Social workers as targets for integration

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to write against normative discourses and interpretations of ‘integration’ by nominating social workers and social work as the main subject of ‘integration’ and find ways to overcome exclusionary and discriminating social work practices. To do that, we use material collected when observing public service interpreters giving lectures to social workers about their experiences from encounters in social work settings. In a critical analysis, we found two ‘integration’ problems, that is, certain problems that social workers have in making themselves accessible and where they risk reinforcing exclusion and discrimination. One problem is ‘the failure of handling perceptions that social services take children’. The other is ‘the failures of (re)producing bureaucratically driven social assistance’. These problems might lead to exclusionary practices towards migrant families, often with disastrous outcomes. The analysis shows that these problems appear due to social workers’ lack of institutional self-awareness, language competencies, and emphatic ability. To overcome these shortcomings, the interpreters emphasized the impact of encounters that social workers were already involved in during their everyday work. The interpreters recognize that social services are unknown to most families who are newly arrived in Sweden and point out the importance of making more efforts to be clear, rephrasing questions, explaining, avoiding abbreviations, and becoming proactive in dialogue outside of the offices, i.e. recognizing that social work is language work.

KEYWORDS:

• child protection
• discrimination
• integration
• public service interpreter
• social assistance
• social work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Asylum, Migration, and Integration Foundation (AMIF) financed the project. The study has been ethically reviewed and approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Agency, Dnr 2020–0471.

2. Words in italics are presented in Swedish followed by a translation. These words refer to technical language used in social assistance and are kept since they illustrate that they are difficult to translate and are often either explained or reproduced in Swedish by the interpreter.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund.