Poverty: social work perspectives

Abstract

The original idea for a Special Issue focusing on poverty stems back several years when it seemed timely to take stock of how continuing austere times were impacting upon service users and the social work profession. Although evidence is mixed due to various financial strategies introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the UK at least the rise in the use by families and individuals of foodbanks and disproportionate experiences of poverty within sections of the community (e.g. Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Black ethnicities in the UK context (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2023)) reveal that poverty remains a primary concern for social work (British Association of Social Workers [BASW], 2023). In keeping with the journal aims we requested in the Call for Papers that authors might propose papers considering social justice and social structural aspects of poverty, but also dimensions incorporating emotional and relational lived experiences of poverty. The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted and slowed the process of gathering papers and we wondered whether the impact of poverty and psychosocial restrictions facing practitioners, service users and academics alike, made the subject too present and too overwhelming for authors to consider. However, our focus on psychosocial elements of poverty’s influence broadened as we began to receive papers from writers based in a range of countries, thus indicating how poverty is of ubiquitous concern to social workers in many parts of the world. These papers were more concerned with directly highlighting the role taken by individual social workers, and the professional discipline itself, in driving forward development aims in nations facing much greater challenges than those experienced in relatively wealthy western countries. In finalising the selection of articles for this issue, we felt it important to include some papers addressing this international discourse within social work and the shared concern within the profession regarding the relentless impact of poverty in the lives of many people. In the end, taking an ecological perspective, the papers in this SI range from those with wider, social structural, developmental themes through to medium level themes concerning social work interventions and agencies and to papers which reveal the more personal, lived experiences of poverty and social work’s interaction with these. This SI thus encompasses articles that touch on various aspects of poverty and the many ways in which poverty can negatively influence lived realities across a spectrum of dimensions. While the quantification of poverty is provided in some articles, it was never our intention to only focus on numbers. For decades, there has been a strong focus on the quantitative study of poverty including how to measure an adequate level of income, how to assess wealth, how to count the numbers of people who live in poverty, and for how long. The quantitative study of poverty is important in order to inform strategies to combat poverty, but it can only provide insight into part of the poverty picture. Numbers can reveal patterns, extremes, and failures in protective systems, and they are essential tools in efforts by social workers and others to provide critical and actionable responses JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE 2023, VOL. 37, NO. 2, 131–135 https://doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2023.2233845