What’s In a Word? Poverty

By Al Murdach, LCSW (retired)

This column explores the meanings and implications of words important to social workers. Our word for today is: poverty.

Since its beginnings, social work has always had an interest in alleviating poverty and destitution.

Although variously defined, poverty refers to a condition of life in which people lack sufficient resources to enjoy a decent, healthy and secure standard of living. The causes of this condition are numerous. Low income, lack of citizenship, poor health, unemployment, homelessness, racial and ethnic discrimination, economic changes, war, natural disasters, disease and famine are just some of the many factors that contribute to poverty. Together, they form an onslaught of misfortune that devastates millions of lives constantly throughout the world.

The social work profession, however, while never neglecting the poor completely, has vacillated throughout its history in the attention it has devoted to this phenomenon. One early social work classic text, Robert Hunter’s Poverty (1904), described in detail the groups of people that drew the field’s attention in its early days: the pauper, the vagrant, the sick, the child, and the immigrant. Hunter’s views of these groups reflect the moralistic tenor of his times. But despite changing times, all of these groups and their issues continue to demand social work’s attention today, though sometimes recast in different terms (the “pauper” today would be defined as the unemployed or low wage worker, and the “vagrant” would be viewed as the homeless or transient individual).

As the profession developed, however, it broadened its focus to include many more interests, and sometimes relegated its concern for the poor to a lower status than when the field was first developed.

In fact, at least since the 1960s various critics have scolded the field for “abandoning” the poor in order to develop a more socially acceptable focus on middle class and higher income clients and their problems. In addition to this shift, the profession has drifted away from its once strong identification with the poor and public social services (child welfare, income maintenance, criminal justice, community development, vocational rehabilitation, etc.) and attached itself wholeheartedly to the field of mental health, where it is now one of dominant professions. Many factors of course account for this, such as increased pay, status, and public acceptance in the mental health field, as well as the profession’s long love affair with psychiatry, which allows it to bask in the public acclaim and high demand for service that psychiatry often enjoys in the U.S., hence the cry that the “social” has left social work.

While the alliance with psychiatry has benefited social work in many ways by improving its research base, its methodology and its income generating potential, it has sadly diluted the focus on the communal and societal aspects of social problem definition and amelioration. As a result, while observers have long noted the importance of cultural and structural causes in understanding the genesis of social problems like poverty, thus generating appropriate solutions, social work remains mired in an individualistic approach to understanding such difficulties and is therefore unable to formulate needed remedies. The case by case approach to social ills, pioneered by medicine in this country and adopted completely by psychiatry and then by social work, has left the public square vacant of any effective presence by “human service” professionals such as social workers who could both “humanize” social services and aid people to develop their own from the ground up. Harry Specht, a renowned social work pioneer, once noted that “groups, community associations, and voluntary associations are (today) usually considered to be (merely) secondary means for change.” Because of their individualistic focus, such social assets are rarely “considered by professionals to be the primary and most desirable means for change.”

Instead social work professionals seize upon “individualized therapy as our major means for dealing with social problems.” This shift away from the public realm, if uncorrected, will ultimately be inimical to social work as a “social” profession. Therefore a renewed focus on poverty and its causes and possible solutions could only benefit social work and help it return in some ways to its original mission.