🦚 The Sleight of Hand: A Philosophical Dissection of Social Work’s Cultural Mythology
Filed under the documentation of institutional epistemology, narrative possession, and the romanticisation of coercive control.
📜 The prevailing cultural narrative — that social work exists primarily to protect the vulnerable — is not merely misguided;
it is an exquisite sleight of hand.
Behind its rhetorical flourish lies:
A mechanism of institutional dominance,
Cloaked in the aesthetics of care,
Performed in the moral theatre of public life,
where coercion is romanticised, scrutiny disguised as concern, and control transmuted into compassionthrough the alchemy of professional jargon.
📚 The Construction of Infallibility
The public is not invited to examine:
Evidence of efficacy;
Evidence of ethical consistency.
They are instead asked to extend blind trust to a professional class:
Granted automatic virtue by proximity to innocence;
Elevated as the custodians of the child,
rendered, thereby, unassailable.
Critique of the profession becomes:
Tantamount to betrayal of the child;
Intellectually dishonest to even propose;
A deflection tactic both disturbingly effective and culturally embedded.
📜 Institutionalised Exile: The Fate of the Questioner
When trust in social work is tentatively questioned:
Suspicion is not redirected to the institution.
It is immediately projected onto the questioner.
Thus begins the ritual of institutionalised exile:
The doubter is pathologised;
The parent is demonised;
The system is exonerated by default.
Dialogue is not permitted.
Only professional diagnosis of dissent.
📚 The Epistemic Inversion: Obedience and Deviance
At the core of this structure lies an epistemic inversion:
Obedience is maturity;
Resistance is deviance.
Autonomy, in this context:
Becomes intolerable;
Becomes a structural threat to an ecosystem demanding emotional dependence and procedural submission.
The self-possessed parent reveals:
That families can thrive without intervention.
Such a truth must be obscured.
Autonomy must be pathologised, punished, and erased —
under the sacred pretext of "safeguarding."
📜 The True Engine: Possession, Not Protection
At its core, the social work establishment is driven:
Not by protection,
But by possession —
Possession of:
Narrative;
Authority;
The child.
The distinction is not semantic.
It is:
The fulcrum upon which the profession’s credibility tilts into permanent crisis.