Understanding and Responding to the Dilemmas Facing Social Workers in Armed Conflict Contexts

1. Understanding and Responding to the Dilemmas Facing Social Workers in Armed Conflict Contexts Prof. Shula Ramon Anglia Ruskin University July 2012 shula.ramon@anglia.ac.uk

2. The impact on social workers: • the personal, • the professional, • and the political. • increase in demands • increase in dilemmas • increase in skills • increase in professional growth and recognition of the centrality of the profession

3. The types of dilemmas: • The connotations of the “political” = negative, one-sided, ideology, unprofessional, not as uplifting as helping victims of disasters (even though many political conflicts have led to human made disasters)

4. Families of Counter Terrorism • Who are these families? • UK Moslem families whose male usually young adult male has been arrested on terrorism charges, usually not charged at the end. • Families that have: • lost their main breadwinner over night • Lived the trauma of search and arrest with little explanation • Often do not know to whom to turn for advice and support • Families afraid to: • approach social services • acknowledge what has happened outside of the small family circle • What should be the role of social workers informed of such families? • What should be the role of researchers engaged with these families? • (Guru, 2012)

5. Gender 1: The power of sweet words • This is the title of an article on the plight of women in rural Sierra Leone during the armed conflict and the post conflict period • Many women who have been abducted, conscripted, forced to marry, treated as slaves, physically tortured and mutilated, sexually violated. • Many continued to be marginalised socially during the post conflict period.

6. The social work response • Facing mental and physical health problems at the post conflict phase, plus the need to keep their past a secret due to fear of being further socially excluded. • Local and international social workers attempted to provide different types of support (psychological, material, social). • The dominance of international agencies and its impact on local social workers

7. What would you have done? • The dilemmas for local workers • They have very few material or social resources • Had to engage in agriculture to survive too • Lost family members, as did the women clients

8. What did they offer? • Engaged in providing solidarity and spirituality • Offered food and money when they could • Did not engage in clinical diagnosis or psychological interventions • (Doucet and Denov, 2012)

9. Gender 2: Asylum Seekers and Mental Distress: Challenges for Mental Health Social Work (Chantler, 2011) • Chantler argues that there is a serious lack of recognition of mental health problems amongst a range of vulnerable groups including asylum seekers and refugees in the UK. • Reluctance to see asylum seekers as legitimate service users, including those who are recognised as refugees. • Coming out of the inherent racism of immigration controls • The role of social workers as co-opted into the state machinery to enforce internal controls thus restricting access to welfare to a vulnerable population (Humphreys, 2004).

10. Further, since 2005,refugee status has been restricted to five years, after which point their case will be reviewed. • Prior to 2005, refugee status was granted on a lifetime. • Three key asylum policy areas have serious mental health implications: • (i) poverty (not allowed to work) (Lewis, 2007), • (ii) dispersal • (iii) detention.

11. represented as ‘bogus’, scroungers or • criminals with nothing to contribute to society. • Often given a PTSD diagnosis. • This has been critiqued on the basis that it ‘medicalises’ distress. • Normal responses to traumatic experiences are transformed into a diagnosis (see Summerfield, 1999). • What should be the role of the social worker in all of this?

12. Emergency Routine • This concerns social workers whose task is to inform families of injury and death of a family member during an armed conflict in Israel. • They are expected to treat this work as ‘emergency routine’. • This routine was characterised by constant preparedness, vigilance and incessant planning on their part • Demands from their employers that they be constantly available for both their regular and emergency work. • The results of the emergency routine were intense emotional pressure • For those who had children living with them, intensified work–family conflict. • Many of the interviewees expressed anger and resentment that they were taken for granted by the system and left to deal with their fears and needs on their own. (Baum, 2011) • How would have you responded??

13. Instead of a summary: • Are these dilemmas without solutions? • Are these dilemmas for which our universal values guide us towards a solution? • Where the professional, the personal and the political are intertwined. • The need to support social workers systematically in such situations

14. References Baum, N. (2011)‘Emergency Routine’: The Experience of Professionals in a Shared Traumatic Reality of War. British Journal of Social Work, Advance Access, May 27th, 1-19. Chantler, K. (2011) Gender, Asylum Seekers and Mental Distress: Challenges for Mental Health Social Work. British Journal of Social Work, Advance Access, June 21st, 1-17. Doucet, D. and Denov, M. (2012) The Power of Sweet Words: Local forms of intervention with war-affected women in rural Sierra Leone In: Ramon, S., Zavirsek, D. (ed) Social Work in Armed Conflict Contexts. Special Issue of the International Social Work Journal, to be published in October 2012. Guru, S. (2012) Researching the impact on families in the context of UK Counter-terrorism policy In: Ramon, S., Zavirsek, D. (ed) Social Work in Armed Conflict Contexts. Special Issue of the International Social Work Journal, to be published in October 2012. Humphreys, B. (2004) An unacceptable role for social work: Implementing immigration policy. British Journal of Social Work, 34, pp. 93–107.

15. Lewis, H. (2007) Destitution in Leeds, York, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Summerfield, D. (1999) A critique of seven assumptions behind psychological trauma programmes in war-affected areas. Social Science & Medicine, 48, pp. 1449–62.