Willing to listen, learn and understand

Events of the last few days have been difficult for me. They have led me to reflect not only on my personal experience as a woman of colour, but also on my profession and role as a social worker.

I grew up in a racially segregated town in the north of England and felt the impact of racism from an early age. I was motivated to challenge prejudice, and as a teenager I volunteered at a local youth club and served as a regional youth councillor promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion. It was these early experiences and my desire for greater social justice that ultimately led to me becoming a social worker.

Social work is a values-based profession, grounded in principles of social justice, human rights, shared responsibility, and respect for diversity. As a specialist regulator, we’re striving to be rooted in these same values. It’s the very thing that made me want to work here. Following recent events, I am acutely aware of why our professional standards are at the heart of what we do. They actively encourage us to recognise differences across diverse communities, challenge the impact of disadvantage and discrimination on people and communities and encourage us so that we can confront and resolve issues of inequality and inclusion to improve people’s lives.

Being critically reflective, open and willing to challenge is an essential element of being a social worker. It’s something I absolutely bring to my role here as a regional engagement lead, ensuring that we always consider how we can do better for people. Yet we know that COVID-19 has killed a disproportionately high number of people from black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. We can also predict that the pre-existing layers of inequality in society have been, and will be, exacerbated and compounded by this pandemic. So how and where do any of us start to make a change?

Last week, I delivered a presentation at our all staff meeting about the role of social work in promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion as part of our new steering group to actively keep this a part of our conversation. We still live in an era where I am asked ‘Where are you from? No, where are you REALLY from?’ because of my ethnicity. We need to create the space to discuss the things that make us uncomfortable. In so doing we have opportunity and hope to overturn and change long held beliefs, and unconscious bias. Recognising and naming privilege and power means we can think about how that power has been used in the past, and how it needs to be used now, more than ever, to support those who are marginalised. We don't need to be highly knowledgeable about each other’s cultures or heritage, we just need to be open, respectful and willing to listen, learn and understand.

Organisationally, we know that we have more to do. We are actively working on making that change through developing our equality, diversity and inclusion strategy, our approach to recruitment and through our national advisory forum. As ever, we will not achieve change alone. As individuals, we must take responsibility to reflect and challenge ourselves, and our own practice and what we need to do differently, however uncomfortable that might feel. I alone am not enough. One organisation is not enough. We need to urge all parts of this complex system we work in to address racism and inequality. Now is the time to work together, speak up, and do what social work is good at doing – to challenge discrimination in a constructive way to create a safer, fairer society.