How would you improve ethics in social work?

In social work, one is not always presented with ethical quandaries, at least not on the surface. But the nuances of social work are complicated, and rife with opportunities to turn a blind eye. Most social case workers are stretched too thin, with caseloads that border on the ridiculous. When a case slips through the cracks and something happens, people and prognosticators wonder “How could this have happened?” and “Why didn’t somebody do something?” You hear it all the time on the newscasts, and news readers often turn the investigation onto the social work agency, as it if were at fault for failing to pick a needle out of a haystack.

The problem starts with the need for social workers in the first place. Our society places too much personal responsibility outside of the home. Call it socialist leanings, but when the government decides to enter into the home to make decisions for its populace, it removes personal responsibility. Once the government, and this includes hundreds of government agencies, start taking over personal lives and responsibilities, it becomes a self perpetuating problem. The agencies need more money, which require more taxes, and as taxes are raised the population expects more from the social work agency, which in turn requires more money and so on and so forth.

The question then becomes, how do you convince a population they don’t need social workers? The first solution is a hard definition of social worker. There are child service agencies that are necessary, rehabilitation counselors, and thousands of other job descriptions that fall under the umbrella of social work, usually employed by a Department of Human Services or similarly named agency. It’s a bureaucratic beast that grows each year, and society is only too happy to pawn off personal responsibility to the agency.

With so many cases to work, ethics become a slippery slope, and that’s how people fall through the cracks. The task over the next decade is to return responsibility back into the home where it belongs and to engineer a change in the way people think. It will not be easy. So how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

The first step is to utilize technology to ease caseloads for overworked social workers. By easing the burden and overwhelming paperwork, social workers can focus on prioritizing cases and increase work flow. This can eliminate some of the ethical quandaries that may crop up. For example, if a social worker notices that a food stamp recipient also just registered a brand new luxury car with the department of motor vehicles, that case deserves to be examined very closely. The technology for communicating this information is in place, but it takes budget request to upgrade an aging infrastructure. Instead of trying to overhaul an entire system at once, the social work agency should create a pilot program that utilizes digital technology and invade the system one department at a time. And the agency needs to demand compensation from the beneficiaries of social work: for example food stamp recipients need to put in ten to twenty hour work weeks as unpaid labor scanning and digitizing paperwork and caseloads, or counseling recipients need to perform community service or some other projects.

By requiring a trade or barter for social work, the agency then puts the onus of responsibility back onto the people and out of the government. When a person doesn’t show up for their assigned task, they don’t get their allotment. And the idea isn’t to “employ” people using social services, but rather wean them from social services by teaching a trade, or making them responsible for their own actions and the consequences those actions produce.

Creating a connected computer system that’s automatic and with an easy interface is one step toward putting the responsibility back into the home. This can eliminate redundancies in the system (two checks going to the same address causes the system to flag a file for investigation, or one social security number collecting numerous checks at multiple addresses flags the file, or even a social security number registered with the IRS for withholding gets flagged on an application for benefits) which can lead to the end of abuses. The way the social work system is designed now, it’s outdated and overwhelmed and easy to fool. An automated computer system with multiple agency information could help end some of the abuses being perpetrated and improve the ethics of social work.