Globally, social workers are committed to human rights and challenging unjust social structures. However, their close ties to the state often reinforce such systems of oppression.
The first to apply abolitionist theory from international perspectives to social work, this book examines this contradiction, exploring whether social work can embrace radical change while operating within state structures. Bringing together scholars from the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Finland, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, it explores alternatives for addressing issues such as child protection, mental health, violence against women, drug use, violent extremism, homelessness and Indigenous sovereignty.
Essential reading for academics, researchers, students, human service practitioners and social activists, this book interrogates the implications of social work's complicity with systems that perpetuate oppression and social injustice.
Table of Contents:
1. The politics of abolition in social work and human services - Ian Hyslop and Bob Pease
Part 1: The abolitionist critique: foundations and visions
2. Why abolition - Dorothy Roberts
3. Social work and the abolitionist movement in the United States - Alan J. Dettlaff
4. Abolition and child welfare in England: is another world possible? - Anna Gupta
5. Radical reflection plus radical transformation equals revolutionary social work - Bindi Bennett and Péta Phelan
6. Punishment disguised as ‘help’: carcerality in the human services and the role of social work towards abolition - Sacha Jamieson and Lobna Yassine
7. Wither child maltreatment investigations by social workers: a case for abolishing the principal carceral link in the family regulation system - Lisa Merkel-Holguin and Ida Drury
Part 2: Abolitionist thinking in practice: implications for social justice organising
8. Social work and social justice: the opportunity of an abolitionist lens - Ian Hyslop
9. Indigenous child protection in Canada: the insanity of doing it the same way - Peter Choate
10. The roadmap to child protection abolition for Māori - Kerri Cleaver
11. Prison abolition as a feminist of colour project: lessons from the United States - Mimi E. Kim
12. The limits of violence prevention in the non- profit industrial complex: moving beyond the masculinist state - Bob Pease
13. Transformative justice informed community responses to harm: a conversation with Idil Ali, Lauren Caufield and Anita Thomasson - Anne-lise Ah-fat
14. Dismantling the master’s house? Abolition, deradicalisation and social work - Sophie Shall and David McKendrick
15. Harm reduction in the opiate crisis: non- carceral, community- led services and compassion - Donna Baines and Mohamed Ibrahim
16. ‘They see it as Big Brother watching at all times’: lone mothers and their children in Ireland’s ‘Family Hubs’ - Aoife Donohue and Paul Michael Garrett
Part 3: Facing the challenges of abolitionism: critical engagement with the state
17. Abolition, decolonisation and public health approaches to child protection: convergence, divergence and the new neoliberalism - Emily Keddell
18. Haunting, abolition and Finnish child welfare - Kris Clarke and Mwenza Blell
19. Beyond ‘doing harm’ and ‘doing nothing’: creating generative alternatives to psychiatric carcerality - Emma Tseris
20. Twin births, twin abolitions: abolishing the capitalist, carceral state and the liberal individual – and, with them, conventional social work - John Fox
21. After social work? - Chris Maylea
