Professional Documents
Culture Documents
C11 Final Empow
C11 Final Empow
Empowerment and advocacy are social democratic practices that enable people to
overcome barriers and contribute to practice a focus on social justice. They enable social
workers to help give people changes to better understand and change their lives.
Empowerment helps clients better make decisions and control their own lives by
reducing social or personal barriers, increase the ability to use their own power, and
transferring power to people who lack it. Advocacy seeks to better represent the
interests of clients with limited power to powerful individuals and social structures. At
this time, empowerment ideas are being displaced in their importance by the growth in
the concept of advocacy although both areas are relevant to social work.
Terminology
Key Ideas
Advocacy has been incorporated into general social work practice since the
1970s.
Since the 1970s, advocacy has been included into social work through case advocacy,
provided by professionals to enhance people’s access to the provisions designed to
benefit them, and cause advocacy, sought to promote social change for the benefit of
social groups from which client come. Policy practice in the USA is a clear stream of
professional practice aimed at changing legislation or policy on particular issues. Four
types of advocacy can be identified: protecting vulnerable people, creating support to
enhance functioning, fostering identity and control, and protecting and advancing
claims or appeals. The latter includes welfare rights practice which is concerned with
ensuring clients benefit from other welfare services.
A different form of advocacy work with the disabled grew up during the
1980s.
This new type of advocacy work, incorporating the other elements of advocacy services,
developed in the 1980s. This began as a process of increasing the capacity of people with
mental illness or learning disabilities to manage their own lives. A movement grew up to
assist them in achieving their civil rights within institutions and in leaving institutions
where they had been held by compulsion. Empowerment in this setting goes beyond
arguing for particular services but rather helping people speak up. This may happen in
official planning processes, group activity, or volunteers with isolated clients and peer
advocacy.
The main values issues are concerns about capacity to participate and
conflicting interests.
The main values issues that arise with empowerment and advocacy are concerns about
people’s capacity to participate in social institutions and act and speak for themselves,
and the problem of conflicting interests. Central to empowerment and advocacy theory
is a recognition that disabilities and an experience of long-term oppression generate
social barriers—this may mean people cannot develop personal skills, emotional
strength, or resources. In addition, practitioners may be so removed from some client
groups that they are unable to identify and represent their interests.
Issues
Critical theorists suggest that empowerment and advocacy fail to see social
change.
They argue that empowerment and advocacy are not structural in their explanations
and so empowering people appreciate education or advocate for work opportunities are
insufficient to overcome social oppression. Accordingly, empowerment and advocacy
ideas are inconsistent with helping clients because they raise understanding but do not
enable to act on the structure of oppression, thus only demystifying but not resolving
the sources of oppression,
Final thoughts…
Advocacy is integral to many social work roles and an increasingly important role for
social workers for agency-based practice in times of reduced budgets and entitlements.
Advocacy is often the main focus of the practitioners’ tasks in task-centered practice and
is a supplementary role in therapeutic practice according to many models. Accordingly,
the development of advocacy skills and actions is a crucial element of helping many
clients. Advocacy also requires skills in developing self- and citizen advocacy, and
practitioners act as instructed advocates in advocacy services for vulnerable population
groups.