandated, can enable those served to join with others for the common good of family and community, tapping into and building their own cultural and personal resources.
A social-justice-as-virtue perspective also enables us to recover a focus on what used to be called, in social work, the professional use of self. The character of the social worker, not only her practice theories and methods of practice, shapes the quality of the client-practitioner relationship and so constitutes an important part of the helping process.15
The virtues work together, talk to, and require each other. Social justice orders the virtues to the common good. For the practitioner, acting with the virtue of social justice requires prudence, humility, courage, self-mastery (temperance), and other virtues that ensure “order in the soul.” No amount of rules and regulations designed to constrain the bureaucratic-professional tendency to overreach can substitute for the practioner’s virtuous character, a formation of the heart.
The bureaucratic tendency to respond to crises and scandals—a child known to CPS who is left with his mother and subsequently is battered to death by a live-in boyfriend; a child removed from his family who is later abused in foster care—with tighter controls over practice carries a high price. It reduces the practitioner’s room to maneuver, to exercise professional judgment, wisdom, and flexibility. Benestad reminds us of a neglected but consistent theme of all Catholic social teaching, namely, that a just society depends on virtuous citizens.16 Rules and regulations are necessary in social work, for we are fallen, imperfect in character and judgment. But they cannot substitute for the virtues that good practice requires and develops. Social work is, in MacIntyre’s use of the term, a virtue-driven profession.17
Similar considerations apply to those whom professional helpers aim to assist. Tighter control over families through rules, regulations, and ultimatums cannot adequately substitute for a culture and community that support and build in individuals the virtues they need to meet their moral obligations to their families.
Empowerment, Coercion, and the Regulatory Pyramid
FGC merits particular study because it addresses most directly the challenge of exercising social justice while carrying out a regulatory process that has a strong coercive aspect. At the apex of the regulatory process sits the prospect of the permanent removal of children from their parents and the termination of parental rights. The process recognizes the family’s potential to be a site of tyranny but also sees the limits of even the most benevolent state’s capacity to run families or rear children. Both formal and informal systems have advantages and dangers. The legally mandated court system can be rigid, emphasizing the harm done with less attention to setting things right and more to the retributive punishment of wrongdoing. On the other hand, the informal system of care and control can be disproportionate in its response and careless of the rights of due process.
The regulatory pyramid presented by Braithwaite in the context of restorative justice enables us to understand the relation of two apparently contradictory but essential elements of FGC (and much social work)—empowerment and the context of social control or state coercion. The pyramid shows how, in the complex field of child welfare, combining the empowering aspects of FGC with the coercive power of the state is not necessarily a limitation or contradiction. Rather, empowerment and control are different but necessary and mutually enriching aspects of a dynamic model of state regulation of families to protect children.
Braithwaite contends that “restorative justice, deterrence and incapacitation are all limited and flawed theories of compliance.”18 Each needs to be understood and applied in a model that includes all three. In his figure entitled “Toward an Integration of Restorative, Deterrent and Incapacitative Justice,” Braithwaite hierarchically orders these concepts and places restorative justice at the base of the pyramid, filling up most of the space.
Figure 1. “Toward an Integration of Restorative, Deterrent and Incapacitative Justice” adapted from Braithwaite, Restorative Justice, 32.
This pyramid provides a dynamic model of governmental regulation (whether of a nursing home, a nuclear power station, an insurance company, or a family). By contrast, the formalist approach to regulation seeks to define in advance which problems or failures of compliance require what official responses, and then mandate them in regulations. In responsive regulation, however, there is a presumption, regardless of the seriousness of the offense or violation, in favor of starting official intervention at the base of the pyramid. Deterrence, in the middle of the pyramid, would mean for a business the threat of a fine, but for a family in the CPS system it would mean relative loss of control of their situation as the agency or court imposes solutions. Moving up the pyramid to deterrence and, ultimately, incapacitation, is a response not to the seriousness of the harm done but to the failure to elicit reform and repair at the base with restorative-justice processes. Of course, as with other violent crime—a shooting spree in progress, for example—an immediate move to incapacitation (at least temporary) may be necessary in cases of child abuse where there is imminent and continuing danger to the child.
The presumption in favor of starting at the base of the pyramid, Braithwaite argues, not only favors less coercive and costly state intervention where possible, but also makes more coercive measures more legitimate when escalation up the pyramid is necessary. This is important because “when regulation is seen as more legitimate, more procedurally fair, compliance with the law is more likely.”19
By analogy, accreditation of a professional school, whether of law, medicine, nursing, or social work, is a process of required self-regulation through self-study and reform. The accrediting body—for example, the Council on Social Work Education in the case of U.S. baccalaureate and master of social work programs—has a range of escalating options to encourage schools to address concerns and come into compliance, culminating in the rarely used action of withdrawing or denying accredited status. This option is understood by all to be at the Council’s disposal as a last resort, and site visitors and accreditation commissioners work in collegial partnership with schools with the shared aim of avoiding escalation up the regulatory pyramid.
Applying this model to a business such as a nursing home or insurance company, a regulator would begin to work with the firm’s management at the base of the pyramid. Both management and regulator are aware that if the firm proves unable or unwilling to make the changes needed to come into compliance, the next level of regulation will be more coercive. The initial assumption is that the firm’s management is a “virtuous actor,” with the will and capacity to respond to the regulatory process by taking the steps needed to come into compliance. Regulator and regulated work together to prevent a more coercive regulatory response. At the next level, if management has no wish to cooperate with regulators, it is still assumed to be a “rational actor” who—faced with a fine or other penalty and the threat of being put out of business—will calculate that it is better to comply. At the highest level of the regulatory pyramid, management is assumed to be an “incompetent or irrational actor” who is unable or unwilling to comply and who therefore needs to be incapacitated by losing its license to operate.
Applying this model to FGC, we see conferencing as a restorative process at the base of the pyramid. FGC may be seen as a “process whereby all the parties with a stake in a particular offence come together to resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the offence and its implications for the future.” 20 Conferencing involves core values as well as processes that entail healing and setting right, moral learning, community and kin participation, respectful dialogue, responsibility, apology, and forgiveness. “So restorative justice is about restoring victims, restoring offenders, and restoring communities. . . . Stakeholder deliberation determines what restoration means in a specific context.”21
The regulatory pyramid in the context of child welfare and FGC promotes social justice. It requires and develops in practitioners and family members the habits and skills of plural deliberation and working together to come up with solutions and to create, implement, and monitor plans to ensure children’s safety.
The model assumes that the level of regulation, or the appropriate degree of participation and self-determination of the regulated entity, depends on the virtue of those managing it. As Figure 1 illustrates, at the base of the pyramid the actor (parent, management) is assumed to be virtuous, both able and wanting to come into compliance. At the next level, the actor is assumed to be rational, and so able to respond to the deterrent effects of penalties or loss of control of the situation to the state. At the apex of the pyramid, where incapacitation through license revocation or termination of parental rights is at issue, the actor is taken to be either irrational or incapable of compliance. The process itself responds to the virtues exercised by the subject of the regulation. As Braithwaite puts it in his essay “Families and the Republic”:
Responsive regulation is a way of thinking, not a definite list of prescriptions. Some pyramids may specify moving an adult out of the family rather than a child, for example, or moving an adult member of the extended family into the household to keep an eye out for the rights of the child. Indeed the superstructure of the pyramid can be redesigned by democratic deliberation at the base of the pyramid. So a family group conference might decide that there will be a trial period of a family member attending an anger management program. Further it might agree that if this fails and degrading tirades of anger persist, there will be an escalation of intervention that requires this person to move out and live with their uncle. Finally, if the tirades still come back to haunt the family and spill into violence, family members may resolve to escalate to lodging a formal assault complaint with the police. Signaling in advance that these escalations will occur if interventions at lower levels fail can be good protective practice. This is because it communicates to the actors who need to change their behavior that if change does not occur, this will not be tolerated. The pre-commitment to an escalated response can motivate change because of the message the pre-commitment gives that change is inexorable.
Later, the conference may resolve that if the tirades have dissipated under the joint influence of the anger management program and living under the firm hand of the uncle, conditions may be set for a return to live with the family. Signaling a pre-commitment to de-escalate in advance can also be good practice because it offers a positive incentive for change. The idea of responsive regulation is that it is better to be at the base of the pyramid where democratic conversation does the regulatory work, but that if escalation is necessary the decision to escalate should always be open to revision, so de-escalation occurs.22
These models and processes depend on and promote the exercise of social justice both by professional actors and by adult family members. But underlying the whole pyramid discussed here is a much larger, less formal base in civil society. That is, FGC is itself a formal, legally mandated process resorted to when informal resources of care and control in families and neighborhoods, in the culture, helping networks, churches, and other intermediary groups and associations, are unable on their own to solve the problem or make things right. By far the bulk of care and control in society takes place beyond the direct reach of the state or professionals—above all in families, the basic building blocks of society, but also in the vast space of civil society that lies between individual and state. For social work and other fields involved professionally in care and control, it is a mistake to treat coercive and empowering aspects of practice as if they were incompatible or mutually exclusive. The key question on which so much else depends, in policy and practice, is the proper relation of formal to informal helping.