Module 5: Anti-Oppression
View the PowerPoint Slides Download PowerPoint Slides as you read this lecture, and a PDF Download PDF of these lectures, if you would like a print copy.
Anti-Oppressive Practices (AOP)
The term “anti-oppression” reflects several different approaches to addressing social and institutional inequalities built-in society. Theories and concepts of anti-oppression emerged from the social justice movements of the 1960s. Disenfranchised groups that opposed the status quo also began to challenge each other to recognize that different people within these groups experience different levels of oppression. Anti-oppression approaches to inequality include feminism, anti-racism, and structural and critical approaches. Often, anti-oppression work may focus on a single issue, perspective, or way of being marginalized. For example, a group may want to address gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender/queer (LGBTQ) rights or women’s rights. Using an integrated model against oppression, people work together to rebuild existing systems so that everyone shares in the benefits and opportunities of the system (Rush, 2012).
The integrated anti-oppression fight analyzes how people may experience oppression and marginalization and how these social placements intersect. This approach recognizes that individual contexts are different and that the realities people live in are complex. It is integrated because it calls for combining information and values from various people and sources for a more comprehensive and inclusive outcome. Integrated anti-oppression requires people to critically examine their own experiences and actions and analyze social structures of power and privilege. It insists that the dominant group recognize the power of its own social position and how that power results in social privileges and benefits to the exclusion of marginalized people. This approach encourages not making assumptions about group identity. It emphasized that people who share a group identity may or may not have similar characteristics and lived experiences. (Morgaine, 2015).
Principles of Anti-Oppression
The following are guiding principles of the integrated anti-oppression model (Alexander, 2008):
1. Society operates within a socially constructed hierarchy of difference where some people are valued and privileged, and others are marginalized and exploited. For example, people living with a disability are devalued by society, and their contribution to society is not recognized solely because of their disability.
2. People do not belong to a single category or social location. Identities are complex and multiple, fluid rather than fixed.
3. The ideas, thoughts, and beliefs of people who “belong” to groups that are higher in the social hierarchy create a “dominant culture.” The dominant culture becomes the standard or norm by which all are compared. For example, the dominant cultural norm of women’s clothing does not include wearing the hijab, so wearing the hijab is considered unusual and abnormal.
4. Individuals who are members of privileged groups have the power to control access to resources and information. This perpetuates the cycle of power and oppression for those not members of these groups. Marginalized and exploited people experience limited access to the power to shape their past, present, and future. For example, history has been written from the perspective of white-skinned colonialists of European descent. This historical perspective is perpetuated through dominant educational institutions as the only true view of history.
5. Not all members of the same social group have the same experiences because people have many different lived experiences. When people have multiplied marginalized identities, they do not simply face additional barriers; their lived experience is completely different.
6. Integrated anti-oppression work requires individuals to accept responsibility for their role in perpetuating oppression both interpersonally and systemically. To achieve change, individuals and systems must be changed.
Equity vs. Anti-Oppressive Practices
A formal equality approach generally means that the rules are the same for everyone, and no one receives special considerations or favors. A formal equality approach assumes that if the same rule is applied to everyone, it will produce equal results. This approach is flawed because it fails to recognize differential impacts and circumstances. It makes social discrimination and oppression invisible by insisting that it does not exist or do not matter. Cultural competence is an anti-oppression practice that encourages people to work across cultural variations. It asks individuals and organizations to focus on understanding the characteristics and needs of “diverse groups.”
Cultural competence encourages people to include diverse groups in existing frameworks. This approach is limited because the dominant group’s culture is accepted as the norm, and diversity is identified as outside those norms. Often, with cultural competence, the dominant group does not critically examine its power and privilege. This approach also reinforces identity politics and divisions between groups that are based on superficial characteristics and social markers (Campbell, 2003).
The integrated fight against oppression is comparable to the substantive equality approach. Another approach is substantive equality or equity, which recognizes that the same rules applied to all will not produce the same results because of different circumstances and social discriminations, now and in the past. At times, substantive equality seeks to remedy the effects of past discrimination by providing additional support to those who have historically been marginalized.
Barriers and Challenges in the Fight Against Integrated Oppression
Working from an integrated framework against oppression is not easy for various reasons. It is important to recognize this and find ways to continue the work. Here are some of the most common barriers and challenges and how each can be addressed (Alexander, 2008).
1. Not enough time: There is always more work and limited funds in social service agencies.
2. Not enough funds to implement changes in social policies.
3. The meaning of anti-oppression and how it is implemented is not understood.
4. Feeling overwhelmed by how extensive the work is.
5. Fear of change or losing position, status, or privilege.
6. Fear of being unable to accommodate everyone or of making a mistake.
7. Lack of will.
8. Not having the formal power to make the change.
9. Not being supported by others or doing the work alone.
10. Everyone involved is at a different level of understanding.
References
· Pathologies of Power. (2005). Health, human rights, and the new war on the poor. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
· Pérez-Garzón, C. A. (January, 2018). Unveiling the meaning of social justice in Colombia. Mexican Law Review 10 (2) 27-66.
· Thompson, N. (2002). Social movements, social justice and social Work. The British Journal of Social Work, 32(6) 711–722
Module 5: Anti-Oppression Policy Review
Anti-Oppression Policy Review
Developing and revising policies can be a huge administrative assignment that costs a lot of money. As a result, policies in community service organizations tend to stay the same for years. This is a problem. Policies establish how the organization operates and should be reviewed regularly as information changes and knowledge grows.
A five-step process can facilitate planning and include integrated anti-oppression in your policy review process (Alexander, 2008).
These steps are:
1. Establish a timeline for policy review
2. Create a work plan
3. Establish a Policy Review Committee
4. Review the organization’s policies
5. Make recommendations
Anti-Oppression Policy Review
In the review of social policies against oppression, the state must evaluate:
How accessible are the policies? This question involves assessing whether the policy documents are accessible. “Accessible” includes where the policy is physically located, its format, and how meaningful the policy is. The best policies will be representative and meaningful to a variety of users. To make policies accessible, you should aim to:
·
· Keep the policies in a place where anyone who wants to read them can access them without barriers.
· Ensure that policies can be translated into different and appropriate linguistic and cultural interpretations and physical formats.
· Use language that is clear and direct, rather than full of jargon.
· Use wording that makes the intentions of the policy easy to understand.
· Have a clear statement of who the policy applies to and who is responsible for implementing the policy.
· Be flexible in the policy to allow for different cultural beliefs and values unless there are legal reasons to limit its flexibility.
How do Policies Affect Different People? This question is designed to facilitate discussion about the impacts of policies on various lived experiences. Some questions can be answered with yes, or no responses, and others require more information (Kevin, 2002). The term “impact” in this context is used in a broad sense to refer to both benefits and constraints. To consider how people are affected, one should aim for a policy that:
· Equitably affects people.
· Incorporates values that are of equal importance to people with different life experiences.
· States what it does not do and describes steps to change.
· Is created with input from the range of people who are affected by it.
What are the gaps in the policy, and what can be done to make changes? These exploratory questions help initiate discussions to identify gaps and generate ideas for change. To identify gaps in policy, the following aspects should be analyzed:
· Does the policy recognize and identify how different people will be affected?
· Is the policy flexible enough to respond to people’s different lived experiences?
· If the policy is not flexible, does it say what the organization will do to change this? Does the change plan include deadlines?
· Does the policy say how people can give input or feedback on how the policy affects them?
· What comments, questions, and complaints do people have about this policy or the practices and procedures this policy has created?
· Does the policy include various cultural norms and values? What are they?
Examples of Anti-Oppression Policy Evaluations
Margaret Alexander (2008) conducted several focus groups to evaluate some of the social policies implemented in Canada. As part of the exercise, the groups were asked to respond to the following questions:
1. How well has your organization and the various sectors practiced an integrated approach to anti-oppression? Responses:
· General feeling that the majority is doing a pretty good job.
· Frustration that all staff in an agency is not fully implementing policies.
· Feeling that the work is isolated and separate, working in one oppression at a time.
· Work is framed from a white middle-class perspective.
· Work is not happening fast or often enough, i.e., gaps and barriers to services for deaf women.
2. What are the effective practices in the various areas? (Policy, Programming, Outreach, Training, Organizational Development) Responses:
· Be committed, inventive, constantly evolving, and vigilant.
· Be open to change, drive change.
· Inclusiveness at all levels of an organization, working together in committees and groups.
· Get involved in diversity, responding to different needs.
3. Where are the challenges? Responses:
· Lack of funding, fragmented and targeted only to specific groups.
· Lack of accountability, lack of clear policies and procedures.
· Lack of inclusion and diversity.
· Lack of time to be together, communicate, workloads on service providers, etc.
· Isolated work.
· Systemic exclusion from internal and social institutions.
4. Visions and Suggestions for Change Responses
· Basic guidelines with key values – written and put into practice.
· Accountability of staff and management.
· Commitment at all levels.
· All are open to challenges.
· Contemplate non-population issues driven by the community.
· Training and tools.
· Fully funded and supported by structures.
5. Who would be responsible for facilitating the change?
· Coalitions.
· Community groups.
· All levels of the organization or the state, including service users.
References
· Pathologies of Power. (2005). Health, human rights, and the new war on the poor. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
· Pérez-Garzón, C. A. (January, 2018). Unveiling the meaning of social justice in Colombia. Mexican Law Review 10 (2) 27-66.
· Thompson, N. (2002). Social movements, social justice, and social Work. The British Journal of Social Work, 32(6) 711–722
What Can Community Organizations Do?
Social inequality is embedded in individual values and beliefs, and systems and institutions reflect these inequalities. Therefore, change must begin with individuals transforming themselves. This is achieved by challenging their perceptions and assumptions, critically analyzing their “know,” and recognizing the power of interpersonal relationships. However, the work against oppression cannot end there. For real change to occur, work must also be done to restructure systems and institutions. Community service organizations can be at the forefront of anti-oppression work. They mostly work with disenfranchised, diminished, and marginalized people, and often the workers come from the community they serve (Thompson, 2002).
Workers’ strength and knowledge come from their lived experience of being marginalized. Community service organizations can challenge social inequality in vital ways. Their guidelines and principles of engagement are innovative and radical because they believe in what they are doing. They seek to provide services in ways that promote dignity, respect, and empowerment. Each organization’s mission statement or mandate states the agency’s vision. These statements are lofty goals. Their purpose is to keep the organization grounded in a common purpose and reason for being. Policies exist to tell people how to enact the mission and mandate. They provide guidelines for action. From policies come procedures that give people instructions on what to do. Developing and reviewing policies is vital to help community service organizations consistently apply their anti-oppression practice. Change takes time, no matter what approach they take to challenge social inequality. There is no quick and easy way to do this work (Alexander, 2008).
The Role of Social Work in the Face of Anti-Oppressive Practices
Anti-oppressive practices (AOP) have taken root in social work as an effort to increase social justice commitments and improve outcomes for those it serves. AOP is a lens through which to understand experience based on group identities or affiliations (such as race, class, gender, and sexual identity). When practitioners notice group identities, they can anticipate, for that client, their family, or their community, a variety of experiences that are associated with positive or negative life outcomes (such as health, income, education, marginalization, violence, status, and social inclusion/exclusion).
The simplest directive for AOP practice is to minimize power hierarchies, helping to build the power of those with marginalized identities and/or reducing the unjust power of those with privileged status.
The broader social and political context of the last generation that provided the impetus for the emergence of AOP is the deepening of globalization and the rise of neoliberal policies, including cuts to social programs, increased inequality, and the dominant discourse that blames individuals for their distress.
In this deteriorating environment, social work has retained its split of a more clinical orientation that is strongly aligned with counseling and psychology and a more social justice orientation to practice that focuses attention on causal and contributing characteristics of distress. That said, one of the exciting additions since about 2005 has been the articulation of a more micro-oriented AOP that provides interventions to work at the individual level in ways that are aligned with AOP principles.
Formally, the definition of anti-oppressive practice has been articulated by Lena Dominelli: “Anti-oppressive practice embodies a person-centered philosophy; an egalitarian value system concerned with reducing the harmful effects of structural inequalities in people’s lives; a methodology focused on both process and outcomes; and a way of structuring relationships between individuals that aims to empower users by reducing the negative effects of hierarchy on their interaction and the work they do together” (Dominelli, 1996).
The field has numerous related frameworks for practice, including structural social work, critical social work, radical social work, feminist and anti-racist social work, and, more recently, the service user movement. Common to these fields of practice is their focus on rectifying injustice, building the power of the powerless, and centering the needs of communities with marginalized identities, namely people of color, people in poverty, women, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized communities. While this field has mostly grown around gender, racism, and white privilege issues, the work being developed in this field has relevance to various forms of oppression. Some may see this work simply as a return to the social action and community organizing efforts of both the settlement house era and, later, the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s that gave rise to structural and radical social work. Unique, however, is a more sophisticated understanding of power and its multiple dimensions, including a growing willingness of practitioners to identify their personal and political privileges (Morgaine, 2015).
AOP has significant implications for the professional identity of the social worker. Within AOP, social work as a profession is implicated as part of governing relations. Social workers can no longer simply position themselves in some form of resistance practice and then believe that this choice has made them “innocent” as practitioners. Anti-oppressive practice now requires all practitioners to understand themselves as implicated in maintaining relations of domination, as benefiting from the status quo, and as part of a profession that similarly depends on serving the interests of privileged groups, be they the ruling classes, white, heterosexual, or other communities of privilege.
This understanding has been deeply informed by postmodernism and its focus on subjectivities, epistemologies, knowledge authorship, and knowledge claims. While this effort is more fully integrated within critical social work, the two fields (AOP and critical social work) are deeply aligned. While AOP tends not to have such a sophisticated understanding of these issues, those in its vanguard are embracing this analysis. Issues such as the construction of identity and experience and essentialism (and corresponding anti-essentialist proposals) are stretching the field of AOP in important and challenging ways. The mandate for social justice practice is embedded in codes of ethics worldwide (Curry-Stevens, 2016). References
· Pathologies of Power. (2005). Health, human rights, and the new war on the poor. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
· Pérez-Garzón, C. A. (January, 2018). Unveiling the meaning of social justice in Colombia. Mexican Law Review 10 (2) 27-66.
· Thompson, N. (2002). Social movements, social justice and social work. The British Journal of Social Work, 32(6) 711–72
