Social Work and the COVID-19 Pandemic: International Insights 9781447360377

Table of contents :
Social Work and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I Context to a crisis
1 Capitalism, the ecological crisis and the creation of pandemics
2 Why politics matters
The origins of COVID-19
Epidemiological impact of COVID-19
Social work and the search of a new commons
3 Neoliberal social work and COVID-19
4 COVID-19 and social inequalities
Introduction
Social inequalities kill: pandemic, poverty, racism and gender
Final reflections
5 Social work responds to COVID-19
Part II Social work responses around the world
6 Social work and the COVID-19 crisis in the United States
The situation in the United States and the government’s response
Social work and the COVID-19 crisis
Social movements and social workers respond to the crisis
Summary: social work and our future challenges
7 Business as usual?
Resisting the pandemic: Chilean social work organisations’ responses
What’s coming next?
8 Social work responses to COVID-19 in Brazil
9 Social services, social work and COVID-19 in Palestine
Introduction
The psychological and social consequences of the epidemic in Palestine
Social work response to coronavirus (COVID-19)
Obstacles and challenges
10 Social work and COVID-19 in South Africa
COVID-19 in South Africa
Formal social work responses
Progressive social movement and social work responses
Conclusion
11 The extent of the COVID-19 crisis in South Korea
Social work responses
Lockdown
Solidarity among social workers
Quarantine in live-in facilities
Innovative social work practices
Digitalisation of social work service
The importance of psychological prevention
Reassessment of key workers
12 Social work and COVID-19 in Greece
Government’s response and society
The social work’s response and solidarity’s initiatives in the COVID-19 era in Greece
Social work in the frontline
Community-based responses and solidarity
13 The extent of COVID-19 in Sierra Leone
How COVID-19 came into Sierra Leone
Government response
People and community response to government policy and actions
Political unrest from opposition parties and effect on the people
Human rights abuses and reasons for increased fear and violence
The effects on Salonian lives
What social workers have been doing
Part III Social divisions, inequality and COVID-19
14 Class, inequality and the COVID-19 pandemic
15 Still left holding the baby
16 Working with women receiving social services during COVID-19
COVID-19 and domestic abuse
What are child protection services noticing?
COVID-19 and mothers in court
COVID-19 and women in poverty
Going forward, a radical shift
17 Black Lives Matter
18 Roma communities’ experiences of racism during the COVID-19 pandemic
Housing
Health
Education
Employment
Increased racism
Conclusion
19 Re-racialisation of migrants and the ‘refugee crisis’ during COVID-19
Violating ‘non-refoulement’: new pushback of refugees in territorial waters and new detention regimes
New challenges, new struggles, new hopes
20 Rethinking right and wrong
Introduction
COVID-19 and the crisis of ethics
Social workers’ ethical challenges: an international study
Rethinking right and wrong
Reinventing the social work relationship
Concluding comments: beyond business as usual towards a new solidarity
Acknowledgements
Conclusion
References

Citation preview

SOCIAL WORK AND THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC International Insights EDITED BY MICHAEL LAVALETTE VASILIOS IOAKIMIDIS IAIN FERGUSON

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RAPID RESPONSE

Social Work and the COVID-​19 Pandemic International Insights

Edited by Michael Lavalette, Vasilios Ioakimidis and Iain Ferguson

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Policy Press, an imprint of Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1-​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2020 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-​1-​4473-​6036-​0  ePub ISBN 978-​1-​4473-​6037-​7  ePdf The right of Michael Lavalette, Vasilios Ioakimidis and Iain Ferguson to be identified as editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved:  no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the editors and contributors and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press and Policy Press work to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality.

Contents

Acknowledgements  xi Contributors  vii Introduction:  Social work and COVID-​19   1 Michael Lavalette, Vasilios Ioakimidis and Iain Ferguson

Part I:  Context to a crisis   1 2

Capitalism, the ecological crisis and the creation of pandemics  9 Michael Lavalette



Why politics matters: understanding the biopolitics of COVID-​19   17 Vasilios Ioakimidis

3

Neoliberal social work and COVID-​19  25 Iain Ferguson

4 COVID-​19 and social inequalities: a political view from social work  31 Silvana Martinez 5

Social work responds to COVID-​19: an international overview  37 Rory Truell

Part II:  Social work responses around the world   6

Social work and the COVID-​19 crisis in the United States  45 Dawn Belkin Martinez

7

Business as usual? Social work and the COVID-​19 pandemic in Chile  53 Gianinna Muñoz Arce



iii

iv Contents 8 Social work responses to COVID-​19 in Brazil  61 Roberta Uchôa 9

Social services, social work and COVID-​19 in Palestine  65 Raed Amira

10 Social work and COVID-​19 in South Africa  73 Yasmin Jessie Turton and Linda Harms-​Smith 11 The extent of the COVID-​19 crisis in in South Korea  81 Sug Pyo Kim 12 Social work and COVID-​19 in Greece  87 Dimitra-​Dora  Teloni 13 The extent of COVID-​19 in Sierra Leone  95 George Abu Mansaray

Part III:  Social divisions, inequality and COVID-​19   14 Class, inequality and the COVID-​19 pandemic  103 Lee Humber 15 Still left holding the baby: women’s oppression and the corona crisis  111 Lindsey German 16 Working with women receiving social services during COVID-​19: reflections from children and families’ practitioners  117 Laura Owens, Rebecca Mair and Alissa De Luca-​Ruane 17 Black Lives Matter: racism, poverty, work and COVID-​19  125 Esme Choonara and Yuri Prasad 18 Roma communities’ experiences of racism during the COVID-​19 pandemic   131 Fatima Uygun 19 Re-​racialisation of migrants and the ‘refugee crisis’ during COVID-​19   137 Nicos Trimikliniotis 20 Rethinking right and wrong: social work, COVID-​19 and the crisis of ethics  145 Sarah Banks

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Conclusion: no return to ‘business as usual’  153 Michael Lavalette, Vasilios Ioakimidis and Iain Ferguson References  157

Contributors

Raed Amira is a lecturer in Social Work at Palestine Ahliya University and main representative in the Human Rights Commission of the IFSW-​Asia Pacific Region. Gianinna Muñoz Arce is Coordinator of ‘Interdisciplinary Studies on Social Work’ Research Cluster, and Editor-​in-​Chief of Critical Proposals in Social Work. Department of Social Work, University of Chile. She is a member of the Social Work Action Network (International) [SWAN-​I]. Sarah Banks is Professor of Applied Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology and Co-​ director of the Centre for Social Justice and Community Action, Durham University, UK. Esme Choonara is an experienced frontline health worker and activist in the group Stand Up to Racism. Alissa De Luca-​ Ruane is a children and families social worker, SWAN steering committee member since 2014, and mother of three. Iain Ferguson is Honorary Professor of Social Work and Social Policy at the University of the West of Scotland. He is on the editorial boards of Critical and Radical Social Work journal and International Socialism Journal and is author of Politics of the Mind: Marxism and Mental Distress (Bookmarks, 2017). Lindsey German teaches diversity and equality, and employment relations, at the University of Hertfordshire. She has written extensively on women, oppression and class. vii

viii Contributors

Linda Harms-​Smith is a Social Work lecturer at the Robert Gordon University in Scotland and a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She is a steering committee member of Social Work Action Network International (SWAN-​I) and SWAN South Africa. Lee Humber teaches health and social care studies to healthcare students and professionals in the UK and Hong Kong. He is also currently editor of the monthly magazine, the Socialist Review. Vasilios Ioakimidis is the Founding Professor of Social Work at the University of Essex and Chair of IFSW’s Global Education Commission. He also teaches at the University of West Attica in Greece. Sug Pyo Kim is President of the Daegu Association of Social Workers, South Korea and a representative of the International Federation of Social Workers to United Nations. Michael Lavalette is Professor of Social Work and Social Policy at Liverpool Hope University. He was a founding member of SWAN (UK) and is a steering committee member of Social Work Action Network (International) [SWAN-​I]. Rebecca Mair is a social worker, an activist in the Glasgow COVID-​19 Action Group, and a member of SWAN and of the Socialist Workers Party. George Abu Mansaray is President of the Sierra Leone Association of Social Workers, and Founder and CEO of the Ruth Stark’s Hope Kindergarten, also in Sierra Leone. Dawn Belkin Martinez is Associate Clinical Professor and Associate Dean of Equity and Inclusion at Boston University School of Social Work. She is a member of Boston Liberation Health, and a steering committee member of SWAN-​I. Silvana Martinez is Global President of the International Federation of Social Workers. She is a Doctor of Social

Contributors

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Sciences with both a Bachelor and Master in Social Work. She is Professor and Researcher at the National University of Mar del Plata, Argentina. Laura Owens is a lecturer in Health and Social Care at New College Lanarkshire and a former children and families social worker. Yuri Prasad writes regularly on anti-​racism and is the author of A Rebel’s Guide to Martin Luther King (Bookmarks, 2018). Dimitra-​Dora Teloni is Assistant Professor at the University of West Attica in Athens, Greece. She is a steering committee member of Social Work Action Network International (SWAN-​I). Nicos Trimikliniotis is Professor of Sociology, legal expert and heads the team of experts of the Cyprus team for the Fundamental Rights Agency of the EU at the University of Nicosia. Rory Truell is the Secretary-​General of the International Federation of Social Workers. Yasmin Jessie Turton is a Social Work lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She is a steering committee member of Social Work Action Network International (SWAN-​I) and SWAN South Africa. Roberta Uchôa is Associate Professor of Social Work at Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, and a steering committee member of the Social Work Action Network (International) [SWAN-​I]. Fatima Uygun is an anti-​ poverty and anti-​ racist activist based in the southside of Glasgow. She is the manager of Govanhill Baths Community Trust, a grassroots charity based in Govanhill.

Acknowledgements

The present collection originated in a series of joint webinars run by the Social Work Action Network (International) and the International Federation of Social Workers in response to the COVID-​ 19 pandemic. The webinars drew a large audience from within the social work community and we decided to pull the contributions together in book form to allow social work academics, practitioners and students to start to think through what social work can, and should, do in the face of the global crisis. We would like to thank Policy Press for their prompt agreement to publish and to the contributors who turned round their short chapters in a very short space of time. The collection brings together frontline practitioners, academics and social movement activists. The chapters are deliberately short so we can include more voices. The referencing is appropriate but ‘light touch’ because we wanted to produce an accessible, easily readable text. We hope the collection will help inform the debate over what kind of social work is required in the face of the pandemic crisis. Finally, as the pandemic spread it has been frontline health, social care and social workers who have found themselves at the heart of the crisis. In too many places government failures have left them exposed with inadequate personal protection equipment (PPE) and essential resources. The ‘old’ managerialist concerns with targets and ‘business as usual’ has been exposed as irrelevant in the face of the crisis. Yet despite this, care workers ‘stepped forward’. Their selflessness and commitment to the greater good was inspiring and often, in their work, they started to provide glimpses of what ‘another social work’ might look like. We would like to dedicate this xi

xii Acknowledgements

book to all those health and care workers who worked to provide care and support to those in need at a time of crisis. Michael Lavalette Vasilios Ioakimidis Iain Ferguson August 2020

Introduction Social work and COVID-​19 Michael Lavalette, Vasilios Ioakimidis and Iain Ferguson

At the start of 2020, when the COVID-​19 pandemic began, a hastily convened meeting between the Social Work Action Network (SWAN) and the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) agreed that the organisations should jointly host a series of webinars tracing the social work response to the crisis. The result was four international webinar meetings that drew thousands of academics and practitioners together to discuss what social work could –​and should –​do during the pandemic. The webinars were structured around two sets of ideas, drawn from aspects of the works of Naomi Klein and Rebecca Solnit. In Klein’s work, The Shock Doctrine:  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), she draws attention to the fact that ‘disasters’ (including earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and monsoons, but also military coups, wars or deep economic recessions) can produce what she terms ‘social shock’. In this situation, people are so focussed on the immediate (saving the lives of their families and those in their communities, meeting people’s basic needs, dealing with the social costs of the disaster) that they lose sight of what can happen to the provision of core public and welfare services. For large corporations and international capital, however, such disasters –​and the disorientation they create –​provides an opportunity. A chance to move in and scoop up all manner of contracts and services which effectively become ‘outsourced’ to private interests. This process she described as the shock doctrine. As she notes:

1

2

Social Work and the COVID-19 Pandemic “Shock doctrine” describes the brute tactic of systematically using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock ‒ wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes, natural disasters ‒ to push through radical pro-​corporate measures, often called “shock therapy.” … [At its core] … is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. (Klein 2019)

As we confronted the COVID-​19 pandemic, how would the ‘shock doctrine’ play out? Certainly, from the perspective of the UK there is no doubt that the pandemic has offered ‘an opportunity’ for some to make very significant profits. As Evans et al. note:  “State contracts worth over £1bn have been awarded to private companies dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, without offering other firms the chance to bid for the work” (2020). Evans et al. (2020) traced how 177 government contracts were offered outside normal regulatory scrutiny, raising significant questions about transparency and accountability. For example, in May 2020 the private company Serco were given a £300m contract to provide the government’s ‘track and trace’ program for three months. The company had no previous experience, and the contract was awarded by Health Minister, Edward Agar. Astonishingly, Agar previously worked as head of public affairs for Serco! (Bagot 2020). The British Medical Association published a report in July 2020 into the growth of ‘out sourcing’ during the pandemic. They noted, “Outsourcing [of key NHS functions] has been accelerated under new contingency measures put in place during the pandemic.” Since the start of the pandemic in March they note the government has offered contracts to:

• DHL, Unipart and Movianto to procure, manage logistics of and store PPE. • Deloitte to manage the logistics of national drive-​in testing centres and super-​labs. • Serco to run the contact tracing program. • Palantir and Faculty A.I. to build the COVID-​ 19 datastore.

Introduction: Social work and COVID-19

3

• Capita to onboard returning health workers in England. (BMA 2020: p1)

It’s not just health and social care contracts that have been privatised. Under the cover of COVID-​19 other government activities have also been outsourced. Perhaps most notoriously, a contract worth £845,000 was awarded to ‘Public First’ to research public attitudes to government policies. The contract was not put out to tender, but simply awarded to the company. It was later revealed the company’s owner had close personal contacts with Government Minister Michael Gove, and the Prime Minister’s senior advisor Dominic Cummings –​through their work together as part of the ‘Vote Leave’ campaign (Conn and Geoghegan 2020). So, at least from the UK, the evidence would tend to support some of Klein’s argument about disaster capitalism and the shock doctrine: as the pandemic spread, as the UK was thrown into turmoil, private interests moved to secure a slice of the government pot. But alongside Klein’s work the webinars also wanted to look at some of the ideas of Rebecca Solnit. In her book Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (2009) Solnit draws on her research from disaster zones to look at what happens on the ground when disasters strike. Solnit’s work starts by examining the dominant idea of what we might call ‘bourgeois man’ (or woman). That is the notion that we are naturally selfish, self-​focussed and concerned with the ‘survival of the fittest’. If this is true, she surmises, then in times of crisis and in the face of disaster, you might expect a brutal fight for survival to take place as we all struggle to look after our own (and perhaps our family’s) immediate interests at the expense of others. But Solnit provides case after case from disaster situations where she witnessed not selfish narcissism, but selflessness, public spiritedness, care and support for others and, she suggests, a glimpse of another world and another way of organising and running our societies. In these hellish circumstances, she suggests, we can see a glimpse of ‘paradise’. As COVID-​19 spread, one of the remarkable things that developed was a flourishing of mutual aid networks, support

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Social Work and the COVID-19 Pandemic

groups and voluntary organisations, many of them with roots in trade unions, social movements and civil society organisations. The New Local Government Network, for example, note that The public response to the COVID-​19 pandemic has been a source of much-​needed hope. Thousands of spontaneous, voluntary Mutual Aid groups have emerged to support the most vulnerable people in our society. They are supplying food and medicine, connecting with those who are lonely, and organising community resources. In many cases these groups have been able to help people far more rapidly and flexibly than traditional public services. (Tiratelli and Kaye 2020)

The growth of such spontaneous mutual aid projects certainly questioned any lingering idea that ‘there is no such thing as society’ (as Margaret Thatcher once claimed). In some iterations the mutual aid networks saw themselves as consciously working outside the increasingly commodified care market, they saw themselves as coming together to support people, meet their needs and challenge divisive discourses in communities. In this sense, as Solnit suggests, they offer a glimpse of another world where need and supporting people are the priorities of society. But we shouldn’t over glamorise. Mutual aid projects can also, easily, fit with pro-​ marketisation agendas. Local government community mutual aid support groups can be seen, by some, as an alternative to state provision –​when in reality it is states that have the resources (financial and otherwise) to support communities in need. The picture, then, can be complex and contradictory! The webinars set out to explore these themes and the current volume refocuses on many of the issues discussed. The book is divided in to three sections. Part I sets out the background context to the crisis. Our basic argument is that, from a social work perspective, the crisis has four elements. First, the ecological –​the consequences of the ‘metabolic rift’, the expansion of industrial agricultural practices, the displacement of farmers from the land has created the

Introduction: Social work and COVID-19

5

conditions where human contact with wild animals becomes ‘normalised’ and the conditions for zoonosis to take place. Second, the epidemiological aspect –​the consequences of austerity and growing inequality have produced weakened and vulnerable communities more susceptible to the disease. Third, the ideological aspect –​the years of austerity, privatisation and marketisation have left social care and public health systems catastrophically weakened. Finally, there is the political aspect –​in those societies suffering most there is the promotion of individual (rather than public and collective) responses, the prioritisation of the economy over public health concerns, indecisive and confused political decision making. These four elements create the terrain upon which social work agencies and social work practitioners have had to act. Part II looks at the responses of social workers across the globe to the pandemic, drawing out good practice and suggesting new ways of renewing and regenerating social work post-​pandemic. The chapters in this part form a series of nation-​state studies of social work responses. Finally, Part III looks at some key social work issues. The pandemic saw an increase in domestic violence and reinforced many aspects of women’s oppression. The pandemic hit poor and working-​class communities particularly hard, emphasising that inequality kills. The pandemic exposed institutional racism at the heart of many societies as minority communities were more likely to become ill and more likely to suffer the most serious consequences from the virus. As we reach the mid-​point of 2020 there is no end in sight to the pandemic. The tentative conclusions and suggestions we include here for a ‘different’ social work will, no doubt, be sharpened and clarified in the weeks and months ahead. But we hope the book will help set the terrain of the debate on social work and the pandemic. One thing we are absolutely committed to: there should be no return to ‘(the social work) business as usual’ once this is over: another social work and another world is possible and necessary.

I

Part 

Context to a crisis

7

1 Capitalism, the ecological crisis and the creation of pandemics Michael Lavalette The year 2019 marked another dreadful year for our planet. The five hottest recorded years of our existence have been the last five (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019); the last decade the hottest ever (Milman 2020). According to a report from Christian Aid, there were 15 extreme climate disasters in 2019 each of which cost over $1bn (with seven of them costing over £10bn each [Christian Aid 2019]). The Christian Aid report came out in December. The following month our television screens were full of terrifying images of Australian bush fires running out of control (ABC 2020), Brazilian rainforests experiencing unprecedented fires (often deliberately set by farmers and logging companies) (Wood 2020), flash-​flooding in Indonesia displacing 60,000 people (Leung 2020) and swarms of locust driving through East Africa and parts of Asia eating crops and threatening populations with starvation (Gilliland 2020). These scenes, and particularly the hellish, nightmare vision from Australia, combined with the heroic school strikes to defend the planet and protests by Extinction Rebellion activists, once again pushed the climate crisis to the centre of world politics. Yet within a month, the climate crisis had disappeared from the world media’s gaze as they focussed on the frightening spectre of the COVID-​19 pandemic. COVID-​ 19 is a coronavirus (CoV). Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that cause illnesses, ranging from the common cold to severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). In their range, coronaviruses cause coughs, fevers and a range of breathing difficulties. In 9

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Social Work and the COVID-19 Pandemic

more severe cases infection can lead to pneumonia, kidney failure, heart failure, severe acute respiratory syndrome –​and death. As Parrington (2020) notes: Viruses can cause vast human suffering and death, as well as social and economic dislocation. However, they are also the simplest forms of life … Be that as it may … viruses are at the root of some of the most infectious and lethal diseases that afflict humanity.

The world’s media focussed on the spread of this frightening new disease. It was portrayed as an almost unpredictable, random event, a quirk –​or (with clear racist overtones) as a result of peculiar Chinese eating habits. The epicentre of the virus was Wuhan Province in China and the ‘wet-​markets’ of the region were identified as the source of ‘zoonotic transmission’ (zoonosis is the process whereby viruses and diseases transfer from one species to another). Yet while the media focus changed from climate crisis to pandemic crisis, it is, nevertheless, the case that there is a link between the two. I do not mean by this that COVID-​19 is caused by the climate crisis –​that is simply not true. But both the climate crisis and the COVID-​19 pandemic reveal our problematic relationship with nature. Specifically, they point to the way in which modern industrial capitalism is destroying our planet, our ecological system and creating the conditions for zoonotic transmission of deadly viruses and diseases. As Ian Angus notes: Global warming. Superstorms. Rising sea levels. Toxic air and smog. Ocean acidification and dead zones. Species extinction. Soil erosion. Fresh water depletion. Ozone destruction. Indestructible plastics and chemical pollution. Deforestation. Expanding deserts. Antibiotic resistant bacteria. New diseases and plagues. The list goes on. We face a planetary emergency, a convergence of ecological crises that threatens the survival of civilisation. (2019: p51)

In his path-​breaking work, The Monster at the Door (2005), Mike Davis plotted what he described as a ‘viral apocalypse’

Capitalism, ecological crisis and pandemics

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in the making (Davis 2005). His focus was the threat of new strains of pandemic flu, the existential threat they posed to human society and the potential public health system failures which, he claimed, were unprepared and ill-​equipped for the pending catastrophe. A hastily printed new edition of the book, now called The Monster Enters (Davis 2020), includes a discussion of COVID-​19, pointing out that the pandemic was completely predictable because it developed out of the conditions of life and work in the contemporary world. Davis argues that pandemics happen in particular social, political and economic contexts and he is clear, the modern world is creating the conditions for more, and more deadly, pandemic events to occur. For Davis there are four elements in particular that are creating the conditions for zoonotic transfer and pandemic threat:  first, the impact of capitalism, as a system, on our environment, second, within this, modern capitalist farming methods and the dominance of large agri-​businesses; third, the growth of mega-​ cities and urban slums, and, finally, dominant political ideologies which prioritises the market at the expense of preventative public health strategies. Let’s look at each in turn. Capitalism is a system that puts the needs of profit maximisation above all other considerations. It is a system that subordinates the satisfaction of human needs to its inherent drive for profit and wealth accumulation. In his great work Capital, Marx noted the impact capitalism had on our environment and argued that capitalism Disrupts the metabolic interaction between man and earth [and generates] an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. (Marx 1976: pp949/​950)

In this passage Marx introduces the concept of a ‘metabolic rift’. Marx argues that humans have a close, dialectical relationship with the natural world. We are not determined by the natural world, nor do we fully control it, but we are part of nature and dependent upon it. The ‘metabolic rift’

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Social Work and the COVID-19 Pandemic

is the central concept within Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism. [It] is built around how the logic of accumulation severs basic processes of natural reproduction, leading to the deterioration of the environment and ecological sustainability and disrupting the basic operations of nature. (Weston 2014: p67)

In other words, under the conditions of capitalist competition, natural resources are used, abused and exploited for short-​ term profit maximisation without any consideration to the long-​term consequences for our environment, our ecological systems, for other animal life and, ultimately, for the existence of human societies. To give some examples, we are currently in the midst of the ‘sixth great extinction’ of animal species (Vaughan 2015). Wildlife is dying out due to habitat destruction, overhunting, toxic pollution, invasion by alien species and climate change. Land-​insect populations have fallen 25 per cent since 1990. As Carrington (2019) notes: The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems” … More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found.

Further, about 90 per cent of marine fish populations are now fully exploited, overexploited or depleted. According to the WWF (2020) the number of overfished stocks globally has tripled in half a century and today fully one-​third of the world’s assessed fisheries are currently pushed beyond their biological limits.

As Dawson (2016) argues: Today’s mass extinction crisis is one of the clearest indications of the fundamental irrationality and destructiveness of the capitalist system.

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We are witnessing unprecedented levels of land destruction. Depending on location, fertile soil is being eroded between ten and 100 times faster than new soil can form. Alongside this we have deforestation where, on average between 2014 and 2018, an area of tree cover the size of the United Kingdom was lost every year (Angus 2016). Dawson (2016) notes: Studies suggest that over the last fifty years a shockingly high 40 percent of the world’s flora and fauna have become extinct. And this extinction rate is accelerating. There are a number of factors that explain the dramatic mass extinction event that we are living through. By far the most important is habitat destruction. While all of the world’s ecosystems host myriad wonderfully diverse life forms, the greatest troves of biodiversity are concentrated in a few regions. The richest places on the planet in terms of biodiversity are tropical rainforests. And these rainforests are being burnt and chopped down at alarming rates.

The ultimate cause of all of these processes is the way our society is organised to put the interests of capital and profit maximisation first. These processes also feed back into the system, creating environmental and ecological crises in the present and for the future. They also bring humans into closer contact with a range of species who carry diseases we are not immune to. Deforestation, damming and environmental destruction force animals into ever smaller regions, often bringing them closer to human habitations. The eviction of small farmers from their land by large agri-​ businesses and logging companies forces landless peasants deeper into the forest. Facing poverty and starvation some populations turn towards bushmeats as a source of food (though in some parts these exotic foods are now highly valued ‘luxury items’ on the pates of the wealthy.) With all these developments, the chances of zoonotic transmission increase. The second aspect of the crisis Davis highlighted was the destructive impact of capitalist farming and the growth of agri-​businesses. Recent years has witnessed what is sometimes

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Social Work and the COVID-19 Pandemic

called The Livestock Revolution –​meaning the development of large-​scale, relatively unregulated, agro-​industrial capitalism. Within the agribusiness sector a relatively small number of massive corporations dominate global farming. They have intensified animal husbandry, bringing together massive numbers of animals in single locations. Their aim is ‘production density’, meaning that there are now regions in North America, Brazil, Western Europe, South Asia and China where the chicken population runs into the hundreds of millions. The factory-​farms create terrible conditions for the livestock. These are also ruthless enterprises. As Davis notes: The world icon of industrialised poultry and livestock production is giant Tyson Foods. Tyson, which kills 2.2 billion chickens annually, has become globally synonymous with scaled-​ up, vertically coordinated production; exploitation of contract growers; visceral antiunionism, rampant industrial injury; downstream environmental dumping; and political corruption. The global dominance of behemoths like Tyson has forced local farmers to either integrate with large-​ scale chicken and pork processing firms or perish. (2006: p83)

Within the sector there is an emphasis on breed specialisation and genetic modification of species to ensure they produce more milk, meat or eggs, but the creation of such mono-​ cultures reduces the chances of the animals developing resistance to new varieties of virus. In the process the agri-​business sector has created what Wallace (2016) describes as a gigantic petri-​ dish for the creation and propagation of new diseases. Intensive industrial food production provides ample opportunity for viruses to mutate and spread across hosts, while the proximity and size of the local population provides cross-​over gateways for viruses to infect human populations. As Lee Humber has argued: The industrial model of agriculture and livestock rearing explains how we have come to the point when each year

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brings the threat of a new and potentially deadly global virus. (2020)

Davis’ third aspect of the crisis was the nature of overcrowded towns, cities and slums. Modern pandemics are what Spinney (2017) calls ‘crowd diseases’. When they take hold in human communities they spread because capitalism forces people to live and to work in close proximity. The poorer the conditions, the more overcrowded the locality, the easier it is for the disease to take hold and spread. In the absence of a vaccine, the key way for people to stop human-​ to-​ human transmission is to socially distance, for economies to lockdown for all but the most essential of work tasks, for people to have appropriate PPE and masks to reduce infection spread and protect those at work. Yet, as is discussed elsewhere in the book, in poor communities and in the slums across the Global South social distancing becomes near impossible. And the prospect of a long-​term shut down of the economy to protect people poses a dramatic question of the purpose and aims of societies –​to protect people or to defend profits? On this final point the present pandemic has revealed the incompetence of right-​wing, populist leaders to address the crisis. In the UK, the US and Brazil, for example, government ineptitude has let the disease take hold and put far more lives in danger than need be the case. Deregulation, years of austerity, a commitment to marketisation in health and social care, just-​in-​time agreements in frontline health sectors have all been part of a monstrous government failure to protect people. The COVID-​19 pandemic has its roots firmly in the way the present system prioritises profit over people’s needs and their health. The crisis exposes a system that is destroying our planet and our ecosystem in the relentless drive to accumulate. It is time to put people and our natural world before profit. Another world is not only possible, but desperately and urgently needed.

2 Why politics matters Understanding the biopolitics of COVID-​19 Vasilios Ioakimidis The term ‘biopolitics’ is not a recent addition to the lexicon of social and political sciences. It has been used since the late 19th century in variable and often contradictory ways. However, it was not until Michel Foucault’s famous series of lectures at the Collège de France in 1978 that the term was redefined in a way that it captured the critical intersection between state power and the control of people’s bodies. Since Foucault’s reconceptualisation, ‘biopolitics’ has come to describe the diverse ways our health, illness, bodies and human development have become contested political territories. A particular aspect of biopolitics is linked to state interventions, social control and the limits of individual liberty when it comes to decisions about one’s body. Michel Foucault’s analysis demonstrated how the development of ‘public health’ policies in advanced capitalism do not necessarily prioritise the management and shaping of individual and collective attitudes towards a healthy society. On the contrary, if states are left unchecked, they have the tendency to enforce policies that aim at fully controlling the life and biological functions of human beings in ways that are disciplinary and moralistic. Two characteristic and recent examples of social control in the sphere of biopolitics relate to debates about women’s ability to access safe and legal abortion or the use of invasive medical procedures to determine the age of young asylum-​seekers. In both cases, human bodies have become the terrain of disciplinary state intervention while at the same time significant mobilisation from social movements has confronted oppressive interventions on the human body. 17

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The concept of biopolitics therefore offers a pertinent analytical framework for understanding the complex political dilemmas emerging from state action ‒ or inaction ‒ in the context of the COVID-​19 pandemic. For the current pandemic, once again, demonstrates how biology and the interaction between humans and their physical environments are profoundly political and contested areas. Despite the consistent tendency of governments to reduce natural or human-​ made disasters to a-​ political and unpredictable phenomena, evidence indicates otherwise; natural disasters and pandemics are neither unpredictable nor do they affect all members of our society equally. Once again, during the COVID-​19 pandemic, states were quick to use the supposedly unifying “we are all in this together” mantra in order to disguise the diverse experiences and vulnerabilities based on people’s socio-​economic background. Notoriously, in March 2020 the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, putting forward an argument for relative inaction towards COVID-​19 implied that as a society, “perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go” (BBC 2020). In his approach, Boris Johnson not only ignored the social determinants of illness, but he also confirmed, in the most emphatic way, that the management of COVID-​19 is essentially political.

The origins of COVID-​19

In order to understand the biopolitics of COVID-​19 one needs to first appreciate the origins and also explore the diverse epidemiological impact of the disease. As Michael Lavalette noted in the last chapter, COVID-​19 is an infectious disease that belongs to the large family of coronaviruses. This group of diseases are known to cause illness in animals and humans. Unlike other coronaviruses, COVID-​19 is very dangerous for two main reasons: a) it is highly contagious and therefore more likely to spread widely and reach the most vulnerable people in our communities, causing serious complications and death and b) it is highly likely that even patients that have recovered may still experience long-​lasting neurological, respiratory and circulatory complications (WHO 2020).

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Although the exact timeframe and location of the disease’s “spill over” to the human species has not yet been determined, there is a broad consensus that COVID-​19 originated from wild animals before infecting the first human (patient 0). At the moment, the most plausible research hypotheses seem to suggest that the natural reservoir for the disease was either a bat colony or a pangolin colony. The genetic makeup of the disease spreading among humans is almost identical to the traces of coronavirus found in both species of wild animals (WHO 2020b). In recent decades there has been a considerable increase in cases of animal viruses jumping species boundaries to infect humans. Outbreaks of deadly viruses such as Ebola, SARS, MERS and Nipah have become more common, claiming thousands of lives globally. Virologists and epidemiologists have been observing this catastrophic trend for a long time. Maarten Kappelle (cited in United Nations Environment Programme 2020) the head of scientific assessments at the United Nations Environment Programme recently confirmed that “People look back to the influenza pandemic of 1918–​1919 and think that such disease outbreaks only happen once in a century. But that’s no longer true. If we don’t restore the balance between the natural world and the human one, these outbreaks will become increasingly prevalent.”

Epidemiological impact of COVID-​19

Another important dimension highlighting the undeniable sociopolitical aspects of COVID-​ 19 is the disease’s disproportionate epidemiological impact on Black and Minority Ethnic Communities (BAME) as well as communities experiencing deprivation (see the chapter by Choonara and Prasad in this book). The link between social inequality, ill health and poor life chances has been established for a long time (see the chapter by Humber). Researchers such as Wilkinson and Pickett (2010) have confirmed beyond doubt what generations of social workers have witnessed first-​ hand; it is the material circumstances that primarily shape people’s lives, wellbeing and health. For example, healthy life

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expectancy for males in the most deprived areas of England is 51.7 years, compared to 70.4 years in the least deprived areas (Public Health England 2019). Early figures of COVID-​19-​ related deaths suggest that individuals in areas of economic deprivation are more likely to die as a result of the virus than those in the least deprived areas. Rates for deaths occurring between 1 March and 31 May 2020 show that in the most deprived areas of England the mortality rate for COVID-​19 was 128.3 per 100,000 population, but in the least deprived areas it was just over half that at 58.8 per 100,000 (Office of National Statistics 2020). A University of Essex recent report on the impact of COVID-​ 19 on families with young children in Southend (O’Connell et al. 2020) demonstrated that COVID-​19 had adversely and disproportionately affected the mental and emotional wellbeing of parents in some of the most deprived wards in Southend. Through a mixed-​ method research approach which included a survey followed up by interviews with parents, the report found that:

• Parents have experienced lowered emotional wellbeing, including an exacerbation of pre-​existing mental health difficulties. • Social isolation during lockdown has reduced individuals’ access to informal support and relationships that facilitate wellbeing. • Relative to other areas, parents’ concerns about their own emotional wellbeing/​mental health are high. • Detection of postnatal mental health struggles may have decreased due to reduced contacts with GPs and wider family member. These findings leave little space for misunderstanding in relation to the detrimental and disproportionate impact of COVID-​ 19 on families and communities who have been historically failed by unequal and unjust ways of organising our societies.

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Social work and the search of a new commons

The adverse impact of COVID-​19 on BAME and poorer communities is, obviously, not the product of some genetic, evolutionary or even moral differentiation, as pseudoscientific theories, once popular even within social work, have tried to present. It is important that the novelty and, therefore, unpredictability of the coronavirus does not lead to misinterpretations that either stretch the limits of logic or mystify scientific knowledge. As mentioned above, it is the limited access to universal health services, the impact of alienation, bad nutrition and lack of prevention that has led to an increase in mortality rates within BAME and poorer communities. All of the above factors had been exacerbated by an extended wave of austerity which undermined the universal and public character of health services in much of the world over the last 20 years. In short, health and social care services were unprepared to deal with a pandemic due to the lack of funding and protective equipment, and many of our communities were particularly vulnerable due to chronic health disparities and our societies have been put at risk due to the decision of many governments worldwide to prioritise “saving” the economy rather than acting to protect people. Such a catastrophic mix of events has been facilitated by a series of calculated political decisions; actions that lead to devastation were neither inevitable nor unavoidable. What has been particularly interesting in the current discussion about the biopolitics of COVID-​19 is the way contrasting interpretations about the limits of science have unfolded. On the one hand, many governments have made selective use of scientific research in order to justify some of the most irrational or even brutal choices with regards to the management of the virus. For example, in the UK the government has systematically used the catch-​phrase “we are following the science” in order to deflect questioning on their passive and inactive approach that led to one of the highest mortality rates globally. Likewise, governments that used drastic approaches of social distancing (including lockdowns and curfews) have also referred to science in order to support their decisions. One may wonder, when was science right?

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When attempting to facilitate “herd immunity” through a passive approach or when advocating for drastic measures in order to contain the spread of the disease? The answer to this question is crucial, as avoidance to deal with such contradictions could inevitably lead to mystification, metaphysical interpretation or even outright rejection of science. A closer examination of the diverse, contradictory and often complacent ways states have developed policies with regards to COVID-​19 are in stark opposition to the unified and comprehensive work researchers have produced globally. The World Health Organization has confirmed that all governments had unrestricted access to the same comprehensive body of evidence about the unusually contagious and consequently deadly nature of the virus. How different states developed policies or which part of the evidence they tried to focus on was purely a political decision. However, COVID-​ 19 has been unforgiving with political choices that manipulated science. Current assessments of political decisions suggest that countries that opted for a “herd immunity” approach (most notably the UK, US, Brazil and Sweden) suffered catastrophic consequences and interestingly also failed to “rescue the economy which was their declared objective”. At the time of writing this chapter, countries that managed to contain the pandemic through strict lockdown measures (for example New Zealand and Greece) managed to protect the population while retaining some economic activity. In this respect, COVID-​19 seems to have offered us a prism through which we were able to view clearly the priorities, values and principles of our societies and states (John Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Centre 2020) As Richard Horton (cited in The Observer 2020), Editor of the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, recently said: COVID-​19 has held a mirror up to our society and forced us to look at who really is vulnerable, who really does make society work, who has to literally put their lives on the line while the rest of us are secluded in our houses. We’ve discovered something about ourselves that we may have been conveniently able to hide before but we can’t hide

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any more. And so the question is what do we do with that knowledge now?

Horton’s question about what is to be done is certainly not rhetorical. Despite the cynicism and complacency of many governments, COVID-​ 19 also helped us shed light on important qualities and values long suppressed from mainstream political discourse, such as solidarity, collective action and socially meaningful (“essential”) work. For example, professions that the market economy had undervalued for too long such as nursing, social care, social work, food chain and factory work have now re-​emerged as crucial and inspirational. The systematic undermining of those vocations and working-​ class jobs have come into question in recent months. The example of the weekly celebration and appreciation of health and social care workers that started in Spain and Italy and spread to the UK and other countries has been a powerful symbolic and collective action. In a similar manner, people have sought creative ways to stay connected with each other and also extend solidarity with the most vulnerable members of our society. Social workers at a global level have been at the forefront of this search for a new commons: new and radically different ways of organising our public spaces, institutions and ultimately societies. It is not only practitioners who have continued practicing under extraordinary and dangerous conditions (often without the necessary personal protective equipment), but most importantly they have attempted to re-​imagining the future of the social, in line with the collective and grassroots action emerging in different parts of the world. The current book presents extraordinary examples of how communities in countries such as Greece and Chile have used social media, arts and social movements in order to reclaim collective solidarity. The urgent need for reimagining different ways of organising our societies during and after the pandemic has been brilliantly captured by the Chilean social movements who have declared that “we won’t get back to normal because normality was the problem”.

3 Neoliberal social work and COVID-​19 Iain Ferguson 28 April 2020 was International Workers Memorial Day (IWM). It’s an annual event organised by trade unions to commemorate the many thousands of workers who have died unnecessarily and too young as a result of government or employer negligence, through industrial accidents or through avoidable industrial diseases like asbestosis. In 2020, IWM Day was a bit different. For this year we observed a minute’s silence for all the frontline workers –​ health workers, care workers, bus drivers, shop workers and social workers –​who have lost their lives due to COVID-​19. It was not, however, as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson tried to suggest, a “day of national unity”. For many of these frontline workers will have died as a direct or indirect result of his government’s failure to prepare adequately for the crisis or to provide adequate personal protective equipment. The slogan of International Workers Memorial Day is ‘Remember the dead, fight for the living’. We should remember the dead and one role of social work is to help people deal with the pain of loss. But in this short contribution I want to look at what kind of role social work might play in ‘fighting for the living’ in the face of this crisis. In Part II of this book, contributors from Greece, Chile, South Africa and elsewhere report on the new and imaginative ways that social workers are developing practice to keep in touch with service users during the crisis, to reduce social isolation and protect mental health. There have also been accounts of social workers making links with the new mutual aid organisations that are springing up everywhere. These are important and positive developments. 25

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But we have also heard another less positive side to this picture, because many social workers have reported that in their agencies it’s ‘business as usual’. That rather than responding in new and creative ways to this wholly unprecedented situation, there is still the same management preoccupation with meeting budgets and targets, the same emphasis on monitoring, surveillance and risk rather than on working with service users to help them meet their needs and address their difficulties. Others still have talked about social work being ‘invisible’ in the current crisis. This situation is not the fault of individual workers or even of individual managers. Rather it reflects the dominance of a market-​driven ideology which emerged in the 1990s, sometimes called New Public Management, sometimes managerialism. From this period, significant transformations took place in health and social work services. In the Global South, it involved so-​ called Structural Adjustment Programmes, imposed by the International Monetary Fund and requiring the wholesale privatisation of health and social care services. In the West it was about creating a social work practice more suited to the needs of the market, with direct work outsourced to voluntary or private agencies. It was based on a very individualised practice –​out went community social work –​and one which saw social work not as an ethical profession rooted in relationships and social justice but rather as a neutral, technical occupation. And it has resulted in increased bureaucracy, with social workers often spending more time in front of computers than with their clients, located in offices or call centres which are far removed from the communities they serve. That model –​what we now call ‘neoliberal social work’ –​is a million miles away from what many of us would recognise as good social work practice. And it has meant, I would argue, that social work’s contribution during this crisis has been much less than it could be. But it doesn’t have to be like this. It was to challenge that model that some of us called a meeting in Glasgow in 2004 called ‘I didn’t come into social work for this’. That meeting led in 2006 to a 300-​strong conference in Liverpool which set up the Social Work Action

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Network –​SWAN. We argued against managerialism and the market in social work and for a social work practice based on more collective approaches, one that learned from the experience of service users and other social movements and rejected the idea that social work could be politically neutral. Since then, SWAN have held well-​ attended annual conferences where workers, students, practitioners and –​ crucially –​service users have discussed and debated how we can develop new forms of practice. We have been involved in numerous campaigns –​to defend asylum-​seekers and fight racism, to challenge the scapegoating of social workers and in defence services against cuts and closures. The success of SWAN and the renewed interest in radical social work also led in 2013 to a new theoretical journal, Critical and Radical Social Work, which now has a global readership. And it’s that global development I now want to turn to. Because, as we found very quickly, it is not just social workers in Britain who have been challenging neoliberalism and neoliberal social work. The past decade has seen the emergence of an international radical social work current, sometimes linked to SWAN, sometimes not (Ferguson, Ioakimidis and Lavalette 2018). So, for example, in 2011 social workers in the New Approach group in Hungary played an active –​and courageous ‒ role in challenging the criminalisation of homeless people by their right-​wing government. In Spain in 2015, in what IFSW General Secretary Rory Truell rightly called ‘the best example of social work led social-​ action in the world right now’, social workers in the Orange Tide took to the streets in their bright orange T-​shirts along with service users and social movements to protest against evictions and against the impact of austerity on poor people. At the height of the refugee crisis, our colleagues in Greek SWAN played an important role in helping support refugees arriving on the Greek islands fleeing war and persecution, while EU governments were prepared to allow them to drown in the Mediterranean.

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And finally, our fantastic social work colleagues in Hong Kong have been actively involved in the pro-​ democracy movement there and last year helped organise a progressive social welfare conference which brought together social workers from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Now more than ever they need our support as the Chinese government cracks down on human rights activists. So, in conclusion, what is the relevance of this new movement to the coronavirus crisis? First, across the world we’ve seen the growth, on a massive scale of mutual aid, of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people volunteering to help isolated or vulnerable neighbours and communities –​and in some cases that’s led to the emergence of what Michael Lavalette (Lavalette 2011) has called ‘popular social work’ –​new, creative forms of practice being developed during the crisis. One of the most inspiring of these was reported in an article the London Review of Books (Wispelwey and Al-​Orzza 2020). In the absence of any support from the Israeli government or the international community, Palestinians in camps have resorted to community-​ based responses to protect themselves. In Aida and Azza refugee camps in Bethlehem, young refugees, trained as community health workers (CHWs) to fight the diabetes epidemic, have now organised themselves in response to COVID-​19. They promote social distancing, the early detection of cases and contact tracing, and help with patient testing and care when symptoms develop. Working under the occupation, the CHWs in Aida and Azza have produced a video and pamphlets detailing ways to minimise the risk of contracting COVID-​19. They call their patients daily and arrange for the safe delivery of life-​saving diabetes medication. As the writers comment: These young refugees are demonstrating the ingenuity and steadfastness that has kept Palestinian dreams of a better future alive for decades, despite constant setbacks and a crushing military occupation. (Wispelwey and Al-​Orzza  2020)

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In the same way, the emergence of mutual aid on a mass scale opens up possibilities everywhere to look again at developing new forms of community social work. Second, the way in which ordinary people and frontline workers have responded to this crisis –​in such stark contrast to their governments who have been criminally unprepared and often more concerned with getting the economy moving than with protecting people’s lives –​highlights a core value which you will seldom find in social work textbooks but which I would argue should be the core social work value: namely, solidarity. And my final point is this. This year began with all of us desperately worried about global warming. Now we have the coronavirus crisis. And already our rulers are talking of decades of austerity when this crisis is over. Truly, capitalism is the system that keeps on giving. So yes, we need to fight for another social work. But I want to end by arguing that as social workers, now more than ever, we need to be part of the wider struggle for a different world, a world based not on the relentless drive for profit but one based on the needs of humanity, our planet and all living things on it.

4 COVID-​19 and social inequalities A political view from social work Silvana Martinez Introduction

Today, we are passing through another world, a world crippled by the COVID-​19 pandemic which, as we well know, is no longer just a health crisis but a profound social, political and economic crisis, which will bring about as yet unknown long-​ term consequences. There is no doubt that we are moving towards a profound change at the global level. We have a historic responsibility, in terms of challenging this world order and the capacity for action to build another order, another world. This crisis has revealed the nature of our patriarchal-​ capitalist-​ colonial social order, deeply unequal, sharpened by the implementation of neoliberal policies and by the philosophical, ideological, political and epistemological assumptions that support them. That social order promotes hyper-​individualism and the logic of ‘every man for himself’. It promoted the notion that social inequalities were going to be magically solved through the invisible hand of the market and the ‘trickle down’ theory. Today we know that the supposed invisible hand was not such because it is visibly trying to save the world’s rich and their financial capital at the expense of the poor. Precisely, with this crisis it was also made clear that finance and financial speculation are like a house of cards that, at the first blow, collapses and that finance in no way replaces the real economy of the people. In this sense, the crisis has put the irreplaceable place of the state at the centre of the debate. 31

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The market has fled in a cowardly manner and we only see on the scene in many countries the presence of the state as guarantor of the rights and protection of citizens, as well as the active and supportive presence of social movements and popular organisations. The great story of neoliberalism has exploded into a thousand pieces and everything that seemed so solid has vanished into thin air. As social workers, we need to have a global debate, which takes into account the structural social inequalities that constitute the most hidden side of the pandemic. Social inequalities that have historically been invisible and naturalised and that today need to be highlighted in the face of a hegemonic political and medical discourse that focuses merely on the biological and epidemiological problem of COVID-​19.

Social inequalities kill: pandemic, poverty, racism and gender

Social inequalities are shaped by multiple oppressions based on social class, race, gender, among others, which intersect and reinforce each other. COVID-​19 came to show, with much forcefulness, that these structural inequalities built by a patriarchal-​capitalist-​colonial social order are the main cause of contagion and deaths in the world. In general terms, diseases, natural disasters, food security problems and all disasters seem to have a well-​defined path: the one that leads to the most vulnerable and impoverished populations around the world. As a social worker I think it is important to demystify a story that covers up social inequalities. It is a story that maintains that this virus makes us equal and does not discriminate between classes, races or genders. But nothing is more fallacious than this. Studies in different regions affirm that COVID-​19 affects, to a greater extent, the poorest and most excluded sectors of society. Peter Winskill, lead author of research at University College, London, said that they estimate an average 32 per cent increase in the probability of death by COVID-​19 when comparing individuals from poorer households with those from richer households (Winskill et al. 2020). The main reason for this, Winskill et al. added, is the lack of ability to go to a

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hospital and intensive care facilities. Poorer families also tend to live in larger households that include several generations. This makes it more difficult to protect older family members through social distancing. Philip Alston (2020), former UN Special Rapporteur, referring to the United States, stresses that poor and low-​ income people face much greater risks from the coronavirus because of chronic neglect and discrimination, and a confusing federal response. Also, referring to Spain, he noted that COVID-​19 has shed light on serious deficiencies in central government and autonomous community policies to combat poverty, with millions of people unable to work suffering from delays in payment of benefits, technical problems and inadequate assistance. Currently Latin America, the most unequal region in the world, has more than three and a half million cases, with Brazil being the nation with the highest number of infections, followed by Peru, Chile and Mexico. Brazil now has the second highest number of deaths in the world, while Mexico is in fourth place. These deaths occur among the most impoverished populations, where overcrowding, structural poverty, lack of drinking water, informal employment and unemployment and lack of access to healthcare stand out among some of the factors affecting deaths before the COVID-​19. In addition to poverty, there is another social inequality: race. According to a study published in the journal Health Affairs, African-​American patients with COVID-​19 are 2.7 times more likely than non-​Hispanic white patients to be hospitalised for more severe symptoms. This uneven impact of the virus among the African-​American population and their descendants is mainly explained by socio-​economic reasons:  inequality and poverty are behind most infections. In this regard, David Harvey (2020) points out that “the new working class” takes the brunt, as it is the workforce that bears the greatest risk of contracting the virus at work or being exposed to dismissal. The black population in the United States is an impoverished group, which tends to have more chronic diseases and difficulties in accessing health coverage. As a

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result, their symptoms may be more severe. In addition, the African-​American population is at greater risk of contracting coronaviruses because, in a situation of poverty, people live more together, with less space to confine themselves, among other reasons. During the coronavirus crisis, part of this population has filled the jobs considered “essential”:  from health personnel to cleaning services, couriers or supermarket staff, thus exposing themselves to greater contagion. Data disclosed by the Ministry of Health on 10 April 2020 (Mena 2020a & b) indicate that the spread of the coronavirus is more lethal among the black population in Brazil. The numbers are still small for a final estimate, in 32 per cent of the total fatal cases there was no identification of race/​colour, but the data indicate that blacks and browns represent 23.1 per cent of the hospitalisations for SARS and, in total, 32.8 per cent of the fatal cases. But in addition to the problem of poverty and racism, in our analyses we must emphasise the problem of gender, as well as other oppressions present in social inequalities and which COVID-​19 came to deepen. In fact, the COVID-​19 pandemic continues to reveal another profound social problem: gender-​ based violence. For many women, the isolation measures with which governments try to contain the outbreak of the virus become a nightmare when they are forced to be confined to their aggressors. Today, the violent no longer need any effort to isolate the victim. The COVID-​19 pandemic put most of humanity in forced confinement, leaving victims of domestic violence in more vulnerable conditions, with far fewer resources available. Cases of gender-​ based violence and femicide are other faces of this pandemic, to give just a few figures: In Colombia, for example, during the period of isolation, domestic violence increased by 39 per cent, in Chile, cases of domestic violence increased by 70 per cent (Arrondondo 2020). In Argentina, where seven out of every ten homicides of women and girls take place in the home, emergency calls for domestic violence increased by 25 per cent. In Bolivia, the city of Santa Cruz reported the highest number of cases of domestic violence and COVID-​ 19. Along with Paraguay, Bolivia also has

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the highest rate of homicides of women and girls in South America (Banco Mundial 2020).

Final reflections

Finally, as I already mentioned, COVID-​19 does not affect everyone equally, nor does it “make us equal”. The virus has deepened social inequalities. Today we have the historic opportunity to re-​discuss, problematise and re-​signify the role of the state, public policies, social organisations, democracy, the value of science and technology, the relationship with nature and the contribution of social workers in the construction of a new social order. We are going through a key moment in which it is necessary to rethink and build a new social contract, where the State, Politics, Sovereignty, Social Justice, Human Rights, Solidarity and the Collective become the guiding principles and fundamental axes of a new social order that reverse the social inequalities that condemn millions of human beings to exploitation, hunger, misery and death. In the face of hegemonic medical discourses, in the face of the biologicist view that “dissociates” the problem of health from the political-​economic-​social problem, we social workers have much to say and contribute. We are an essential profession, of course. We always have been. We have always been in the frontline. There, where capitalism, racism and patriarchy materialise most crudely through unemployment, exploitation, racism and gender violence.

5 Social work responds to COVID-​19 An international overview Rory Truell When the lockdown in Wuhan, China was announced, “that day was chaos”, Wuhan-​based social worker Chen LanLan told IFSW. The first thing I did was to gather an online group of colleagues using the WeChat app. At the time, that was the best way to organise people quickly and to respond to vulnerable residents. Many people were in isolation or suspected of being infected with the virus. In less than three hours, the first group was up to full capacity. We felt helpless and overwhelmed. Everywhere, there was panic and anxiety about what lay ahead. Many residents worried about being infected and didn’t know what to do. We knew that the demand for social work and social support services had multiplied many times.

This was the first few hours that began the international social work response to COVID-​19. By day two in Wuhan, social workers had organised themselves along with psychologists and medical staff to work in shifts creating and operating online services to the Wuhan residents. In the next days, the Chinese Association of Social Workers (CASW) established nationwide call centres, targeted plans for vulnerable populations and online training manuals for the countries more than one million social workers. CASW then shared their learning through IFSW to the international profession setting a path of action later called:  ‘Social Work Responds’. The path developed well ahead of most 37

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governments and resulted in saving the lives of uncountable numbers of people. Social work is not new to epidemics and pandemics and was quickly able to react. Our lived experiences with Ebola, HIV and SARS taught us that we would need to act both nationally and globally and act fast. To facilitate this, the IFSW website became a place of shared learning and cooperation as the profession faced the challenges together. This resulted in the successful campaigning that governments recognise that a social response alongside a medical reaction was imperative, that social services needed to remain open during lockdown and that all social services would need to adapt to new transformative practices. By the time COVID-​ 19 reached out beyond China’s borders, social workers in many countries were organising masks and personal protection equipment for communities as well as themselves. They were arranging live-​in shift work in residential care settings, organising programs that enabled homeless people to stay in hostels and motels and establishing food and clean water distribution systems in the countries that previously relied on crowded marketplaces. All of this was extremely challenging for frontline workers. In the early weeks of the pandemic, social workers successfully lobbied government ministers and took actions that were not always understood by their employers. At times social workers also confronted by challenges from the communities where they worked. Just days after the virus spread to Milan, the first European pandemic epicentre, social worker Claudio Pedrelli told IFSW: “From the very start of the pandemic, it has been up to social workers to check on the welfare of older people who are vulnerable or living alone. We’ve been wearing masks from the beginning. At first, people looked at us as if we were from another planet when they opened the door. Now it’s become normal.” Working in settings with a complete absence of social service policies to manage pandemics and contexts where governments were yet to recognise the significance of the problem, social workers encountered significant challenges. Calls and emails came daily and frequently to IFSW, and here are three examples we received:  A social work association

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in Asia wrote that their welfare system is near to collapse. From Europe, a social work association questioned:  “An elderly woman has died of COVID-​19. Her body is stacked with many others in a church awaiting burial. But her family aren’t aware of this and want to know where her remains are. I am sure if I tell them, they will break the curfew to reclaim the body.” What advice would you give? From a Social Work Association in West Africa, they reported: “Food distribution has stopped for the rural communities. The communities are now eating seeds that were to be planted next spring. They will die of starvation.” Finding solutions to each of these typical examples became, and in many cases remains, the focus of social workers worldwide. To facilitate finding answers and building on the shared learning and collaboration that started with the experiences from Wuhan, 20,000 social workers worldwide came together with cared-​experienced people, UN representatives and progressive government ministers in an online conference to collectively develop a global response that would advance the transformation of social protection systems from underdeveloped entities that respond to people in crisis to systems that prevent social crisis and recognise the equal rights of all people. The conference resulted in a framework of five integrated themes to be advanced over the next ten years. They are: Valuing Social Work as an Essential Service Realising the essential role of the social work profession to connect people, communities and systems, to co-​ building sustainable communities and to contribute to liveable futures. Resourcing the profession with legal recognition, respectful working conditions, education and continuing professional development and supporting professional associations. Co-​building Inclusive Social Transformation Co-​ building with people, families, communities, social movements and governments to achieve inclusive social transformation locally, nationally, regionally and globally.

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Promoting participatory democracy, gender equality, action to address racism, economic sustainability and climate justice. Ubuntu: ‘I am because we are’ Nurturing relationships are central to the social work profession in all aspects of our work. Promoting indigenous knowledge and the decolonisation of the social work profession. Transforming Social Protections Systems Transforming social protections systems to secure the human dignity and rights of all peoples. Strengthening connections for security and change. Promoting harmony in relationships and a way of living between peoples, communities and mother earth. Promoting Diversity and the Power of Joint Social Action Celebrating the strengths of all people and their active role in leading social development. Working together to co-​ design and co-​ build thriving communities and societies for people and the environment. This framework of themes, born not just from the context of COVID-​19 but also from the more than 90 years of global social work experience highlights the need for social protection systems to be transformed entirely at both policy and practice ends. The 10-​year campaign will focus on state and NGO social protection being developed ‘with’ people rather than ‘for’ people. That social protection systems need be designed on the principles of ‘inclusivity’, ‘joint participation’, the recognition of ‘everybody’s strengths’ and ‘co-​designing/​co-​ building’ societies of thriving interconnected communities with shared ‘sustainable’ futures. Like facing COVID-​19, the social work profession will have many challenges in advancing this transformational strategy. As with the social work response to COVID-​19, if the worldwide social work profession acts together and includes the communities we work within as leading partners to this process, this transformational journey will become a reality.

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Our tasks ahead will include developing strategies advancing the five interrelated themes in every community and in every country as well as coordinating them globally. It will be hard work but worth it. Inclusive social protection systems and their active prevention of crises that stem from poverty, marginalisation, denial or rights and climate change need to be a pillar for the future of humanity and the natural world. We can do this. The social work profession is large, growing; and time and time again it has demonstrated its capacity and capability in transforming crises into better futures.

II

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6 Social work and the COVID-​19 crisis in the United States Dawn Belkin Martinez The situation in the United States and the government’s response

As of 5 August 2020, there have been 4,966,524 million people in the United States diagnosed with the coronavirus and over 161,000 deaths, more cases than any other country in the world (Worldometers 2020). The federal government’s response to this crisis, under the for-​profit healthcare system, has been nothing less than appalling and horrific. The Trump administration, with its allies in Congress and the states, are united by an ideology that distrusts any role for government except the redistribution of wealth upward to the wealthy and the surveillance and repression of dissidents, immigrants and people of colour. It’s abdication of responsibility for a unified national response to the pandemic guided by science and sound public policy has been total. Given the absence of an overall federal response, each state or county or city has been left to develop and implement its own rules and policies, except to the extent that some states, under Republican control, such as Arizona, have attempted to block efforts of Democratic mayors to impose effective healthcare restrictions. As a result of this piecemeal approach, the effectiveness of state and local responses has varied wildly. For example, in New York, face masks are required for anyone over the age of two when out in public, travellers arriving from states with high rates of transmission must self-​quarantine for 14 days and indoor dining is still prohibited. In Chicago, the public schools will feature remote learning only. In Georgia, 45

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indoor dining is permitted, public schools are open and face masks are not required (Bunis and Rough 2020). In Boston, the city built heated tents for people experiencing homelessness to shelter during the worst period of the crisis while in Las Vegas, Nevada the city turned a parking lot into a so-​called shelter by painting white boxes on the ground six feet apart while there were an estimated 100,00 hotel rooms unused. Bidding wars between states to obtain crucial supplies, medicine and protective equipment were not uncommon. In March, the governor of New York appeared on national television to describe his inability to purchase ventilators for the state, comparing his experience to being on the online marketplace, eBay: We all wind up bidding up each other and competing against each other, where you now literally will have a company call you up and say, ‘Well, California just outbid you.’ It’s like being on eBay with 50 other states, bidding on a ventilator. (Guardian 31 March 2020)

Currently, death rates for COVID-​ 19 are increasing in 22 states. It is no exaggeration to say that the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus has been an absolute and complete disaster.

Social work and the COVID-​19 crisis

The lived and work experiences of many social workers expose us to the cruel realities of racial capitalism unmasked. The wealthy of the United States escape to their second homes and take advantage of “work at home” opportunities while frontline “essential” workers, often black and brown, bear the brunt of this economic and health catastrophe, exposing the falsity of the claim that we are “all in this together”. The economic collapse resulting from the government’s failure to get the pandemic under control has plunged many working people into poverty, hunger and homelessness. Even before the crisis hit, nearly half of all renters paid more than 30 per cent of their income on housing costs. Twenty per cent of

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all households didn’t have 400 dollars in the bank for an unexpected emergency (Federal Reserve Survey of Household Economics and Decision Making 2018). Social workers understand that the outcomes of COVID-​19 are just one more example of institutional racism, classism, sexism and income inequality that has existed in the United States since the founding of this country. States with the highest income inequality also experienced a larger number of COVID-​19 deaths (UCLA Health 2020). African Americans are twice as likely to die from COVID than whites. In some states they are three or more times likely to die (COVID Racial Tracker 2020). Latinos, overrepresented in frontline jobs which increase their exposure to the virus, are four times more likely to be hospitalised for COVID than Whites (Center for Disease Control 2020). These figures also reflect the reality that the United States shares with South Africa; the distinction of being the only industrialised nations without universal health insurance. Almost 20 per cent of the non-​ elderly population in this country lacks health insurance at any given time, and the disparities in access to care and health outcomes are very much greater in the United States than anywhere else from which there are reasonable data. The resistance of the Trump administration to a comprehensive national response to the COVID-​19 pandemic is in no small part due to its reluctance to acknowledge the necessity for strong federal healthcare policies and its fear that a successful national response to this crisis would bolster the growing national movement for universal health insurance. The devasting economic effects of COVID-​19 are well known, but once again, our black and brown clients have been hit particularly hard. In an April survey, 66 per cent of Latinos reported that someone in their household had experienced wage or job loss as a result of the outbreak. Nearly half of all black and 44 per cent of all Latinos surveyed indicated that they could not pay all of their monthly bills (Hugo Lopez, Rainie and Budiman 2020). Finally, 42 per cent of Massachusetts black renters indicated they had little or no confidence that they would be able to make their August rent payment (City Life/​Vida Urbana 2020).

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Social movements and social workers respond to the crisis

In spite of the many obstacles confronting them, social workers have been finding creative ways to respond to the COVID-​19 pandemic and the resulting economic crisis. Here are some of the most interesting and inspiring examples grouped together in several categories: 1) Mutual Aid:  This is a strong movement which has sprung up and many social workers are involved both at the local level and in national service. Mutual aid efforts are promoting a variety of activities including neighbourhood food delivery, financial support for essential workers, social support for the elderly, free counselling services for those undergoing stress, and concrete support for those immigrants in detention and those incarcerated. 2) Political Organising/​Campaigning: In Massachusetts, social workers have been working alongside housing activists and together they helped to successfully pass a statewide eviction moratorium. Massachusetts social workers are also currently supporting the COVID-​ 19 Housing Stability Act, which aims to freeze rents, cancel evictions and provide economic relief for both homeowners and renters. Radical social workers are involved in the tremendous upsurge in the movement for black lives sparked by the police murder of George Floyd, including efforts around defunding the police, prison abolition and immigrant rights. Social workers in Chicago have started a petition demanding that the National Association of Social Workers embrace abolition, racial justice and commit to ending carceral practices in social work (Medium 2020).  Out of these various struggles a growing consensus has begun to emerge demanding fundamental reforms. As a part of this consensus a wish list of COVID-​19 demands has been formulated: • The healthcare system and treatment for the coronavirus and related illnesses should be made available for all people, with no exceptions.

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• The government must subordinate the private healthcare system to the need to fight the epidemic, nationalising healthcare institutions, if necessary. • The government must take immediate steps to release confined persons who are unable to practice social distancing. These include prisoners, detained immigrants, etc. • The government must provide ongoing economic relief to all working people who have lost their jobs as a result of the present crisis. This includes cash payments, debt relief, no evictions, rent/​mortgage freezes, no loss of credit, etc. • The government should not interfere with or permit corporations to interfere with the activities of labour unions and community organisations working to protect and defend workers who continue to work during the present crisis. • The government must not use the present crisis to fan the flames of xenophobia or to wage war on vulnerable immigrants and immigrant populations. 3) Clinical Social Work Practice with a Sociopolitical Frame of Practice:  For those social workers that do therapy or counselling, now more than ever we really need to be uplifting a sociopolitical frame for people to understand what’s happening to them and what they are feeling/​experiencing. The Boston Liberation Health Group believes, in the face of this crisis, social workers have an important role to play:  as an ally of our clients and all peoples struggling to name the oppressive systems, to point out its causal role in the present crisis, to offer immediate responses to alleviate the suffering of those effected by the crisis, to raise up the fundamental demand:  another world is possible, and to dedicate ourselves to bringing it into being.

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Summary: social work and our future challenges

The present crisis poses an enormous challenge for progressive social workers and all activists who recognise that the greater pandemic afflicting our planet is capitalism, and in the United States, its particularly toxic form –​racial capitalism. The coronavirus and the disastrous way it has been handled are just the latest examples of how this system is profoundly destructive for both nature and peoples. The challenge is this: the present crisis is laying bare for all to see how capitalism and capitalist healthcare systems cannot and will not provide health and security for the majority of the world’s peoples. As such, the present crisis provides us with a great deal of ammunition to take the political and ideological struggles for alternative economic, social and healthcare systems to a whole new level, to build powerful movements for social change, and to reach many additional people in the process. This is true in spite of the fact that we are currently operating under conditions where the social distancing and community quarantining required to address the pandemic raise enormous difficulties for the effective collective organising and public action that the crisis demands. There is an urgent need to seize the moment provided by the current crisis to connect the dots for people –​to show them how the interconnected and mutually reinforcing planetary environmental crisis, the social crisis created by wealth inequality and the crisis created by for-​profit healthcare systems render governments and social systems not just unable to effectively respond to a pandemic, but profoundly dysfunctional across the board. Working with our allies in social change movements, social workers have an opportunity to play a leading role in shifting the policy debate on the many issues and problems that impact our clients and their families. We can contribute in a variety of ways, not the least in the crafting of concrete, practical policy solutions to the urgent and immediate consequences of racial capitalism’s failure to address the multiple crises confronting us. Equally urgent is the need to find ways to convert these policy solutions and the ideological messaging we do around

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them into a comprehensive political program and, in the face of social distancing, find ways to organise or generate a political movement around it capable of rising to the greatest challenge of our planet’s history. It is not enough to struggle just to get through this pandemic; given the operations of the capitalist world system, new pandemics and environmental disasters will inevitably follow. Social workers and our community members need to be a part of the multiracial working-​ class movement that is fighting for policies like defunding the police and investing in communities, prison abolition, Medicare for All, the cancellation of all medical and student debt, a green new deal and rent control The only solution is fundamental change: another world is possible but we have to, and we will, fight for it.

7 Business as usual? Social work and the COVID-​19 pandemic in Chile Gianinna Muñoz Arce The first case of coronavirus in Chile was confirmed by the Department of Health on the 3 March 2020, when the country was still facing political uprising and massive riots that had started on the 18 October 2019 (18-​O). The national plebiscite scheduled to be conducted in April 2020 –​an agreement obtained as a consequence of protests aiming to define the end of the Political Constitution created during the Pinochet dictatorship –​had to be postponed because of the sanitary crisis. The government established partial lockdowns and quarantines during the first months in some sectors of some cities. These selective measures that aimed to protect the functioning of markets and the health of the economy1 have resulted in Chile remaining in Phase 4 of the outbreak –​that is, uncontrolled and widespread community transmission.2 Despite policies aiming to protect market functioning, unemployment reached 11.2 per cent between March and May,3 a record-​high level in the past ten years. Debt, precariousness and poverty have increased (Fundación Sol 2020), to the point where a new wave of riots was unleashed in late May due to food unavailability and lack of support in the poorest areas, which was fiercely repressed by the police. “The Chilean system is even crueller than coronavirus” stated the protesters’ banners,4 referring to the consequences of 1.  https://​ciperchile.cl/​2020/​06/​13/​el-​desastre-​esta-​aqui/​ 2.  www.minsal.cl/​coronavirus-​en-​chile-​pasa-​a-​fase-​4-​y-​presidente-​ anuncia-​cierre-​de-​fronteras/​ 3.   https:// ​ l yd.org/ ​ c entro- ​ d e- ​ p rensa/ ​ n oticias/ ​ 2 020/ ​ 0 6/​ desocupacion-​alcanza-​su-​mayor-​nivel-​desde-​2010–​2/​ 4.  www.bbc.com/​mundo/​noticias-​america-​latina-​52717413

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the neoliberal experiment that historically had made Chile recognised around the world (Harvey 2005). Recently, the measures adopted by the right-​wing government of Sebastian Piñera to address the corona crisis have included the launching of a new Employment Act allowing companies to suspend employment contracts or negotiate reduced work schedules with their employees; the offering of loans to families to cover subsistence needs which are granted by private banks; and the delivering of food boxes in the poorest areas –​food bought from the biggest supermarket chains.5 These, among other strategies implemented by the government during the last months, have served as opportunities for implementing profit generation in times of crisis, as Naomi Klein (2007) has identified in her celebrated book, The Shock Doctrine. This is not new in Chile. Even more, it was precisely the indignation of Chilean people against ‘the shock doctrine’ implemented during the dictatorship (1973–​1990) to install the neoliberal model and its effects in daily life which resulted in 18-​ O, one of the most significant political uprisings experienced by the Chilean society in the last century. The current sanitary crisis has brought to light the inequalities and fragility of the Chilean system which was the core demand of the 18-​O movement:  the dispossession of those who cannot access high-​quality healthcare, housing, pensions and many other dimensions of wellbeing, which are direct consequences of the neoliberal experiment. The pandemic has also illustrated how xenophobia, stigma and discrimination operate in terms of access and distribution of the state’s social services and social protection.6 Measures undertaken by the government to address the crisis in a renewed version of The Shock Doctrine, and also those everyday practices that reinforce oppression of some groups in times of a sanitary crisis, have been highlighted by social workers along with other professional associations and social movements in recent months.

5. www.fundacionsol.cl/​ 6.  https://​www.elespectador.com/​coronavirus/​chile-​atrapado-​ entre-​dos-​pandemias-​el-​coronavirus-​y-​la-​xenofobia-​articulo-​913420/​

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Resisting the pandemic: Chilean social work organisations’ responses

Chilean social work has resisted political crises throughout almost a century of professional history, a history full of struggles and violent traumas. During the dictatorship, and due to the Marxist background, schools of social work were considered a source of subversion and were closed. Social work lost its university status, which meant that professional titles started to be awarded by private ‘technological training centres’ and ‘professional institutes’ created under Pinochet’s privatisation policy and education reform. The gap between private and public schools of social work grew deep, and each school of social work created its own curriculum, without regulation from either the state or professional bodies. Part of the reforms conducted during the dictatorship resulted in the loss of control that the National Association of Social Workers used to have over training and ethical supervision of professional activities (Sepúlveda 2016). With the weakness of the National Association and the absence of other professional organisations in the 1990s and 2000s –​the so-​called ‘transition to democracy’ –​social work experienced a period of lethargy in terms of political activism and collective action. After 2006 –​the year in which social work recovered its university status ‒ social work organisations reactivated progressively. That was the case with the Chilean Association of University Schools of Social Work, which was inactive for almost 15 years. The National Association of Social Workers gained political visibility throughout the years and the Chilean Social Work Research Network was created when social workers who had studied a PhD program abroad –​in the context of a massive doctoral training program implemented by the government of Michelle Bachellet in 2009 ‒ started to return to Chile. These three social work organisations have participated in diverse responses to the COVID-​19 crisis, adopting an active role in denouncing injustice, generating knowledge and promoting critical reflection from a social work basis. The Chilean Association of Social Workers has denounced situations in which human rights are being violated and/​or produce oppression of more disadvantaged, impoverished and

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discriminated groups. For example, it argued for a change in the situation of political prisoners detained during the protests occurring last October, given the spread of coronavirus within prisons, and advocated for the commutation of sentences; it also denounced, in coordination with the Federation of Professional Associations, an agreement between the National Intelligence Agency and the National Children Service that aimed to identify and criminalise acts of protest organised by young people, which was eventually nullified.7 The precarious situation of frontline workers in hospitals, community health centres, municipalities’ social services, prisons, residences and other public services has also been publicly highlighted by the National Association of Social Workers, including the lack of basic safety equipment, especially at the beginning of the pandemic.8 After the government’s calling for public servants to return to work ‒ in the middle of the increasing numbers of infected people in the capital city of Santiago ‒ the Regional Association of Social Workers (Provincial Santiago) called on social workers to disobey the calling and refuse to return to workplaces until safety measures were implemented. One month later, a voluntary system of ethical shifts was established in most public services, providing social workers with security equipment and safety protocols. The National Association of Social Workers has also undertaken campaigns to prevent domestic abuse and institutional violence against children and old people who are in nursing homes during the pandemic, and guidelines to promote the mental health of frontline professionals. By enacting these acts of defence and promotion, the National Association of Social Workers has contributed, as a priority, to making visible and supporting those sectors that are suffering the most in the pandemic.

7.   www.tvu.cl/ ​ p rensa/ ​ 2 020/ ​ 0 4/ ​ 2 7/ ​ m inisterio-​ d e-​ j usticia-​ y -​ derechos-​humanos-​deja-​sin-​efecto-​convenio-​entre-​la-​ani-​y-​sename. html 8.  https://​capsulainformativa.cl/​sename-​y-​coronavirus-​alicia-​del-​ basto-​dirigente-​nacional-​denuncia-​que-​la-​gente-​se-​esta-​exponiendo-​ sin-​tener-​los-​elementos-​basicos-​para-​poder-​trabajar/​

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But it is not only urgent issues that have been addressed: those dimensions that require time to think, discuss and share, such as research and theoretical reflection, have been included as part of social work organisations’ responses during the pandemic. These actions reflect the purpose of reinforcing the articulation between theory and practice and between academic research and professional intervention. In an effort to produce knowledge that enables the Association to seek improvements in the situation of social workers during the sanitary crisis, a joint research project is being carried out in collaboration with the Department of Social Work at the University of Chile, the National Association of Social Workers and the Chilean Association of University Schools of Social Work. The study, currently being conducted, will contribute to make visible not only the consequences of the sanitary crisis in social workers’ practices and labour situations, but also to identify how social workers resist it by contesting, modifying, omitting or creating new strategies of professional intervention during these critical times. Many social workers have had to change their approaches in practice, replacing family visits for video calls, or doing collective virtual meetings instead of face-​to-​face workshops with service users, just to list a few changes. The study aims to understand how these changes have affected professional intervention, relationships and the positions of frontline social workers. The generation of knowledge from the frontline has been understood as a crucial aspect to provide the basis for professional debates and struggles for better labour conditions in the future. Reflection on the situation of social work as a profession and discipline is also something very important in these critical times. The Chilean Association of University Schools of Social Work has also contributed to the social work debate during the political and sanitary crises, broadcasting conferences that aim to discuss remote training and the challenges of social work education faced by educators and students in the current context. In a similar vein, the Social Work Researchers’ Network has also contributed to democratise access to social work training through the so-​called campaign “Donate your Lecture”. The campaign aimed to gather collaborations from diverse academics in the format of 30-​minute videos which

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were published via open access on the website of the network. These initiatives have contributed to improving access to social work education in Chile in the current critical scenario by providing access to diverse social work students, academics and professionals to the courses taught at universities. This contribution is significant in the Chilean context as university education is highly privatised, segmented and unequally distributed.

What’s coming next?

All the impacts of the pandemic in social work development, as well as the diverse responses produced by social workers in Chile, illustrate how the profession has strengthened the relation between academics, frontline professionals, researchers and students, manifested in joint projects, collaborations and articulations that have enabled social work to position itself in the public discussion, making visible the injustices and oppression that are institutionally produced. The value of producing and sharing knowledge that provide the basis for claiming the defence of human rights, and the health and safety of the people, has been recognised by the three social work bodies –​professional association, academic social work and social work researchers ‒ which used to work separately before the pandemic. This suggests that the crises challenge us to rethink our limits and to create and participate in joint initiatives rather than to undertake atomised responses, as we used to do in the past. We live in critical times, as Penelope Deutscher and Cristina Lafont (2017) have claimed. There is a widely shared sense of unease about the future, as we face a global sociopolitical and sanitary crisis, but this may be an historic window of opportunity for alternative perspectives to address the present. We need to recover the historical past of social work and the examples of many colleagues that fought for dignity and human rights, without renouncing the theoretical discussions and recognising the value of collaborative research with critical purposes. Political discussions related to the plebiscite re-​ scheduled for October 2020 represent an opportunity

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for Chilean social work to knock down these boundaries, such as academic individualism, professional segregation, competitiveness and commodification of knowledge, imposed by neoliberal rationality. This sanitary crisis has compelled us to contest these principles, and actions such as those described in this chapter illustrate how possible it is to recover our collective sense as a discipline and profession.

8 Social work responses to COVID-​19 in Brazil Roberta Uchôa Brazil has one of the worst COVID-​19 scenarios in the world. By mid-​July, there were more than 2 million confirmed cases and more than 80,000 deaths related to COVID-​19. This is not by accident. Since the beginning of the pandemic in the country in late February, the federal government, and particularly the president, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, a far-​right neo-​ fascist, has denied its existence and sent confusing messages to the public such as “COVID-​19 is a mild flu”, “It is much ado about nothing”. A despicable person: when asked once about the death record, he replied “And so what? I am not a gravedigger. I am a ‘messiah’, but I don’t work miracles” (The Lancet Editorial 2020). Therefore, Brazil faces this crisis without national health measures coordinated by the federal government, with less health investment and less social and labour protections than previously, due to ultra-​neoliberal reforms carried out in recent years, especially after the coup d’état against the democratically elected Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff from the Workers Party, in 2016. Since Rouseff was ousted, subsequent governments, backed by parliament and the judiciary, have imposed a radical neoliberal model characterised by social exclusion, authoritarianism and loss of national sovereignty. In the last four years, with the support of Pentecostal churches, agribusiness, pharmaceutical companies, banks, the middle classes and national and international capital, policies have become anti-​democratic, anti-​labour and anti-​people, with the loss of rights in social security, health, education and labour and environment protections. 61

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The most important legislative change is Constitutional Amendment nº 95 (2016) which froze health and education investment, including research, for 20 years. And following labour reform (2017), millions of workers were thrown into the informal market without social protection. Historically, Brazil is one of the countries with the highest wealth concentration and social inequalities. Therefore, COVID-​19-​related deaths are more associated with postcode rather than age and comorbidity in the country. However, this is also a country known for its strong grassroots movements like the MST (Workers Landless Movement), the MTST (Workers Homeless Movement), the Workers Party and other social and workers’ movements that have permanently placed on the national agenda the struggle between profits and lives. In this continental country, with more than 200 million inhabitants, millions of unemployed or informally employed people and many homeless or those living in houses without a proper sewage system and daily running water, the profound contradictions of capitalist society are a challenge to any social worker. Despite Catholic and conservative influences dating back to its birth between 1930 and 1940, social work in Brazil has seen radical changes since the end of 1970. These changes gained momentum exactly when professionals engaged in many social movements including the democratic challenge to the civil-​ military dictatorship (1964–​ 1985) and social movements for sanitary and psychiatric reforms, among others. The Ethical-​ Political Code of Social Workers’ Conduct (CFESS 2012), a critical approach in most under-​and post-​ graduate courses, and a firm commitment to protect social and labour rights, backed by CFESS (Federal Council of Social Work) and ABEPSS (National Association of Lecture and of Research on Social Work), all place social workers centre stage in most local and national struggles. Social workers in the country are mainly employed by the public sector (at local, state or federal level) and are in direct contact with the people most in need of social protection in the health, social care and retirement-​ pension system, the so-​called tripod of Brazilian social security, established

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by the Federal Constitution (1988). However, in a time of crisis caused by an infectious disease, a lack of funds to SUS (Brazilian NHS), a need for physical distancing and yet a shortage of PPE (personal protection equipment), what have social workers done so far? Many social workers still have their work suspended or are doing remote home-​based work while their workplaces, such as universities and the retirement-​ pension system, among others, remain closed. However, those in the social care and public and private health sectors are working full time and have even had their vacations suspended. Alongside social distance measures, the response of most state and local government bodies to tackle COVID-​19 was to create field hospitals (COVID-​ 19 treatment hospitals). Therefore, many new jobs were created for social workers to join the multi-​professional health teams in these hospitals, mainly to give support in the intensive care units. Naturally, like most human beings, these social workers are afraid for their health and their lives, and also for their families. And sadly, dealing with death is a daily routine for them. In COVID-​19 field hospitals, social workers have been asked to give daily treatment reports and/​or communicate a patient’s death to their families. These communications should be done by doctors or nurses who are more qualified to explain these health procedures. In response to this situation, at the end of March, CFESS launched a statement recommending social workers not to do these communications on their own, but alongside doctors and/​or nurses. Their job is to give family support and inform families of their rights as well as procedures in case of COVID-​19 related deaths (CFESS 2020a). In times of crisis and outwith their normal routine, as mentioned by Matos (2020) and recommended by the Ethical-​Political Code of Social Workers Conduct (CFESS 2012), social workers work in task forces with relief programs to respond to, and protect, workers’ rights and needs without putting themselves at risk. Most social workers are located in social care, health and mental health systems responding to users’ needs, delivering health education to prevent COVID-​ 19, giving social rights information and making

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referrals to other social services. However, these activities are not carried out with clients, but mostly with their families, friends or representatives. Social workers are not currently able to do much more than this during this crisis as physical distancing is extremely necessary. Last, but not least, in the context of the pandemic, many health professionals have been infected and have died as result of their work on the frontline fighting COVID-​19. In Brazil, more than 30 social workers have lost their lives, mainly women, because of their commitment to their work and to clients’ needs. As stated by CFESS (2020b), working in an anonymous way, invisible to capitalism but familiar to clients, these deaths cry out and denounce the Brazilian state’s failure to provide adequate resources including PPE, the exhausting working hours and a shortage of social workers which has resulted in others often being subjected to moral blackmail.

To remember and honour these social workers, CFESS (2020b) created an online memorial dedicated to them as social workers and victims of COVID-​19:  “Our grief, our fight”. To these social workers, families and friends, our respect and solidarity. Finally, this crisis will pass sooner or later. However, Brazil and the world that will come after the pandemic will be the same as the one left behind. Even worse, as predicted by the United Nations, with greater inequalities there will be more wealth concentration, more power in the hands of a few, with big business cashing in on what is left of smaller ones and so on (UN 2020). Capitalism will prevail with its wealth concentration and social inequalities; and as long as capitalism exists, there will be room for social work, for solidarity with all the underprivileged, nationally and internationally, and most importantly, for engagement with grassroots movements against this savage austerity which takes place at the expense of the social rights of the poor and of sustainable social policies. Thus, international cooperation is extremely important.

9 Social services, social work and COVID-​19 in Palestine Raed Amira Introduction

Since the outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-​19) in the world, societies have taken unprecedented protection procedures in terms of prevention and compliance with health procedures that have been announced by the World Health Organization. The commitment of these procedures and policies varies between countries, some have been keen to follow the procedures in a rigorous and serious way, while others have delayed following the recommended preventative procedures, with a tendency towards heavy loss of life. In Palestine, the virus appeared in Bethlehem city on 5 March and has since spread all over Palestine. It was necessary to start work on creating and raising awareness, providing protection advice and helping and supporting affected families. The individual and community interventions varied between governorates (cities, villages and camps), with interventions taking many forms of social solidarity. A special fund was established in Palestine to meet the economic, health and social effects of coronavirus. Community and official emergency committees were formed to deal with the procedures issued by the Palestinian National Authority through different bodies and official spokesmen from the government. All the interventions, donations, charitable works and aid were associated with these committees. On the level of individual and collective behaviour, there was indifference among large segments of the Palestinians. This was evident through citizens’ behaviour and the lack of commitment to public safety procedures in accordance 65

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with Palestinian government instructions and not taking into consideration the risk of virus spreading. In Palestine, institutions, ministries and schools were closed as (128,2054) male and female students were deprived of education and they were deprived of their education. Universities, mosques and churches were also closed, and many people were stuck in different countries and not able to return home for four months until the initial phase of the crisis subdued. Palestinians fears increased toward their detained children and toward prisoners in general. Also, the economic hardship of the Palestinians increased because factories were closed and many workers were not able to work inside the occupied territories. This situation created psychological, social, economic and cultural repercussions for society, and many families have been quarantined. This caused a sense of boredom, anxiety and fear among all categories, especially among children. In a study conducted by the Defence of Children International (Palestine Section) to investigate children’s needs during the corona pandemic, 226 children participated: 48.1 per cent of the children answered that they were feeling bored during the pandemic, while 20.2 per cent felt anxious and upset. According to the children, during this quarantine trial, verbal violence spread by 37 per cent. Also, as a result of relying on the internet and electronic media for communication, children reported that cyberbullying was a common behaviour during the pandemic. Very quickly, people feared the consequences of epidemic crises, like death, and this was accompanied by psychological, social, economic and cultural dimensions. In the social dimension: This is a change in the patterns of social relations that prevail according to the customs, traditions, concepts and values of the society. The psychological dimension:  This comes from fears, anxiety and tension in the minds of people and the impact of the psychological structure of the individual and family in particular, and the society in general.

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The economic dimension: This pandemic will undoubtedly lead to short-​and long-​term global economic problems. In Palestine, it will lead to a high economic recession, a reduction in investment rates and a reduction in human capital for unemployed persons. In the cultural dimension:  There has been a change to cultural concepts and practices, for example, at weddings and during mourning.

The psychological and social consequences of the epidemic in Palestine

As well as the slogans urging people to ‘stay at home’ and ‘socially distance’, various new technologies have been used to communicate with citizens and pass on public health messages. Institutions have initiated practical and concrete programs and steps for society from a social, health and psychological perspective. As a result of this pandemic, many people in have been looking for information, then for protection and security, and then for food. Society has found itself facing very difficult choices between the protection mechanism and the results of the adverse economic situation in Palestine, as well as the increasing unemployment rate. This doubled the number of marginalised and poor families. Many families have reclaimed and replanted lands to meet their family needs. It is indicated that the number of refugees, according to the statistics of the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), in the West Bank and Jerusalem territory, stands at 275,524 families, which is equivalent to 1,074,319 persons. The total number of refugees in the Gaza Strip is 365,133 families which is equivalent to 1,633,485 persons who don’t have land for agriculture as land provides a psychological cure for many Palestinians. The pressures generated by the pandemic and the public health measures being imposed on the population, exist alongside the oppressive activities of the Israeli state in its dealing with Palestinian communities. During the pandemic Palestinians have continued facing arbitrary arrest,

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the ever-​present threat of death or injury at the hands of Israeli occupation forces, house demolitions, destruction of agricultural lands and the constant threat of annexation. Thus, between coronavirus and the occupation there are major challenges confronting social workers both to build resistance and to support people and communities through a range of practical social and psychological interventions. Accordingly, professional teams, of various specialisations (including social workers), have worked to address the social and psychological consequences of the pandemic and the social isolation resulting from quarantine measures. In the state of isolation, the psychosocial, physical and mental health is threatened. Palestinian people consider the coronavirus as similar to the Israeli occupation on Palestinian prisoners, who are also a source of anxiety and fear for their lives. According to the prisoner support organisation, Addameer, in June 2020, there were 4,700 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails. Of this total, 160 were children, 41 were women and 365 were held under ‘administrative detention’ (that is, interred without trial). The Prisoners’ Institutions have also indicated that from the beginning of 2020 until 30 June, Israeli occupation arrested 2,330 Palestinians, despite the spread of coronavirus, and among them there were 304 children and 70 women, while the number of administrative detention orders issued reached 565. The intervention required from social workers was not limited by coronavirus alone, but included the Israeli occupation, and so to meet the consequences of the occupation too requires a double effort and presents a great challenge. Together the occupation and the pandemic present social work with major issues to confront and address, but, to date, social workers have been determined to work to address both issues simultaneously. According to the study prepared by the coordinators of the Palestinian-​ British Network of Social Workers (PALUK), in June of 2020, in which 526 social workers participated, 39.2 per cent reported that they felt challenged and motivated during the corona pandemic. Therefore, this challenge prompted an effective role for emergency committees, social workers and social activists.

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Social work response to coronavirus (COVID-​19)

In crises and emergencies, efforts falter, and the routine of life is disrupted. The priorities and needs of people change. Palestinian society, like many others, has been ‘shocked’ by the trauma of the pandemic. In these circumstances families and communities have not automatically responded in a coordinated manner. Social workers have had to direct and lead responses that focus on human need in the specific situation we face. This does not necessarily reflect a real human response during a crisis. In Palestine, the crisis is linked with two aspects, the first is in the occupation that violates everything in Palestine, and the second aspect is coronavirus, which has spread and requires rapid intervention. Palestinian society did not think that this epidemic was less important in its danger than the occupation, as both are deadly viruses that disrupt and hinder the growth and development of individuals and their political, economic, social and psychological development. The need for social workers within the committees formed by the Palestinian government is very important when dealing with individuals’ feelings, distress and health concerns, and in providing individual and family counselling to the most vulnerable, and when dealing with crises that health workers and health staff face while performing their professional roles and dealing with their own fears of infection and transmission. However, social workers in Palestine are an important part of the Palestinian professional component, even though a huge number of them are employees in the various state ministries, including the education sector and the social development sector. They face economic difficulties due to irregularity in their salaries and thus the financial situation for the social workers is complex and not easy which affects their psychology and motivation and creates a state of stress and burnout, which in turn reflects on the values and ethics of social work in Palestine. A study reported that 46.7 per cent of social workers indicated that the most important ethical challenges that they face during their various interventions during the corona pandemic is the lack of confidentiality and the privacy of those who are infected with the virus.

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Further, 44.5 per cent indicated the absence of objectivity in assessing needs, 44.1 per cent indicated that they did not accept working with difficult and complicated cases and 38.2 per cent indicated that the dignity and privacy of the infected people were not appreciated, while 28.2 per cent emphasised that they are unable to work with cases due to the interference of political parties. Social work responses to the state of emergency varied according to the resources they had at their disposal –​and also depending on the social work models of intervention they worked to. Social workers worked with people infected with COVID-​19 using new technologies. Individual and group work was undertaken using mobile phones, for example Children’s social workers provided remote access activities with children in their homes. Some workers staffed phone hotlines, responding to people’s needs. Other social workers worked in the emergency committees established in local areas and provided in-​kind assistance to struggling families. Others focused on providing psychological support to people with disabilities, the elderly and to marginalised families. In the partial absence of mutual coordination and organised referral, and this is due to many reasons, the most important is the absence of a comprehensive national referral system in Palestine, and the lack of a law regulating the social work profession. This creates structural problems in social work, psychological and social interventions lose their leadership and there will become opportunities for improvisation action (for example, intervention by phone or media without training or prior preparation). A study by the UKPAL Social Work Network at the start of the pandemic indicated that many workers were working effectively, but in an unregulated way. Participants thought that the profession in Palestine was not suitably coordinated (51 per cent) and not governed by an appropriate legal and regulatory framework (47 per cent), whilst 44 per cent suggested that social workers didn’t have a clearly identified professional role in Palestinian society.

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Obstacles and challenges

Social work in Palestine has always faced challenges as a result of the occupation, but the challenges and obstacles to professional working have increased significantly as a result of COVID-​19. Social workers used to provide a face-​to-​face service, but due to the corona pandemic, their work system changed so that the protocol was for working over the phone or other remote technologies. However, this has been linked to greater challenges, including maintaining privacy and confidentiality and protecting the private data of the beneficiaries, as well as neglecting any psychological or emotional aspects, such as recreation and social activities whether for children, the elderly or persons with disabilities. In addition, there has been the obstruction of the emergency committees in the West Bank and Jerusalem, especially by the setting up of military checkpoints and the restriction of movement between villages and cities. As happened in Jerusalem at the beginning of the pandemic in March, April and May 2020, all the headquarters of the emergency committees in Jerusalem were raided, and their activists arrested and their centres closed (these committees are established in order to protect Palestinians in Jerusalem from the corona pandemic). It must be noted that the absence of a unified professional discourse in the corona pandemic and the absence of a comprehensive national referral system constituted an obstacle to the essence of social workers’ performance to the fullest. This is due to many reasons, including the absence of coordination, actual networking, the absence of an information source in the mechanisms of professional intervention during the pandemic and the absence of a law regulating the social work profession in Palestine. The biggest obstacles and challenges facing social workers in dealing with individuals, families, the elderly and people with disabilities are the long periods required to stay at home, which is a different lifestyle that Palestinian families are not used to. Isolation meant that people with the virus were

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vulnerable to bullying and this was exacerbated by media intimidation which further provoked fear and anxiety in society. Based on the above, we can say that social workers are playing an important role in working within this complex situation.

10 Social work and COVID-​19 in South Africa Yasmin Jessie Turton and Linda Harms-​Smith

COVID-​19 in South Africa

Lockdown was imposed in South Africa on 23rd March 2020 in the context of a society structured by the highest levels of inequality in the world (IMF 2020), extreme levels of poverty, hunger, inadequate housing security and unemployment. Globally, South Africa is defined as one of the emerging epicentres of hunger during COVID-​19 (OXFAM 2020). The structural conditions perpetuated by post-​ Apartheid neoliberal macro-​economic policies were “forged under the past race-​based colonial and apartheid regimes” (Bhorat et al. 2020). Four months on, having embraced a stringent set of lockdown policies early on (Arendt, Robinson and Gabriel 2020), it is said that there is hope that the country will not experience the devastation seen elsewhere globally (Karim 2020). However, it is evident that the ‘peak’ of the pandemic is slowly approaching and South Africa now has the 5th highest infection rate globally (BBC 27 July 2020). At the start of the pandemic in South Africa, the government was lauded as a ‘standout’ in the region for its early response to the pandemic, which slowed down the rate of infections. Various actions were said, early on, to have explained the relative success of the strategy; namely, what was seen to be excellent communication, leveraging of previous health crisis experience, adopting a science-​based approach, working with religious and traditional leaders and unifying the political class (Devermont and Makulu 2020). 73

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According to the chair of the Ministerial Advisory Committee, the government’s early intervention delayed the peak of the crisis through the declaration of the State of Disaster and following a staged approach of gradual easing of the ‘lockdown’. It relied on a “high-​level advisory committee with 51 clinicians, virologists, epidemiologists, mathematical modellers, public health practitioners, and other experts”, for advice and guidance (Karim 2020). However, these responses occurred in the face of extreme challenges. These included the extreme levels of poverty and inequality and low trust in the government (Devermont and Makulu 2020). Preventive hygiene measures are almost impossible in vulnerable, overcrowded communities already overburdened by HIV/​AIDS and tuberculosis. Realities such as overcrowding, densely populated townships, informal settlements and shack dwellings meant that social distancing was a luxury. In many contexts, there is still no access to running water and families share communal toilets and water pumps or taps (SERI 2018). Recent unemployment statistics show that 30.1 per cent of South Africans are unemployed (Statistics South Africa 2020) with those between 18 and 59 years old not meeting the criteria for social grants, thus unable to buy food or having to rely on equally poor family members. Approximately 18 million people receive social grants (either child support, older persons, disability, foster care, care dependency and war veterans’ grants). This situation describes millions of people in South Africa living in very poor and poverty-​ stricken communities (Bassier et al. 2020). When the president announced the lockdown, there was a response from social movements (COVID-​ 19 Peoples’ Coalition 2020) who declared that measures taken were not adequately ‘pro-​poor’ and that insufficient consideration had been given to people in untenable living conditions who are unable to adhere to the regulations. Millions of job losses occurred as a result of the COVID-​19 pandemic with one in three working people having lost their jobs early during lockdown measures (Ranchhod and Daniels 2020). Jain et al. (2020) estimate that 15–​30 per cent of job losers fall into poverty and that social protection efforts were

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inadequate to mitigate this poverty, while about one in three job losers had no social protection at all. Measures taken by government included a ‘Solidarity Fund’ which was initially started by donations from two very wealthy South African families, and this was followed by international loans. This was intended to support the healthcare system in the face of the impending and extreme demands that it would face and to supplement the unemployment insurance fund. It also intended to support small and informal businesses such as house ‘spaza’ shops; to increase social grants, to set up Food Distribution Centres, and in some provinces, to provide homeless people with temporary shelter (South African Government 2020). The government also agreed to what was called a COVID-​19 relief grant, an amount of R350 that would be made available to unemployed people who were not receiving other forms of social assistance. In July 2020, over 3.5 million people had received the grant, while another 3 million had not yet been approved (ENCA 13 July 2020).

Formal social work responses

There seems to be no general comprehensive social work strategy provided by both the state and through social work bodies. In fact, it has been argued that far too little use has been made of social workers with respect to the pandemic and the social problems accompanying it (Rasool 2020; Turton et al. 2020). There is evidence of some ad hoc initiatives such as those of the Department of Social Development in the Western Cape, which provided a ‘humanitarian relief workstream’ in collaboration with stakeholders from the non-​governmental sector (South African Government 2020). However, simultaneously, in the same Province, the behaviour of the City of Cape Town in destroying housing structures of people accused of ‘illegally’ occupying land (Meyer 2020) was condemned by a High Court Judge as being “deplorable and grotesque”, accusing them of acting “without care for human dignity” and being instructed to rebuild the structures.

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Some social work agencies started working remotely through digital platforms, to continue delivering some service to communities while statutory social workers were put on standby as an essential service. In this regard, the Council for Social Service Professionals (SACSSP), which is the statutory body responsible for setting the standards for the education and training of social service professionals (at this stage for Social Work and Child and Youth Care), provided a communication spelling out some guidelines for operating through ‘technology supported services’ during this time (SACSSP 2020). They also engaged with all registered social workers on a regular basis, issuing communications spelling out guidelines for employers and employees operating during the pandemic. They also suggested that social workers engage in advocacy and awareness raising around the pandemic and encouraged the participation of communities in the development of local plans and protocols (SACSSP 2020). Generally, the non-​ governmental social work sector remained silent. For example, the National Association of Social Work (South Africa) formed in 2007 with a current membership of 6,942 evident on its Facebook page gave no indication of activities related to COVID-​19 during this recent period. This is an indictment on the sector, as it could be assumed that such a large representative group would be actively engaged in issues of health, social justice and struggles of people and communities with whom they work (NASW 2020). Similarly, there are a few other social work groupings on Facebook representing a further approximately 10,000 social workers. One of these is the Unemployed Social Workers Movement in South Africa with 2,860 members (USWMSA 2020). With no clear leadership emerging from the NASW in South Africa, this fragmentation does not help to build a consolidated movement for social work and social service professionals. The other social work body that has been active is ASASWEI (Association of South African Social Work Education Institutions), whose membership consists of social work academics across 16 universities in the country offering social work education. They have offered support to the presidency, SACSSP and the Departments of Education and

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Social Development and provided virtual training to members on disaster management, trauma debriefing and loss and grief. More recently, some of their members also embarked on advocacy supporting anti-​ racist practice and around the problem of severe levels of inequality across the higher education sector with respect to students’ socio-​economic inequality of access to the online delivery of teaching. It is evident that the social work statutory and education sector showed some response to the COVID-​19 pandemic. However, the voice for social workers has been largely absent.

Progressive social movement and social work responses

During the lockdown, it has been of great concern that government measures in response to the crisis were failing those most vulnerable through extreme poverty, hunger and untenable living conditions (COVID-​19 People’s Coalition 2020; SWAN-​ SA 2020). It has been social movements, activists, non-​ governmental and community-​ based organisations, and more recently and to a far lesser extent, some social work sector groupings, who have drawn attention to the severity of these conditions. As a result of the government’s inadequate COVID-​19 crisis response, the Peoples Coalition was formed from about 160 organisations consisting of social movements, NGO/​ CBOs, faith-​ based organisations, trade unions, informal workers organisations, academic institutions, public interest law firms, migrant and refugee communities (COVID-​ 19 People’s Coalition 2020). It called for a country response rooted in social justice, democratic principles and that the most vulnerable are prioritised. They have played a significant role in mobilising, advocating for and monitoring the state’s responses. They also put forward a Programme of Action. This demanded that all households and the homeless have access to food; that government should ensure proper shelter for the homeless; that particular care should be taken of women and children given the high rates of gender-​based violence; and that there should be income security for all those who

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are, or will become, unemployed (COVID-​ 19 People’s Coalition 2020). Social workers in general have not supported or worked with social movements in South Africa. Those who choose to participate and offer solidarity to the activities of social movements, do so in their personal capacity outside of formal social work activities (Harms-​Smith 2015). However, there was soon a more organised response from the progressive social work sector (SWAN-​SA 2020). Social media platforms emerged as a highly effective tool for mobilisation and organising a radical social work voice. The first of these was the Black Womxns Caucus (Black Womxns Caucus 2020), a grouping formed before the crisis, led by a social work student at the University of the Witwatersrand, predominantly around black women’s issues and gender-​based violence, with a current following of 870 members. It soon developed a crisis counselling service for women affected by gender-​ based violence during the lockdown period and advocates around issues of racism, gender and social justice. Similarly, the critical and radical South African Social Work Action Network was initiated by three practitioners and academics on 8th May 2020 through a social media WhatsApp platform in response to the lack of leadership and ‘voice’ in the sector. Initially, social workers who were known for their radical and critical ideological position and for their consciousness about the oppressions of race, class and inequality, particularly around the impact of COVID on South Africans living in poverty, were invited. Further invitations were made by group members to extend the group and so within a few hours about 150 social work practitioners, students and academics had joined the group. Since the formation of SWAN-​SA and based on inclusivity, democratic participation and a critical ideological agenda, various collective social action interventions have occurred. A working group was formalised, and a Media Statement was written and signed by 122 supporters, and was circulated widely, including to the South African Council for Social Service Professions. This was an important position statement on social justice and socio-​economic structural inequality. It

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was also published as an article in a respected critical media source titled “The social work sector speaks out:  a radical response is urgently needed” (Turton et al. 2020). SWAN-​ SA has performed a largely mobilising, conscientising and advocacy role, offering platforms for education, conscientisation and a voice for practitioners, educators and students in the social service sector. Some of these have included a webinar on radical social work responses to COVID-​19, on racism and racist violence in the South African context and an engagement between practitioners, radical social work perspectives and the SACSSP. Other involvements have been in a networking capacity with the demolition and forced eviction of so-​called ‘illegal’ occupiers of land; and mobilising support for a Basic Income Grant (SWAN 2020).

Conclusion

COVID-​19 will change the world forever, it will never be the same. Social workers are required to believe that ‘another world is possible’. For this reason, a crisis such as this demands that things should be done differently and that there should be innovative responses to not only the effects of COVID-​19 itself, but also to devastating socio-​ economic inequalities that have been exposed once again. It cannot be business as usual. The solutions we need today are profoundly non-​ capitalist, perhaps the seeds of post capitalism. The solution is community activism, rapid political grassroots responses, and mobilisation of mutual aid in the face of the crisis –​as well as a renewed climate of vigour for progressive, anti-​capitalist and anti-​racist, social justice inspired social work.

11 The extent of the COVID-​19 crisis in South Korea Sug Pyo Kim As of 13 June 2020, South Korea had recorded 12,110 confirmed cases of COVID-​19, with 277 deaths. It was early February, when there was a dramatic increase in COVID infections in South Korea. A COVID positive carrier attended a service of the Sincheonji Church and, as a result, the infection rate increased exponentially. The Daegu region, where the church was located, became analogous to Wuhan in China, it became the epicentre of the COVID-​19 in Korea. In March, there are 6,894 confirmed cases in Daegu (56.9 per cent of the nationwide total). Thirty-​four per cent of the confirmed cases in Daegu originated from the Sincheonji church. In response, the government imposed a ban on this church, which remains in place as of August. The deaths in Daegu, and nearby North Gyeongsang Province, account for 88.7 per cent (243 people) of the total deaths in the country. The infections hit the elderly significantly. Ninety-​ two per cent of the total deaths were amongst people over 60, 49 per cent of deaths were amongst people in their 80s or older. Like other countries, Korea has had the most fatal consequences for the vulnerable elderly. What is unusual here, however, is that although lots of the elderly have died, there are very few infections and deaths through elderly welfare centres and nursing homes. The common infection route for the elderly was the geriatric hospital. As a social worker, with responsibility for elderly care facilities, it is something, at least, for the profession to be proud of, we managed to keep the infection rate low.

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Social work responses Lockdown

All social welfare facilities have been closed according to government guidelines in Korea from February. The elderly were unable to come to the senior citizens’ restaurants because of the social distancing measure, and the lockdown of social welfare facilities. They endured the situation in their own homes –​almost as if they lived on a remote island. Social workers visited every morning with lunch boxes and basic necessities. Social workers also had responsibility for supporting people with severe disabilities. Social workers at live-​ in facilities quarantined alongside service users, while others took responsibility for work in the community. Social workers are working hard for our underprivileged and isolated members of our community. We don’t fight the virus directly like professional medical staff, but social workers have been centrally involved in protecting our communities and neighbourhoods and providing solidarity against the isolation that the diseases bring. Solidarity among social workers

When COVID-​19 spread widely, all social work facilities in the public and private sectors became panic-​stricken. There was a shortage of daily necessities and volunteers to deliver lunch boxes. At that time, Korean social workers sent goods from all over the country and sent donations that they got from fundraising. Not only the Korea Association of Social Workers (KASW) but also the Association of Social Workers in cities and provinces sent donations and emotional support to the community at the epicentre. Social workers in the community centres did their best to sort and deliver these items. Social workers at live-​in facilities also prevented the virus by themselves participating in facility isolation. Even though they may have had a family to take care of, they joined in protecting the disabled and the elderly in the danger group before them.

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After the outbreak of the mass infection, the government organised a task force team focusing on private welfare facilities. The team set up online contacts with private facilities for the elderly and disabled, making sure they were following protocol and had appropriate and necessary supplies. If required, this team could draw on support from the Community Chest of Korea, the Korean Red Cross, and public officers, who all committed resources to support facilities in emergencies. All of these meetings conducted through video conferences and important decisions were made quickly on the video conference. The response to the infection provided a good lesson that the effect would be maximised when the government and private sectors work together. Quarantine in live-​in facilities

What made Korean social workers different from other countries’ response was that social workers working in live-​ in facilities voluntarily decided to quarantine. In Deagu, the epicentre of coronavirus in Korea, there is a total of 258 nursing homes and 67 hospitals for older people. The number of beds of each type is almost the same at 15,000 beds. However, the number of confirmed cases in these two groups was quite different. There were 299 confirmed cases in the hospitals compared to only 14 in nursing homes. There was no massive infection of nursing home residents in Daegu, which is a high-​risk facility, and the speed of transmission in social welfare facilities nationwide is minimal. It seems that social workers are protecting clients well. However, the measure was controversial. Coronavirus tests were not done before the implementation of the quarantine. So initial lockdown measures put clients and workers potentially at risk, because no tests had been done. Subsequently testing was carried out, with all facilities subjected to two weeks severe lockdown after the tests to ensure they were clear. But this meant some facilities had a total of four weeks’ severe isolation because initial testing was slow. Nevertheless, the quarantine measures were successful, and greatly contributed to preventing infections among senior citizens. All live-​ in

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facilities that implemented quarantine had no confirmed COVID-​ 19 cases. This is an example of social workers’ preemptive commitment to protecting the health rights of their clients.

Innovative social work practices

Three innovative social work practices that led to innovative changes in the future social work field are outlined as follows. Digitalisation of social work service

As lockdown has been sustained for a long time due to COVID-​19, social workers have developed the practice of social welfare services in various ways. For children of essential care workers, who have not been able to be with their parents because they have quarantined, the government provided tablet PCs to enable them to make video calls once a day. In addition, community-​ based social welfare services have begun to incorporate information technology to check the safety of senior citizens. The professional management system using technology has been developed, and the methods to effectively deliver intact services have started. The government provided all the facilities for technical support by installing cameras and earphones for video conferencing. This technical support played an important role in bringing the private and public together. The importance of psychological prevention

Social workers have been fighting the virus for months. As a result, social workers working in the field experienced exhaustion, and the need for methods of crisis response emerged. Therefore, multidisciplinary help was implemented. The Social Workers’ Association worked with the Korean Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (KSTSS) to create a psychological quarantine manual to respond to crisis experiences. Eighty-​one per cent of Korean social workers have experienced a mental health crisis. Psychological

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quarantine is now the most needed service for clients and social workers in the corona era. It has become a social service that plays a vital role in the social welfare field. The Daegu Association of social workers (DASW) and the Daegu Council on Social Welfare (DCSW) jointly gave lectures on psychological protection manual through online education for the project to strengthen the capacity to cope with the crisis. Ninety people applied for the program, exceeding the initially planned quota of 60 people. So we increased the number of students and provided online education. I expect that the psychological and social protection of social workers will get more attention in the future. Reassessment of key workers

In the wake of the COVID-​ 19 crisis, there is a growing awareness in Korean society that social workers are essential personnel along with the medical staff. This is quite surprising because, before COVID-​ 19, people did not know the importance of care workers and social workers, but after experiencing COVID-​19, people realised how indispensable the care economy was for the existence of society and the continuation of economic activities. The Korea Association of Social Workers (KASW) now has the task of enacting legislation that ensures social workers and care staff are recognised as essential human resources and establishing a corresponding support system. The COVID-​19 situation in Korea has been well controlled so far. Although the danger of a second pandemic exists, I believe Korea will overcome it well based on experience.

12 Social work and COVID-​19 in Greece Dimitra-​Dora  Teloni Government’s response and society

According to WHO, on 15 July 2020 there were 3,826 confirmed cases of COVID-​19 in Greece with 193 deaths.1 During the last months, Greece managed to achieve a low pandemic rate due to measures concerning social distancing and early lockdown. However, there are three other issues that are behind these ‘successful’ policy that are not often addressed in public discourse. First, as Alexis Benos (2020) argues, Greece is “in the margins of the capitalist production”, which, amongst others, entails intensification of mass production and all its ills such as the tragic working conditions. Second, the Greek public health sector has been totally abandoned by the government, which leads to the third issue that the health system would be unable to afford or handle a large-​scale hospitalisation of COVID-​19 patients. Greece is following the pace of a global trend where health systems across the world collapsed as a result of “40 years of neoliberalism”, which “has left the public totally exposed and ill prepared to face a public health crisis on the scale of coronavirus” as David Harvey (2020a) argues. In fact, since 2019 the right-​winged Greek government has deepened the degradation of the public health sector by attempting to merge it with the private sector. Since the pandemic outbreak, the Greek Federation of the Unions of Hospital Doctors (2020) repeatedly pointed out the lack of staff and protective equipment in the hospitals.

1.  https://​covid19.who.int/​region/​euro/​country/​gr

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The pandemic had made more than apparent across the world the need of a strong public health system. Yet, this is not the priority of the Greek government. While COVID-​ 19 and climate change are the most recent aspects of the crisis, the general impact of neoliberal capitalism on society should not be lost. More specifically, the over-​10-​year crisis of neoliberal capitalism in Greece, which was exposed with the financial crisis of 2008, was used as a pretext by the government to dismantle the welfare state and public sector (Papatheodorou 2018), resulting in the well-​ known austerity measures, whose tremendous consequences are still palpable on the population. The negative implications of neoliberal capitalism were further exposed as the so-​called “refugee crisis” emerged (Khiabany 2016). There is enough evidence to suggest that refugees routinely experience violations of their human rights due to the EU’s punitive and hostile policies, leading to thousands of deaths (Karageorgiou 2016; Khiabany 2016). However, the pandemic has worsened the situation as thousands of refugees are trapped in hotspots with minimum protective measures and limited access to toilets and water. Still, the Greek government’s hostility continues with the prohibition of the refugees’ movement, while those that are transferred to the mainland –​including families and children –​are left homeless in the public squares (Médecins Sans Frontieres 2020b). The government’s campaign “stay home –​stay safe” did not incorporate the refugees or other vulnerable people. Antonis Rellas, a representative of the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “No Tolerance”, consistently published articles addressing the isolation and social exclusion faced by the disabled during the pandemic. By the same token, Karagianni (2020) pointed out that disabled have not been included in “the risk and vulnerable groups of beneficiaries”. This exclusion has engendered the social isolation of the elderly, while domestic violence has increased (General Secretariat for Family Policy and Gender Equality 2020). The government focus on promoting “personal responsibility” vis-​ à-​ vis the pandemic entailed “specific socio-​ economic variables” ‒ which, as Sakellaropoulos (2020:  34) argues, include class, race and access to health services ‒ that played a role on

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“whether one will receive treatment and whether one’s health will be affected”. As Clarke (2020:  117) argues, “[t]here can be little doubt that COVID-​19 will leave in its wake an enormous growth of poverty on a global scale”. In the case of Greece, the population had already experienced years of recession, rendering them even more frail to confront another financial crisis.

The social work’s response and solidarity’s initiatives in the COVID-​19 era in Greece Social work in the frontline

During the first few months of 2020, frontline social workers across the globe found alternative ways to provide support to its users. In Greece, the Help in Home project, as well as social workers in local government, hospitals and NGO’s, continued to provide their services during lockdown. While the Greek Association of Social Workers attempted to record the challenges faced by social workers and proceeded in certain interventions, the Greek SWAN organised a webinar concerning social services and their users in COVID-​19 era, with significant participation, further indicating the urgency of the situation (Social Work Action Network in Greece 2020). In addition to the challenges of the practitioners, such as the lack of resources, understaffed social services and tackling the negative implications of neoliberalism on the social protection system, COVID-​19 further aggravated the situation, in Greece and elsewhere, as social workers faced ethical dilemmas and were deprived from face-​to-​face contact with users. More often than not, the state exploited social workers as a “social ambulance” for every complex situation in the community (Teloni 2011a) not only with minimum, if any, welfare provisions for the users. In addition, the already poor working conditions and lack of supervision further burdened the frontline social workers during the pandemic, many of whom have protested against the worsening situation for the health and social workers as they were struggling to provide support with minimal means, no hygiene protocols and no

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protective equipment. As aptly put by frontline social worker Dimitra Giannou in the webinar organised by SWAN: “[w] e are like the emergency departments in the hospitals, we are asked to provide help in every urgent situation and cases. However, the emergency departments in the hospital have also specific clinics and provide care for their patients until they recover. We have nothing! We just provide the emergency help and then there is no welfare system for supporting the people” (Social Work Action Network in Greece 2020). The social workers’ dire working conditions were evident years before the financial crisis of 2008 as the state has exploited social workers to perform duties beyond their mandate (Papadaki 2005; Teloni 2011a). By the same token, while during the first phase of the COVID-​19 pandemic, in Greece and beyond, social workers had a significant role in containing the virus, however in some hospitals in Greece they were used in the emergency departments to triage or even for temperature checks during the lockdown (Greek Association of Social Workers 2020), with minimal resources and working in “unsafe and stressful circumstances” (IFSW 2020a: v). Many of the social workers, mainly women, worked for 8–​ 10 hours providing support through online platforms, attempting to find out resources to help their users, only to face the frustration of limited welfare provision and services. At the same time, they were also carers for the children and elderly in their homes. Amidst this tremendous stress, many workers, mainly in NGOs, received less wages, had no support and no supervision, all while being overworked and facing precarity in their work. In response to the dire situation, the Federation of the Union of Hospital Doctors in Greece recently went on a strike. One of their banners read “In this system, the priority is not the patients’ needs and health professionals’. The priority is profit:  We can’t breathe” (FUHD 2020). While these last words echo the main slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and beyond, it also expresses the feeling of many people on various levels.

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Community-​based responses and solidarity

Parallel to the official social work response to COVID-​19, there are other community-​based responses that could also be seen as “popular social work” (Jones and Lavalete 2013) and are some noteworthy aspects. First, they are organised by and for the users; second, they are grassroots welfare initiatives; third, they provide practical help to people, but also raise political and social concerns. These initiatives are a valuable source of inspiration and an important alliance to social work, especially, in demanding social justice.2 Moreover, these solidarity initiatives continued to flourish even during the lockdown period, some of which are a continuum of the anti-​racist and solidarity movement activities. One of which is the Zero Tolerance Movement for the Emancipation of the Disabled, a very active collectivity in Greece for the rights of the disabled. It was quick to organise campaigns to raise awareness during the lockdown regarding social isolation and exclusion of the disabled people in their houses, the situation in institutions and advocated for their rights. Furthermore, they provided mutual aid following three main steps: • Record the needs and the demands of the disabled people in need; • Raise awareness; • Provide support to people around Greece through their network and coalitions.3 Another example is the Movement for the Rights of Refugees and Migrants in Patras, an anti-​ racist organisation, which continued their political activity and found alternatives ways in providing support to migrants by distributing food and goods in their houses.4 Other organisations provided free meals via “El Chef”, a collective kitchen organised by the Social Migrant’s Center in Athens.5 2.  See for example Teloni 2011b and Teloni and Mantanika 2015. 3.  https://​tinyurl.com/​y3ctbr5p 4.  https://​tinyurl.com/​y42s9tnh 5.  https://​tinyurl.com/​y6gf78az

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A third example is a mutual aid initiative Moria Corona Awareness Team, which is run by and for the refugees in the “hell” of Moria, “a group of people in Moria Camp in Lesvos who are organizing … to face the Corona Crisis … cooperating with the Greeks and organization who want to help. [The Team members] are teachers, pharmacists and other professionals from many nationalities.”6 The Team organised a number of activities to raise awareness. Nevertheless, “social distance, washing hands regularly is very difficult or impossible in such crowds and with lack of water. Also, now there is a lack of masks … But we try our best,” as they put it. Additionally, they were recycling plastic bottles but also upcycling and reusing everyday items to make toys for children. The aforementioned initiative cannot be defined as official social work, but is still a community-​based response to an extreme situation. This initiative also attempts to address the refugees’ brutal living conditions, by creating campaigns and demanding rights. This illustrates the need to provide a political framework for advocacy rather than just providing services for the refugees. Interestingly, there is evidence that COVID-​ 19 has stimulated an official community-​based social work response. A case in point is Ethiopia where “workers helping build systems of informal education and support within communities where there is little in the way of state social or health services” (IFSW 2020b). While there is no doubt that this sort of community-​based action is a priority for the social work agenda, the latter has demonstrated that it can carve space for a more politicised framework, similar to that of the grassroots initiatives, in order to have greater impact.

6.  This is the description of Moria Corona Awareness Team official Facebook page (www.facebook.com/​ pg/​ MoriaCoronaAwarenessTeam/​about/​?ref=page_​internal). It is important to note that according in the official government statistics there were 15,500 refugees living in Moria Camp by the end of June, while its maximum hosting capacity is for 2,757 people (General Secretariat for Information and Education 2020). In addition, there are numerous reports regarding other systematic human rights violations in hotspots and camps in the EU’s borders (Médecins Sans Frontieres 2020b, Human Rights Watch 2018).

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David Harvey (2020b) argues that “emergency steps to get through the crisis also show us how we could build a different society that’s not beholden to capital”. Social work will face many challenges over the next decade. As societies across the globe face the health and economic crises, social work will be again on the frontline. To this end, there are some critical points that social work needs to address: • Rethink our practice in the new-​ old context, by addressing questions such as:  Whose side are we on? Whose rights and interests are we defending and why? Are we committed to a world of greater equality, social justice and opposition to oppression in all its forms? Is our work and intervention inclusive? • Strengthen the networks of solidarity and resistance of social workers on both national and international levels, via unions and social work organisations, in order to tackle the concerns in regards to working conditions. • Community-​ based practice needs to be reinforced with collective and political action as essential elements in social work by demanding both users’ and social workers’ rights and dignity so as to defend the public health, education and welfare sectors. It is important to include grassroot movements such as the Black Lives Matter movement, the disabled movement, the gay liberation movement, which are run by users’ and social movements, as co-​partners in our day-​to-​day work. COVID-​19 is adding enormous strain to a system that is already burdened by the negative implications of neoliberalism and the numerous crises it has triggered. Consequently, the challenges faced by the social workers prior and after COVID-​19 are interlinked. Yet, the pandemic has proven that social work is indispensable, especially for the underprivileged and the most deprived, who are increasing in numbers. Therefore, social and political struggles for social justice will increase in the following years. Let’s ensure that we won’t be silent or silenced.

13 The extent of COVID-​19 in Sierra Leone George Abu Mansaray Sierra Leone is located on the west coast of Africa with a population of about 7 million. Between 1991 and 2002 it went through a gruelling civil war. Between 2014 and 2017 it was wrecked by the Ebola outbreak, by repeated mud-​and landslides and by flooding. The country has a weak economy and struggles to meet human needs. In this sense, COVID-​19 is just the latest problem to confront the country.

How COVID-​19 came into Sierra Leone

News of COVID-​19 started reaching Sierra Leone in March 2020. The video footage of on national and private television stations was frightening, though many believed that the virus was specific to the West. A common belief was that Africans have a very strong resistance to the virus. Traditional herbal concoctions were shared across communities via social media in the belief they could protect people. Similarly, obscure face coverings have been used in the same belief. In essence, many people believed that COVID-​19 was not real, or not dangerous to them. The government launched a huge national campaign to let the population understand the global and national trend of COVID-​19, but this had little effect because the government was so mistrusted by the population at large. The COVID-​ 19 situation, then, has become immersed in internal political conflicts –​at the expense of an appropriate public health response.

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Government response

The first confirmed case of COVID-​19 was on Tuesday 31 March and was brought to public attention by the Head of State, Retired Brigadier Julius Maada Bio, during a special state broadcast. The infected person was a national who had returned to the country from France on the 16 March 2020. Fear gripped the nation as the country’s healthcare system is appalling. The cases spread with hundreds of people succumbing to the virus on a daily basis. Much of this goes unrecorded in official statistics. The government instituted the National Emergency Response Committee to manage the situation. The healthcare system in the country is weak. Across the country there are three testing sites. Regional Emergency Operational Centres have been set up to manage the crisis. They have a responsibility to provide care for COVID-​19 patients and have the capacity to install isolation units in government hospitals and clinics. A committee was summoned to work collectively and responsibly as medics, social workers, security personnel and local community leaders to contain the threat of COVID-​19. But the work of the committee was undermined by political interference. The government also introduced restrictions on the movement of people and goods. But this has had a significant impact on vulnerable communities across the country who are not receiving essential items. The restrictions are extensive, all institutions of learning, public gatherings surpassing one hundred persons, religious houses of worship and entertainment spots have all been closed and or banned indefinitely. Commercial flights to the only international airport have also been suspended except for essential flights bringing in medical supplies and/​ or emergency relief items. In bigger towns and cities, market opening hours have been limited to 07.00 to 19.00 hrs. In addition, there is a mandatory curfew between 21.00 and 06.00 each night and there are restrictions on inter-​district travel. There are also limits on the number of passengers

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travelling by public transportation as a way of reinforcing social distancing protocols. Preventative measures were instituted such as the wearing of face coverings in public places, offices and other relevant institutions. Hand-​washing and maintaining social distance are required before entering these buildings. At home and in one’s community people are implored to hand-​wash regularly and stay inside as much as possible. This is only possible, of course, in those communities that have access to water and soap. However, these strict protocols and restrictions were not uniformly applied. The president’s son flew into the country from Europe and ignored all quarantine restrictions –​prompting hostile reactions from political opponents and on social media. It is, nevertheless, good to state that COVID-​19 is being taken seriously by the government despite critical voices from amongst opposition political parties about their incompetence. The populace is updated on a daily basis using radio, television and other social media channels with specificity on new, confirmed, recovered, deaths and quarantined cases, respectively. People and community response to government policy and actions

There is still considerable scepticism about the impact of COVID-​19 amongst some communities and groups. There is a notion that COVID-​19 cannot exist because of the high African temperatures and that it is a virus that only exists in temperate climates. Cynicism towards the ruling and political elites also means that some people believe the threat of the virus is being exaggerated as a money-​making venture. These ideas gain some hold because people point to the poor healthcare system, the overcrowded living conditions and congested nature of our communities and suggest that, if COVID-​19 is as dangerous as the politicians claim, then you would expect thousands to be ill and dying. This is not the case.

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Political unrest from opposition parties and effect on the people

The lockdown and quarantine measures have increased hardship. This is creating discontent and opposition parties are using this to question the government’s competence. Opposition parties are demanding the economy is boosted to give people jobs and put food on people’s tables. The reality is that hunger remains a greater killer than the virus in Sierra Leone. Human rights abuses and reasons for increased fear and violence

Lockdowns are associated with human rights abuses. The government has not taken into consideration the challenges to its citizens especially those living on the streets and those involved in marginal day labour. How are these people meant to survive during lockdown? Sierra Leone has a silent pandemic called hunger that is killing people slowly because people can’t earn or don’t have access to food. Lockdown has meant essential services have been cut (especially in towns and villages), making life even worse. Many places don’t have safe drinking water. There aren’t the facilities for good hygiene. Lockdown exacerbates all these issues. There have been some demonstrations and some journalists have spoken out, but the state has responded brutally with beatings and arbitrary arrests. In some localities. groups of security, health, social, environmental and other essential officials have been deployed to promote measures to contain the virus. But political corruption is extensive in much of the country and their work is often shaped by patronage. The effects on Salonian lives

The extent of the COVID-​19 crisis has been appalling. It has eaten into every sphere of life in society. The crisis has meant community grain stores are empty, as farmers are not working their land. As a result, farmers have eaten their stored seed which would normally be used for planting (creating a

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long-​term famine threat). Local markets have closed, or have little produce on sale, exacerbating rural peasant poverty. Small-​and large-​scale businesses have started winding down. Prospective investments have been cancelled. Unemployment is growing, as is inflation and the non-​availability of essential items. There are restrictions on visits to hospitals and health centres. There is evidence of a growing mental health crisis. There has been a surge in youth violence (with violence erupting in some major communities across the country). Domestic violence has increased. And the politics of ‘divide and rule’ has raised its head with hatred and tribalism returning to the country. What social workers have been doing

However, in these dark times there are flashes of light. We have seen some community indigenous social work projects develop to meet people’s needs. Such projects as ‘Hope Kindergarten Sierra Leone’, the ‘Anti-​ bullying squad initiative’ as well as a range of global and non-​ governmental organisations have lent support to vulnerable communities in the form of preventative education on COVID-​19, and the provision of emergency food supplies and other essential items. Social workers’ role in the fight against COVID-​19 has been outstanding. Its services have been developed out of the lessons learned from fighting Ebola and laying much emphasis on indigenous models that worked then. Built on the relationships established over the years, social workers have stood with the people, shining a light on the communities they serve to show the conditions they are in and what they can do collectively and sustainably to support the change they yearn for. Key activities have been the identification and utilisation of local resources to strike a balance between self and community protection, to prevent the coronavirus from entering the community; improving the knowledge, attitude and practice of communities based on local ‘best practice’, which has meant passing on sustainable models, learned from other local communities, to adhere to the anti-​COVID-​19 message. It has meant working with communities to enable

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them to ‘live green’ and with nature as a natural partner. And it involves adhering to the call of government and the global health leaders in their drive to ward off the pandemic. By working with communities, alongside communities, as part of those communities, social workers have become trusted. This has given social workers a key role in the fight against the pandemic.

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14 Class, inequality and the COVID-​19 pandemic Lee Humber Research by the Office of National Statistics into COVID-​ 19-​related deaths in the UK up to April 2020 provides clear evidence that working-​class people in the most deprived areas of England and Wales are the most likely to die after contracting the virus. People living in the poorest, particularly inner-​ city, communities are more than twice as likely to die than those in the wealthiest areas. The mortality rate for the most deprived areas in March and early April was 55.1 deaths per 100,000 people, compared with 25.3 deaths per 100,000 in the least deprived areas. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the death rate progressively rises from the least deprived areas to the most deprived.1 This is on top of other immediate and longer-​term health consequences of the loss of income resulting from global lockdowns. In Africa, for example, the African Union has warned that no less than 20 million jobs could have been lost over the period. The idea that workers there face either coronavirus or a ‘hunger virus’ is a myth. Workers face both simultaneously, deepening already stark global health inequality. At the top end of the income scale, the COVID-​ 19 experience for the world’s richest has been very different. As well as this class avoiding the fatal consequences of the pandemic, more than three-​quarters of the world’s richest people reported an increase in their already vast fortunes, despite the economic shock associated with the lockdown. Research looking at the super-​rich found that the vast majority were able to ride out 2020’s storm in financial markets, while millions of the rest of us have lost jobs and seen the value of our savings and pensions collapse. The report, by the Swiss-​ based bank UBS, found that 77 per cent of the richest families 103

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–​who had average fortunes of $1.6 bn (£1.25 bn) –​had seen their investment portfolios “perform in line with, or above, targets during one of the most volatile moments in the history of financial markets”. Of the 121 families surveyed, 93 had met or exceeded their financial targets in the year to May 2020, and with little hint of any severe health reactions to the pandemic.2 To understand this disparity in suffering the worst consequences after contracting the virus, we need first to be clear about the difference between the likelihood of people catching it –​our susceptibility –​and our vulnerability to its worst affects. We are all susceptible, anyone can be infected by the virus which is why minimising the risk of this –​rigorous lockdown procedures until social safety is maximised –​is so important. General susceptibility also illustrates the folly of lifting lockdown too early as has happened in, for example, Hong Kong where in July they were facing ‘Phase Three’ of the pandemic with increasing infection rates after they had previously fallen to near zero, a lesson the British government had not learned from as I write. However, it has become clear that vulnerability to the worst effects of the virus is specific to certain population cohorts. Potential vulnerability to pathogenic disease can be assessed and analysed using three interacting elements –​how virulent and contagious is a pathogen itself, how vulnerable individuals and groups are to infection and its worst affects, and how well equipped to support the vulnerable are local health and wellbeing facilities. We know that COVID-​ 19 is both virulent and highly contagious, the key factor in its global spread, our collective susceptibility and the reason why isolation and lockdowns are so important. We also know that, from a very timely report by the World Health Organization, global healthcare provision was almost completely unprepared to deal with the pandemic, despite it being known that such an occurrence was highly likely. The WHO’s Strategic Preparedness and Response plan,3 initially published weeks before the pandemic was declared and later updated, outlined how poorly equipped global healthcare services were. Experiences have illustrated this, with too few beds, staff and equipment a universal phenomenon. The rest of this chapter will therefore focus on

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the question of vulnerability of specific population cohorts, to develop an analysis of what it is that makes them so. From the data available to them in March, the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention produced a breakdown of all known cases, deaths and Case Fatality Rates (CFRs) –​the numbers of those dying after infection –​in China by specific demographics (age, sex, pre-​existing condition etc.) It conclusively showed that older people are by far the group most at risk of fatalities. Crucially, research also showed that those of any age with underlying health conditions are at a higher risk. For example, more than 10 per cent of those diagnosed with COVID-​19 who already had a cardiovascular disease died. Diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases, hypertension and cancer –​in fact, all of the modern-​ day global ‘non-​communicable’ diseases –​were all risk factors as well. The CFR for those without a pre-​ existing health condition was much smaller, at 0.9 per cent. Subsequent COVID-​19 analysis has confirmed these findings to show that underlying conditions are the key determinant of fatalities.4 Non-​ communicable diseases –​increasingly becoming more accurately described as socially transmitted disease5 to reflect their roots in the nature of modern-​day societies –​are at epidemic levels. We know that, until recently, average life expectancies globally were climbing. That trend has now halted and in many regions is in reverse, but even before it did, one aspect of longer lives for many was to experience later life with often severely debilitating underlying health conditions. Disability Free Life Years (DFLY) has become an important measure to assess not just length but quality of later life. Research has shown the DFLY is significantly skewed to disadvantage those from working-​ class backgrounds, with, according to a Journal of Gerontology report in January 2020, those at the lower end of the socio-​economic scale living up to ten years fewer without a disability after the age of 50 than those at the top end of the scale.6 What the COVID-​19 research tells us is that it is these health conditions that have made, in particular but not only, older people vulnerable to COVID-​19 death. But what causes such underlying conditions in the first place? What are the ‘causes of the causes’ of death from COVID-​19?

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Diet is a fundamental cause of both debilitating underlying conditions in general and specific vulnerability to COVID-​19. In June 2020, the Lancet published research conclusively showing that poor diets lacking in fruit, vegetables, fibre and fish, and often high in levels of salt content and highly processed food, were increasingly common amongst the global working class, a central underlying cause of the modern world’s epidemics including, most obviously, obesity and diabetes. Poor diets weakening immune systems, coupled with other health determinants discussed below, shape the social context of higher vulnerability to disease, including COVID-​19.7 The extreme expression of poor diets –​malnutrition –​ resulting from too little or nutritionally poor food has become a common experience for millions globally. Some of the most alarming increases in malnutrition rates over the recent past have occurred in the so-​ called Highly Industrialised Countries, including millions of older people. Age-​related changes in systems of appetite regulation, when accompanied or set in train by additional risk factors like health or social problems such as loneliness and social isolation, low-​income and/​or inadequate residential care facilities, is likely to cause malnutrition. In Britain, two decades of privatising care for older people and general austerity has meant that, according to the Lancet, malnutrition amongst older people in Britain has reached epidemic proportions.8 Malnutrition by itself can, of course, result in death. Epidemiological research also conclusively shows that it lowers immunities, thus greatly increasing vulnerability to and severity of infections. It affects older people in their own homes and, all too often, in residential care. For example, research by Sheffield Hallam University found that care homes spend on average just £2.44 per day feeding each resident. The British Association for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition estimates one in five residents of care homes are at medium to high risk of malnutrition. Poor diet, older age poverty, social isolation and more set the context in which older people suffer from underlying conditions and from the often-​fatal consequences of COVID-​19. Similar contexts determine the health experiences of other population cohorts. The experience of BAME communities

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during the pandemic is now well documented and discussed elsewhere in this publication. Less well documented is how the pandemic has affected people with learning disabilities. Learning disability services account for most local authorities’ second biggest spend in England and Wales, after services for older people. It is another cohort which has suffered disproportionately from the virus. Reports from the Learning Disabilities Mortality Review (LeDeR) compiled by the University of Bristol show that even before the COVID-​19 pandemic people with learning disabilities were twice as likely to die deaths that were avoidable than the general population, with very nearly half of people with learning disabilities (44 per cent vs 22 per cent for the general population) dying an avoidable death (with avoidable deaths defined as deaths that were preventable, treatable, or both). May 2020’s LeDeR report shows that 19 per cent of people with learning disabilities compared to 14 per cent of the general population died in ways that were preventable. Particularly grim was the finding that one-​third of people with learning disabilities (34 per cent) died in ways that were treatable given timely and effective healthcare, compared to 8 per cent of the general population, a statistic illustrating people with learning disabilities’ woefully inadequate access to good healthcare. The reasons for these early death rates are clear, the vast majority of people with learning disabilities live lives of poverty, in relatively poor housing, on poor diets, often in very isolated circumstances, with the constant mental and emotional stress of social exclusion. As Chris Hatton and Eric Emmerson of Lancaster University’s centre for Disability Research have consistently shown, people’s access to and experience of health services is also, on average, poor, fragmented and most often inadequate. The result, as the latest LeDeR survey shows, is that people with learning disabilities experience multiple health conditions that combine to make people extremely vulnerable to COVID-​19, as well as other disease. Though Public Health England were, as I write in July 2020, yet to release specific figures documenting death from COVID-​19 for people with learning disabilities, accounts from those in the field strongly suggest this is another cohort which has suffered disproportionately.

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We can explain the particular vulnerability of specific population cohorts by understanding that health is socially determined. An approach now championed by the World Health Organization and generally accepted amongst health academics and bodies worldwide, is the social determinants of health analysis. Summing this approach up in its Closing the Gap in a Generation document of 2008, the WHO says, ‘The unequal distribution of health-​damaging experiences is not in any sense a natural phenomenon but is the result of a toxic combination of poor social policies, unfair economic arrangements and bad politics.’9 Globally, populations experience health differently not for genetic or individualised health-​behaviour reasons but for social and political ones as the WHO points out. This approach contrasts starkly with currently dominant biomedical models which centre on the idea that health is determined by an individual’s relationship with ‘natural’ disease, ameliorated by the expertise of the medical profession. The social determinant approach argues that the very idea of the ‘individual’ is a social construct, in terms of health shaped by the ‘conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age’. Subsequently, good health requires the active involvement of the ‘whole of government, civil society and local communities … Policies and programmes must embrace all the key sectors of society not just the health sector.’ Health services, though essential, are but one amongst many such as housing, diet, conditions of employment, management of stress and more, which together determine the health of individuals, groups and global populations. Each of these health determining elements need to be sustained at health-​enhancing levels as we go forward in order to address already existing health inequalities and class and wealth-​based disparities in terms of vulnerability to disease. The future, however, looks bleak. Already, job losses, further cut-​backs in depleted public services and a growing impoverishment of working-​class populations globally which began during lockdown is set to continue and deepen as lockdowns relent. In these circumstances, it is highly likely that long-​established class-​based inequalities in health, the consequences of which have been vividly illustrated by the pandemic, will be further amplified as economic crisis replaces

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health crisis as the common experience. Without resistance to any further destruction of the social and natural environments which contextualise our health, inequalities will deepen. As we go further into the 21st century, without a fundamental root and branch change in the political and social priorities of our societies, average health experiences will worsen.

Notes 1. www.wsws.org/​en/​articles/​2020/​05/​12/​depr-​m12.html 2. www.theguardian.com/​news/​2020/​jul/​16/​family-​fortunes-​of-​ wealthy-​increase-​as-​super-​rich-​ride-​coronavirus-​storm 3. www.who.int/ ​ p ublications/ ​ i / ​ i tem/ ​ s trategic-​ p reparedness-​ and-​response-​plan-​for-​the-​new-​coronavirus 4. www.thelancet.com/​ j ournals/​ l anglo/​ a rticle/ ​ P IIS2214- ​ 1 09X (20)30264-​3/​fulltext 5. www.thelancet.com/​ j ournals/​ l anglo/​ a rticle/ ​ P IIS2214- ​ 1 09X (17)30200-​0/​fulltext 6. https://​academic.oup.com/​biomedgerontology/​article/​75/​5/​ 906/​5698372 7. w w w. t h e l a n c e t . c o m / ​ p d f s / ​ j o u r n a l s / ​ l a n g l o / ​ P I I S 2 2 1 4 -​ 109X(17)30058-​X.pdf 8. www.thelancet.com/​ j ournals/​ l ancet/​ a rticle/ ​ P IIS0140- ​ 6 736 (53)90523–​6/​fulltext 9. www.who.int/​social_​determinants/​final_​report/​csdh_​finalreport_​ 2008.pdf

15 Still left holding the baby Women’s oppression and the corona crisis Lindsey German There are sometimes very great events and upheavals which not only present challenges in themselves, but which also throw into relief the wider inequalities and fault lines in society. The coronavirus crisis is one such upheaval which has posed questions about how we live and work, how we care for those unable to do so for themselves, how we protect the wider health of society. It makes us consider the way in which society is organised from housing to education to the nature of the family itself. It highlights divisions of class, race and gender in a stark way. Those already at a disadvantage in ‘normal times’ find themselves at a much greater disadvantage now. This is very obvious in the case of women. There are many signs that women are particularly suffering as a result of the crisis and the lockdown. Reasons for this range from the dangers from domestic violence, the problems of stress and mental illness, the difficulties faced with prolonged periods in overcrowded or unsuitable accommodation, the many challenges of childcare in these circumstances. An estimated 4.5 million people have become unpaid carers for relatives as a result of the coronavirus, including 2.7 million women (Carers Week 2020). All these potential problems are combined with major changes in work:  women are heavily represented in those occupations which have lost jobs or been furloughed since March, such as retail and hospitality, and many of those in work are faced with often unfamiliar and isolated ways of working from home. There are, of course, very different working conditions for different groups of women. Large numbers of 111

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people have been working from home, including many office workers, university lecturers and admin staff, finance staff, civil servants and local government workers. These include considerable cohorts of managerial and professional grades, who generally find it easier. Those unable to work from home tend to be among the lowest paid, with senior executives being among the most able to (Thomas 2020). The pressures of working from home vary but for those with children it is particularly onerous, and there are numerous indications of women being in the most difficult positions, taking on the bulk of childcare and other domestic work, and having to do much of their paid work in the hours when their children are asleep. One study which surveyed people in opposite-​gender two-​ parent families during lockdown found that there are major discrepancies in who does what. When looking at those who are doing paid work at home, mothers are more likely than fathers to be spending working hours also trying to care for children; they are also more likely to have left paid work or seen their paid hours of work reduced. They are much more likely to be interrupted by childcare during work:  in lockdown they are doing only a third of uninterrupted paid work of fathers (Andrew 2020). A survey carried out by IPSOS Mori along with Kings College London showed that both parents felt that they faced increased domestic responsibilities, but women spent far longer on childcare. At the same time men found it harder than women to deal with these responsibilities as well as paid work, suggesting that they were less accustomed to doing so. While women (33%) and men (31%) are equally likely to say their caring and domestic responsibilities have increased since lockdown, female parents say they spend seven hours in an average weekday on childcare, compared with five hours for male parents.

Despite this, 43% of working fathers say their caring or domestic responsibilities are negatively impacting their ability to do their paid job by at least a fair amount, versus 32% of working mothers who say the same. (Global Institute 2020).

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A report on pregnancy from the TUC shows high levels of discrimination over pregnancy and maternity; a flouting of health and safety law and putting women’s lives at risk; a lack of childcare for those returning from maternity leave; and a lack of adequate protection for those on zero-​hours contracts (TUC 2020b). A full 70 per cent who do not qualify for statutory sick pay because they earn too little are women (TUC 2020a). Women are more likely to take time off for children’s illness and events than men. A survey by the insurance firm AIG showed women are nearly three times more likely than men to take short or longer periods off work to care for children (Muller-​Heyndyk 2019). If the default position in working households is that women are left to do the bulk of childcare in ‘normal’ situations, it is hardly surprising during emergency situations when the family can no longer rely on outside services, the same dynamic might apply. To many women in work, however, they may find themselves in still more difficult situations. Those working from home retain their salaries and often find their day-​ to-​ day costs reduced (commuting and the other costs of going to work). Those on the frontline –​in the NHS but also working as cleaners, shopworkers, catering workers, and in care homes ‒ have had to continue working but often in difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions. They too have to grapple with increased domestic duties. The huge increase in women’s work at home, because of longer times shopping, home cooking from scratch with few takeaways or restaurants open, closure of nurseries, and the greater proportion of domestic labour because the family is at home much more, all put a further burden on those women who also work outside the home. Many employees in badly affected areas where job losses are threatened are women –​in retail, catering and hospitality industries. They are already very often in conditions of low pay and precarious employment, with zero-​hours contracts. Those who suffer loss of earnings through furlough, or who become dependent on benefit, and are not entitled to redundancy pay are more likely to be female and relatively low earners.

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In addition, many of these women are from BAME backgrounds and the indications are, according to a Fawcett Society report on the current crisis that: BAME people working from home are more likely to say they are working more than prior to lockdown, with 4 in 10 (41% women and 40% men) agreeing compared with 3 in 10 white people (29% women, 29% men). Nearly half of BAME women (45%) say they are struggling to cope with the demands on their time, compared with 35% of white women and 30% of white men.

This reflects the way in which the crisis helps illuminate existing inequalities. If, as these examples suggest, the bulk of domestic labour falls onto women, the question which needs answering is why? The reasons for these figures are myriad but in large part lie in the nature of women’s role at work and in the home, and the way in which this helps structure inequality. Under neoliberal capitalism, women are fully part of the paid workforce but their role in unpaid domestic work is also considerably more than that of men. Recent figures showed women did 60 per cent more unpaid work than men, and more than double the childcare, housework and cooking (ONS 2016). Women’s role in social reproduction and domestic labour is rooted in the family, and now that the family has become –​albeit temporarily –​the site of work, education and leisure, the pressures on women have become immense. Women’s oppression, the systematic disadvantaging of women because of their sex, is also rooted in the family, and it is therefore the site of increased challenges facing women. One of the great developments of late capitalism has been the drawing in of women into the workforce. Once considered a ‘reserve army of labour’, to be brought in at times of labour shortage and to leave the labour market in times of unemployment, women, and crucially working mothers, have been a permanent part of the workforce for the past decades. This has reflected the needs of capital to utilise their labour power in a range of different occupations and at different levels of the labour market.

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This has in turn led to major changes in the costs of reproduction of the family. These costs now require the wages of two adults to survive at all comfortably, to pay the very high price of housing and transport to work, childcare, food, clothing and the occasional holiday. Women’s work has become essential both to the maintenance of adequate standards of living for working-​class people, and to many professions and industries which depend on female labour –​ and on paying women less than men in equivalent work. All this has taken place at a time when women’s entry into social production has not been matched by an equivalent emphasis on the onerous costs of social reproduction. This is still carried out largely within the privatised family and is carried out as unpaid labour (usually) by family members, of whom women do the majority share. As women have gone outside the home to work on a greater scale, so some of the functions of the family have become commodified, where family members pay for goods or machinery which can provide services once carried out by women in the home or can ease the burdens of housework to some extent (German 2018). So families with both adults working, especially those with children, have tended to pay for services such as childcare, takeaway or restaurant meals, ready-​prepared food, laundry and ironing services, as well as dishwashers or washing machines. For those in the higher income brackets, these services will extend to paying others outside the family to clean their houses, walk the dogs and home tutor their children. This outsourcing of the functions of the family depends on an army of low-​paid labour which is highly feminised, and in many instances comprised of migrant labour. The growth of low-​wage, insecure jobs has characterised recent decades of neoliberalism. Many of these jobs are involved in roles of social reproduction, caring for children, the sick and elderly, preparing and delivery of food, cleaning and catering (Bhattacharya 2017). The labour supply for these jobs depend on lengthy international supply chains which in turn depend on cheap labour, often by migrants, and a degree of insecurity both about jobs and status (Hochschild 2014). The situation has long been untenable, as various roles previously carried out unpaid in the family are now available

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on the market but in highly unequal conditions. These jobs and services are noted for low pay and precarity. The ability of mainly higher paid professionals to take advantage of the low-​wage economy in employing other women to carry out some of their domestic tasks was already, pre-​COVID-​19, based on a society with high levels of inequality. Suddenly, as the whole system grinds to a halt, we begin to see the flaws in this system and recognise that women are having to cope with even greater burdens. We have seen a long-​ term breakdown in the male breadwinner family and its replacement by a dual-​ income family. This has changed the division of labour within the family, but when that includes full-​time workers buying goods, services and labour to substitute for what would otherwise be unpaid domestic labour carried out within the household, it is likely to be dependent on levels of stability of income and employment. When that changes, for whatever reason, the traditional roles begin to reassert themselves. The coronavirus crisis has therefore highlighted the levels of labour involved in social reproduction, and how dependent these have been on women’s work, whether paid or unpaid. When we discuss the idea that we should not have to return to the old normal, we should challenge the present model of social reproduction, which depends on the privatised family, augmented by usually low-​paid, very often female and migrant, labour to perform essential cleaning and caring tasks. It is no wonder that the model is broken and that this crisis has caused so much difficulty for so many women. While the mantra of women being able to have it all has been very seductive, the reality is a long-​hours, intense, often low-​wage, exploitative economy, with many women struggling to work and care for their own families. While women have long seen paid work as part of their emancipation from the confines of home, the crisis has shown us that there is no real escape. That has to change.

16 Working with women receiving social services during COVID-​19 Reflections from children and families’ practitioners Laura Owens, Rebecca Mair and Alissa De Luca-​Ruane

Social distancing rules during the coronavirus pandemic forced Children and Families Social Work to focus only on its core legislated tasks, and what has emerged is a system that fails to respond humanely to women and children drawn into the child protection system, further contributing to women’s oppression.

COVID-​19 and domestic abuse

Support services for those experiencing domestic abuse has reported a significant increase in calls to helplines and online searches for information and assistance (Social Care Institute for Excellence June 2020). What are child protection services noticing?

Domestic violence has been a dominant feature within child protection for a long time. Although we may currently be seeing a huge number of child protection referrals, it is challenging to compare before and after COVID-​19 because the system has been overwhelmed with domestic abuse cases for years. The Office for National Statistics reported that in the year ending March 2019 the Crime Survey for England 117

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and Wales estimated 1.4 million women had experienced domestic abuse, giving us an indication to the scale of the problem (Office for National Statistics 2019). When we cannot refer women affected by domestic abuse to external services for face-​to-​face support because they have pulled back, and when social distancing means that we cannot go into homes to focus on therapeutic and relationship-​based direct work, it becomes apparent that we are left to simply monitor women and children. The impact on women is one of punishment and surveillance. Research tell us that pre-​ COVID support for women experiencing domestic abuse was, at best, under-​resourced. Women have reported that they feel social work particularly blames them by using a narrative that portrays them as putting their children at risk when continuing to stay with an abusive partner (Keeling and Wormer 2012). There is little cognisance taken for the dynamics of an abusive relationship, the elements of control and coerciveness that form over time, leaving a woman feeling trapped. Therefore, prior to COVID-​19, many felt that social work added to the oppression of women rather than challenging it. During the pandemic, social workers report that the pressure remains to complete visits to families within procedure-​led timescales (Turner, Blackwell and Carer 2020). This is tied to a culture of fear:  a fear that a failure to visit will result in a serious case review and risk to professional social work registration. It should be asked if this type of practice really helps women and their children, or if it is a ‘back-​covering’ exercise in defensive practise. A doorstep visit does not help a social worker to identify coercion and control. Domestic violence is not, simply, black eyes. The profession is still learning how to address the powerlessness of women in abusive relationships. It could be argued that social services often do not forge good relationships with victims of domestic abuse, because responsibility is pushed back onto the woman to manage and mitigate her partner’s behaviour. This type of practice only leads to the further oppression of women, meaning they will not tell us when they and their children are suffering and at risk. Social work practice does indeed need serious review.

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As a profession, are we in fact reflecting the deep-​rooted gender imbalance of a sexist society? One that focusses upon the mother’s responsibility to protect her children from the abuse of her partner, buying into a culture of victim blaming and the ‘why doesn’t she just leave’ mentality? Research on general public opinion by Wiesz and Wiersma (2011) found that two-​thirds of surveyed respondents believed that if, after a women had experienced domestic violence, she did not find a way to make the violence stop then she was in fact complicit in the neglect of her children. Within society as a whole, there seems to be a lack of critical thinking around the complexities of risk to a woman and her children should she leave: 76 per cent of women are killed by their abusive partners within the first year of leaving (Brennan 2016), suggesting that for many, women leaving is just as risky as staying. There are many complex strategies that women use to protect their children from abusive partners and during COVID-​19, when so little support is available, social work needs to be recognising them (Watson 2017). Social work must stop denying the efforts women make to keep children safe.

COVID-​19 and mothers in court

New oppressions have become glaring and gross during the pandemic as safeguarding cases escalate to court. Key resources have significantly reduced during COVID-​19, such as providers of the psychological assessments that inform social work court planning. Social workers are therefore being asked to decide if we are moving from a period of pre-​proceedings to court without the essential assessments. In the absence of mediation services, youth workers and direct support for perpetrators, the court system is asking social care to provide those specialised interventions. Social workers are however not those experts and our interventions at this point lead to a false sense of due process. The result: weakened processes to inform decisions such as whether children remain with (overwhelmingly) their mothers –​or not. Child protection services rarely admit in assessments or court reports that had we provided intensive preventative

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services then the situation would not have escalated to court. To do so would be a direct criticism of the local authority or the government’s social policies. Yet families need interventions, support and resources. But, as a result of significant cuts to services we are simply left with removal orders. “Jane” is a 33-​ year-​ old student social worker, and her experiences as a looked after and accommodated child, who faced neglect and abuse at a time when authorities were meant to be keeping her safe, tell us much about the impact of social work failing to engage with the complexity of domestic abuse. While being ‘looked after’ she was exploited by an older male with whom she began a relationship. Jane felt like her life was “doomed from an early age”, that she was stigmatised by social workers for being care experienced and as a result when she spoke out about domestic abuse as an adult, she continued to feel “unheard, not believed and vilified” by social work authorities, both north and south of the border. Jane describes her motivation for studying social work as rooted in those poor experiences. She is determined to effect change in a system that she believes continues to oppress women and fails children, so that all women affected by domestic abuse and their children are protected and ultimately empowered to go onto to lead safe, successful and happy lives. Jane, although not her real name, is a genuine example of a person who believes she experienced prejudice from systems that failed to recognise her as a victim of domestic abuse and labelled her simply as care experienced which she feels informed judgements about her children being placed with their father. The ‘new normal’ court system has stripped many small mercies away (Harker 2020). Women are left with no opportunities to speak to their solicitors during hearings and are often not allowed to present their case face-​to-​face: despite the technology being available, it isn’t often prioritised in that most critical of scenarios –​children potentially being removed from their families. Article 9 of The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) states that “Children must not be separated from their parents against their will unless it is in their best

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interests”. When services and courts are not upholding their responsibility to do what they can to support and protect victims of domestic abuse, resulting in the separation of children from their mothers, we must ask how prepared is social work to promote the rights of the children and women they work with? Social work is a profession with a responsibility to uphold and promote human rights, however with the rise of managerialism and the lack of challenge to austerity-​driven cuts within our local authorities, the profession is at risk of complicity in the abuse and eradication of human rights. Going forward, social work must critically examine its role.

COVID-​19 and women in poverty

In reality, the destruction of swathes of resources during ten years of austerity has already resulted in the increased oppression of women. These austerity measures have disproportionally affected women as refuges designed to support survivors of domestic abuse have had their funding cut by nearly a quarter: 44 per cent of women survivors are forced to couch surf when fleeing an abusive partner. Furthermore, refuges for women of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) background were the first to have funding removed. All of this highlights the intersectional issues affecting women on grounds of class and race (The Guardian, Sisters Uncut 2019). The year 2019 saw the biggest equal pay strike to hit the UK. The women involved were some of the lowest paid employees of Glasgow City Council, and many were Scotland’s social services workers. Following the pay claim some women were finally in the financial position to be able to leave their husbands, highlighting that there is a commonality between those women that receive services and those that provide (Bates, in Socialist Worker 2019). COVID-​ 19 has highlighted that many women living in extremely impoverished communities, who are already overrepresented in child protection services, are fighting on multiple fronts. They are trying to manage abusive men; home-​schooling; often working and providing unpaid care for multiple generations within their families and communities,

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all while trying to uphold the requirements of lockdown. The social work system then expects women to take the responsibility to protect children and flee abusers during a pandemic. Again, this is a pattern that existed prior to COVID but is hugely exacerbated during the pandemic.

Going forward, a radical shift

Social work is characterised by a high number of female workers. In 2017, it was reported that 85 per cent of frontline Children and Families’ social workers were female (UK Government 2017). Management, however, is male dominated (McPhail 2004; Hicks 2015). Having little female influence at the top of the hierarchy will undoubtedly have an impact on policy decisions within the profession as a whole. Reports on women during COVID-​19 state that women are disproportionately burdened with home-​schooling, unpaid-​ caring roles and housework. Certainly pre-​COVID-​19 social work was in a state of crisis, with only one in five workers saying their caseload was manageable, and over half of workers considering leaving the profession (Unison 2019). Our female workforce appears misunderstood and underappreciated, which draws parallels to the women we work with. It must be questioned: do the multiple roles that women take on come at the expense of promoted posts? (Close the gap 2020). The gender balance must be redressed in order to give equal weight to the views of both women and men at policy level. Domestic violence has undoubtedly accelerated under lockdown and services have been haemorrhaging funding under austerity. Governing bodies need to gather evidence that analyses who it is that vulnerable women turn to for support, as well as what strategies they develop in a crisis and how this been disrupted by COVID-​19. With this information social work needs to implement systems that women trust, which protects and empowers both them and their children. In order to meaningfully assess the complexities of domestic violence, workers must have the ability to reflect, think critically, utilise theory and consider structural oppression. To

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do this, social workers must have a healthy work environment, with a large enough workforce to be able to devote quality time to preventative work with families, and to challenge systemic inequalities. A crucial part of this is to fight for better working conditions for social workers and voicing grievances through unionising. Social work has a history of being a fragmented workforce (Carey 2015), and in order to change this, social workers must unite and speak out. By definition, social workers ‘Promote social change … and the empowerment and liberation of the people’ (IFSS 2020). Social work education is based around an understanding of oppression, critical thinking, risk and need, ethics and values (SCIE 2007). Social work university education challenges students to understand the systemic causes of poverty; domestic violence; addiction; mental health problems and criminality, and rebukes the position of blaming the individual. Social workers should therefore be trailblazers in the challenging of oppressive systems. It is imperative that we analyse what prevents social workers from undertaking true anti-​ oppressive practice, with social workers realising that policy decisions are having a direct impact on our values and practice. Policy makers must be held to account and forced to accept that austerity has indeed ripped the very fabric of our welfare state and, as such, devastated the wellbeing of our society. In a new age of activism, with 2019 being the year of the activist (Rachman 2019) and 2020 seeing the largest social movement of all time with Back Lives Matter (Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui and Patel 2020), there is an appetite for radical change. Becoming active in grassroots groups such as the Social Work Action Network (socialworkfuture.org) and the COVID-​19 Action Group ‒ People before Profit is invaluable to raising issues around inequality and will act as a vehicle for social workers to campaign for better funding for resources and services for their service users. Furthermore, highlighting the gender imbalance within the profession is a real attempt at rooting-​out structural inequalities that our female work force face.

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For progressive, meaningful societal change to happen, the profession needs to speak up and must do so –​loudly!

17 Black Lives Matter Racism, poverty, work and COVID-​19 Esme Choonara and Yuri Prasad Early on in Britain’s coronavirus crisis some of us noted a pattern to the deaths –​a disproportionate number of them were from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities, and many of them were frontline workers. It was late March, a week or so after the UK had initiated its lockdown, and there were as yet no credible statistics to back up our feelings. But in April came the report from the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC 2020). It found that 35 per cent of almost 2,000 COVID-​19 patients were “non-​white” –​three times the expected rate. Some 14 per cent of the most serious cases were Asian, and another 14 per cent were of African or African-​Caribbean heritage. This was followed a month later by a report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) that showed black women are 4.3 times more likely to die from COVID-​19 than white women, while black men are 4.2 times more likely to die than white men (ONS 2020). How can we explain such disproportionate figures? Some have pointed to underlying health conditions that particularly affect black and Asian people and suggested that these factors are unavoidable, or even genetic. This explanation finds much favour on the right, but even some senior health professionals have pursued a similar line of argument. Writing in the doctors’ Lancet journal, Angela Saini spelled out the damaging consequences of this approach: It has become routine in medical research and clinical practice to categorise people by race and ethnicity. While this is no doubt important in identifying demographic groups who might be disadvantaged by unequal treatment 125

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and to spot any environmental or social patterns affecting disease prevalence, these categories are also sometimes used to guide research, diagnosis, and treatment in ways that are not necessarily useful. At worst, they may be reinforcing damaging myths about biological differences between groups … The temptation to group people by perceived common traits is known in any other sphere of life as stereotyping. I would argue that in medicine there is also a dangerous habit of racial stereotyping. This tendency to treat people in the same social group as similar, to enter into biological essentialism, too easily glosses over the complexities and breadth of individual differences. (Saini 2020)

The truth is that distorted and racialised patterns of work and poverty are the key drivers of difference. Many people of working age who died from the virus were health and care workers, terribly exposed because of the lack of protective equipment and testing. Care homes became particularly vulnerable after hospitals discharged hundreds of untested patients, who were potentially COVID-​ 19 positive, into their care. Hundreds of thousands of people who work in the health service are from black and Asian backgrounds. That includes over 40 per cent of specialist doctors in England and more than half of London’s nurses and midwives (UK Gov 2020). Those percentages rise still higher when care homes are added to the equation. The Runnymede Trust reported in July that one in 20 black and minority ethnic people have been hospitalised with the virus, compared with one in a hundred white people (Runnymede Trust 2020). Some 15 per cent of black people say they personally knew someone who died with the virus, with this figure rising to 19 per cent for people of African-​ Caribbean backgrounds. The number of white British people is less than 10 per cent. While some 23 per cent of white British people classify themselves as keyworkers, around 38 per cent of those from black African backgrounds do. And when gender is taken into account, the disparity rises further still. Some 43 per cent of Bangladeshi women workers are in key worker roles. But occupation alone does not entirely explain

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why black and Asian groups have been disproportionately at risk in comparison with their white counterparts. The report shows that some 21 per cent of white British workers said they were not given adequate PPE, and that 13 per cent were given tasks which may have exposed them to the virus. But 42 per cent of those from a Pakistani background say they had inadequate PPE, and 20 per cent were given dangerous tasks. The risk of exposure for health professionals was clear to most, but when many London bus drivers also fell victim to the virus it shone a light on the way so many public-​facing essential jobs were done by black and minority ethnic (BME) workers. Bus workers are generally poorly paid and, certainly in London, disproportionately staffed by migrants and their offspring. The protection of staff barely features on the bosses’ agenda. Again, the greater exposure to risk is the key factor in why so many have died. And, if you are black or Asian, you are more likely to work in a high-​risk job. Diseases likely to lead to worse outcomes from COVID-​19 are more likely found among black and Asian people. But again it is social conditions that determine how healthy we are likely to be. For example, British people of South Asian, African or African-​Caribbean origin are significantly more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than their white counterparts.1 This disease appears to be a significant risk factor for anyone with COVID-​19. But there is little evidence that this is primarily the result of a genetic trait. People working long hours are less likely to get regular medical check-​ups and good advice –​and less likely to maintain a regime of blood sugar testing. They find making time for exercise difficult and the use of split shifts means they are more likely to have a cheap and quick diet with unhealthy amounts of trans fat and saturated fats, and grains such as white rice. These are all things to avoid if you’re at risk of diabetes. The conditions people live and work in also damage immune systems. Pollution is known to increase the risk of

1.  See www.bdct.nhs.uk/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2016/​12/​Race.pdf for detail of how race inequalities in the multicultural city of Bradford result in disproportionate incidence of diabetes and other conditions.

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insulin resistance, for instance, which is a significant factor in diabetes (Meo et al. 2015). Housing presents a similar pattern. Poverty pay and insecure jobs mean that many black and South Asian people live in shared accommodation or multi-​generational houses which can make self-​isolation extremely difficult and helps spread the disease. Some 30 per cent of the British Bangladeshi population live in overcrowded conditions, compared to 2 per cent of white British people. Overcrowded housing is a common factor in many of the recent lockdowns of particular cities and regions. Having a large family in too small a property exposes people to greater risk. The Runnymede report shows that “Black and minority ethnic households are, on average, larger than white British households”, and that they are also “more likely than white people to live with someone (including children) who may be vulnerable to coronavirus due to a disability or health condition” (Runnymede Trust 2020). Much of the reporting of the lockdown in the north of England has focussed on Asians families living in multi-​ generational households. But the spread of the virus from younger people, who are going out often, to their older relatives, who generally aren’t, cannot be reduced solely to patterns of multi-​generational living. It is entirely possible to live in a safe multi-​generational household. And after the disaster of COVID-​19 in care homes, many people from all backgrounds would prefer to live this way. Having many separate bathrooms and living areas is important. This can ensure that more vulnerable members of the family can more effectively shield themselves from those more at risk –​ the obstacles are money and prejudice. The types of social housing that are available generally cannot facilitate larger families, and decades of racist housing policies have locked many Asians into the poorest areas (Gulliver 2017). There must also be an assessment of the way barriers to healthcare have played a role in increase the risk of coronavirus transmission and mortality. The Tories’ “Hostile Environment” policy is still very much with us, and has as one of its aims the prevention of certain categories of migrants from using the NHS freely. In practice, this meant that some people who displayed COVID-​19 symptoms were too scared

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to seek medical help, and could then have posed a risk to many others. But for a government determined to issue itself a clean bill of health on racism and poverty, this evidence of structural racism is something of an inconvenient truth. That’s why Tory ministers were so ready to adopt the phrase “underlying health conditions” when describing those who had died from COVID-​19, and why anti-​racist writer Gary Younge responded by telling an online Stand Up to Racism meeting that “being black today is an underlying health condition”. The spread of the coronavirus had already heightened awareness of structural racism and its impacts on health when the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor took place. The resulting Black Lives Matter global rebellion against racism has been quick to identify the way the state and the system are the common actor in both crises. People are demanding that long-​ hidden inequalities are brought out in the open for challenge. That means exposing the links between racism, poverty, work and disease.

18 Roma communities’ experiences of racism during the COVID-​19 pandemic Fatima Uygun During the COVID-​19 outbreak Roma communities faced specific additional risks and vulnerabilities which needed to be addressed, in order to prevent the spread of the virus and also to prevent the exacerbation of existing inequalities. Roma communities already faced a level of social exclusion and destitution and there was a real danger that the outcomes of COVID-​19, and the resultant climate of uncertainty and fear, would further marginalise these communities. The response to COVID-​19, and the related issues highlighted here, needed to be both swift and holistic, or the implications for Roma communities would be severe.

Housing

Govanhill is home to the largest Roma communities in the UK. The housing conditions many Roma people in live in across Scotland are unacceptable, with many facing problems of overcrowding, exploitative landlords, high rents and poor housing conditions. Many live in large extended family groups in, one-​or two-​ bedroom tenement homes with limited garden access which made social distancing more difficult and stressful for both parents and children. Overcrowding meant self-​isolation could not be possible for anyone presenting symptoms of the virus. Similarly, overcrowding meant that the Scottish Government advice for those in the ‘shielding’ category to ‘avoid all non-​essential contact with other people in your household’ would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to follow. This meant that 131

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the virus threatened Roma communities disproportionately, and the greater Govanhill area, quicker. Govanhill is the most densely populated area of Scotland, and research has shown cramped living conditions accelerated the spread of the virus. Roma and community groups argued and campaigned that Roma and other communities living in overcrowded situations should, as a priority, receive targeted testing, and alternative accommodation, as well as empty hotel rooms, be made available. In addition, the ‘benefits’ of government initiatives, such as mortgage holidays, were not passed onto Roma people, who are disproportionately represented within the private rental market, often renting from exploitative landlords, without written or legal leases. Many Roma people were not aware of their rights in relation to these new housing initiatives. Other than Roma charities, housing rights activists and the individuals within the local housing association, nothing was being done to communicate these initiatives to the Roma community, and importantly, nothing was being done locally to force the adherence by local landlords to the Scottish Government’s housing eviction moratorium.

Health

Poverty has been a major contributor to reduced health outcomes for Roma people in Scotland. Roma communities have higher numbers of underlying health conditions, potentially resulting in greater numbers of more serious coronavirus illness. This was well known to local NHS bodies pre-​COVID-​19, with higher levels of pre-​COVID-​19 existing medical conditions, particularly heart and circulatory disease and their risk factors, including high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. In addition, Roma communities were at a higher risk of problems with mental ill health due to their disproportionate lack of access to the opportunities granted by income, education, employment and safe and stable housing, factors compounded by experiences of racism and discrimination.

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Roma charities argued that attention had to be given to the disproportionate health risks faced by Roma people and their risk of isolation from family and friends during the pandemic, thus compounding mental health issues, due to disproportionate rates of digital exclusion. Roma communities were also more likely to need government advice and public health information translated into community languages. Accurate, reliable and trustworthy data and information were much-​ needed and essential resources in the wake of the spread of coronavirus. However, little was done by statutory organisations to provide relevant and appropriate information. Local community groups, mutual aid groups and Roma charities responded to this need and provided translated government guidance. However, this was another burden on already stretched groups for whom additional resources were needed to meet this urgent need. Nor was it helped by the government’s inconsistent messages regarding what was safe and what wasn’t. Within a few weeks of the pandemic, Roma charities were receiving evidence of institutional racism faced by Roma people when presenting with symptoms to hospitals. There were reports of Roma people feeling belittled or not taken seriously, dismissive attitudes from frontline NHS staff, being turned away without consultation or refusing to provide translators or translated information.

Education

Roma communities have historically been severely discriminated against in access to education. Some of the reverberations of this are still felt today by Roma communities in Scotland. The circumstances around COVID-​19 risked a reversal of the real educational progress made in recent years by local schools and Roma students. Roma families were disproportionately likely to be digitally excluded as they were without tablets, PCs or laptops required for an adequate experience of online learning. For primary and secondary students in the area, many of whom previously relied on the library for internet and computer access, this

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meant any online learning provided by schools would be of little benefit to them, which would exacerbate already existing educational inequalities. Where families had access to a phone (or other device) to use for learning, there were further difficulties with no internet access and a reliance on limited and expensive mobile data. There was an urgent need for digital devices to be distributed for primary and secondary school students. In addition, pupils needed to be given free SIM cards for unlimited internet use or internet access and these should be provided to all children in need. However, although recognising this need, neither local councils nor the Scottish Government were able to address it. It was left to a local Roma charity to secure funding and distribute over a hundred free tablets that could be used for internet access, allowing schools to make contact with children and parents and gather evidence that will assist in identifying further  needs.

Employment

The severe and disproportionate levels of poverty within Roma communities in Scotland were exacerbated by the COVID-​19 crisis. Income loss and the impact of stockpiling in local shops made access to everyday basics difficult. This was particularly acute for families with children and babies. The provision of food parcels and delivery of essential items for Roma families was organised by mutual aid groups and local charities to address what was often a desperate need. Many of the Roma community are key workers, often travelling together in large numbers in buses, working within large workforces in agriculture, factories and warehouses (often without protective equipment), at risk of contracting the virus and spreading it though to their families on their return. They are often employed on zero-​hour contacts in the informal economy or as casual labour teams. Communities are put at particular risk of destitution and financial problems due to the exploitative nature of these jobs, insecure employment contracts, a lack of sick pay and the inability of these jobs to be translated into ‘work from home’ employment.

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Due to the aforementioned issues with employment, Roma communities were unlikely to benefit from the furlough scheme or other government schemes to support those made unemployed by COVID-​ 19. Research in the local area has shown that Roma communities are some of the most discriminated groups with regard to accessing welfare and benefits support. Nor do Roma communities have the experience of, language skills or insider knowledge needed to navigate a complex welfare system. In addition, digital exclusion made online applications for welfare extremely difficult.

Increased racism

Anti-​racism charities have previously documented the increase in racism faced by Roma and other BME communities across the UK due to Brexit. COVID-​19 had the potential to further perpetuate a rise in hostility towards migrants, despite the fact that BME communities faced a greater risk of developing critical coronavirus. This was evidenced within weeks of the pandemic, with reports on Roma communities in local newspapers and comments on social media making spurious claims that Roma people were deliberately, disproportionately and routinely breaking social distancing rules. There were concerted attempts by racists to use the pandemic as an opportunity to blame Roma communities for the spread of the virus and to scapegoat Roma communities for the failings of the Scottish and Westminster governments to protect people. Anti-​ racism groups and Roma charities were able to effectively mobilise to counter the lies and information being pushed through social media and the right-​wing press. However, the racism, fear and confusion of contracting COVID-​ 19 has had an impact on sections of the Roma community. Within weeks of the pandemic it was estimated that half of the Romanian Roma community had returned to Romania due to feeling unsafe in Scotland. They relocated because they do not feel safe in Scotland, both from COVID-​19 or from racialised abuse based on misinformation

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and prejudice. Romania guaranteed a test and with four times more hospital beds available there than in Scotland, and they felt more likely to survive the virus if contracted (Rhodes et al. 2012).

Conclusion

It is difficult to assess the impact that COVID-​19 has had on the Roma communities, including how many people contracted the virus and how many died. Roma charities have reported that of the hundreds of Roma who left Govanhill to seek safety in Romania, many are likely to return when the pandemic is over. One thing is clear, however, a positive outcome of the COVID-​ 19 crisis was how quickly and effectively grassroots groups were able to recognise and respond to the needs of the local community. Local mutual aid groups, anti-​ poverty charities and community groups were able to deliver an immediate, targeted and collective response while local governments and statutory organisations seem to be paralysed and unable to effectively meet the needs of the most vulnerable. There is a lesson here for the future of social work.

19 Re-​racialisation of migrants and the ‘refugee crisis’ during COVID-​19 Nicos Trimikliniotis The world in 2020 is radically different from the year before. A major sociopolitical transformation due to an ‘exogeneous’ factor has begun. COVID-​ 19 has brought the celebrated ‘world on the move’ to a standstill. We could imagine neither the scale nor the depth of the panic and global state of emergency against what might be termed “miasmic deviants” (Sitas et al. 2015). We are in the middle of accentuated processes of exclusion, racialisation, marginalisation and expulsion of migrants, refugees and ‘the damned of the earth’. New borders and bordering processes generated, as old ones are invigorated. These dynamics have rekindled ‘old’ and ‘new’ forces in Europe and the globe, bringing about the collapse of consensus in politics and generating a ‘politics of hate’. Dissensus reigns and migration and asylum are at the heart of these processes (Trimikliniotis 2020). This chapter will primarily focus on these processes in the eastern Mediterranean. New struggles of resistance are emerging in a system flipping ‘out of joint’ (Wallerstein 2015) against the competing reactionary camps of ‘fixers’:  on the one hand, the mainstream ‘managers’ of neoliberal globalisation, in their 40-​odd-​year reign are essentially calling for more of the same. Against them, we have the reactionaries of the ‘new’ far right calling for ‘authoritarian restoration’ of the ‘old’ order:  nostalgic for some idealised ‘golden age of nation-​ states’, a (bizarre) bygone era of ‘authentic’ national or ethnic ‘homogeneity’ that has never existed. After the pandemic nothing will go back to the status quo ante; no matter how the powerful pretend that it will 137

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be ‘business as usual’. The new ‘brave world’ before us may well be a truly dystopian one: denial on the one hand, when it comes to the threat from the ‘deviant other’ coupled with authoritarian restrictions, algorithmic discriminations, mobility barriers and new racialisation processes. While COVID-​19 effects last, this is likely to be based, it seems, on what I have previously termed ‘miasmic deviance’ (Sitas et al. 2014). The two reactionary forces are converging on this. But the world is heading towards more instability, massive inequalities, threats of wars and intra-​state vitalities and break-​ ups and environmental disasters. Migration and asylum are at the top of the political agenda of disagreement.

Violating ‘non-​refoulement’: new pushback of refugees in territorial waters and new detention regimes

Numerous states are openly using pushbacks in the Mediterranean, violating humanitarian and refugee law (UNHCR 2020a): Italy, Malta, Greece and Cyprus, invoking the exceptional situation of the pandemic, are routinely using pushbacks in the sea and land to deter and exclude asylum-​ seekers. Interestingly, Matteo Salvini, whose immunity has been lifted by the Italian parliament so that he can stand trial, has been repeatedly accused by the UN of this crime. Just before the outbreak of the pandemic, there was a new ‘refugee crisis’ at the northern borders between Greece and Turkey; these were coupled with some new arrivals of refugees on the Greek islands identified as ‘EU hotspots’ (Lesbos, Samos etc.). The right-​wing Greek government suspended access to the right to asylum. For the ‘new’ far right, this was the opportune moment to ‘connect’ asylum/​immigration to foreign threats and warfare. With the pandemic, the right-​ wing government of the Republic of Cyprus, which slavishly emulates the worst of Greek policies, followed suit. During this period, we had another proliferation of the states of exception: rights to international protection were suspended as states pursued their authoritarian drives of ‘policing the crisis’. Rather than solidarity, states pursued their new

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penalisation of movement and criminalising those unable to cope with the lockdown: the poor, irregular migrants, those without social insurance, asylum-​seekers. New detention and incarceration processes were unleashed in ‘closed camps’. The Turkish autocrat President Erdogan has been operating in tandem with the Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis. Each for their own reasons, as a diversion from serious problems in the cohesion of their government formations, but also instrumentalising the refugee issue for negotiating purposes with the EU, they turned refugees into a so-​called ‘hybrid and asymmetric warfare’. Both governments appear to be making political capital out of the plight of refugees. Both, aided and abetted by media propagandists, are branding families and individuals who attempted to cross the Evros (unarmed, of course) as an ‘asymmetric threat’ and an ‘invasion’. In the Aegean islands and in Evros we have witnessed outrageous scenes of unprecedented violence. As revealed by Forensic Architecture (2020), there are secretive military camps used for the illegal refoulement near the river Evros which is the border between Greece and Turkey, which is a continuous state crime (Tsianos 2020). Moreover, the results of these policies have unleashed further racist poison into society. Greece stands accused of violating the principle of non-​refoulement in the European Parliament. European Commissioner Johansson stated:  “We cannot protect our borders by violating human rights.”1 The ‘migration/​refugee crisis’ has for the moment subsided, giving way to other broader geopolitical games between Turkey and Greece over the exploitation of gas reserves and agreements with Libya, Egypt, Israel and Cyprus, yet the matter is hardly over. Larger states and small states alike, former colonies and colonisers are using similar regimes violating basic rights. Many of these result in deaths of asylum-​seekers; 12 asylum-​seekers

1. European Union, Investigate alleged pushbacks of asylum-​ seekers at the Greek-​ Turkish border, MEPs demand, 7 July 2020, https://​ e uropeansting.com/​ 2 020/​ 0 7/​ 0 7/​ i nvestigate-​ a lleged-​ pushbacks-​ o f-​ a sylum-​ s eekers-​ a t-​ t he-​ g reek-​ t urkish- ​ b order- ​ m eps-​ demand/​?fbclid=IwAR0MhU6LJakoF7RwwVktM4n7NqK0CHaG5m 8DN67pqT62t8zTzgyZK-​MPEME

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were killed when Malta used private ships to push migrants back to Libya (Tondo 2020). Small island states are just as ruthless. The Republic of Cyprus, in an unprecedented fashion for a country tirelessly invoking international law against the invasion and occupation of its territory by Turkey in 1974, has so far embarked on three pushbacks of boats with refugees which approached the Cypriot shores. On 20 March 2020, Cyprus Sea Patrol proceeded with pushback by expelling a fishing boat of Syrian refugees, amid UNHCR concerns about the danger of undermining the safeguarding of international protection during the times emergency measures implemented by many countries to control the spread of COVID-​ 19 (Zenonos 2020). The right-​wing government is implementing tougher border restrictions and fewer rights within the reception process, aiming to reduce the “pull factor” implemented through repressive measures (Trimikliniotis 2020). A further documented pushback at sea took place on 30 July 2020. The new Minister of Interior, just after the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic, conflated measures to combat ‘illegal immigration’ to exceptional emergency measures to contain the spread of the virus. The new package includes tough “border” restrictions, fewer rights within the reception process, pushbacks, mass expulsions and suspension of the Asylum law, following the example of Greece (Offsite 2020). Hundreds of refugees were detained, even after the loosening of the lockdown, causing mass anti-​ racist mobilisation (KISA 2020). In response, the Minister attacked non-​government-​controlled groups, accusing them of treachery, illegally supporting immigrants like his anti-​ democratic counterparts in Poland and Hungary. In his frolic of anti-​immigrant discourse, he even accused them of being funded by terrorism (Hazou 2020). Pushbacks are routinely practiced. There is a media attempt to ‘normalise’ and treat them as ‘legitimate’. The media headlines concerning the recent pushback of a boat with Syrians on 30 July 2020 arbitrarily use the terms ‘refugees’, ‘migrants’, ‘undocumented migrants’, and even ‘illegal migrants’ (Racism Watch 2020). Apart from ‘illegal migrants’, which is legally meaningless and dehumanising,

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the UNHCR has issued statements against the use of the term ‘illegal migrants’ (UNHCR 2020). The other terms denote a legal status with specific rights –​therefore, it is important to clarify the terms:

• ‘Migrants’ are people who choose to move, not because of an immediate threat of persecution or death, but mainly to improve their lives; • ‘Undocumented/​irregular migrants’ are migrants who find themselves in an irregular situation in a country, i.e. without papers (so it is inaccurate to call persons fleeing armed conflict as ‘migrants’ or to call them ‘undocumented/​ irregular’ while they are still on a boat); • ‘Refugees’ are people fleeing an armed conflict or persecution, such as Syrians. Whether they come from a non-​combat zone is something the authorities do not know until each case has been considered individually. It is not legitimate for refoulement decisions to be made while people are still on a boat and their country/​area of origin is still unknown. Pushbacks are illegal in international and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) law (Hruschka 2020). Even at times of crisis, the non-​refoulement principle cannot be violated. As the UNHCR (2020a) notes: “measures may not result in denying them an effective opportunity to seek asylum or result in refoulement”. Differentiating between terminologies and categories is important because one of the fundamental principles of international law stipulates that refugees must not be returned to face conditions where their lives or freedom are at risk. A refoulement at sea, as well as the prohibition of disembarkation, endanger lives. Pushbacks and obstructing disembarkation are illegal. If the government has concerns about the spread of the coronavirus, they can perform tests and place refugees in quarantine. The pandemic is no excuse for human rights abuses and for endangering lives (Racism Watch 2020).

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New challenges, new struggles, new hopes

The virus continues its deadly global course, exposing the 40-​ year reign of neoliberal capitalism which has left unprotected the populations with the destruction of the welfare states. The pandemic is accentuating and accelerating processes well in place prior to advent of the virus. The infovirus is spreading alongside COVID-​19 but we must distinguish the progressive-​ democratic media contra the conservative-​reactionary media, whose destructive role in distorting, diverting attention and amplifying news. Generating shock and moral panics is used to justify dangerous repressive, racist and anti-​migrant politics and policies. There is a ‘counter-​revolt’ unfolding as various right-​wing and religious fundamentalisms see the virus as a ‘cosmopolitan global hoax’. There is a new impetus of anti-​immigration info-​ war, as we are overwhelmed by ‘news’ and commentaries, where conspiracy theories are often state-​induced or state-​ sanctioned or spouted by other anti-​democratic forces. The fact that migration and asylum is increasing connected to ‘Security Studies’ and International Relations, with an emphasis of ‘geopolitics’ is highly problematic as it is lending ‘scientific’ legitimacy to conspiracy theories. Various geopolitical experts are conflating and obfuscating immigration and refugees as part of a satanic plan in a world of ‘hybrid’ and ‘asymmetric warfare’ (Theophanous 2020). All sorts of strange mutations are taking place between currents of the former left and the racist extreme right. In this crisis, when the old world is dying and the new is not yet born, we have an “interregnum” where “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”, as Gramsci called it. The ‘new’ extreme right in Europe has emerged as ‘Orbanization’ transcended the borders of Europe ‒ taken from the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán. The ground was prepared even before the 2014–​15 ‘refugee crisis’ but it is now uttered with new rigour. The ‘new’ far right today unashamedly adopt indiscriminately the view that we are dealing with an ‘invasion of civilians’ (Lygeros 2016) to counter the so-​called ‘silent fall’ or ‘silent plunder’ resulting from the alleged changes in the ethnic/​racial demographic composition of Greece. The

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same imported discourses are repeated in Cyprus, adapted to include references to the Turkish invasion and Islamization of the occupied territories. This extraordinary global experiment is the ‘perfect storm’ for global ‘states of emergency’ or ‘states of exception’ as a pretext to suspend ‘normalcy’, including basic democratic rights. Simultaneously, there is a sustained criminal neglect and exposure to deadly risks of the most vulnerable. It is not the refugees who are the ‘invaders’, but the new far-​right ideologies and other morbid symptoms in ‘asymmetric and hybrid wars’ against democracy. The new far right is invoking the ‘necessity’ of emergency regimes as ‘legitimate defence’ (Koutsogiannis 2007) to de-​ democratise and militarise society by spreading hate and fear via their nationalist-​populist geopolitical hysteria. In this context, resistance struggles must take stock of how, during this difficult time, we may locate openings for better prospects for the world. There are potentialities for a radical alternative to the doom and gloom scenario of dystopian futures. This will be a connecting of the thousands of plateaus of resistance struggles taking place in different shapes and forms and at different levels. Digital materialities can creatively unite the world by learning from struggles and the new socialities. We are called upon to unite the social and political forces, the agents of a potential world of hope. Critical social scientists must join forces with progressive social workers and activists at local and regional and international level to become the forces of change in the direction of equality, progress, solidarity. There is no pre-​determined route to disaster as it all depends on the struggles ahead. The emergence of a cohort-​ in-​the-​making of a progressive ‘fixer’ is now a necessity. There is a plurality of alternative and critical forces who reject both the ‘old order’ and the neoliberal globalisation, seeking new worlds drawn from experiences of the commons by building a common humanity, solidarity and a world of hope. In this tradition, I would like to connect to radical social work to public sociology in the post-​ COVID era:  sociologists and social workers cannot but make choices about what they ought to do about a world riddled with contradictions. As

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those in power are pushing the world further into crisis, we are called up to return to politics and praxis of rationality, social justice, equality and progress. We are called upon to become agents of change accountable to communities of resistance that rekindle and reshape solidarity and the new socialities based on mobile commons.

20 Rethinking right and wrong Social work, COVID-​19 and the crisis of ethics Sarah Banks This epidemic is not just about people who tested positive but also about people whose life ended and deteriorated as an indirect result of the inhuman management of this epidemic. (Hospital social worker, Canada) One of the challenges I am currently facing is being more human than professional. (Medical social worker, Colombia) We felt sad, stressed, and sometimes exhausted … we did not have time to think and reflect. I felt like I was at a war. (Community social worker, China)

Introduction

This chapter highlights the ethical implications of COVID-​19, seeing it as a crisis of social justice for social work. Drawing on responses to an international survey, it illustrates how social workers had to rethink the meaning of ethical practice in real time, balancing privacy against health risks, empathy against efficiency and rule-​following against being human. It argues for framing social work ethics with values of radical social justice and empathic solidarity at its heart.

COVID-​19 and the crisis of ethics

The continuing impact of COVID-​19 is as much a crisis of social justice, and hence of ethics, as it is of health or the 145

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economy. As such, it calls for a spirited social work response, which, as the title of this chapter suggests, calls into question ‘business as usual’. COVID-​19 creates huge challenges for the profession, as social workers, social work organisations and governments work out what needs to change and how, both short and long term. These questions are not only political and practical, but also fundamentally ethical. The crisis of social justice brings to the surface perennial ethical questions about social, ecological and economic wellbeing; collective responsibility; and the legitimacy of systems of governance and social control, including:

• What responsibility do humans have for each other and the global ecosystem? • How should scarce material resources be distributed fairly? • How much individual or community freedom should be curtailed in the public good? • What is ‘the public good’ anyway, and who gets to define and defend it? These are big questions, to which social workers and social work organisations can make an important response from the frontline. Social workers witness everyday social injustices, experienced by the people with whom they work. They confront difficult ethical decisions and dilemmas about how to prioritise services and resources, whether to call out their employers for callous and unfair practices, whether to bend or break rules and procedures in order to provide services to people in chronic need, and how to ensure people are treated with dignity, humanity and compassion. These were familiar ethical challenges for social workers pre-​pandemic. However, during the pandemic their frequency has increased and they have become more complex as needs have grown, resources declined and usual ways of working become impossible or difficult. Previously taken-​for-​granted activities, such as in-​ person home visits, arranging adoptions or finding places in domestic violence shelters, have turned into nightmares of ‘ethical logistics’ (Banks et al. 2020b). These routine events have become fraught with ethical issues, problems and

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dilemmas as new risks of harm to more people are factored in, while services are restricted and resources reduced. What counts as safeguarding people in these circumstances is open to debate.

Social workers’ ethical challenges: an international study

This chapter draws on 607 responses to an international survey of the ethical challenges faced by social workers during COVID-​19. It was conducted during May 2020 by a group of researchers in partnership with the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) (for details see Banks et al. 2020a). Six themes were identified: 1) Creating and maintaining trusting, honest and empathic relationships via phone or internet with due regard to privacy and confidentiality, or in person with protective equipment. 2) Prioritising service user needs and demands, which are greater and different due to the pandemic, when resources are stretched/​unavailable and full assessments often impossible. 3) Balancing service user rights, needs and risks against personal risk to social workers and others, in order to provide services as well as possible. 4) Deciding whether to follow national and organisational policies, procedures or guidance (existing or new) or to use professional discretion in circumstances where the policies seem inappropriate, confused or lacking. 5) Acknowledging and handling emotions, fatigue and the need for self-​care, when working in unsafe and stressful circumstances. 6) Using the lessons learned from working during the pandemic to rethink social work in the future. The framing of these themes, with several sub-​ clauses describing the conditions of work, reflects the complexity and multi-​ layered nature of the situations social workers faced. While at the time of the survey, countries and regions

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experienced different degrees of severity of the pandemic and varying government responses, similar ethical challenges were articulated. Many respondents simply described the difficult conditions they faced, such as lack of protective equipment, working from home, finding ways to work with service users who did not understand physical distancing and receiving little support from managers. Others also gave more insight into their ethical dilemmas, decisions, actions and emotions, including the mental processes of agonising, reasoning, worrying and empathising.

Rethinking right and wrong

One notable feature of the professional and ethical crisis of the pandemic for the social workers responding to the survey was that actions that might have been regarded as bad practice or ethically dubious in normal circumstances were permitted or required in pandemic conditions. This might include preventing mentally competent service users from going outdoors, suddenly pausing an adoption or informing a mother by phone that her children would be removed. Although such actions were allowed or required according to government or agency policy during COVID-​19, social workers were still asking:  are these practices ethically right, even in these circumstances? For example, a Dutch neighbourhood worker commented: So far I have been following the guidelines of the government, which are implemented by my organisation as well, but as a person and as a professional I am constantly wondering whether we are doing the right thing … Many social professionals indicate that they think that sticking to the guidelines is more harmful to many clients than dealing with them in a more flexible way, so that more activities and help can be provided.

The critical question here is:  are some social workers, like this Dutch practitioner, unrealistically holding onto a vision of social work and a set of values that can no longer be

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implemented in pandemic circumstances? Although it seems harsh, it could be argued on utilitarian grounds that the greater good is served if urgent cases are prioritised, face-​ to face contact minimised and some legal and good practice guidelines relaxed. This may be the inevitable, macro-​level policy response at the initial peak of COVID-​19 in a country or region under emergency lockdown, with some social work staff sick or redeployed. Yet as the Canadian social worker quoted at the beginning of this chapter so clearly articulated, current government policies (including pandemic lockdowns) are responsible for ‘structural violence’ against people and groups already economically and socially marginalised –​ people in poverty, people already in poor health and members of minority ethnic groups. Some social workers were therefore motivated to mitigate these effects by finding room for discretion, undertaking micro-​ level ethical resistances. Furthermore, as time went on, many social workers and social work organisations worked hard to provide alternative services, more empathic and inclusive ways of communication and creative solutions to the challenges they faced. This is evidenced powerfully in the survey responses, IFSW’s ongoing reports (IFSW 2020; Truell 2020) and earlier chapters of this book.

Reinventing the social work relationship

One issue featuring in many survey responses was the impact of remote and restricted working on the quality of relationships with service users. Social workers spoke of struggling to make this better, juxtaposed with feelings of guilt and regret when they were unable to do so. For some it felt like a failure of professional responsibility if they could not meet face-​to-​face to carry out assessments, gain consent for interventions and provide empathic support. They were unable to do social work as it should be done, but instead were practising what a UK child and family social worker called ‘anti-​social social work’ –​which felt unjust and oppressive. Others felt the need to shed some aspects of the professional social work identity, seeing this as entailing following government/​agency policies

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and procedures. Instead they focussed on offering a humane response to people using or needing social work services, drawing on personal values and motivations as well as notions of professional duty. The Colombian social worker quoted at the start of this chapter illustrates this, speaking of ‘being more human than professional’. Certainly, many social workers reported going above and beyond their defined work roles, sometimes even breaking or bending rules in order to do what they thought was ethically right in the circumstances. A Nigerian hospital social worker helped relatives of sick patients get cash to pay hospital charges by using her own bank account, despite this being against hospital rules. A team leader in an Australian Community HIV team decided to provide masks for service users, who had to travel to hospital appointments, without asking her manager’s permission. A Canadian adult mental health social worker who was teleworking decided to go to the home of an isolated and distressed service user in order to arrange hospitalisation, although home visits were not allowed. Her very brief account of why she took this decision was: ‘I remembered the motto of my employer at the time … The human first! My reflection lasted two seconds and I left.’ These responses called for risk-​taking, moral and physical courage and an implicit or explicit process of ethical evaluation. It is difficult for readers to judge whether the actions of these social workers were ethically right or wrong without knowing the details of the circumstances. There are examples of social workers in the survey refusing to do home visits when asked, judging this to be too risky. Others made big efforts to maintain professional boundaries, especially when stressed and working from home. A clinical therapist (mental health and addiction) in a small Canadian rural community reported walking her dog every day past the home of an older service user who had a sprained ankle. She said: ‘It’s really hard not to offer to take their dog on my walk,’ adding: ‘I feel like I am not being a good human by not doing what is right (helping others in my community) and I am doing what is “right” by not breaching my professional ethics.’

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Concluding comments: beyond business as usual towards a new solidarity

As the Canadian clinical therapist recognises, social workers are both fellow human beings and professionals with specific responsibilities. During a pandemic, or any crisis or emergency, these roles and boundaries are shaken up. This creates dilemmas and uncertainty. While social work’s professional values and principles remain the same, their priorities get reorganised when matters of life and death, severe harms and injustices are at stake. It is not easy to stop, reflect and rethink the social work role during a period of stress and confusion. This takes us back to the quotation from the Chinese community social worker at the start of the chapter, who said about working at the height of the pandemic:  ‘we did not have time to think and reflect. I felt like I was at a war.’ Yet, as the impact of the pandemic continues, it will be important to make time for ethical reflection about what role social workers can and should play in the future. An Italian social worker described the process of going from ‘work as usual’ to unusual ways of working. Social work can learn from the experience of the pandemic. This entails vigilance in resisting the digital exclusion created by widespread teleworking, and challenging the inequities of service closures affecting already marginalised people hardest. It also involves pursuing positive ways of expressing social solidarity, strengthening the community development and community organising strands of social work and pressing for socially just change. Earlier chapters show how the pandemic has tragically exposed inequities caused by neoliberal and managerialist welfare regimes. The COVID-​19 experience calls on social workers urgently to reclaim and reconfigure their values, at the heart of which should be commitments to radical social justice and empathic solidarity (Banks 2014:  19–​ 21). As Rebecca Solnit (2020: xiv) comments: collective disasters wake us up to who we are, who we can trust, what matters and what doesn’t. The difficulty is in how to stay awake when the ordinary returns.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to the survey respondents for sharing their experiences; Tian Cai, Ed de Jonge, Jane Shears, Michelle Shum, Ana Sobočan, Kim Strom, Rory Truell, Maria Jesús Úriz and Merlinda Weinberg for collaborative work on survey design and analysis; those who distributed and translated surveys; IFSW staff and Ethics Commission for ongoing support; and Durham University for contributing funding for the research.

Conclusion No return to ‘business as usual’ Michael Lavalette, Vasilios Ioakimidis and Iain Ferguson

The year 2020 has been marked by four interlinked crises: the climate emergency, the COVID-​19 pandemic, the virus of racism and the brutality of deep recession. These are linked crises, rooted in the nature of modern capitalism. Capitalism is a system that is built upon ruthless, anarchic competition. It generates vast inequalities and it leaves large numbers of people struggling in the face of poverty (Dorling 2019). It uses, abuses and exploits people’s labour and, in the process, it divides people against each other and leaves us feeling ‘alienated’ (Lavalette and Ferguson 2018). It creates the conditions within which racism, sexism and other forms of oppression manifest (German 2018; Callinicos 1992). It exploits and abuses the natural world and is destructive of ecosystems that are necessary to sustain life (Angus 2016). And it creates the conditions in which new viruses can more easily develop and spread (Davis 2020). This is a system that puts the demands of profit maximisation before the needs of people and planet –​with devastating consequences. This collection represents the third of a trilogy of books that we have been involved with which aims to trace the impact of modern capitalism on people’s lives and on social work activities (see also Ferguson, Ioakimidis and Lavalette 2016; Lavalette 2019). Over these three books our argument is that social work can make a very positive contribution to people’s lives –​but this is not inevitable! Indeed, what we mean by social work, the activities associated with the profession, the theories that shape its interventions, are all contested. Our argument is that over the last 20–​30 years what we term ‘neoliberal social work’ has grown in influence and shaped institutional practices. As John Harris (2002) 153

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argues social work has become more ‘business like’ (in terms of how it treats its professionals as workers and prioritises managerial authority; how it adopts the logic of marketisation and competition in service delivery; and how target setting and rationing of services have become normalised). But we have always argued that there is another way, that another social work is possible. Faced with the four great crises of 2020, neoliberal social work failed. It revealed itself as an ‘emperor without clothes’. This collection draws on early case-​studies from social work scholars and practitioners confronting the questions of ‘what we need to know’ and ‘what we need to do’ to make social work relevant in the face of the current crisis. The first section looked at the broader systemic questions. It demands that social work theory and practice take account of the climate emergency, of the causes of pandemics, of political context and of the social divisions that shape our world. On occasion social work is criticised for having ‘too much theory’ but the pandemic reveals that we need more, not less, theoretical understanding of our world and its inequalities. The second section drew on colleagues’ experiences of the pandemic from across the globe. Of course, the pandemic continues and we will learn more and reflect on our work as we go on. But several of the contributors all emphasised the importance of collective and community responses to the pandemic and the divisions it generated. For too long, collective and community responses to social problems have been marginalised in social work, but the pandemic has revealed their importance and the need for a return to the collective. Finally, in the third section we looked at social divisions and how they have played out during the crisis. As a number of the authors emphasised the pandemic did not mean that we were ‘all in it together’. Rather the pandemic played upon existing social divisions. In the pandemic, class matters, institutional racism kills and quarantine has reinforced women’s oppression. Social work theory and practice needs to urgently revisit its knowledge and practice base. There needs to be a thorough decolonising of social work theory and practice; we need to

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refocus on the roots, causes and consequences of women’s oppression and we need to understand that class and inequality have significant, detrimental impacts on people’s lives. But these are not simply demands placed on academic social workers, nor are they a demand that we disappear to the libraries to ‘re-​ write theory’. The best social theories are those that derive from, and relate to, the problems and issues generated by the social movements that are attempting to challenge existing practices and structures. New ideas in social work are rarely generated ‘from within’ the profession. Rather, they are fed into social work from debates within the movements trying to shape our world. Social workers need to engage with the Black Lives Matter movement, with climate change activists in networks like Extinction Rebellion, with trade union and labour movements fighting the effects of the recession, with community groups fighting housing evictions, and with service user activists demanding services that are fit for purpose and which listen to their voice. In the face of the present crisis some politicians are demanding that we get back ‘to normal’. In some senses it’s an appealing demand. Lockdowns and quarantines can be isolating and we all want to get back to more fruitful human contacts and relationships. But the ‘normal’ that our rulers want us to get back to is the ‘normal’ business as usual of things like growing inequality, austerity cuts to services, reduced wages for workers, more privatisation, less regulation and less democratic accountability. In other words, the ‘normality’ of global, neoliberal capitalism. It is now time for social workers to join the movements for social change and demand that there should be no return to business as usual. The contemporary crisis demands ‘another social work’. Another social work, one which focuses on equality and social justice, on putting people’s needs before profit, of collective provision of service and democratic accountability, is not only possible but necessary –​and it must see itself, consciously, as an ally in the struggle for a better world that puts people and planet first.

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