Feminists and State Welfare (RLE Feminist Theory) by JENNIFER DALE PEGGY FOSTER

Author:JENNIFER DALE, PEGGY FOSTER [JENNIFER DALE, PEGGY FOSTER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General
ISBN: 9780710202789
Google: lJc9AAAAIAAJ
Publisher: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Published: 1986-01-01T03:41:23+00:00

Social workers, women and sexuality

Annie Hudson's analysis of social workers’ reactions to ‘deviant’ adolescent girls suggests that many social workers continue to define women as deviant if they do not follow the traditional female path towards marriage and motherhood. According to Hudson social workers tend to define adolescent girls as being ‘at risk’ if they are seen to be in danger of becoming promiscuous and/or pregnant. Hudson accepts that girls who spend their time on the streets with ‘the wrong sort of men’ may be in genuine danger, but she challenges the conventional social work wisdom that these girls are at risk from themselves and therefore in need of treatment to cure them of their deviant behaviour. ‘What needs to be contested’, she suggests, ‘is whether they are at risk from themselves (as may be implied by reception into care), or whether the dangers lie in the potential of male violence and exploitation on the street.’ (Hudson, 1983, p. 11.) Hudson claims that social workers’ treatment of ‘wayward’ adolescent girls is frequently a type of social control. Both capitalism and patriarchy, she suggests, are threatened when girls reject passive femininity and openly express their sexuality or exhibit aggressive tendencies. Girls who stray too far from the traditional paths towards marriage and motherhood become the focus for concern and social work ‘supervision’. They are then defined as not ‘fully feminine’ and as suitable cases for treatment. They may also evoke social workers’ deep seated and perhaps even unconscious fears about the uncontrollably sexual female. Hudson quotes one social worker in her study describing an adolescent under her care thus: ‘J is a very promiscuous girl, if all that she tells the other girls is true, then no young man is safe.’ (Hudson, 1984.)

As well as exposing the sexist assumptions underlying social workers’ reactions to aggressive or particularly sexually active adolescent girls, feminists have also analysed social workers’ reactions to the sexual abuse of young girls within their own families. According to Elizabeth Wilson social workers and other welfare professionals still tend to ignore evidence of incest mainly because they just ‘do not want to see anything’ which threatens their view of what family life ought to be like. Wilson admits that social workers face many practical difficulties when dealing with incest and that they may be right to be reluctant to take children away from their families too readily, but she criticizes social workers for accepting certain myths about incest, particularly the myth of ‘mother collusion’. Mothers of sexually abused children are frequently labelled sexually frigid or castrating and then blamed for colluding in their husband's abuse of their children. (Wilson, 1983.) Annie Hudson argues that by failing to place the blame for incest firmly on the male abuser, social workers avoid facing up to the feminist insight that the family is not a private haven for women but is all too often an unsafe prison. She concludes:

Social workers are prepared to take an active role in protecting young women from

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