Blog Launch: Radical Reflections on Social Work

Introduction

After two decades immersed in the emotionally saturated terrain of child protection, I have arrived at a juncture where silence is no longer tenable. This blog marks the beginning of a new chapter—not a reinvention, but a reclamation. It is a space for radical critique, intellectual honesty, and unapologetic truth-telling about a profession that demands everything and often returns very little. It is also, quite frankly, a means of survival. I intend to earn a living from this work, and I make no apologies for that.

The Myth of Resilience

In the shadowlands of statutory social work, I came to understand that "resilience" is managerial shorthand for the slow, dignified disintegration of one's inner life. It is a euphemism deployed to mask systemic neglect, a rhetorical device used to valorise suffering while deflecting accountability. The system did not hollow me out; I simply reached the natural perimeter of human endurance while those around me remained preoccupied with performance indicators, as though emotional wellbeing were an optional accessory rather than the very substrate of the work.

The Practice

Across two relentless decades, I became an inadvertent custodian of crises that were never mine to inherit, absorbing the emotional residue of other people’s catastrophes while navigating institutional labyrinths that routinely exceeded the limits of policy and common sense. And yet, within that long, unyielding stretch, there were moments—brief, incandescent, almost mythic—that suspended the cynicism the profession so expertly cultivates: a family inching its way back toward equilibrium; a child finally released from the quiet tyranny of violence; parents who, against every statistical expectation, dismantled their own destructive patterns and reclaimed the children they had once imperilled; a student discovering, perhaps for the first time, the tensile strength of their own voice. These were the rare intervals that rendered the work not merely survivable but, on occasion, startlingly worthwhile.

The Academy

In a gesture that now feels almost academically farcical, I also spent years teaching social work at UK universities—lecturing, supervising, researching—as though preparing the next cohort for the same ritualised depletion were some noble pedagogical obligation. My doctoral thesis, A Narrative Study of Social Work with African Refugees in South London, examined displacement and survival; the irony, of course, is that I now find myself displaced from my own vocation, surviving on whatever intellectual remnants remain after years of statutory triage.

Within the academy, I witnessed a parallel theatre of oppression. Social work students were treated as statistics, their humanity often disregarded by lecturers more invested in gatekeeping than in nurturing. The culture was one of surveillance and control, not care. Many students were failed not for lack of competence but for lack of conformity. Radical thought was punished; critique was pathologised.

The Disconnect

There exists a profound and dangerous disconnect between what is taught in social work education and the brutal realities of frontline practice. The curriculum is often sanitised, abstracted, and divorced from the lived experiences of those who endure the system’s violence—both as professionals and as service users. The profession, which ought to be rooted in care, is instead dominated by those who wield power with impunity. To succeed, one must conform: as a professional, as a client, as a student, even as a lecturer. To challenge is to risk obliteration.

Why This Blog Exists

This blog is for those who have been silenced, marginalised, and broken by a system that pretends to care. It is for social workers who are tired of being treated like disposable labour. It is for families subject to local authority involvement, for children who have survived the care system, and for students who refuse to be complicit in their own oppression. It is for anyone who recognises that the profession is in crisis—and that crisis is structural, not personal.

What Comes Next

Here, I will write with the clarity, complexity, and critical edge that the profession so desperately needs. I will not dilute my language to appease institutional sensibilities. I will not pretend that everything is fine. I will tell the truth, and I will do so with the full force of my academic training, professional experience, and personal conviction.

If any of this unsettles something familiar within you, stay with me. This is only the beginning.