Eileen Younghusband - Social Work and Social Change

Volume 38

SOCIAL WORK AND SOCIAL CHANGE

EILEEN YOUNGHUSBAND

First published in 1964 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

This edition first published in 2022

by Routledge

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1964 George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

ISBN: 978-1-03-203381-5 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-00-321681-0 (Set) (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-03-205921-1 (Volume 38) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-03-205925-9 (Volume 38) (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-00-319985-4 (Volume 38) (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003199854

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

by
EILEEN YOUNGHUSBAND

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1964

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no portion may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers.

George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1964

printed in great britain
in 11 on 12 point Fournier type
by c. tinling and co. ltd
liverpool, london and prescot

To social work friends in many countries,
and especially to Charlotte Towle, with gratitude

Social work is undergoing and has already undergone great changes in the last decade or so. It has been profoundly affected by social change in general and has also begun to be more articulate, precise and objective about its own methods and aims. The papers that form this book which were written at different dates themselves demonstrate this change. The earliest paper Training for Casework: Its Place in the Curriculum, dates from a United Nations seminar in Finland in 1952. The situation described in it contrasts sharply with that outlined in a paper for another United Nations seminar in the Netherlands in 1963.

Thanks are recorded to the United Nations for permission to reprint these two papers, and also to the University of Chicago Press for permission to reprint The Dilemma of the Juvenile Court, and to the Unitarian Service Committee, Boston, for permission to print The Philosophy of Social Work and Some Highlights of Social Work Education. Acknowledgments are also made to the various periodicals in which other articles appeared. Finally, grateful thanks are due to Robin Huws Jones, Charles Furth and Shirley Knight without whom what follows would have remained in a decent oblivion.

Eilbbn Younghusband

London, 1964

preface

i the social services and social work

2. The Evolution of Social Work

3. Social Work Today

4. The Social Services and Social Change

5. Adoption and the Unmarried Mother

6. The Juvenile Court and the Child

7. The Dilemma of the Juvenile Court

8. Juvenile Court Reform

ii international aspects of social work

1. The Philosophy of Social Work

2. The Challenge of Social Change to Social Work

3. Some Highlights of Social Work Education

4. An International Appraisal of Trends in Education for Social Work

5. The Relation between Basic and Further Training for Social Work

6. Training for Casework: Its place in the Curriculum

It is worth pausing to look back over the development of social work in order to try to understand what we have discovered, what we have achieved, what we have lost by the way, and what objectives we should try to set ourselves for the future. This excursion will not induce complacency, for there is nothing to be complacent about. But if we turn to look at the history of social work, the peak periods and the troughs, we find reason to hope that, having rested for too long by still waters, we are once more on the march.

In a short space it is not possible to do more than bow to the earlier pioneers like Vives, St Vincent de Paul, Count Rumford and Thomas Chalmers, though the discoveries they made in fact became part of the life blood of social work. They are, however, its more remote ancestors. The grandparents of social work in this country are typified by the Charity Organisation Society and the police court missioners. The C.O.S. of course discovered just what its name saidthe importance of organizing charity. This meant instead of indiscriminate doles a thorough investigation of each case, making a plan in co-operation with the applicant, always giving adequate help if you helped at all, seeing a case through to the end once you had taken it on, only helping the deserving, and keeping full records of what you had done. Some of this rings harshly on modern ears, even if it is not quite so fashionable nowadays to decry the old C.O.S. But if we translate these principles into current medical terms which are familiar to us they sound much better. They then become thorough initial diagnosis of the disease, not giving a bottle of cough mixture to cure tuberculosis, taking the patient into the doctors confidence, using all necessary resources for the treatment of the patient, and where resources are limited concentrating them on treatable cases.

It is only necessary to think of the mid-nineteenth century with its mass poverty ill relieved by a harsh poor law or indiscriminate and inadequate charity doles, or (more effectively) by organized mutual aid and spontaneous good neighbourliness; to think too how little we knew by then about rescuing people from drowning in the mass of poverty, to realize how much the old C.O.S. achieved. Its discovery, repeating in a measure those of earlier times was that, if almsgiving is to be effective in helping the receiver rather than solacing the emotions of the giver, it must follow upon objective study of the situation which creates the need, and must be combined with a personal, individual approach in which everyone concerned is aiming at the same result. In modern terminology this would mean a thorough diagnosis followed by treatment planned in the light of the diagnosis. This, for the C.O.S. pioneers involved the study of a variety of social situations as well as of individual need.