History of Social Work

During the time period known as Victorian England, the high unemployment rate caused England’s lower class to flood the streets with nowhere to live. Soon after, the construction of workhouses began. Workhouses were built to accommodate the poor people in England. Here, they were housed, fed, and forced to work. Workhouses were some of the most cruel and controlling places in Victorian England.

According to (Dulmus & Sowers, 2012, p.106), the history of social work is one of an old religiously grounded ethos of offering, aid and comfort. This shows that social work has been around for quite a long time, helping the unfortunate and it has developed more throughout these past centuries. The profession was largely shaped by Westerns idea and events. (Chenoweth &McAuliffe, 2015, p.32). The ideas and events included could have been war, poverty and other social reforms. That is when social welfare was needed to give aid and help solve these issues. Social work largely expanded in England in the 16th during the Elizabethan poor laws and later on in America between 17 and 18th century (Dulmus & Sowers, p.6). This essay is going to focus on how social work has evolved or changed for the better from the 1960s till present.

Early social work focused on individuals and casting blame on them for their circumstances. Social workers had good intentions, but believed poor people were poor because of some failing on their part and often held a moralistic view that they were better than those they were helping. Social work has always had some type of organization behind the

Social workers’ commitment to social justice means they want everyone to have a fair and equal opportunity to an assessment. In line with fairness, social workers should tell carers about their right to refuse an assessment as their permission, and not the person receiving care, is needed before the carer’s assessment can commence. In addition, social workers, bound by legislation regarding confidentiality and information sharing, must reserve the carer’s right to privacy whilst uphold their right to a fair hearing. This is achieved by only disclosing carer’s personal details to 3rd parties with consent, unless a safeguarding concern arises.

Jane Addams and her colleague, Ellen Gates Starr, founded the most successful settlement house in the United States otherwise known as the Hull-House (“Settlement” 1). It was located in a city overrun by poverty, filth and gangsters, and it could not have come at a better time (Lundblad 663). The main purpose of settlement houses was to ease the transition into the American culture and labor force, and The Hull-House offered its residents an opportunity to help the community, was a safe haven for the city, and led the way through social reform for women and children.

In this essay I will try to highlight the key attempts made to improve workers housing in Britain between the years of 1850-1910.

Young, middle-class, educated men and women worked to link the gap between social classes by living in inner-city settlement houses. Over 400 settlements in big cities were established by 1910 sponsoring activities such as art exhibits, vocational training, and health clinics. The vanguard of Progressivism, settlement house workers backed housing and labor reform, offered meeting space to unions, and served as school nurses, probation officers, and teachers (Norton,

The Progressive Era was a time of social work, the struggle for women’s rights, and millions of immigrants expanding into the United States. During the era, there was many poverty stricken neighborhoods. Poverty reforms were created to help poverty in the U.S., one of them being settlement houses. Settlement houses were influenced by Toynbee Hall in London. Their idea was that students and wealthy people should “settle” in impoverished neighborhood and provide services and improve the lives of the neighborhoods and those living in them. Settlement houses were designed to help the poor, including immigrants, with the help of middle class workers, in an effort to improve the neighborhoods in the poorest parts of the cities.

Jane Addams was a Progressive reformer and famous advocate for the settlement house movement. Addams mostly focused on improving social conditions for immigrants and for other residents of urban slums. Jane Addams’s health problem caused her to become famous reformer. In 1881 she travelled many medical schools. In one of her journey she took her friend Ellen Gates Starr with her. They visited well known Toynbee Hall in London. The purpose of Toynbee Hall was to reduce urban problems such as poverty. This visitation inspired them to create one settlement house in Chicago. In short term their dream became true. In 1889 they opened Hull House in the neighborhood of slums in Chicago. Hull House provided services for the poor immigrants in that

5. What social conditions during early 1800s contributed to the development of houses of refuge? The social conditions that contributed to the development of houses of refugee were drunkenness, vagrancy, and crime.

The settlement house movement was a social reform that was first established or started in England in 1884 when the first settlement house was opened in Whitechapel and it was called the Toynbee Hall and was staffed with university men . It rose in America around the time that women struggled for suffrage, the development of social work as a profession, and the arrival of millions of new immigrants into the country. The idea of the settlement house was founded or formulated by a man that went to university named Cannon Barnett who wanted other university men to help working class neighborhoods to relive poverty by “settling” into those neighborhoods. He also wanted the university men to learn about the real world and he thought that only way for them to do that was to live day to day in the slums like the people that they were helping .

The London slums grew out of the rising population in urban areas. Individuals working extended hours in Victorian times had to live close to their employment. Fully taking advantage of the fact, available housing became scarce and highly priced. Residents of the slums would sometimes rent their rooms for 2 pence to 4 pence a day to other laborers to be able to afford it. They were often unsanitary, overcrowded and neglected. Not much has changed however, projects all over the world continued to be disregarded. The late nineteenth century found an unfortunate attraction to the economic, social and cultural deprivation of slum by various groups of the middle and upper classes (Diniejko, 2013). Missionaries, social investigators, writers, and simply wealthy people would visit the neighborhoods of the poorest citizens seeking scandalous entertainments. The New York Times published an article about this practice dubbed slumming which spread from London to New York,

History of social welfare policy regarding veterans falls under the Veterans Bureau General Order year of 1926 which established a social worker program outlining its organization as well as functions during the first year only fourteen social workers were placed psychiatric hospitals later placing twenty-two in regional offices around the country. The program was small but efficient at that time they focused exclusively psychiatric and tuberculosis patients. The vision of Mrs. Irene Grant Dalymple who directed the social work program envision that the social work program should be incorporated in the VA than having social services contracted by outside organization this has been practice following World War

The article I choose was Researching Social Work Practice Close Up: Using Ethnographic and Mobile Methods to Understand Encounters between Social Worker, Children and Families by Harry Ferguson from the British Journal of Social Work. Ferguson, discusses the challenges of research the face to face interactions with social workers, children and families. Ferguson felt there was a need to better understand the dynamic of social works, children and families, due to “reviews into cases were children have died have shown that social workers were present with the children when they were injured but did not effectively engage with them” (Ferguson pg 154). Ferguson shows that is possible to observe these face to face encounters while being ethical.