Social Work and Ethnicity

Juliet Cheetham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000438475
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Social Work

Originally published in 1982 Social Work and Ethnicity was the first purpose-written text for social work students, administrators and practitioners designed to prepare them conceptually and practically for work in Britain's established ethnic minority communities. Much more than the vicissitudes of immigration now had to be considered: this book discusses social work's response to chronic racial discrimination and disadvantage and the hazards and advantages of taking ethnicity into account in service delivery. Emphasised throughout is the role of the social services in promoting good race relations and a better deal for black people.

Social Work and Ethnicity is based on research carried out by Mrs Cheetham and sponsored by the DHSS to identify the major concerns of social workers with ethnic minority clients and to study the development of relevant services in Britain and the USA. The contributing authors are mainly practitioners and come from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds; in fact, this is the first book on social work to be published in Britain to which a substantial contribution has been made by black writers. The specially commissioned contributions discuss the fundamental questions of principle in giving special consideration to ethnicity and underline the implications for practice. In particular, the lessons which Britain can learn from American experience are reviewed.

The book opens with a discussion of political and ethical questions; the problems of assessing need and monitoring services are then examined. This is followed by several chapters on the special needs of various ethnic minority client groups, particularly children and young people, who now deserve priority attention. The tricky issue of ethnic matching is discussed, so too are the different methods of developing services which are appropriate to ethnic minority needs and aspirations. Recruitment, training and education for work in a multi-racial society are subjects for several chapters and the book concludes with the experiences of two ethnic minority social workers.

This book is a re-issue originally published in 1982. The language used and assumptions made are a reflection of its era and no offence is meant by the Publishers to any reader by this re-publication.

PART III CLIENT GROUPS

Chapter 5 SOME PRIORITIES

Juliet Cheetham

Three groups of ethnic minority clients deserve particular attention. First, children, who are substantially and probably disproportionately represented in caseloads and in care. This partly reflects the age structure of the ethnic minority population and the economic and other pressures to which they are particularly vulnerable. Bagley, Arnold and Kreech deal in different ways with two major child care issues: the reduction of the numbers of black children in residential care and the place of ethnic and racial matching in substitute families. There are other subjects which also deserve attention and are not dealt with in this volume. These include the ethnic content of residential care and the special measures that may be needed to reduce the disruption of ethnic minority family life. One should certainly be the provision of culturally sensitive day care for preschool children who need this in substantial numbers because of their parents’ employment and, sometimes, as a preparation for formal education (Rampton Report, 1981). Ethnic minority families tend now to depend heavily on the private market for substitute care. Its shortcomings probably increase the need for intervention from the statutory services (Holman, 1973; Commission for Racial Equality, 1975; Ellis, 1978; Jackson, 1980) at a later stage, although very few of the contributors to the DHSS study seemed aware of this. Supposed economies in state provision may thus produce serious costs.

The second group is a sub-group of the first: black adolescents and young adults whose needs are great but who, as the introduction shows, hover on the periphery of the statutory services. This tenuous contact is at least partly collusive. Young blacks are said to be suspicious of white-dominated welfare organisations and their suspicions are confirmed by the actual or alleged failure to help them. Social workers in their turn are often at a loss to know what to do. They usually have little access to accommodation apart from local authority children’s homes and hostels and are reluctant to receive young people into care simply on the grounds of family rows they feel are either beyond their understanding, or intervention, or both. There is often little appropriate local authority provision for ethnic minority adolescents and growing criticism from black social workers and parents that young people use white social workers as a stick to beat their parents by persuading them that reception into care is the only alternative to domestic violence or life on the streets.

The consequence of these dilemmas is substantial but uncounted numbers of ‘half clients’ – black young people known to social services departments, sometimes on unallocated supervision orders but, if there is any action, usually referred to other voluntary agencies or to the housing department or, occasionally, to the youth service. This is a muddled, unconsidered response not a policy. It leaves black young people in an uncoordinated nether world of squats, temporary hostels and crash pads, sometimes suspended or truanting from school, often unemployed and commonly with little or no regular income. The fact that there is nothing more about this group in this book reflects the paralysis of the statutory social services, a cause for considerable embarrassment and regret.

The third group is elderly people whose demands on social services have so far been few, again partly for demographic reasons. Predictions about their future needs and numbers make it possible, as Glendenning and Coombe demonstrate, for social workers to prepare themselves in advance of client demand and to adapt their substantial experience of work with elderly people.

Provision for day centres and residential homes for elderly people raises in an acute form questions about the place of integrated or specialist services. The arguments for integration advanced, sometimes mistakenly, in respect of children, cannot easily be extended to elderly people, many of whom do not speak or expect to learn English and who, as their lives drawn to a close, cannot adapt their lifestyle to fit in with majority expectations. Indeed, it is likely that the tendency of elderly people to look with favour on the experience and traditions of their earlier life will make the case for adaptation and integration to British norms especially unrealistic. Authorities have therefore to grapple directly with the implications of providing ethnically appropriate services. So far, with rare exceptions like Lambeth, most appear to find it easier to delegate this responsibility to voluntary ethnic minority organisations, perhaps without considering in depth the problems as well as the strengths of voluntary endeavour.

Ethnic Matching and Mixing in Substitute Families

Jenkins has shown how important this issue is in contemporary American child care and Kreech describes the radical change of placement policy of a prestigious American voluntary agency in its efforts to recruit black substitute parents for black children. Although Arnold writes about British attempts to do likewise these are rarer enterprises and the DHSS study shows that British social workers are either largely unaware of the significance of racial or ethnic matching in child placement, although this was forcefully discussed by the Community Relations Commission well over a decade ago (1975 and 1977), or confused about its ends and means.

A common objection to ethnic matching in substitute families or residential homes is the belief that children’s experience in care should be integrated racially and culturally as a proper preparation for life in society. This argument is a muddled one in that it demands for children in care a quite different set of expectations than would be considered desirable for children in their own homes. Black children living with their parents usually attend integrated schools and many spend their leisure in centres catering for a mixed population. In these respects their roots are in British society. At home with parents and relatives, they may live with a quite different ethnic religious orientation. Their lives are therefore both integrated and separate, with the security of familiar ethnic traditions providing the base for successful negotiation of a mixed and often hostile culture outside the home. This should apply as much, if not more, to black children in care as to those in their own families.

To uproot children from their own homes without providing any continuity or recognition of their ethnicity is for many, especially when very young, a traumatic experience. White workers understand this easily when asked to imagine their own children’s reactions to a placement in a home with a predominantly Asian or Caribbean culture. This exercise in empathy should be extended. As a footnote to this point it was revealing in the DHSS study that those departments which had black foster parents would never, except in the direst short-term emergency, place white children with them. The reason given was not that these foster parents were more urgently needed for black children but simply that such placements would be unpopular with natural parents or, in some cases, with local councillors.

A second objection to ethnic matching rests on the belief, wholly admirable as an ideal, that in the deepest human relationships colour differences are unimportant. This is most obviously expressed in the pioneering transracial child placement programmes in Britain and America (Raynor, 1970). Evaluation of these placements has tended to be haphazard but there is some evidence that they can provide secure, loving and mutually rewarding homes (Bagley, Chapter 6). Is it not wasteful to abandon such potential?

The third objection is practical, based on the claim that black substitute parents cannot be recruited in sufficient numbers. Lack of interest, insufficient resources and personal unsuitability are variously cited as reasons. That these are all mistaken assumptions is well illustrated by Bagley and Young, Kreech and Arnold.

In America the swing of opinion about transracial placements reflects the growing self-confidence and militancy of minority communities, determined to control their own affairs and committed to their ethnic heritage. Blacks in Britain seem more ambivalent. Dissatisfaction with most substitute child care arrangements, linked with doubts about the capacity of white people to rear black children successfully, is accompanied by a recognition that life in a white family is preferable to an institutional existence (Bagley and Young, 1980).

The arguments against transracial placements are put most forcibly by the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) in America. Although most American child care workers are not committed wholeheartedly in their practice to the implications of this unequivocal position, many subscribe to its ideals.

Black children must not lose their cultural identity by being reared in a white home. Advocates of transracial adoptions have tried to negate the importance of ethnic and cultural identity and have stressed ‘human identity’. While it is true that all people have basic common human needs, it is also true that in a race conscious society like the USA black people are constantly judged by the colour of their skin and racial background and all the negative stereotypes that have been attributed to that colour and background and not by their ‘human identity’. It is imperative that black children learn that there are cultural differences between black and white and that black culture provides a viable positive way of life. This can only be learned by experiencing black culture through black family life and not simply by reading books, black history or watching TV shows about black people ... No child should be denied his heritage. . . Further, internal conflict is inevitable (for the transracially adopted child) by his minority status within his own family. Such status is normal in school, employment and some communities but in one’s most intimate personal group such oddity status is neither normal nor anticipated ... In addition there are survival techniques that black parents impart to their children . . . These cannot be imparted by white parents who have not had the experience of growing up black . . . (When) white parents of black children seek out special help with their parenting, help with acquiring the normal and usually instinctual parental behaviours inherent in the cultural and psychological development of children, it is tantamount to having to be taught to do what comes naturally.

NABSW make no bones that they reject assimilationist ideologies. They are committed to pluralism in a way which may jar with some British people.

Ethnicity is a way of life in these United States, and the world at large; a viable, sensitive, meaningful and legitimate societal construct. This is no less true for black people than for other ethnic groups. Overt ethnic identifications, especially for blacks, was long suppressed by the social and political pressures speaking to total assimilation of all people in that great melting pot. We are made, by devious devices, to view ethnic identification as a self defeating stance, prohibiting our acceptance in the mainstream. Black people are now developing an honest perception of this society; the myths of our assimilation and inferiority stand bare under glaring light. (NABSW, 1978, italics original)

Although they may not yet be so explicit, many black people in Britain share similar views; social workers must therefore think out the implications for practice. The moderate conclusion of American workers (Jenkins, 1981 and Chapter 2; Cheetham, 1981) has been forged in a fierce professional and political debate about transracial fostering and adoption. In Britain this discussion has hardly begun.

The DHSS study showed how important it is for social workers to disentangle the arguments about ethnic ‘matching’ and ‘mixing’ in substitute care. Briefly the arguments for matching are:

• that it preserves a child’s heritage;
• that white parents are unable, despite their best efforts, to teach black foster and adoptive children to cope with discrimination;
• that a black child cannot develop a proper sense of identity in a white home.

The notion of heritage is more easily grasped in work with children who belong to a clearly recognised distinctive cultural or religious tradition. American and British social workers gave clear examples of such backgrounds: Hispanic, Chinese, Muslim, American Indian. Americans, especially if they are black, may also speak forcefully about black American heritage. The outsider initially finds it difficult to accept this, given the many traditions shared by black and white Americans. There are similar doubts about black British identity. When pressed, black Americans cited the three or four hundred years of suffering and persecution which have bred special family loyalties, fostered the capacity to survive and persevere and which, most recently, have flowered into racial pride. A few mentioned Afro-American traditions.

While the outcome of centuries of persecution could be debated, the crucial issue is that professional and lay people believe strongly in the notion of black heritage. It clearly has a meaning which cannot always be easily articulated. This affective power is an important factor for a developing child, more important than the exact anthropological comparison of black and white traditions.

It is now good practice in child care to help a child become aware of his origins and, as far as possible, maintain some sense of continuity in his life. This could now be extended to include, where appropriate, racial and ethnic heritage. The question of appropriateness will, no doubt, be hotly debated by black and white lay and professional people. Such debate is infinitely preferable to neglecting the issue.

It is easier to understand the assertion that white substitute parents cannot, from their own experience, help their black children cope with racial discrimination, even if they understand it in its full force and pervasiveness. Indeed, many white substitute parents say that they suffer this through their children almost as onlookers, fighting for them when they can but unable to offer the support of shared experience and survival.

Reasonably easy to grasp, although rather more contentious, are arguments about the development of children’s racial identity. There is considerable evidence that children are aware of colour differences from as early as three years old and that two or three years later positive and negative associations with black and white skin are common (Goodman, 1964). A prevailing assumption, robustly challenged by Stone (1981), is that black children have negative attitudes towards their colour and poorer self esteem than their white peers. Most studies concern children ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• I The Place of Ethnicity in Social Work
• II Establishing Need and Shaping Policy
• III Client Groups
• IV Working Across Cultures
• V The Development of Services
• Notes on Contributors
• Index