Encouraging outrage in social work: Palestine and Ebola

ABSTRACT

By advocating the universality of human rights, as in support for Palestinians’ entitlement to self-determination and the need for generous responses to the Ebola epidemic, social workers can improve their advocacy of social justice issues closer to home. By participating in the world-wide, non-violent Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign to end Israel's brutal occupation of Palestinian lands, social workers could enhance their political understanding and skills; they could live and love the notion that the personal is the political. Engagement in such campaigns contributes to an identity of confident self-respect. This, said French human rights’ advocate Stephane Hessel, is achieved by outrage over injustice because such a reaction makes connections to a common humanity. The alternative to such outrage is indifference. By taking stands on human rights issues, social work educators and practitioners would be confronting those key questions, ‘what do you stand for, what do you believe in ?’ Their answers could re-activate the social justice roots of their profession and could enable them better to confront the selfishness of social policies in Australia. Their jobs would become more vibrant, their lives more interesting. Who could resist that?

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• social welfare
• outrage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.