A Psychology of Empowerment

Abstract

Among the helping professions, social work has always had a unique relationship with marginalised and powerless members of society (Bailey and Brake, 1977; Simpkin, 1983). As so much of social work practice is conducted within public welfare bureaucracies, social work’s clientele tends to contain two kinds of individual: those who lack the purchasing power to seek other solutions to their problems, and those who are constrained by the courts to submit to social work supervision. Common to both kinds of individual is a fundamental lack of control over some of the most important events in their lives. The term ‘welfare recipient’ is greatly disliked by social work practitioners, but it conveys a fundamental truth about the daily experience of being a social work client: it is an experience of dependency, of being a receiver. Indeed, the very institution of public welfare stands as a symbol to its clients of their powerlessness. This inescapable fact of social work practice is a crucial but greatly ignored consideration in the development of practice theory. It is not sufficient for casework theory merely to assert the client’s right to self-determination; for most social work clients it is a case of discovering that even limited self-determination is possible. This brings us to the need for a psychology of empowerment on which to base casework practice.