Introduction

In this edited text, we and our contributors ask whether social work and human services can fundamentally challenge injustice and promote human liberation. We consider the relationship between social work and the liberal capitalist state and contribute to a growing recognition of the oppressive functions associated with social and human services (Ioakimidis and Wyllie, 2023). More importantly, this book begins to develop tangible alternatives for social justice practice by exploring the application of abolitionist theory.

Social work is perpetually fraught with tensions and contradictions. It targets those on the social and economic margins: racialised and gendered populations drawn from the residual working class. The soft-policing of threatening groups has been integral to the functioning of mainstream social work since the late 19th century. Ferguson (2004: 28) identifies social work as ‘the decisive bourgeois response’ to the disturbing reality of social suffering and fear of social disorder generated by capitalist industrialisiation and urbanisation. In this sense, social work can be seen to have served an integrative function in socially and economically stratified societies by mitigating some of the inherent social suffering: effectively saving capitalism from itself (Lorenz, 2017). Abolitionist thinking challenges this perception by arguing that to work within oppressive structures is to collude with social injustice; to effectively become part of a carceral web (Roberts, 2023).