Abstract
This edited collection of essays from European scholars and educators about shame and social work is a long awaited and important contribution to the field and strikes at the heart of what it means to be a social worker. The authors have provided a comprehensive, timely, and critical overview of a range of theoretical and philosophical perspectives on the ubiquitous and devastating effects wrought by the use of shame across the spectrum of social work practice, impacting workers at all levels and the individuals served. Shame is variously conceptualized as an attack on subjectivity, a means of regulating and controlling the emotions of others, a way to ensure organizational compliance, and a mechanism for deflecting and projecting blame away from its sources.
Often covert but always present, the authors describe the systematic production of shame as a method of control, coercion, and domination, threatening to subjugate the social worker’s creative exercise of autonomous, professional decision-making and action, the sine qua non of reflexivity and praxis. While acknowledging that some may argue that shame can produce useful normative effects for protecting vulnerable persons from harm, the authors overwhelmingly critique shame-inducing practices as detrimental to social workers and service users.
In Chapter 1, Frost, one of the editors, provides a psychosocial framework for categorizing shame, viewing it as emanating from three realms of experience: the political/national, the group/social, and the individual/personal. Frost stresses the ways in which the failings of sociopolitical social welfare policies can silently and fastidiously inscribe themselves into the very identity of those persons who are most harmed by them and who then see themselves as failures. This is a useful conceptualization for social work practitioners and educators, who sometimes struggle with how best to integrate a multisystemic lens into individual practice.
In Chapter 6, Schröder examines emotional labor and the production of shame in a German residential setting. She provides an example of how compliance to expected normative behaviors in residential care is reinforced by sometimes harsh, rigid, and exclusionary disciplinary practices that are enacted simultaneously with forced and physical closeness. Shame-inducing sanctions, along with emotional labor, become the currency for ensuring conformity and adherence to normative behavioral expectations, while imperiling the individuality and creativity of children served.
In Chapter 8, Hardy makes a convincing case that shame, emerging from UK neo-liberal policies that favor managerialism, accountability, and risk avoidance, pervades almost all aspects of organizationally based social work practice. Workers are expected to forgo using their professional authority and best clinical judgment in managing complexity, in favor of evidence-based, actuarial policies and practices. Hardy argues for authenticity and risk-taking in social work and issues a call for collective “parrhesia”—the act of speaking truth to power as a means of challenging the status quo, despite the risks to social and institutional status (Foucault, 2010, p. 67 as cited by Hardy, p. 178).
While the authors are successful in shedding light on the myriad mechanisms of shame within contemporary European social welfare contexts, none consider the role of shame in motivating persons to enter the field of social work in the first place. Argentinian psychoanalyst Heinrich Racker posited that moral masochism, with all of its attendant guilt and shame, can induce persons to enter the helping professions. Others have suggested that an inability to cure one’s family-of-origin’s dysfunction can be a motivator. Certainly, feminist thinkers and scholars may also provide contexts for elucidating shame-based motivations for entering the profession, such as a need to do penance for not being selfless enough.
Another omission by the authors is an examination of social work education as a site for producing shame that can be internalized by students and reproduced in social work practice. For example, under the guise of gatekeeping practices, social work education may disadvantage students at the margins, who may have unique life challenges that put them at risk of failure, by establishing rigid grading policies or not recognizing occurrences of racism or micro-aggressions within classrooms or field settings. Notwithstanding these critiques, Hardy, and others within this collection, do provide a beginning framework that may be used by social work policy makers, administrators, practitioners, and educators to combat and resist the use of shaming practices in social work.
