🦚 Methodological Integrity and Lived Testimony: An Intellectual Refusal of Institutional Mythology
📚 Critical Methodology: Disarmament by Design
This inquiry is not bound by the hollow formalities of traditional empiricism.
It makes no claim to neutrality, and harbours no illusions of objective distance.
It proceeds from the unapologetic premise that:
Knowledge is always political — and methods must be crafted to confront, not legitimise, the systems they critique.
A system that conceals coercion beneath the lexicon of care cannot be analysed through tools that accept its definitions.
Thus, this paper deploys a critical philosophical methodology, drawing from:
Critical theory, to dismantle institutional fictions
Post-structuralism, to interrogate power beyond its stated aims
Anti-carceral ethics, to expose the violence concealed in procedural benevolence
It privileges conceptual clarity over statistical seduction, and lived epistemology over bureaucratic abstraction.
It does not ask whether social work is effective;
It questions the legitimacy of "effectiveness" itself.
🖋️ Theoretical Foundations:
Michel Foucault’s bio-power: State control masked as care.
bell hooks’ abolitionist love: Domination cannot be rebranded as protection.
Trauma-informed feminist epistemologies: Lived experience is evidentiary, not anecdotal.
Reflexivity is not a methodological flaw;
It is the condition of intellectual honesty.
Abolitionist social work theory further anchors this critique, rejecting not merely individual abuses, but the carceral logic of the profession itself.
This is not an attempt to rehabilitate discourse —
It is a philosophical act of demolition and reconstruction.
📜 Lived Experience and Testimonial Authority: Truth Written in Aftermath
Theory without testimony is architecture without foundation.
Thus, this work is situated explicitly within the lived aftermath of institutional violence.
I write not as a detached observer,
but as a scholar and a parent — a subject, a critic, a witness.
🩺 Medical Silencing and Communication Violence
Despite documented disabilities:
Eosinophilic asthma
Muscle tension dysphonia
Panic-induced aphonia
Social work institutions repeatedly demanded verbal compliance.
My silence was weaponised.
My speech, when possible, was pathologised.
Requests for written communication were ignored.
Panic attacks were treated as defiance.
One notable instance:
I was required to narrate a complex medical history while in respiratory distress — and then reprimanded for being "uncooperative."
This was not a miscommunication.
It was institutional violence dressed as "procedure."
📜 The Rhetoric of Concern and the Politics of Entrapment
I was assured:
"You are not under investigation."
And then:
Public Law Outline (PLO) letters arrived, without evidence, without cause.
Consent was staged until dissent appeared.
Then dissent was criminalised.
No harm occurred.
My children remained — and remain — academically excellent, emotionally bonded, medically protected.
Yet I was targeted precisely because I:
Questioned authority
Documented inconsistency
Asserted autonomy
Thus began a campaign of escalation rooted not in protection, but in retaliation.
📜 Linguistic Gaslighting: The Codification of Doubt
Language became the institution’s most refined weapon.
Calmness? “Detached.”
Grief? “Overwhelmed.”
Boundary-setting? “Aggressive.”
Silence? “Withholding.”
There is no recognised category in institutional logic for:
A self-regulating, critically literate, medically informed parent who refuses to capitulate.
In the institutional imagination, competence without submission is a category error — one that must be corrected by force, or failing that, by erasure.
📜 Impact on My Children: Institutional Violence by Proxy
The most devastating harm was not inflicted by family failure —
but by the very professionals who claimed to protect.
Respiratory infections following disruptive home visits
Interrupted education and modelling opportunities
Erosion of fundamental trust in social institutions
My children learned not caution, but distrust.
Not safety, but surveillance.
This was not safeguarding.
It was psychological vandalism masquerading as benevolence.