The portrayal of social workers in popular culture
As a baby social worker at the age of barely-20, I took a job at the domestic violence shelter and program in the city where I went to college. When I told my mom about it, I recall a distinct crinkling of her nose. My mother is, to put it lightly, rather skeptical of feminism or anything that can be remotely portrayed as such (agitating for women’s rights apparently falls into this category), even though she does, says, and believes in many things that could fall under the label–another post altogether. Besides the fact that she was wary of my decision on eerily women’s lib-sounding grounds, she was somewhat dismissive of the field of social work in general. She relayed to me the following example of why social workers are not to be trusted (names have been omitted due to my poor memory):
“So-and-so had her kid taken away for spanking him in the grocery store when he was pitching a fit. Somebody called a hotline and the next day a social worker came to her house and took him away just like that.”
My mother is gifted with powers of exaggeration, but her implication here is very much in line with the (generalized) perception of social workers, specifically that of the working class: these bleeding hearts can swoop in any minute and take your kids away just for disciplining them!
My parents’ viewpoint on the field of social work has evolved since then, mainly due to seven years of me dismantling stereotypes and then getting accepted to a master’s program, which (behind managing to finagle any kind of degree in the first place) may be one of the few things I’ve ever done to make them proud. But some of the wariness remains, and it is actively reinforced by a lot of our pop culture and mainstream media images. This is not to say that social work, glamorous profession though it may be, is a regular feature on TV or elsewhere, yet when it is mentioned, it’s often painted as oppressive. I find this interesting, especially given the underpinnings of a social work education are to work toward the elimination of all forms of oppression (again, how this is actually played out in graduate school is another post for another day). As a person who prefers to Netflix rather than actually watch TV, I’m probably behind on current television portrayals, if any, of social workers; however, compiling a list of all the times in movies, media, books, etc. when social workers are portrayed in a positive light has proven pretty fruitless thus far. I’d be interested to hear other perspectives.
I’m not sure how much of this negativity stems from a general misunderstanding of the profession by the corporate-owned media (e.g., as cops and detectives surely know, Hollywood portrayals should always be taken with a grain of salt) or whether it’s leftover from the forerunnings of modern social work practice in the colonial Northeast. Early social workers are largely known now for their racist, classist, and otherwise “misguided” attempts to save the poor from themselves through door-to-door community education known as “friendly visiting.” Such visitors were often middle-class, unmarried or older Christian white women who volunteered their time to charity since cultural standards prohibited them from actually holding a job. They might knock on the door of a poor immigrant family and “teach” the mother how to cook proper American fare instead of borscht, bring the kids to the orphanage if Daddy was a drunk or unemployed or perhaps just Irish, or attempt to convert the children to Protestants. While some good was probably done, it must also be noted that this do-gooding only extended to the borders of the white areas of town. Communities of color were left to their own devices (where some pretty awesome social work took place, especially in Chicago).
Recently, I read Sudhir Venkatesh’s book Gangleader for a Day. I did enjoy the book, but as with other “renegade” sociologists and rogue journalists (a.k.a. Barbara Ehrenreich), I was struck by all these amazing! insightful! brilliant! compassionate! realizations that Venkatesh made with regard to race, class and poverty in the United States. This kind of shit is not new to any good social worker, police officer or the urban clergy. He talks about stuff like the “underground economy” (did you know that since poor people cannot afford to buy things sometimes, they pool their resources? OMG how can that happen in our glorious free market economy?), segregated neighborhoods, the exploitation of young black women, and the fact that you have to be (gasp!) pretty intelligent to operate a successful cocaine enterprise in a revelatory tone that once again drove home the incredible gap between academia and actual life for me. The funny thing about it all is that, while ostensibly studying life in the projects for people in Chicago in the late 1980s, Venkatesh essentially takes on a series of social work jobs without ever calling what he’s doing “social work”: he starts a writing group for young mothers, mediates conflicts between apartment residents, does educational outreach with teenage boys, and links people to outside resources. This is hailed as a superb and radical new way to do sociological research, and I suppose it is, and I suppose it’s great that he was able to help those people for a few months before he published his dissertation on them and became really famous and successful. It’s the same with Barbara Ehrenreich: although her focus is entirely different and her “research” methods not exactly statistically sound, books like Nickel and Dimed (again, a book I enjoyed) say a bunch of things that the poor and working class could have told you–among them: damn, it’s hard to support yourself with a job at Merry Maids.
Throughout Gangleader for a Day, social workers (and cops) are portrayed as predatory and corrupt, which brings me back to the “oppressive” theme: something has gone terribly wrong when a helping profession becomes the very thing it seeks to eliminate. Thus, even in fictionalized versions of life, social workers are caricatured as dowdy, meddlesome, unreasonable, mean-spirited, child-grabbing, or worse. Maybe I need some more self-awareness reflection about my career choice, but a lot of the vitriol does seem unwarranted or misunderstood. Does anyone know of a positive (or at least nuanced) portrayal of a social worker in our current pop culture landscape?
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July 29th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
my mom, as a teacher in the suburbs, who probably wished she was teaching students more deserving of her enthusiasm was always whipped into a sort of do-gooder frenzy by the movie “dangerous minds.” she even bought the soundtrack and would (sadly to me) sing along with it, and do a sort of white lady rap dance to “gagsta’s paradise.” ugh.
there is also the movie “the rainmaker” where matt damon is a do gooder attorney.
i guess neither of these people are really “social workers” at least not in job title. but they sure seem nice.
July 30th, 2008 at 11:56 am
It’s true there are social work elements to both of these roles, but the fact is that teachers and attorneys are well represented on television and in the movies, and have the luxury of their portrayals being nuanced and varied.