Sarah Banks’ great contribution to social work ethics has been to challenge, as she does here, the idea that ‘ethics’ is all about solving ‘dilemmas’ like crossword puzzles, and to offer a much more challenging and dynamic vision of ethical practice as being about courage and a particular kind of hard work. The more I think about this, the more I agree with her. When I look back over my own many shortcomings as a social work practitioner and manager, I can see that very often the things I got wrong were not really about knowing the right thing to do, so much as about having the courage of my convictions, the courage to resist pressure.

All that said, there are many aspects of the lead article here that I find myself wanting to argue with. In particular I feel it subscribes to a kind of myth about the history of social work which I think is very questionable, but which is so commonly found in social work texts that it has become a kind of unexamined orthodoxy. This myth is summed up in Banks’ first paragraph, when she speaks of:

I started working as a social worker in the early 1980s, before the advent of ‘managerialism’ and ‘marketisation’, and I had access to files dating back to the 1970s, 1960s and even earlier. It is not my recollection that this period before managerialism was the Garden of Eden that these accounts imply. Practice then was, it seems to me now, often amateurish and dangerously unaccountable, and frequently oppressive as a result. I think of a case from the 1960s that I encountered in a file, where a woman social worker, responding to allegations that a father was sexually abusing his daughter, had visited the mother and told her she must have sex more often with her husband, so that he wouldn't need to resort to his children.