of faiths and religious beliefs that social workers work with. Hodge (2013) discussed the importance of routinely including issues of spirituality and religion in assessment, and how this could contribute to the development of a comprehensive understanding of a client, especially in the area of health and mental ill health. It is widely accepted that faith traditions helped to lay the moral foundations of social work; our secular and diverse societies require social workers to demonstrate neutrality in that regard.
Campinha-Bacote (2002, p1) notes that competence is a process, not an event; a journey, not a destination; dynamic, not static; and involves the paradox of knowing. It is not unfair to expect to see development in social workers’ cultural competence as they grow into sound reflective practitioners who view learning as cumulative and not as individual events. Cross et al. (1989) proposed a definition of cultural competence that emphasises three crucial issues for professionals who want to become culturally competent:
1 Cultural competence includes knowledge, behaviour and attitudes. They argue that knowledge in itself is insufficient, and that behaviours and attitudes are important. The knowledge for cultural competence can be understanding historical and structural inequalities and the impact of culture on service users’ functioning. For social workers, the behaviour and attitudes referred to here can be said to be ones that promote anti-oppressive practice, avoiding the use of their own cultural beliefs and practices as a benchmark for assessing and intervening with others.
2 Cultural competence is a skill that needs to be expressed in behaviour as the capacity to function effectively in multicultural contexts. These skills include communication (speaking, listening, recording) and critical reflexive skills that enable social workers to understand and act on the role of power in the context of cross-cultural work.
3 Cultural competence goes beyond individual professional behaviours and includes organisations and systemic applications. A culturally incompetent system can undermine the work of culturally competent social workers where an organisation or team does not have systems in place to address the ever-growing numbers of, for example, Black, Asian and/or other minority ethnic families who report their involvement with social workers as being of poor standard.
Fook (2012) has suggested that a person’s identity is complex – for example, an individual from Africa may express their cultural identity through their belief structure, attire, diet or hairstyle. Even though this individual might identify as African, there are subcultures to which they might further identify with, all of which should be considered to ensure that service users are treated with respect and dignity. Tervalon and Murray-Garcia (1998) have suggested that in order to enhance cultural self-awareness, social workers should interact with diverse clients with the aim of learning from them. Assessments should openly identify forms of oppression, othering and discrimination, and should offer recommendations about how these might be minimised through social work intervention. They further propose some practice behaviours which are congruent with anti-oppressive practice – for example:
Social workers should view themselves as learners and their service users as experts of their experiences, and should be able to communicate the importance of difference in shaping these experiences.
Social workers should work to ensure they eliminate personal biases when working with diverse groups of people. This can be achieved through reflecting critically on theirs and colleagues’ practice.
Social workers should recognise when, how and why individual and structural barriers further oppress, alienate and diminish service users’ power while maintaining privileged status for some.
Thomas (1995) has suggested that managers in particular have been seen to respond to diversity in a number of ways.
Exclusion – By exclusion, managers minimise diversity by keeping diverse people out or by not retaining them once they have been included. For example, if the selection criteria for a place on a social work programme in the UK requires ‘UK’ experience in the social care industry, then such a criterion would automatically exclude people who may have recently migrated to the UK, as well as people who may have no social care work experience. Another example of exclusion would be if the majority of students who withdraw, defer or are withdrawn all happen to belong to a specific group – for example, male students, students with disabilities, Asian, Black or other minority students.
Denial – In this context, denial refers to not seeing or not acknowledging the whole person. In social work practice, there is an emphasis on holistic assessments that require practitioners to assess and intervene with the ‘whole person’ in focus. To deny the race, ethnicity or any other dimension of diversity of a service user is to show disregard for their full identity. Therefore, it is important to avoid gender blind, colour blind and any other denial approaches. When a social worker claims not to see or be influenced by a service user’s race, the Asian, Black or other minority service users’ perspectives and experiences become invisible. This invisibility is both oppressive and discriminatory. It is important for social workers and educators who are promoting diversity and anti-oppressive practice to be open, honest and upfront about their commitment to social justice through confronting exclusion, denial and suppression of diversity.
Suppression – is about holding down or restricting someone, something or a feeling. In this context, diversity is suppressed when people with specific characteristics are expected to minimise their difference – for example, a social work student who is asked not to wear their traditional clothes to placement. What is being proposed here is that social workers should actively work against the exclusion, denial and suppression of diversity while at university and once qualified in practice.
Case Study
Ged is a female social worker in Romanshire county where the ethnic make-up is over 80 per cent White British. A 35-year-old female of Black British heritage, Janita, requires support to leave an abusive relationship. Ged informs her of a refuge in the area where she could go with her 5-year-old daughter who is of dual heritage. Janita asks Ged whether there are any ‘Black’ women in the refuge because that would ‘really be good’, to which Ged responds ‘No, but you will be OK’.
Reflect on the following questions on your own or with a colleague.
How do you interpret Ged’s response to Janita?
How else could you have responded to Janita if you were the social worker?
If you were Janita, how might you interpret Ged’s response?
Commentary
It is important that you understand the wider issues around domestic abuse and the anxiety, fear and other feelings and emotions that may be at play in this case study. Janita is already feeling anxious about issues of race and ethnicity – hence her direct question about whether there are any Black women in the refuge. Ged’s response is one that could be perceived as colour blind and this denial leaves Janita potentially invisible, which in itself is oppressive. Ged may be well-meaning and her comments are possibly borne out of her knowledge of the refuge; however, in the absence of outlining this to Janita, we have to err on the side of caution and interpret her response as dismissive and potentially oppressive.
Diversity pie chart
When I first came across this ‘diversity pie chart’ I was intrigued about how it was used often to provide a visual and powerful representation extent of diversity in each area or workplace setting. Such a pie chart would identify the breakdown of the population by age, gender or ethnicity, for example. In the activity
