Rick Henderson and Mike Pochin: A Right Result? Advocacy, justice and empowerment

As Henderson and Pochin point out in the introduction to their book, recent years have seen the concept of advocacy given increasing prominence in central and local government policy in the UK. It made an appearance in local community care and long-stay hospital closure plans. It features in reforms to the health service in England and Wales, in the form of the Patient Advocacy and Liaison Services (DoH 2000), while proposed changes to the mental health system also accord a key role to service users' advocates. In addition, Valuing People, central government's proposals on the future strategy for people with learning disabilities, promised the widespread development of advocacy services (DoH 2001). Advocacy, traditionally located on the margins of state activity in the UK, is experiencing something of an attempt to shift it into mainstream policy and service provision. This makes it a significant time to review the core values and practices that have distinguished advocacy from other forms of professional and voluntary intervention and to explore how these may be preserved and developed in the contemporary context.

Social Work, Social Politics and Justice

"The disaster does not primarily lie in people and in the way that they perceive the circumstances, rather in the circumstances that doom people to powerlessness and apathy - circumstances which they could, however, change" (Adorno, 1966, p. 189). When Karl Marx writes to Friedrich Sorge in his letter of the 19.10.1877, regarding his critique of the opinion of his opponents Dühring & Co., that one must deal with "a whole crowd of immature students and pompous doctors who claim to give socialism a 'higher, ideal' turn, that is to say, to replace the materialistic basis (that demands serious, objective study if one wants to operate on it)… with modern mythology by means of their goddesses of justice, freedom, equality and fraternité" (Marx, 1973, p. 303; cf. Schiller, 1993, p. 199 onwards), this thus refers to fundamental problems with the concept of "justice" up until today. As the debate shows, it concerns the contextualization of the term "justice", its meaning in historically concrete as well as socio-political circumstances, and therefore a social analysis that is both representation and critique. Essentially it also concerns the question of the relationship between ideas and reality and the development of standards of historical systematic 'nature' out of social frameworks (see Frey, 1978; Theunissen, 1989).

Book Review of “At Risk: Social Justice in Child Welfare and Other Human Services” by Karen J. Swift and Marilyn Callahan, 2009, Toronto: University of Toronto Press

The newest book by Canadian social work scholars Karen Swift and Marilyn Callahan is exemplary of how other disciplines can invigorate social work theory. “At Risk” uses child welfare practice as an entry point for exploring the continuing movement away from addressing needs and towards the management of risk in the human services.