🦚 Epistemological Disarmament: A Manifesto for the Restoration of Ethical Care
📚 If social work is to retain any claim to moral legitimacy, it must undergo not mere revision, but epistemological disarmament.
Tinkering with protocols will not suffice.
Reform must begin with the uncomfortable admission:
The profession, as presently practiced, is predicated on mistrust, coercion, and the aestheticisation of control.
From that foundational premise, the following are issued — not as suggestions, but as ethical imperatives for the reclamation of dignity within care.
📜 1. Redefine Support on the Basis of Demonstrable Harm — Not Speculative Risk
Intervention must be evidence-based, not a bureaucratic divination ritual disguised as "concern."
Abstract risk must not be a pretext for institutional intrusion.
Speculative harm must never substitute for actual, evidenced harm.
📜 2. Prohibit the Instrumentalisation of Children to Enforce Adult Compliance
Weaponising children to coerce adult behaviour is:
Coercion masquerading as safeguarding.
Children are not bargaining chips.
Any system that weaponises love against the family is structurally abusive.
📜 3. Institute Mandatory Training in Autonomy-Affirming, Trauma-Informed, and Culturally Literate Practice
Professionalism without epistemic humility is:
Assimilation by another name.
Train practitioners to listen without projecting.
Train them to support without directing.
Confront systemic bias with more than performative workshops.
📜 4. Mandate Truly Independent, Community-Informed Oversight
Internal reviews are institutional laundering, not accountability.
Oversight must be external, community-rooted, and empowered to intervene publicly and decisively.
Anything less is theatre for bureaucrats.
📜 5. Establish Robust Redress Mechanisms for Families Subjected to Institutional Harm
Harm, once inflicted, cannot be undone — but it must be acknowledged.
Financial compensation
Public apology
Formal legal recognition of wrongdoing
Absence of redress is not neutrality; it is state-sanctioned complicity.
📜 6. Require Social Workers to Wear Body Cameras During All Home Visits and Formal Interactions
If surveillance is good enough for citizens,
It is good enough for the surveillants.
Transparency must be mutual, not one-sided.
Let the record show what "support" truly entails.
📜 7. Remove Financial Incentives Tied to Child Removal and Foster Care Placement
The commodification of trauma is not care.
Profit motives must be extricated from social care structures.
No agency should thrive by dismantling the families it claims to protect.
📜 8. Redirect Funding Toward Peer-Led, Community-Based, Culturally Embedded Models of Support
The best support is not hierarchical; it is horizontal.
Communities must be resourced to care for their own.
Power must be decentralised, not fortified through bureaucratic paternalism.
🧾 Closing Declaration
Let it be stated unequivocally:
These are not utopian musings.
They are structural correctives.
They are ethical minimums.
To dismiss them as “unrealistic” is to confess one's allegiance to convenience over justice.
If the profession is unwilling to do better,
Then it must at least have the decency to stop pretending it is trying.