🦚 The Carceral Roots of Social Work: On Inheritance, Illusion, and the Myth of Benevolence
Filed under the documentation of historical continuity, systemic denial, and the romanticisation of moral supremacy.
📜 To understand the contemporary failures of social work is to recognise:
They are not anomalies.
Nor are they emergent dysfunctions of an otherwise well-intentioned system.
They are:
Inheritances.
The profession is:
Not broken;
It is performing precisely as designed.
And the design — as history makes uncomfortably clear — is rooted not in care,
but in containment.
📚 I. The Paternalistic Genesis of Social Work
The modern institution of social work:
Evolved not from an ethic of empowerment,
But from the paternalistic logic of the poorhouse, the reformatory, and the orphanage.
These were:
Not places of refuge;
They were instruments of social purification,
Designed to extract, discipline, and morally rehabilitate those deemed undesirable.
The vulnerable were:
Never the focus.
They were the raw material.
📜 II. The Machinery of Institutionalised Trafficking
Orphanages and boys’ homes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries offer an unvarnished view:
Publicly positioned as sanctuaries;
Functionally operated as holding pens for:
The poor,
The racialised,
The inconvenient.
Children:
Were not housed for their benefit,
But for society’s comfort.
They were:
Exploited for labour;
Their emotional needs ignored;
Their humanity rendered conditional.
One need not speculate whether this constituted trafficking.
Historical records leave no ambiguity:
Children were transferred under dubious pretences;
Institutions relied on their servitude to remain solvent;
"Placements" thinly veiled the extraction of child labour under the guise of moral development.
Their identities were:
Erased;
Their trauma medicalised;
Their abuse institutionalised.
📚 III. The Present as Palimpsest
This legacy is not a cautionary tale.
It is:
The soil from which the present system has grown.
The language may have changed.
But:
The function remains chillingly familiar.
Today’s social workers:
No longer operate industrial orphanages,
But they participate in pipelines that:
Remove children with alarming ease;
Place them into care systems riddled with neglect, surveillance, and vulnerability to exploitation.
📜 IV. The Persistence of Ideological Architecture
The parallels are not incidental.
The ideological architecture persists:
Families are still deemed unfit based on:
Poverty,
Nonconformity,
Cultural variance.
The threshold for removal remains perilously low.
The assumption that the state is a more reliable custodian than the family remains appallingly widespread.
📚 V. Historical Amnesia as Institutional Policy
Perhaps most disturbingly:
The contemporary profession has failed to reckon with its history.
Social work training:
Rarely confronts its colonial entanglements;
Its classist origins;
Its proximity to systems of trafficking.
Instead:
It cloaks itself in ahistorical benevolence —
Pretending to have been born pure,
Untethered from its carceral ancestry.
This delusion is:
Not merely intellectually embarrassing;
It is institutionally dangerous.
📜 VI. The Path to Authentic Reform
For as long as social work:
Refuses to acknowledge its complicity in historical harm,
It will continue to reproduce those harms in the present.
Reform, if it is to be meaningful, must begin with historical honesty.
Until the profession:
Confronts the reality that its foundations were built upon control, moral supremacy, and exploitation —
It cannot claim the moral authority to lead anyone forward.
What we inherit, we must also interrogate.
And what we interrogate, if we are honest, we must be willing to abandon.
📜 Final Observation
The contemporary profession clutches the language of compassion,
while operating with the legacy of containment.
Until it chooses honesty over heritage,
it will remain an institution more committed to performance than to protection.