THE SOCIAL WORKER'S ADVOCACY ROLE: A British Quest for a Canadian Perspective

THE SOCIAL WORKER'S ADVOCACY ROLE: A British Quest for a Canadian PerspectiveAuthor(s): David BullSource: Canadian Social Work Review / Revue canadienne de service social, Vol. 6, No. 1(Winter/hiver 1989), pp. 49-68Published by: Canadian Association for Social Work Education (CASWE)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41669291 .

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THE SOCIAL WORKER S

ADVOCACY ROLE

A British Quest for a Canadian

Perspective

David Bull

ADVOCACY" IS EASIER to practise than it is to define or justify. I write that from experience: as a full-time teacher who stumbled

unthinkingly into advocacy as a volunteer in the late 1960s, I have subsequently been concerned to understand better the problems and prospects of this form of intervention, as a way of promoting access to social services. My quest for comprehension has focused, for reasons that will become apparent, mainly on the social worker's role. This line of enquiry has tended to produce more questions than answers. As an American researcher into the phenomenon recently remarked,

4 'no empirical studies of social work advocates have been published .... Instead, the literature ... is confined to exhortations pro and con and to descriptive case studies."1

The present addition to that literature is intended to be neither hortatory nor descriptive; rather, it poses a number of questions, provoked by the process of my finding myself in a practitioner role that I have since had opportunities to question, both in the classroom

Abrégé En tant que professeur à temps complet qui s'est adonné au militantisme bénévole à la fin des années 1960, je me suis appliqué par la suite à mieux comprendre les problèmes et les perspectives de cette forme d'intervention à titre de moyen de favoriser l'accès aux services sociaux. Ma recherche s'est principalement concentrée sur le rôle du travailleur social, attitude qui a eu tendance à produire plus de questions que de réponses. Les travailleurs sociaux canadiens discutent-ils et pratiquent-ils le militantisme, comme leurs voisins du Sud il y a vingt ans, ou est-ce que la théorie et la pratique se développent aussi lentement qu'en Grande- Bretagne? Dans mon article, je définis mon emploi des termes « droits à l'assistance » et « militantisme », j'examine, chez les travailleurs sociaux et les autres, les attitudes envers le militantisme en tant que forme d'intervention et je réfléchis sur ce que nous pouvons déduire d'une comparaison des codes d'éthique dans ces trois pays. David Bull is a faculty member in the Department of Social Administration, School of Applied Social Studies, University of Bristol, England.

Canadian Social Work Review, Volume 6, Number 1 (Winter 1989) / Revue canadienne de service social, volume 6, numéro 1 (hiver 1989) Printed in Canada / Imprimé au Canada

49



50 Revue canadienne de service social, volume 6 (hiver)

and in print. An eminent activist-academic has modestly questioned whether such a process of social enquiry is that of the "true academic"2 - even though most of her own writings have "originated in some outside interest which in turn has led to academic studies." I trust that a readership of social work teachers requires no such apology from a writer whose practical involvement has led him to raise - but not necessarily to answer - numerous academic questions.

That process entailed two interrelated searches: of myself and fellow-practitioners, and of the literature. The former introspective enquiry initially took the form of participation in debates within the British welfare rights labour force. As the unpaid pioneers began to be joined, in the early 1970s, by the first paid rights workers, we activists assembled often to agonize over the contradictions of the advocacy role. We even expressed our shared anxieties in print.3 The next step was inevitable: I began to recycle those questions in my paid role as a teacher of various practitioners - social work students and in-service trainees from both social work and advice agencies.

The second enquiry was leading, meanwhile, to a substantial literature on "advocacy," most of it American and much of it written before I had ever wandered into the dual role of advocate-teacher. In the 1970s, a British literature began to develop slowly; by the end of that decade, the language of "advocacy" was making a tentative entry into the country's social work texts. In that respect, "advocacy" must resemble many a concept and many a practice: teachers and practitioners in Britain's social services could surely demonstrate how so many American experiences, concepts, and terms have been imported into British thinking and practice. While it must depend, for much of its material evidence, on that traditional (eastward) trans- Atlantic trade, this article stems from the curiosity of a westward- bound traveller: where does Canada stand on "social work advocacy"? From the perspective of a British teacher, newly-introduced to the teaching bibliographies of Canadian colleagues, I was struck, in 1987, by the profusion of British and American texts, which made it more difficult to ascertain a distinctly Canadian position. Were Cana- da's social workers debating and practising advocacy, like their American neighbours, 20 years ago, or did theory and practice develop as slowly as in Britain?

Compared with previous visits to Canada, I had a little longer, in 1987, to contemplate such questions. In an intensive summer, I gave a paper to the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Schools of Social Work,4 taught practitioner-students in one of those schools,5 and was a participant-observer in the nascent Canadian counterpart to the British voluntary body that first brought me into advocacy - the Child Poverty Action Group.6 Enlightening as they



Canadian Social Work Review, Volume 6 (Winter) 51

were, those different experiences could not be expected to provide answers to questions that were essentially rhetorical.

In my initial efforts to add a Canadian dimension to my thinking, 1 have learned especially from the Code of Ethics7 of Canada's social work profession. Before pondering what we might deduce from a comparison of codes in three countries, I need first to define my terms and then to examine attitudes, among social workers and others, to advocacy as a form of intervention.

Although other social service and social work concerns have begun, in the 1980s, to assume an "advocacy" dimension, the term tended to be exclusively associated, in the British debates of the 1970s, with "welfare rights."8 We need, then, to unpack two concepts: "welfare rights" and "advocacy."

Welfare rights British students of "welfare rights" have no need to complicate matters by following Rosalind Brooke9 or David Watson,10 who have drawn upon the United Nations Declaration of Rights and the like, or to pursue a philosophical path through the kinds of "welfare" to which rights have been established. 11 There is a less esoteric explanation for the British adoption of the term "welfare rights": it was imported, without translation of the adjective, from the United States to the United Kingdom, by Tony Lynes.12 In America, of course, "welfare" is the vernacular for public assistance or social assistance. Had we British translated on import, we would have had "assistance rights" or - adopting our vernacular - "social security rights."

But "welfare rights" and "welfare benefits" are now very much part of British terminology. In practice, the areas in which the rights of potential claimants have been pursued soon spread, not only from social assistance to non-means-tested benefits, but also to housing, employment, and other aspects of what has become known as "welfare law." My approach to all this is a pragmatic one. Whatever the benefit or service that people in need, especially poorer people, are being helped to claim, the helpers may profess to be practising "welfare advocacy." That begs the question, of course, as to how we use the word "advocacy."

Advocacy When British welfare rights activists came to talk, in the early 1970s, of "advocacy," we appeared not to take the social work profession with us. True, the term crept into a 1971 dictionary of the social services, in which it was defined as a "function of a social worker to intercede with another on behalf of his client to procure his rights or the services to which he is entitled."13 Even so, British writers on the




social work task made no impact, in the 1970s, on this "conceptual disaster area."14 While the American literature abounded with attempts to "unpack this buzzword ... of advocacy,"15 the word did not so much as appear in the index of a British social work textbook until Goldberg and Warburton16 broke the deadlock.

Others promptly followed.17 I must acknowledge the possibility that I could be unduly concerned with labels, however. There must have been thousands of social workers - not to mention some of the other professionals referred to below - who were practising advocacy, as here defined, but who would never have used this term to describe it. As American commentators have observed, "advocacy was a part of social work practice long before it was labeled as such in the 1960s' ' ; 18 indeed, if invited to choose from a catalogue of alternative titles (as compiled by Sosin and Caulum19), many a social work advocate mightprefer to be called, say, "champion" or "defender."

We might have expected a British working party on "the role and tasks of social workers" to have helped us find a way through the terminological maze. Alas, the working party recklessly littered its report with references to "advice," "advocacy," "brokerage," "mediation," and "negotiation."20 Sometimes, two or more of these terms were used interchangeably; once or twice, they were loosely distinguished, but never were they adequately defined and delimited.

The Barclay Report epitomizes, then, the continuing British confu- sion about a language we have been slow to learn from the United States. We ought surely to be in a position, for instance, to distinguish between a bipartisan intervention by one who "conciliates" or "mediates" between two competing parties, and a partisan intervention on behalf of one person against another ("advocacy"). Having achieved that, we might then proceed to debate possible hierarchies and conflicts between these different approaches. For instance, is it fair to say that bipartisan techniques are basic tools for a social work profession that fears and distrusts the adversarial nature of advocacy?21 And should we question, as Ronda Connaway22 does, the "general" assumption that "advocacy is the role of the last resort," after "neutral" conciliatory approaches have failed?

It should also be simple enough to distinguish between "advice" (go and get it) and "advocacy" (I'll try to get it on your behalf). But we need also to distinguish between intervention aimed at the other party (classically the official bureaucrat who has denied a benefit or service) and intervention to persuade a neutral referee (classically a hearing - notably, in Britain, of the equivalent to Canada's Social Assistance Review Boards). In the former situation, there is a triangle of aggrieved citizen, decision-maker, and a third party who attempts to influence the latter on behalf of the former. In the second, there is a




fourth party, to whom competing persuaders - the original decision- taker (or a surrogate from the decision-taking agency) and the citizen's representative - address their respective claims.

For some American writers,23 the intervening party in the triangle is a "broker"; the term "advocacy" is thus reserved for quadrilateral exchanges. Yet Sosin and Caulum,24 in a confused attempt to limit and clarify the use of the "advocacy" label, restrict it to the triangular situation; it is not clear how they would describe the citizen's representative at a hearing. I prefer to concentrate on the feature that is common to the two settings: the citizen has a representative to help him or her to achieve a reversal of an adverse decision. In other words, 1 shall use the term "advocacy" - as most American writers do - to embrace both triangular and quadrilateral exchanges. It is implicit in, if not essential to, this perception of triangular advocacy that the decision-maker and advocate are not employed by the same agency. This is "external advocacy," as opposed to the "internal advocacy" that Rino Patti25 has identified.

When I first adopted the language of advocacy in the early 1970s, I imagined that I was borrowing a term - as Ben Carniol26 put it in a contemporaneous Canadian contribution - that was "technically rooted in the practice of law." I assumed that American social workers had likewise borrowed from lawyers: thanks to Piven and Cloward,27 I knew something of the interrelated activities of the National Welfare Rights Organization and neighbourhood legal services in the "War on Poverty." What I had to learn was that the American concept of "advocacy" had other non-legal roots.

This involved learning about two problems of translation. The first was about stages of advocacy. I had already thought through what I called an "advocacy continuum,"28 along which advisers might travel from mere advice, to confrontations with bureaucrats, to representation at appeal hearings, to feeding that individual case experience into a campaign for reforms that would benefit not only that individual but like-situated thousands. By and large, it was the support of the individual - against bureaucrats or at an appeal hearing - that we were calling "advocacy": the term was much less used, in the United Kingdom, for reformist activities. The most common generic word for the latter was probably "campaigning," with "lobbying" probably second. The American language that I had to learn, then, was that of "case advocacy" and "cause advocacy,"29 with the possibility of journeys from "case-to-cause-and-back-to-case."30

In his appraisal of "family advocacy," Riley contributed to the second lesson. Americans would often prefix the word "advocacy" with a human category or ideal whose cases and causes were at issue: thus "family advocacy," "patient advocacy," "citizen advocacy," and "child advocacy."




My special interest was "child advocacy." Learning both from the experiences of my American students and from the work of Gilbert Steiner in particular, I came to appreciate that "child advocacy" was multi-rooted. True, it had grown partially from legal roots, but it was rooted also in the coalescence of cause advocacy groups variously focusing on the daycare, education, development, or mental health of children. 31 In other words, it was only case advocacy that had been adopted from lawyers, while cause advocacy was multi-rooted in other helping professions. "Child advocacy" - along with some of the other species I have identified - had grown from these roots in ways that a British visitor of 1977 had had no opportunities to experience: it arrived in Britain, in a rather confused form, 10 years later.32 Meanwhile, "citizen advocacy" was being debated and prac- tised in what would appear to be British equivalents to the pursuits of the Canadian Mental Health Association.33 And one more and more often encounters British allusions to "patient advocacy," although "family advocacy" has yet, to my knowledge, to be imported.

It will be apparent that I have not monitored uniformly the trans- Atlantic journeys of different brands of "advocacy" across a range of social policies. This need not impede my limited focus on "welfare (rights) advocacy." Having sketched a background of language differences, I can proceed to a social work view of case-to-cause advocacy.

Attitudes I refer here to positions expressed to me in those early introspective days of British welfare advocacy. Having considered elsewhere34 several arguments for and against an advocacy role for social work, I am content to explore four positions, each of them couched as an

objection to the involvement of social workers (or, in the first three cases, to anyone who wishes to be an advocate): 1) Why help Ms. X alone (while being unable to help numerous

others in the same - or perhaps a worse - position)? 2) Why help anybody? People must be enabled to help themselves. 3) Why "support the system" by helping individuals to use it? 4) Doesn't advocacy interfere with the social work relationship?

Helping Ms. X alone The notion that helping one claimant can "injure" others35 and that ' 'advocacy for some produces deprivation for others' ' 36 was one over

which we agonized in those early gatherings of British welfare rights activists. This anxiety is based, in my view, on three misjudgments.

First, it pretends that case advocacy is somehow different from other relationships in which those with a capacity to do something for




many others will have to make decisions about the distribution of their time and skills. Social workers, surely, do it, consciously or otherwise, all the time. Indeed, the fact that this kind of allocation is central to the social work task could explain why most commentators on the profession's responsibilities seem to consider it unnecessary to mention it.37

Secondly, the argument insinuates that the case advocate has an obligation that extends beyond Ms. X. Is that necessarily so? Some caseworkers will surely argue that their commitment is always to the client of the moment. Others will perceive it as being to all of their clients all of the time, and others to all clients of the agency. An extreme perception would be an obligation to all like-situated people. I would not prescribe that perception for other advocates, unless they were practising, as I have done, within an avowedly case-to-cause organization. Those of us who operate in such a setting must use our case experiences for the cause; that is how helping Ms. X can and should be part of the process of helping like-situated thousands -

subject, of course, to any contrary expressions of the claimant. I have only once encountered any such objection by a claimant

(withdrawn, in fact, as we emerged, victorious, from the hearing). I would certainly have felt unable to make it a condition of my advocacy that that appellant support the cause in that or any other way - although I was happy to accept, from this well-off parent (of a child whose degree of physical disability was the subject of the appeal), a financial contribution to CPAG. I am in a privileged position as a volunteer with considerable control over the disposition of my time, however. My case-to-cause arguments will have little or no relevance to social workers who (subject to assertions in their codes, as discussed below) have neither a cause to promote nor obvious moral grounds for turning away a person in need of individual attention. On the other hand, some case-to-cause groups might feel morally entitled to turn away those whose cases have no obvious message for the cause, whether the claimants want to support the cause or not.

In fact, most claimants, in my experience, do want to help the cause. Moreover, they will often say so, almost as a condition of their allowing me to help them. This brings me, then, to my third counter- argument - welfare advocacy offers an ideal opportunity for what is often, surely, an elusive social work objective: reciprocity. Claimants have often said: "I don't want you to do this just for me, you know; this is for all people in my position." The best way in which to respond to such a plea is to assure the claimant that his or her case has, indeed, contributed to the cause. It is especially satisfying to be able to hand a claimant a reprint of an article based on his or her case. My opportunity to publish for the cause will not be shared, however, by field




social workers the length and breadth of the land (whether the land be Canada, Britain, or the United States). That is why the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), the Canadian association (CASW), and America's National Association of Social Workers (NASW) must surely owe it to their members to offer outlets for the publication of case-to-cause lessons.

I am not aware of BASW' s having fulfilled that role in Britain. What price CASW? Provided that case advocacy is accepted as a social work function, then the professional associations should be helping their members to make case-to-cause statements about the circumstances of their clients and of similarly-situated citizens. Not to do so is to waste the knowledge gained from the profession's exposure to deprivation and disadvantage. This knowledge is not unique: other helping professionals also encounter these circumstances. But to challenge the notion that the social worker's knowledge is unique is not to gainsay that the profession is in a very good position to promote case-to-cause advocacy. Arguing thus, Lurie38 effectively echoes (without attribution) the famous sentiments of Clement Attlee: "... the social reformer or revolutionary may advocate changes and may create a new public opinion, but it is, in the main, to the social worker that they must look for practical experiment and for the collection of data on which action can be taken."39

Two-thirds of a century later, it would appear that Canadian social workers are under considerable pressure from their academic critics to achieve Attlee' s objectives - and not just in respect of poverty. Thus, Graham Riches has called upon them, in distinctly Attlee- esque language, to use their "front line" observations and experience of unemployment as a source of data to be made "available for public education and advocacy purposes";40 while Helen Levine has taken issue with social workers - along with fellow-professionals in possession of the relevant knowledge - for their failure to exploit that knowledge to expose both rape and wife-battering and to campaign for appropriate support services.41

Why help anybody? The argument has so far assumed that an advocate-claimant relationship is morally sustainable. It is an assumption to which I continue to subscribe - despite years of objections, from within and outside social work, that the advocate's goal should be to make claimants self- sufficient in their bureaucratic encounters.

This "do-it-yourself" school is founded, I submit, on a number of fallacies. These start from the premise that "dependency" upon an advocate (and perhaps on social work generally) is a particular evil. Leaving aside the possibility that "dependency," in general, has been given a worse name than it deserves,42 1 shall confine the




argument, briefly, to social work and advocacy. Why, ask Handler and Hollingsworth,43 is dependency upon a social worker any different from dependency upon a motor mechanic? Or, as Wootton puts it, since the rich have their lawyers and accountants, why should the poor not have social workers to help them claim their rights?44

Wootton's argument requires qualification: it would surely be preferable if all citizens were equally able to choose whichever kind of advocacy specialists they desired. With that qualification made, 1 would argue that it is misguided to claim that we should help all citizens to master the necessary legislation, so as to be always able to argue their own cases with bureaucrats or at hearings.

I offer six reasons for this. First, even the most well-informed and articulate claimant will often need to be represented by someone who stands emotionally outside his or her case. This was often impressed upon me by intelligent, perceptive claimants who had researched and thoroughly prepared their cases but who were afraid - often because of a previous experience - that they would become rattled and break down in the emotional cut and thrust of a hearing. Secondly, even the claimant who is confident of keeping cool is at a disadvantage, compared to an advocate, when it comes to arguing exceptional circumstances. It is much easier, and often more credible, for a third party to argue the merits of a claimant than for the claimant to do so in the first person. This principle is not, of course, peculiar to welfare advocacy or the dependency of the poor: why else should so much professional time be devoted to the writing and reading of references?

My other four arguments can be considered, however, with special reference to welfare advocacy. First and foremost, do-it-yourself enthusiasts underestimate the skill involved in welfare advocacy. I have already posed the question: why pick on this particular activity? If the Monty Python team has gone a little too far with its instruction kit on "How to take your appendix out on the Piccadilly Line," it nevertheless encapsulates my sentiments on the excesses of the self-sufficiency school. Moreover, this school ignores the possibility that the advocate-claimant relationship can increase the latter' s sense of dignity and purpose, insofar as it offers opportunities for reciprocity, sharing, and inclusion.

The scope for reciprocity has been argued already: the advocate's expertise and the claimant's experiences are interdependent in their exploitation for the common cause. The potential for sharing the conduct of the client's case has received little attention in the Ameri- can literature - although "joint planning" is one of several possible approaches identified in the consideration of "who decides?" by Sosin and Caulum.45 An illustration of the scope for shared advocacy in the United Kingdom was provided by Kathleen Bell's official




enquiry into the British equivalent of Social Assistance Review Boards: shared representation of the case, where claimant and advocate again pool their differential resources, was the approach most favoured by claimants.46 It has also been more generally argued, from both sides of the Atlantic,47 that welfare advocacy represents an opportunity to reduce feelings of dependency that the social work relationship might otherwise engender. As a social work student put it to me during her welfare advocacy internship, it was her first experience of "coming alongside" the client.

Finally, we should not dismiss the possibility that recipients of help do not always want or need their supporters to "come alongside." A feeling that somebody is on one's side may be sufficiently reassur- ing and reinforcing of one's worth. That obvious, but seemingly neglected, point has been forcefully put by Stuart Williams in a CPAG review of ways in which poor people are excluded:

. . . the very poorest and most harshly excluded people continue to face the criticism of neighbours, continue to live without heat and light, . . . continue to cope with chronic ill-health on a poor diet, . . . and ... in decaying and dangerous housing, and continue to live in the constant belief that people are capable of taking their side but do not want to.48

In other words, if those with knowledge and skills withhold them, in the name of "self-help," from poor people, they may add to the latter's exclusion. Indeed, it is notable that Canada's umbrella organization of self-help groups - the National Anti-Poverty Organiza- tion - summoned up that statement of Williams in rallying social assistance recipients "to resist others' disrespect and misunderstand- ing."49

Supporting the system Leaving the ludicrous self-help school, we encounter the ludicrous school of conspiracy theorists: do they really expect us to believe that there is an identifiable "system" against which we who oppose deprivation and disadvantage can, and should, declare ourselves? If that rhetorical question characterizes unfairly the stance of these armchair revolutionaries, let me narrow it down: perhaps they are simply objecting that we support means-tested benefits whenever we help poor people to claim them. In other words, it was ethically acceptable for CPAG to ask me to represent the well-off father of a disabled child, who was entitled to all manner of non-means-tested support, but CPAG should refuse referrals - from social workers, say - of poor families requiring help to pursue their means-tested entitlements.

I cannot agree, for two reasons. First, helping somebody to obtain means-tested benefits can be the best way of learning about the




shortcomings of such benefits and acquiring information against them for use in our campaigning. Secondly, who is to be God? Who is to decide that we should desist from helping Ms. X today on the grounds that her sacrifice will benefit the poor when the revolution comes? Who is to determine, in other words, that the ' 'client's interest in the short run" should be sacrificed in the pursuit of "institutional changes in the long run"?50 The advocate who takes the long-term view may not impress the client, "... who may be doubtful about being around 'in the long run' to reap the benefits of the hoped-for change. . . . Who will weigh the potential losses and benefits ...?... Who will determine just how long the 'long run' will be?"51 As Gilbert and Specht acutely observe, "the old-fashioned ethical social worker" would surely have remembered that his or her "clients . . . were . . . self-determining people who, given appropriate respect, support, and opportunities, could decide what was in their best short-term and long-run interests."52

This call to "old-fashioned" values is apposite for what is hardly a new dilemma for welfare rights activists. If we depart momentarily from both the trans-Atlantic perspective and from the social work role, we find that Lenin was "intensely hostile" towards those "legal Marxists" who supported welfare reforms inimical to his long-term objectives.53 Yet Pravda regularly published articles, explaining how workers could claim their welfare rights under the "capitalistic insur- ance" laws of 1912.

Interference with social work In its crudest form, the argument of this school is that the advocacy relationship interferes with the casework relationship. It would clearly be inappropriate for me - as a self-taught recruit to the former role who has never been trained in the mysteries of the latter - to say anything that smacked of partisanship. However, it is not necessary to take sides: faced with the apparent assumption that one relationship (casework) is somehow morally superior to the other (advocacy), I am content to recall the sentiments of Barbara Wootton, writing a decade before "welfare rights" became an identifiable cause in the United Kingdom:

The range of needs for which public or voluntary services now provide, and the complexity of relevant rules and regulations, have become so great, that the social worker who has mastered these intricacies and is prepared to place this knowledge at the disposal of the public, and when necessary to initiate appropriate action, has no need to pose as a miniature psychoanalyst or psychiatrist: her professional standing is secured by the value of her own contribution.54




Although I endorse Wootton's position that social workers need not be ashamed of a case advocacy role, it does not follow, necessarily, that 1 feel they must accept that role, let alone proceed from case-to-cause. Yet, in a generally hortatory, trans-Atlantic literature, this obligation upon social workers is often taken for granted. Thus we are assured by Charles Levy,55 in a leading American contribution, that advocacy is "integral" to social work practice, but he does not tell us how. Nor does Adrian Sinfield get us very far in his assertion that "no social worker can be neutral in his or her daily actions."56 His conclusion that "the poor, the weak, the helpless and their families" will suffer if the British social worker is not prepared to accept the role of "interpreter and mediator for the citizen"57 echoes my earlier point about "inclusion." While I agree with this identifica- tion of the citizen's needs, it does not begin to explain why the social worker, in preference to others who come into touch with ill- informed and otherwise excluded citizens, should be the one who acts as their "interpreter and mediator."

Similarly, the case for advocacy's performing the function of what Jane Streather calls "preventative social work"58 is easily made. But might not advocacy also act, both preventatively and promotionally, in respect of, say, a child's health or education? Why are the teachers and doctors - each of whom will encounter a far higher proportion than will social workers of Sinfield' s "poor, weak and helpless" - not equally called upon to be their advocates?

There are, it seems, two broad alternative answers to this question. On the one hand, it might be said that social workers have assumed a welfare advocacy role, faute de mieux: because doctors, teachers, and other helping professions have shown no taste for this kind of intervention, social workers have had to do so. As some social workers put it, in an official British study of social work teams, advice and advocacy are a "necessary evil."59 Yet such an explanation is generally lacking from a prescriptive literature - although Donald Shapiro, in an apparent exception to that rule, did warn a "War on Poverty" conference that America would have to "turn to. . . the social worker" because it would "never have enough legal counsel" to be case advocates for poor people.60

On the other hand, a few will argue (the majority, it seems, will simply assume) that this role is somehow inherent in the social work task in particular. For instance, John Burton has distinguished between the roles of the social worker and the doctor. The latter

. . . has a role within society because disease and accident occur within all societies. He may have to battle for more resources; but, in his role of doctor, he can afford to be supportive of existing social structures, even though, as a person, he might not approve of them. The social worker, on the contrary, is contend-




ing, not with disease or accident, but with the inevitable organi- sational inefficiencies, bureaucratic inefficiencies, institutional values, consequences of change, and is professionally up against social structures generally. No profession is so directly confronted with the clash between the interest of system and person.61

While not convinced that the distinction is so clear-cut, I shall, for the sake of this discussion, accept it and apply it explicitly to the advocacy role. In other words, I accept that role for social work: does it follow that each and every social worker is obliged to be an advocate, or can individual professionals legitimately argue not only that they lack some or all of the pertinent skills, but also that they have no inclination to acquire them? A recognition that "not all social workers are temperamentally inclined"62 for this or any other task is a rare feature of a prescriptive literature. Such a recognition seems realistic, until one discovers some of the demands that the professional associations have imposed on their members.

Codes of ethics "Social work is a profession whose purpose is to bring about social changes in society in general."63 That claim, by the International Federation of Social Workers, makes Burton's special demands seem rather modest. But, if this is the world view of the social work task, it is not uniformly reflected in the respective codes in Britain, the United States, and Canada. Take first the Code of Ethics adopted in 1960 by America's NASW. It asserts

That the social worker has an obligation under the Code of Ethics to be an advocate.

That this obligation requires more than mere "urging." That under certain circumstances . . . the obligation is enforcible under the Code of Ethics.64

The problems of enforcing such hortatory enjoinders have not escaped the critics of NASW's code. For instance, Ronda Connaway finds it difficult to reconcile the demands of the code with NASW's 1968 guidelines on "professional competence." In this document, she complains, the association "all but ignores" its 1960 "requirement" that its members practise advocacy: the guidelines concentrate overly on "consensus concepts," and NASW should also have addressed the "professional standards" relevant to "conflict . . . and to the . . . adversary process in social work advocacy."65 Gilbert and Specht object that the code fails, as they see it, to entertain "ifs."66

Has BASW, NASW's young British counterpart, imposed such standards on its members? An ambiguous answer has emerged. At its




annual conference, in 1972, the association resolved that welfare rights "be regarded as an integral part of Social Work Training."67 Within a few months, however, BASW issued a more cautious statement about the "extremely wide range of work" undertaken by social workers: could they be expected not only to carry out such comprehensive duties, "but also to advise on welfare benefits. . . and to act as a sort of second class solicitor and accountant for the poor"?68

Barbara Wootton might have preferred them (on the evidence noted earlier) to have been providing a first-class alternative to solicitors and accountants. Yet, whether its modesty of 1973 was false or genuine, BASW was taking a more assertive stance in its 1975 Code of Ethics. Consider its "statement of principle": "In view of the applicant's lack of power, social workers have a special responsibility to ensure the fullest possible realisation of his rights and satisfaction of his needs." If this seems vague, take the "principle of practice" that follows: "... each Member of the Association undertakes that, to the best of his ability, ... he acknowledges a responsibility to help clients to obtain all those services and rights to which they are entitled, both from the agency in which he works and from any other appropriate source."69 What does it mean, though, for social workers to act to "the best of [their] ability"? Are they obliged to maximize their abilities, or are they entitled to plead below-average ability in some areas of their work? Given the non-prescriptive perspective that I have taken thus far, I naturally incline to the latter view.

It would appear that one might be hard pressed to get away with this position in Canada. As readers will be aware, the Canadian social worker undertakes, like his or her British colleagues, to fulfil 10 tasks "to the best of [his or her] ability."70 But there is no room for a non-prescriptive approach to this requirement: CASW informs us that the social worker "will have adequate knowledge and abilities to meet standard of practice requirements." The areas of knowledge include "social policy and relevant law," and the standard is defined as being "at least equal" to that which "one would expect to receive in a like situation."71

If this all sounds rather hortatory, CASW does not make unam- biguously clear the range of tasks (including advocacy of any kind) in which this standard is required. Its code appears, though, to be an even more demanding one than NASW's. Take the following fea- tures of it:

The social worker . . . will act to ensure through reasonable advocacy . . . that dignity, individuality and rights of persons are safeguarded.72 Social work is a profession committed to the goal of effecting social changes in society. . . . The functions of social work




include . . . advocating, promoting and acting to obtain a socially just distribution of societal resources; and facilitating social connections between people and their societal resources.73

I will act to effect social change for the overall benefit of humanity.74

The reference to "reasonable advocacy" is the only specific reference in the code to case advocacy alone. And the adjective "reasonable" implies - contrary to what we noted earlier about standards - a guardedness (more redolent of the British approach) about what can be demanded. There is perhaps a further allusion to case advocacy in the quaint phrase, from the code's preamble, about "facilitating social connections." That includes helping clients, I assume, to claim their entitlements. But the commitment expressed earlier in that quotation to "advocating, promoting and acting" appears to be to a wide cause: as the final quotation puts it, it extends to "the overall benefit of humanity."

The obligations of the Canadian social worker, then, go far beyond a responsibility to Ms. X. This commitment effectively tells us that case advocacy for the particular client of the moment is not enough. While accepting, above, a wider obligation for myself, as a voluntary member of a case-to-cause group, I was not prepared to impose it upon social workers. Since the Canadian association is prepared to do so, two questions need to be asked of it: how is this commitment to be fulfilled, and what sanctions exist for non-conformers?

The first question is not answered in the Canadian code, even though the association does elaborate on how to serve "humanity." In a section headed "Responsibility to Society," it professes that "the social worker will make reasonable efforts to advocate for" the following: "the equitable distribution of societal resources and act to ensure that all persons have reasonable access to the resources, services and opportunities which they require"; and "changes in policy and legislation to improve social conditions and to promote social justice."75

Again, the commitment goes beyond Ms. X and even beyond the agency's clients. Again, though, there is a touch of realism about the adjective "reasonable." Is this vagueness a let-out? Are we to infer that the Canadian association has no standards by which to judge "reasonable efforts" on behalf of "humanity" and hence no sanctions for those who fall, undetected, below those undefined standards?

In contemplating alternative answers to that question, I lean, as I have already intimated, towards the non-prescriptive, cautious Brit- ish approach. As one who has argued that doctors ( inter alia) might be expected to do more to promote poor people's entitlements,




however, I must refer to the code of conduct of the Canadian Medical Association. Its statement of "Patient's Rights" requires that the "Ethical Physician . . . will, on the patient's request, assist him by supplying the information required to enable the patient to receive any benefits to which the patient may be entitled."76 Reproducing this model in its own Handbook of Medical Ethics, the British Medical Association77 failed to make any such ethical demands of its members. In urging that the BMA adopt a more pro-active version of this code78 - why wait for the patient to ask for help? - I am not being inconsistent with my non-prescriptive approach to social workers. All that doctors are being asked to do is to "supply information"; what social workers are being exhorted to do is to leap into "advocacy."

Social workers and their associations should look long and hard before they leap. That long, hard look should entail the following introspection: 1) What is my commitment, if any, to case advocacy? 2) Does any commitment to case advocacy oblige me, necessarily, to

be a cause advocate, too? 3) If I am to fulfil either or both commitments, what does it mean to

do so to "the best of my ability" and to a "reasonable" extent? What, for instance, are the positive implications (N.B. training) and what are the negative implications (N.B. sanctions)? An examination of the professional codes in three countries does

not enable us to answer such questions. Perhaps it is of the essence of such statements to be long on rhetoric and short on reasoning. And they appear to rest on two implicit assumptions about the members of the profession: that they know the ethical rules, and that they will apply them systematically. Each assumption is surely unrealistic. With regard to the former, I was not surprised, for instance, to find that only one student in my introductory 1987 class of Canadian social workers had heard of the professional code. And the latter assumption is at odds with a supposition derived from my own unplanned entry into advocacy, to say nothing of my meandering journey along the "advocacy continuum."79 While later entrants would no doubt be better informed than I, I was prepared, nevertheless, to hypothesize that many of them would "wander to and fro along a continuum of welfare rights activities . . . with different goals and with different levels of awareness."80

That supposition is perhaps confirmed by Epstein's sample81 of self-confessed advocates, who gave such "scant attention ... to setting goals": case advocacy tends to be relatively "reactive."82 If Epstein offers us a few answers, my belated introduction to the Canadian code has given me what every academic visitor surely wants: a longer list of questions.




REFERENCES

1 Irwin Epstein, "Advocates on Advocacy: An Exploratory Study," Social Work Research and Abstracts 17, no. 2 (1981), 5.

2 Barbara Wootton, In a World I Never Made: Biographical Reflections (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 195.

3 Welfare Rights Working Party, Which Way Welfare Rights ?, Child Poverty Action Group, 1975.

4 The present article is developed from that paper given at McMaster University in June 1987. 1 am grateful to Ben Carniol and Ernie Lightman for bibliographical advice in the preparation of that paper; to Ewan Macintyre, for similar advice and other guidance as an assiduous conference host; and to Ann Stanyer, for reading my paper in my absence.

5 1 am grateful to Ralph Garber, Brigitte Kitchen, and Ernie Lightman for the long-term plotting that eventually brought me to a summer contract at York University; to Frank Turner and colleagues in York's Department of Social Work, especially to Pat Evans for encouragement on this paper and on much else; and not least to my York students for their insights into Canadian practice. Having received invitations to a few more Canadian schools of social work, I hope it will not seem immodest to offer this article as a kind of calling card, as an introspective position statement by a teacher-practitioner whose ideas have been shaped by American conceptualization and British experience.

b 1 am gratetul to Chnsta rreiler and her Cr AO colleagues tor tacihtating this learning experience, with the support of the Laidlaw Foundation. The policy and campaigning lessons of my brief visit to CPAG Canada have been drawn elsewhere: see David Bull, "Cans Across Canada," Poverty, no. 68 (1987), 15-16.

7 Canadian Association of Social Workers, Code of Ethics , Ottawa, 1983. 8 Welfare Rights Working Party, Which Way Welfare Rights ?; David Bull, "The

Anti-Discretion Movement in Britain: Fact or Phantom?," Journal of Social Welfare Law (March 1980), 65-83.

9 Rosalind Brooke, "Social Administration and Human Rights," in Peter Town- send and Nicholas Bosanquet, eds., Labour and Inequality (London: Fabian Society, 1972).

10 David Watson, "Welfare Rights and Human Rights," Journal of Social Policy 6 (1977), part 1, 31-46; David Watson, reproduction of "Welfare Rights and Human Rights," in his Caring for Strangers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).

11 Peter Jones, "Rights, Welfare and Stigma," in Noel Timms, ed., Social Welfare: Why and How? (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 124.

12 Tony Lynes, "More Money Now!," Poverty , no. 5 (1967), 6-8. 13 Joan Clegg, Dictionary of Social Services Policy and Practice (London: Bedford

Square Press, 1971), p. 2. 14 Charles Levy, "Advocacy and the Injustice of Justice," Social Service Review

48, no. 1 (1974), 39. 15 Alan Stone, "The Myth of Advocacy," Hospital and Community Psychiatry 30,

no. 12 (1979), 819. 16 E. Matilda Goldberg and R. William Warburton, Ends and Means in Social Work

(London: Allen and Unwin, 1979). 17 Martin Davies, The Essential Social Worker: A Guide to Positive Practice (Lon-

don: Heinemann, 1981); Ronald Walton, Social Work 2000: The Future of Social Work in a Changing Society (London: Longman, 1982).

18 Neil Gilbert and Harry Specht, "Advocacy and Professional Ethics," Social Work 21, no. 4 (1976), 288.




19 Michael Sosin and Sharon Caulum, "Advocacy: A Conceptualization for Social Work Practice," Social Work 28, no. 1 (1983), 12.

20 Barclay Working Party, Social Workers : Their Role and Tasks (London: Bedford Square Press, 1982), paras. 1. 19-1.20, 1.32, 1.40, 3.46, 3.51, 8.20, and 10.24.

21 James Scherrer, "How Social Workers Help Lawyers," Social Work 21, no. 4 (1976), 279.

22 Ronda Connaway, "Teamwork and Social Work Advocacy: Conflicts and Possibilities," Community Mental Health Journal 11 (Winter 1975), 382.

23 Paul T errell, ' The Social Worker As Radical: Roles of Advocacy, "Neu; Perspec- tives: The Berkeley Journal of Social Welfare Law 1, no. 1 (1967), 85; Charles Grosser, New Directions in Community Organization : From Enabling to Advo- cacy (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 195; Scott Briar, "The Current Crisis in Social Casework," in Neil Gilbert and Harry Specht, eds., The Emergence of Social Welfare and Social Work (Itasca, 111.: F. E. Peacock, 1976), p. 409.

24 Sosin and Caulum, "Advocacy," p. 13. 25 Rino Patti, "Limitations and Prospects of Internal Advocacy," Social Casework

55, no. 9 (1974), 537. 26 Ben Carniol, "Advocacy: For Community Power," Canadian Welfare (May-

June 1984), 12-15. 27 Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor : The Functions of

Public Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1971), chap. 10. 28 David Bull, "The Advocacy Continuum," in Welfare Rights Working Party,

Which Way Welfare Rights ?; Bull, "Anti-Discretion Movement in Britain." 29 Ad Hoc Committee on Advocacy, "The Social Worker As Advocate: Champion

of Social Victims," Social Work 14 (April 1969), 16-22; Alfred Kahn, "Perspec- tives on Access to Social Services," Social Work (U.K.) 26, no. 3 (1969), 3-9; Alfred Kahn, reproduction of "Perspectives on Access to Social Services," Social Work 15, no. 2 (1970), 95-101; Robert Sunley, "Family Advocacy: Case to Cause," Social Casework 51, no. 6 (1970), 347-357; Arnold Panitch, "Advocacy in Practice," Social Work 19, no. 3 (1974), 326-332.

30 Patrick Riley, "Family Advocacy: Case to Cause and Back to Case," Child Welfare 50, no. 7 (1971), 374-383.

31 Gilbert Steiner, The Children's Cause (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1976), especially chaps. 6-7.

32 John McMaster, "Points of View," Journal of Social Welfare Law (July 1987), 205-207.

ÓÓ Mary Clare Tanguay, Support for Psychiatric Patients: The Citizen Advocate Volunteer," Canada's Mental Health (June 1985), 4-6; David Randall and J. Paul Grocott, "Advocacy and the Delivery of Community Mental Health Services - Do They Mix? A Saskatchewan Perspective," Canada s Mental Health (March 1986), 9-10.

34 David Bull, Welfare Advocacy: Whose Means to What Ends? (Birmingham: British Association of Social Workers, 1981); David Bull, "Social Workers As Advocates," Social Work Today 14 (December 1982), 11-13.

35 Ad Hoc Committee on Advocacy, "The Social Worker As Advocate," p. 19. 36 Charles Grosser, "A Polemic On Advocacy: Past, Present and Future," in Alfred

Kahn, ed., Shaping the New Social Work (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), p. 85.

37 For rare exceptions, see Barclay Working Party, "Social Workers," para. 3.54; Howard Glennerster, Social Service Budgets and Social Policy: British and American Experience (London: Allen and Unwin, 1975 ), p. 12.

38 Abraham Lurie, "The Social Work Advocacy Role in Discharge Planning," Social Work in Health Care 8, no. 2 (1982), 81.

39 Clement Attlee, The Social Worker (London: Bell, 1920), p. 221. 40 Graham Riches, "Poverty and Unemployment: Assumptions, Responsibilities

and Choices," Canadian Review of Social Policy, no. 19 (October 1987), 70.




41 Helen Levine, "The Personal Is Political: Feminism and the Helping Profes- sions," in Angela Miles and Geraldine Finn, eds., Feminism in Canada: From Pressure to Politics (Montreal: Black Rose Books. 1982). d. 190.

42 Martin Rein, Social Policy (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 87. 43 Joel Handler and Ellen Jane Hollings worth, "The Administration of Social

Services and the Structure of Dependency: The Views of AFDC Recipients," Social Service Review 42, no. 1 (1969), 415.

44 Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Social Pathology (London: Allen and Unwin, 1959), p. 296.

45 Sosin and Caulum, "Advocacy," p. 15. 46 Kathleen Bell, Research Study on Supplementary Benefit Appeal Tribunals:

Review of Main Findings ; Conclusions; Recommendations (London: HMSO, 1975), p. 16.

47 From the U.K., see Jane Streather, "Welfare Rights and the Social Worker," Social Work Today 3 (October 1972), 3; from the U.S., see Briar, "The Current Crisis," p. 410; Scott Briar, "The Social Worker's Responsibility for the Civil Rights of Clients," New Perspectives: The Berkeley Journal of Social Welfare Law, 1, no. 1 (1967) 90.

48 Stuart Williams, "Exclusion: The Hidden Face of Poverty," in Peter Golding, ed., Excluding the Poor (London: Child Poverty Action Group, 1986 ), pp. 29- 30.

49 National Anti-Poverty Organization, written submission to Social Assistance Review Committee, Ottawa, 1986, mimeoaraph.

50 Ad Hoc Committee on Advocacy, "The Social Worker As Advocate," p. 19. 51 Gilbert and Specht, "Advocacy and Professional Ethics," p. 291. 52 Ibid., p. 292. 53 RobertPinker, The Idea of Welfare (London: Heinemann, 1979), pp. 145-146. 54 Wootton, Social Science and Social Pathology , p. 296. 55 Levy, "Advocacy and the Injustice of Justice." 56 Adrian Sinfield, Which Way for Social Work ?, Fabian Tract 393 (London,

1969), p. 57. 57 Ibid., pp. 36 and 58. 58 Streather, "Welfare Rights and the Social Worker," p. 3. 59 Michael Hill, "Relations With Other Agencies," in Olive Stevenson and Phyllida

Parsloe, eds., Social Services Teams: The Practitioner s View (London: HMSO, 1978), paras. 10.63-10.64; Michael Hill and Peter Laing, Social Work and Money (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979), p. 83.

60 Donald Shapiro, "Specific Technique for Providing Social Workers With Legal Perspective," in The Extension of Legal Services for the Poor (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), p. 151.

61 John Burton, "Poverty, Deprivation and the Crisis in Social Work," Social Work Today 5 (October 1974), 460.

62 Harry Lurie, "The Responsibilities of a Socially Oriented Profession," in Cora Kasius, ed., New Directions in Social Work , reproduced ed. (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), p. 46.

63 International Federation of Social Workers, "Definition of the Social Work Profession," reproduced in Joanne C. Turner and Francis J. Turner, eds., Canadian Social Welfare , 2nd ed. (Toronto: Collier-Macmillan, 1986), Appen- dix B.

64 Ad Hoc Committee on Advocacy, "The Social Worker As Advocate," p. 21. 65 Connaway, "Teamwork and Social Work Advocacy," p. 386. 66 Gilbert and Specht, "Advocacy and Professional Ethics," pp. 289-290. 67 British Association of Social Workers, BASW News, Social Work Today 3

(November 1972), VII. 68 Keith Bilton, "Transmitted Social Deprivation," BASW News, Social Work

Today 3 (January 1973), para. 5.5.




69 A Code of Ethics for Social Work, reproduced in BASW News, British Associa- tion of Social Workers, Social Work Today 6 (September 1975), paras. 9-10.

70 CASW, Code of Ethics. 71 Ibid., Commentary, paras. 3.5-3.6. 72 Ibid., Commentary, para. 5.1. 73 Ibid., Preamble. 74 Ibid., Social Worker Declaration, para. 10. 75 Ibid., Commentary, paras. 10. Z and 10.6. 76 Canadian Medical Association, Statement of Patient s Rights, 1983. 77 British Medical Association, Handbook of Medical Ethics (London, 1981 ),

p. 78. 78 David Bull, "Family Doctors and Welfare Advocacy," in Just Welfare (forthcom-

ing ). 79 Bull, "Anti-Discretion Movement in Britain," pp. 74-76. 80 Ibid., pp. 76-77. 81 Epstein, "Advocates on Advocacy," p. 6. 82 Ibid., pp. 9-10



Documents

THE SOCIAL WORKER'S ADVOCACY ROLE: A British Quest for a Canadian Perspective