Placing the Debate within its Social/Political Context

Abstract

The reasons why, historically, anti-discriminatory practice became an acceptable discourse within social work practice in the 1980s are complicated. The reasons for its increasing lack of acceptability in the 1990s will only be speculative at the present time. Let it suffice to say that social work has never been separate from political processes and pressures, either at local or national level. In Britain, direct ministerial intervention with the Central Council of Training in Social Work in 1992 was undoubtedly one of the contributory factors which led to the much diluted and politically more acceptable equal-opportunity policy attached to the new Rules and Requirements for the Diploma in Social Work (CCETSW, 1995). Anti-discriminatory practice was not born in the 1980s or even in the 1970s, although it may have developed a recognisable set of languages that are associated with the debates during those decades. Forsythe (1995) offers an interesting historical contextualisation of anti-discriminatory practice, tracing its origins back to ‘the pioneer phase of social work’ and linking it to the work of individuals such as Josephine Butler and Elizabeth Fry. Non-discriminatory, anti-discriminatory and anti-oppressive practice, terms that are often used interchangeably but have different meanings and different implications for workers and service users (Thompson, 1993), are not new phenomena. However, the ways in which they have been articulated and their consequences have been specific and different in the recent past. Theoretically, anti-discriminatory practice is now an accepted orthodoxy within the academy and the practice agency, although the variation in this, between different organisations, is still vast.