Social services trauma?

Abstract

The essay puts forward the thesis that contemporary Polish social services (social work) suffer from a kind of trauma, the source of which is their cutting off from their historical roots and, consequently, the deprivation of a tradition that has institutional continuity. This state of affairs is one of the sources of their continuing weakness. Polish social services traditions emerged in the period up to the outbreak of World War II, and they were formed by three strands – three types of institutionalized social practice, each of which also had its own development potential. These were: the social care strand growing out of the experience of 19th-century public charity, the people's house movement, and the social work strand developed in the 1930s among graduates of the Study of Social and Educational Work. As a result of the War, and then stalinism, almost all of this output was destroyed; the institutional continuity of the people's house movement and social work was irretrievably broken, only the tradition of social care was referred to. Within this framework, the profession of social worker was created in the 1960s – so to speak – from scratch, the institutional design of which was – and remains today – based on the 19th-century model of visitors of the poor.