Critical Social Work and Ethics: Working with Asylum Seekers in Australia

Abstract

This chapter explores the ethical challenges facing social work with marginalised, excluded, and displaced humans subject to forced migration, and highlights working with asylum seekers in Australia. Presenting a background to forced migration internationally it describes the humanitarian refugee programme, and the challenges facing asylum seekers claiming protection. For the latter group the evidence is of human rights abuses and a failure to deliver socially just outcomes, particularly for people in immigration detention. Social workers engage with diverse communities including those who have been formally approved as refugees, or lived in detention, and who may continue to live on temporary protection visas. This presents tensions between meeting the aims of the ethical codes of practice and the reality facing their clients of having limited access to resources and social justice. It presents the lived experience of two prominent refugees who have written about their experiences of unsuccessful claims for protection in Australia. The chapter addresses how, in the face of silencing refugee and asylum seeker voices, critical social work can identify sites of resistance, hope and compassion.KeywordsRefugeesAsylum seekersEthicsCritical social workImmigration detention