Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  Social workers engage in such activities, but usually from the outside, as helpers. They practice in poor neighborhoods where they do not live. They work with impoverished and oppressed people but are not poor or exploited themselves. They provide psychotherapy for those with mental illness, but as professionals to clients, not as fellow patients or family members.

  Professional Helpers and Social Justice

  The concluding chapters on charity take up some of the issues involved in this kind of helping relationship. Here I want to look at examples of how the virtue of social justice may guide the practice of professionals, even those employed by or working under contract for the state. In the first case, the outside helpers are economists or people with financial expertise, helping women in poor communities and financially fragile circumstances. The other two cases involve social workers in their most regulatory, coercive role on behalf of the state, intervening in families to protect children from abuse or neglect. What does exercising the virtue of social justice look like in these situations? All three cases illustrate how a program may require and develop, in both its organizers and clients, the virtue of social justice as the personal disposition and habit of joining with others to promote the common good.

  Grameen Bank

  Like the Franciscan friars of the fifteenth century and Archbishop McGrath, C.S.C., (1924–2000) of Panama City in the twentieth, the economist Muhammad Yunus saw the importance of providing small loans at low interest to poor people (primarily women) so that they could use their entrepreneurial creativity and energy to build small businesses. As loans were repaid, new loans could be made to other borrowers in the community. A key aspect of the Grameen Bank model is the forming of groups of women who repay their loans via frequent installments in a group setting.2 Founded in 1976 as a research project in Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank (literally the Bank of the Villages in Bengali) was authorized by the government as an independent bank in 1983. Since then it has flourished and now has more than 2,000 branches, inspiring imitations and variations in over forty countries. Repayment meetings provide clients opportunities they did not have before, including “walking across the village to attend the center meeting, sitting in conversation with a diverse set of women, handling money for the group and receiving personal address.”3

  When researchers compared the effects of the standard weekly meetings with an alternative of monthly meetings, they found that those in the former groups were 90 percent less likely to default on their loans and had substantially higher rates of interaction with each other and their families outside the meetings. The women held each other accountable and built community and democratic participation. The weekly meetings were important for both economic and social development.

  The bank has grown to the point of having many thousands of employees, including loan officers and financial experts, and 3.5 million members. It has distributed more than $15 billion in loans. It is owned by its members, most of them poor women. The bank is an extraordinary example of people joining together—with outside help—to achieve a common purpose they could not have achieved on their own. The bank’s microcredit programs have many secondary benefits in terms of empowering women, enabling their creativity, resourcefulness, and initiative, and ensuring the education of their children. (It is a condition of membership to send your children to school.)

  If those in dire poverty are to be helped, they need, at least for the children, education that will enhance their human capital and tap into their creativity and capacity for innovation. They need secure property rights and a business environment in which it is easy to start even a very small business, a setting more like that of Hong Kong than Argentina—or than the Peru described by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, where excessive regulation, bureaucracy, bribery, and corruption made the cost of starting a business prohibitive for the poor.4 And they need lines of credit at low and predictable rates. In Bangladesh, it is not government programs of redistribution or income maintenance but the Grameen Bank that provides most of these. An important role of the state is to get out of the way and not to hamper the economic and social development that wells up from below in civil society.

  As wonderfully illustrated in the series of DVDs created by Poverty-Cure, Grameen Bank and its founder Muhammad Yunus have had an enormous impact in spreading these principles and the practice of microfinance in many forms through much of the developing world, where the lack of private property rights and the rule of law have kept the poor in poverty, stifling their creative energy and entrepreneurial spirit.5

  Patch

  “Patch” is an approach to delivering social services, including child protection and other forms of social care, that was developed in the United Kingdom and uses a locality-based integrated team of human-service workers.6 In the 1990s I was involved in adapting this approach for a distressed neighborhood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The Iowa patch team continues to operate in expanded and modified form, and other patch teams have sprung up in various parts of the United States since.

  In the United Kingdom, a patch team would usually involve a single agency, the local authority social-services department responsible for statutory child welfare, mental health, aging, and other services. The agency’s social workers and other staff were redeployed from a central downtown office to a number of small, neighborhood-based teams and given responsibility for work within a locality of about 10,000 residents. The team contained specialists in various areas of practice but, as a team, offered integrated, comprehensive services.

  In the context of a more fragmented American urban service system, the Iowa Patch Project integrated staff from five state or local programs—Iowa Human Services (four child-protection social workers), Juvenile Court Services (a probation officer), City Housing inspector, County Homemaker Services, and a community center—into a multiagency team located conveniently within the neighborhood. The idea was to take advantage of some decategorization of funding streams in order to offer more integrated and responsive services on the ground.

  The team started with the recognition that most helping in communities is nonprofessional, involving extended family, friends and neighbors, churches and informal networks, schools and voluntary associations, beauty parlors and natural helping figures, and informal groups and systems. The task of social work, they concluded, was to identify who else was involved and close to the situation, to enable them to tap into their own knowledge of the situation and resources in order to interrupt problem-perpetuating patterns of relationship. Such an approach requires decentering both the service system and the professional-client relationship. It depends on teamwork among the patch members and the residents of the neighborhood.

  The shift in practice—from case-by-case work to a shared workload, from crisis response to providing a little help when needed at an earlier stage, from professional responsibility for solutions to sharing responsibility among those involved and interweaving formal and informal helping—is best illustrated by an example. On visiting a house to inspect for code violations, the housing inspector (who despite her lack of any social-work education was one of the first to grasp the patch concept) found some frayed electrical wiring. In the past this would have been the extent of her professional concern. But she also noticed a single mother, new to the neighborhood, with several children and only one piece of furniture, a sofa. She reported this to the team, which sent out an MSW practicum student and a child-protective services (CPS) worker to talk to the woman. They put her in touch with a local church which set her up with needed furniture, and they invited her to join a moms’ group that the team had initiated. Thanks to “a little help when needed,” what might have become in a few months a formal case of child neglect never became an official case at all.7

  Responding in this way depended on the role flexibility and shared work of the team members and their proactive approach. (Normally CPS would target only more serious cases where bruises were evident or a child had run away or committed a serious
offense.) The team’s response to this situation depended on their prior work in the neighborhood. They were able to involve the church because they had already built relationships with the churches in the neighborhood. The moms’ group had developed out of a tae kwon do class offered free to local kids by the team’s probation officer. Moms would hang around during the class and chat with each other despite their own isolation or shyness, and a regular moms’ group formed naturally and continued under its own steam.

  Family Group Conferencing

  As an alternative to honor killings and vendettas between families, some form of restorative-justice practice seems to have been universal across time, place, and cultures prior to the development of the modern state, as a way of confronting and correcting injustices and making things right.8 Of the many adaptations across the world in the context of a bureaucratic-professional state, I want to focus briefly on the use of the Family Group Conference (FGC) in New Zealand and Hawaii.

  The Maori whanau hui and the Hawaiian ho’oponopono are surviving indigenous practices of family group meetings. In both New Zealand and Hawaii, the state’s child-welfare system has drawn on (but not supplanted) this experience to develop a hybrid process that is traditional and modern, formal and informal, to address cases of child abuse and neglect among the whole population, indigenous and other. These processes are the FGC in New Zealand and the ‘Ohana Conference in Hawaii. The professional practice in both cases is to plan for and conduct a meeting of the extended family group (whanau, ‘ohana) to address concerns about children’s safety and to come up with a plan to ensure it. Meetings vary but typically include introductions, information sharing, private family time, and a decision about the plan, how to monitor it, follow up, and reconvene as needed. Professionals involved, such as conference coordinators, social workers, school counselors, and therapists, share their knowledge of the situation and answer questions. Then they leave the family alone to discuss the situation and formulate their own plan. That plan, which may involve extended family, community, and agency resources, is normally accepted after some clarification and negotiation. Families are usually far more creative in generating options and identifying family and community resources than social workers are.

  The relation of family and community to state is one which John Braithwaite describes, by analogy to regulating business, as “responsive regulation,” and which Susan Chandler and I call “state-enforced family self-regulation.”9 In either case, the state does not abdicate responsibility for the “bottom line” (child safety in this case) and retains its full coercive power in the background, while widening the circle of responsibility for finding and implementing solutions and aiming to keep family self-governance and empowerment in the foreground.

  Building Community

  These examples mark a shift in professional-client relationships. Both professionals and families bring knowledge and expertise to the task at hand. And rather than substituting for the more proximate knowledge of local people, the professional task involves restraining oneself from imposing plans, solutions, or ultimatums (do this if you want your children back!). In these examples, outside helpers enable those directly involved in the situation to tap into their own wisdom, knowledge, resources, creativity, and initiative. They bring professional knowledge and expertise to bear, but at the same time rest on the assumption, as Gale Burford and Joe Hudson put it, that “lasting solutions to problems are ones that grow out of, or can fit with, the knowledge, experiences, and desires of the people most affected.”10

  These practices fundamentally alter the relationship of professionals to the families and communities they serve. They both de-emphasize that relationship and also widen the circle of responsibility and decision making to include those whose relationship to the families and community is based not on professionalism but on caring and kinship.

  In the case of child protection, the state’s statutory responsibility for child safety remains. The key shift in practice and legislation is from professional-dominated practice resting on a model of regulatory formalism to a process for decision making and planning that mobilizes and empowers children’s kin and community. It does not replace the formal processes of the court system, but—and this is surely the advantage of this kind of social practice—it enables both formal and informal care and control to enrich and constrain each other.

  All three cases involve two basic changes in ways of doing business. One is a change of relation between professional and client. The other is a widening of the circle of responsibility so that the professional-client relationship is no longer at the center of the helping process, but is instead a part (though still an indispensable part) of a larger system of both formal and informal elements.

  In each case, the professional intervention meets particular needs and builds community. But these processes are generally understood without reference to the virtue of social justice as discussed in this book.

  The Grameen Bank approach to microcredit is discussed in terms of social capital11—trust, norms of reciprocity, and networks—that is, in terms of the forms of social organization the program develops.12

  The patch approach is often described in terms of the shift in practice it requires, to what has been called “partnership practice” or “empowerment practice,” or in terms of the changes in service system, from crisis driven to prevention oriented, from fragmented to integrated.

  FGC came to be viewed as part of the larger field of the theory and practice of restorative justice. It is about making things right, repairing harm, restoring community. It requires both restorative processes and restorative values. Braithwaite added the important element of responsive regulation, so as to incorporate the formal regulatory element into restorative practices when the state becomes involved. He drew on his experience in business regulation, where the response of the regulated business (a nursing home, say, or an insurance company or a nuclear power station), not the seriousness of the violation, defines the response of the regulatory body. Is the business both able and willing to come into compliance?

  A similar approach prevails with accreditation of professional programs like those in social-work education. In areas like youth justice and child protection, the regulatory body (e.g., child-protective services) can see its task as closer to that of an accrediting body, helping the family meet standards and come into compliance, rather than that of a rescue operation or an emergency surgery, performing a “parentectomy” for the children. Except as a last resort, the aim is not the termination of parental rights (the equivalent to revocation of a license to do business or loss of accreditation). As with businesses and educational programs, the regulatory body requires that standards be met and that the family come into compliance. Seen from this perspective, the regulator does not dictate exactly how this must happen, becoming the boss of the family. Rather the government enforces the self-regulation of families, as it does of businesses.

  In child protection, the coercive power of the state still lies in the background of even the most empowering or partnership-oriented professional practice. But coercion, which cannot be abdicated or wished away and of which parents are well aware, should remain as far in the background as possible. The empowerment of families and communities to protect their members by regulating themselves stays in the foreground as much as possible. Families are required to meet their responsibility to their children. The state’s coercive power comes into play to the extent parents demonstrate their continued incapacity or unwillingness, notwithstanding the help of kin, community, and professional services, to regulate themselves and keep their children safe.

  What Does Social Justice Add?

  In these three examples, practitioners have developed practices with theories for what they were doing, but without explicit reference to the virtue of social justice. They refer to social capital, empowerment, restorative justice, or responsive regulation. But what does a social-justice perspective add? What new light does it cast on these
practices?

  In these examples, the aim is not to supplant the decision making, self-regulation, creativity, resourcefulness, or caring capacity of families, but to strengthen and support them. It is not to squeeze out the space between individual and state, but to make it more capacious and competent. In line with the principle of subsidiarity, higher-level institutions intervene (but only as necessary) to ensure the capacity of lower-level groups to carry out their moral obligations.

  Resisting the bureaucratic-professional temptations to assert their control unnecessarily and to usurp the proper functions of subsidiary groups, practitioners act with social justice. They help individuals to join with networks of others to further the common good of their families and communities. In doing so, they mitigate those social injustices embedded in cultural patterns and social practices that weaken individuals’ capacity to provide for and protect themselves and each other. Professionals’ help strengthens subsidiary groups of civil society, not the state. This help requires and develops the virtue of social justice—the disposition, habits, skills, and knowledge for association and democracy—in those being helped as well as those helping.