The main reason why I entered into the Social Work field was because of this value, Social Justice. The Ethical Principle, listed on the SocialWorkers.org website, is “Social workers challenge social injustice”. What is social injustice? Social injustice is when there are things happening against certain people, groups, religions, etc. that are wrong and go against out basic human rights.
Some recent examples of social injustices:
- Racism
- Ageism
- Homophobia or any type of negative actions again those in the LGBTQIA2S+ community
- The pay gap between genders
There is some things that we don’t think about as social injustices, on this website, the helpfulprofessor.com, there is a page with this image on it:
The writer of the site has included a definition from the book “Social Injustice and Public Health“, which you should at least read the abstract that be seen here.
Dr. Chris Drew, the author of the article, goes through this list of types as well as other types of social injustices, and gives great details on each one, Including a “real life fact” snippet at the top of each type. Some of the Real Life Facts are really show what it is that we as social workers need to fight for, for example “Women earn 83 cents for every dollar men earn”. This isn’t a sign of equality between genders, this is an atrocity that we need to stand up against. I urge you to visit the site and read through the types Dr. Chris has listed, which can be found by clicking this link: https://helpfulprofessor.com/social-injustice-examples/
Going back to the Code of Ethics, it states that social workers should “pursue social change”, on behalf of the vulnerable and oppressed people and groups. Which we can see from the examples above and on the HelpfulProfessor.com website, there are a lot of places where people are being oppressed or cannot stick up for themselves. This is where we, as social workers, have to step up and be the voice for those who are either unable to speak for themselves or are not being heard. Large issues such as unemployment and poverty are harder to tackle, but we can start on the micro scale and work our way up.
The first steps we should all take though is to educate ourselves on what social injustices are, how they affect people and groups, and what the long term concerns are. We have seen that the pay gap between genders has been going on for decades, why hasn’t there been a change to this? Well, there has in some work places, but it’s not enough. A woman who work as construction managers should not make less than a man in the exact same position. Even more shocking, on https://narrowthegap.co/gap/construction-managers they explain how women in construction make 75 cents to the dollar men earn in 2021. They give a few statistics, how this is a difference of $383 per weekly paycheck and that women would make, on average, about $20,000 less a year than men in the same job. Please, check out NarrowTheGap.co where you can choose from a massive amount of occupations to view the wage gaps, you may be shocked at what you read!
Something to remember, social work can be a hard field to be in if you have strong values of your own or beliefs that don’t work with human rights, I’ll discuss this more later, but an example would be if you do not accept the LGBTQIA2S+ community, you may find it hard to work with someone who identifies with them. However, as a social worker, you have to speak up for all injustices, and we know that that community is going through a lot right now and most likely will continue to do so, so even if it doesn’t follow what you believe, please do your best to respect those you disagree with and help them have equal rights.
