🦚 On the Incompatibility of Coercion and Care
🎩 A Prelude in Moral Inversion
To examine British social work is to confront a most peculiar moral inversion: a system that speaks of dignity while administering humiliation, professes support while enacting surveillance, and invokes protection while practising control.
The institution has become so adept at cloaking coercion in therapeutic language that even those ensnared by it often struggle to name their experience for what it is: state-sanctioned abuse.
Indeed, this is the mark of a truly effective system of domination — not that it inflicts harm, but that it persuades its victims the harm was necessary.
📜 The Grand Error: Compliance Confused with Virtue
At the core of this philosophical collapse lies a singular, devastating error: the conflation of compliance with virtue.
In this deranged schema:
The ethical parent is not the advocate, but the supplicant.
Dissent is reframed as disorder.
Silence is presumed guilt.
Intelligence is pathologised as manipulation.
Autonomy becomes a diagnosis in need of cure.
Thus emerges not protection, but a culture of cultivated suspicion — one that punishes clarity, undermines trust, and fractures the very familial bonds it purports to preserve.
🛡️ Ethical Care Cannot Exist Amidst Coercion
This treatise has argued, without apology, that ethical care and coercion are mortal enemies.
Support, when conditioned on surrender, is not support; it is blackmail.
Consent, when extracted through threat, is not consent; it is capitulation.
Intervention, when divorced from demonstrable harm, is not protection; it is predation.
A system that retaliates against those who voice these truths is not merely misguided —
it is dangerous.
🌿 In Defence of Autonomy: The Only Ethical Terrain
The antidote to this degradation is not chaos, but autonomy.
Consent is a precondition, not a garnish.
Collaboration is a covenant, not a convenience.
Cultural humility is the bedrock, not a brochure promise.
Epistemic respect is non-negotiable.
Autonomy neither presumes incompetence nor demands uniformity. Most crucially, it refuses to mistake authority for wisdom.
⚖️ A Manifesto for Dismantling
The reforms advanced herein — peer-led support, linguistic deconstruction, and structural abolition — are not radical in any meaningful moral sense. They are radical only because modern social work has so thoroughly normalised coercion that freedom appears treasonous.
If social work is to possess a future worth defending, it must be dismantled — intellectually, structurally, and ethically.
Not rebranded.
Not cosmetically reformed.
Dismantled.
Only then might we imagine a system wherein families are revered as the architects of their own lives, and children are safeguarded not through domination, but through the relational integrity of their communities.
🪶 Final Decree
Anything less is not reform.
It is complicity.