Just before this final issue of the year was being collated we were able to welcome a new addition to the editorial team. Our new colleague is Heidrun Wulfekühler, professor of ethics in social work at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Hannover, Germany. Heidrun has published widely in German and English, including valuable contributions to this journal in the last few years. She has held numerous academic and research positions at the University of Applied Sciences in Osnabrück, Faculty of Social Work and at the Wilhelms-Universität Münster Faculty of Philosophy. She also has experience of social work in Germany and the USA, working with a variety of service users. The editorial team are looking forward to working with her, and further developing our plans for the future of the journal.
This final general issue of the journal contains some stimulating practice papers as well as thought-provoking academic papers. It is unusual but of interest that four papers (two academic papers and two practice papers) all originate in Aotearoa New Zealand – a country that has made headlines for good practice during the pandemic. However, the first paper in this issue by Merlinda Weinberg The Supremacy of Whiteness in Social Work Ethics is a careful but powerful examination of a topic to which both academics and practitioners need to pay close attention. The paper explores the minimisation of racism as an ethical issue in the field of social work (a topic also evident in the Aotearoa New Zealand papers), and is illustrated by two research studies with racialized practitioners. Weinberg also explores the influence of Kant on traditional approaches to ethics in social work, arguing that there is a difficulty with universal principles as interpreted in social work ethics in the Global North, with potentially harmful consequences. The paper offers a more focused and specific study, complementing an earlier paper in this journal on a similar topic – ‘decolonizing white care’ – by Shona Hunter, (Hunter, Citation2021).
Kathryn Muyskens, a US political philosopher with special interests in the politics of health and has contributed the second paper entitled A Human Right to What Kind of Health? She offers a link to the first paper insofar as it is also critical of assumptions about the universality of universal rights to health, contending that an explicitly political and pluralistic account would more appropriately help guide international and cross-cultural interventions on behalf of health. She concedes the importance of an enforceable minimum standard of health, but asserts that it also needs to admit a large degree of cultural flexibility. Muyskens aims to clarify what makes up that minimum standard in a way that avoids unjustified parochial bias, while avoiding the danger of undermining the force of a widely accepted universal human right.
In their paper, Koen Gevaert, Sabrina Keinemans & Rudi Roose examine the problem of prioritising in youth care in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. The article’s analysis of Prioritising Cases in Youth Care: An Empirical Study of Professionals’ Approaches to Argumentation, shows that workers take a personal stance on the criteria for assigning priority where there are scarce resources. The authors’ main conclusion is that the prioritisation process illustrates the moral-political core of decision-making practice, even (perhaps especially) when it appears to be just a technical issue. It raises the issue of whether professionals are as aware as they might be of their own processes of argument and interpretation.
There are three contributions to the journal in this issue about ethical issues in health work that emanate from Aotearoa New Zealand – two practice papers and this fourth academic study by Kelly J. Glubb-Smith. Glubb-Smith's paper on Realising Values: The Place of Social Justice in Health Social Work Practice in Aotearoa New Zealand, explores how 15 health social workers negotiate value demands when working with new-born infants. Despite the tensions and risk-laden situations where bias and racism are central concerns, the study re-affirmed the place of social justice as a ‘primary organising value’, and advocates a stronger focus on the profession's values.
In the fifth paper from Australia, Sally Robinson and her colleagues Anne Graham, Antonia Canosa, Tim Moore, Nicola Taylor & Tess Boyle, have contributed a paper on disability services that has a focus on the views of young people with disability and adults who work with them. The aim was to elicit their opinions about how well their wellbeing and safety was supported by services. In the paper, Ethical Practice in Disability Services: Views of Young People and Staff, the authors come to the conclusion that closer attention needs to be given to the intersection between individual and systemic factors in shaping ethical practice. This will hopefully confirm what good practitioners currently attempt to do, but it is a kind of research that is always valuable in constantly changing circumstances and settings.
The Ethics in Practice section of the journal contains three substantial contributions, two of which deal with ethical values arising in health settings in Aotearoa New Zealand. Zoe Bourke has written a critical review of the literature on Stigma and Personality Disorder with a focus on developing interventions and responses that support self-management, to support the recovery of whaiora (people seeking wellness). It takes ethical concepts and interweaves them with aspects of established therapies, aiming to support lives worth living. From a similar national setting, Ruta Sale writes specifically about Pacific people and mental health. Tongan people in Aotearoa New Zealand experience higher rates of mental health challenges than Tongans born in Tonga. This paper explores how services could use available evidence to support more appropriate responses for Pacific Islanders, and especially Tongan communities. The final paper in the practice section was written by a Slovenian graduate student of social work, Ana Kapelj, some of whose lectures stimulated her thinking about ethical boundaries in social work. She wishes to challenge the idea of rigidity of those boundaries, and explore the possibility of fluid boundaries, keeping in mind what she sees as their main purpose – to protect human dignity.