Women's work? Social work practice in protecting children from male violence from 1898 to 2010

My proposal is for an engaged interdisciplinary PhD exploring change and continuity in ideas about gender in social work practice between 1889 and 2010, with a particular focus on maternal protection of children from domestic violence. This project aims to provide a new, longer-term perspective to contemporary research into gendered practice and add to the extensive historiography of social work (which largely explores discourses of childhood and the relationship between the family and the state), by focussing on gender and intersectionality. It will be of interest to academics, practitioners, and educators.

There has been a decline in the teaching of social work history on qualifying courses and there is a tendency to locate the origins of the profession in the post-war creation of the welfare state which obscures earlier connections with social Darwinism, maternalism and the Poor Law (Scourfield, 2020). This loss of a historical perspective de-politicises a profession that operates on the boundary between state and family, within which responses to domestic violence serve as 'a weathervane identifying the prevailing winds of anxiety about family life in general' (Gordon, 1988 p.2). My research aims to challenge this trend, producing accessible training materials, drawing on the more troubling aspects of the profession's past to provoke reflection on current attitudes. It will be rooted in practice, as 'social work needs politicized, historical research'...'grounded in the lived experiences of people in poverty and in the lived experiences, dilemmas, and challenges of practitioners' (Krumer-Nevo, 2009 p.318). This research is particularly relevant during a period of austerity, with high levels of domestic abuse within care cases and overwhelming evidence of the association between poverty and child removal, mediated by ethnicity (Bywater et al., 2020).
I am particularly interested in how such gendered stories are expressed and hidden within the historically and socially contingent narratives of life story books created for children in care. I am an experienced practitioner, trainer and mentor in this area, author of the forthcoming RiP Life Story Work Practice Tool and national training programme. My article on this subject is on the reading list of many social work training programmes. My decision to study history was inspired by a visit to the Paramatta Female Convict Factory Memory Project as part of my Churchill Travel Fellowship to Australia (Djuric, 2016). This is a place where experts by experience work with and become historians, poets and playwrights to create collaborative, collective life stories. This is an approach I would like to develop in the UK post-doctorally, focussing on work with women who have experienced social work intervention as a result of domestic violence.

My ideas have been inter-disciplinary from their inception; the wish to pursue this way of working motivated my decision to study history. The proposed research is methodologically innovative, using historical analysis as a way of highlighting issues in contemporary practice and seeking to explore arts-based methods of disseminating knowledge within both social work education and through developing collaborative practice in the longer term. It has the potential to make a significant societal contribution.