Chapter 11.

Empowerment and Advocacy

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

Barriers or blocks prevent people from achieving their social objectives.

Normalization or social role valorization is related to empowerment and seeks to change

healthcare and social work practice to encourage greater equality and participation for
people with learning disabilities and others.

Validation is important to acknowledge peoples’ feelings and experiences

Key Ideas

Empowerment and advocacy incorporate aspects of critical theories and

discrimination.
The main role of empowerment and advocacy theory within the range of practice
theories has been to incorporate aspects of critical theories, without drawing on the
Marxist roots, and ideas about anti-discrimination. Empowerment is attractive,
institutive, and positive and so greatly influenced social work; in fact, empowerment is
often used independently of its theoretical base to support practice techniques of self-
help, mutual assistance, participation in planning and managing services, as well as the
participation of clients and those who care for them.

Empowerment and advocacy do achieve social progress.

These approaches are not aimed primarily at social change but many practitioners
believe they achieve social progress through individual and group learning and
encouragement of participation in broader social movements. Therefore, empowerment
and advocacy practice is included in community and social development and macro-
social work as well as critical, feminist, and anti-oppressive practice. As such
empowerment and advocacy contributes to their objectives without necessarily adopting
their theoretical positions.

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.

Advocacy is distinguished from other help by several factors.

Systematic advocacy includes developing social movements and providing services to
protect groups. Practitioners act only on their clients’ instructions and follow a legal
model of distinguishing advocacy and the helping role. Many practitioners carry out
both types of work; policy development and influences is also a significant part of the
work of agencies where social workers are often hired and then carry out policy practice.
There is also a range of ‘non-instructed’ advocacy to implement empowerment and
advocacy approaches where the helping role predominates or agency constraints make it
impossible to take up a full advocacy role. Practitioners often use these approaches
alongside instructed advocacy when possible.

Advocacy ideas build on the experience of citizen and self-advocacy.

These include at least four approaches: person-centered advocacy, in which
practitioners develop a trusting relationship with their clients, enabling them to act and
speak on their client’s behalf; human rights advocacy, in which practitioners make
decisions based on clients’ rights according to various charters of rights or other
principles; watching brief advocacy, in which regular contact enables practitioners to
pick up and respond to difficulties where clients are unable to communicate for
themselves; and, best interests advocacy in which the practitioner defines the client’s
best interests and acts on these.

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.

Empowerment practice has assisted the development of self-help and

mutual aid groups.
Practitioners support groups of people sharing the same problems to come together to
support one another often around particular health conditions or fields of mental health
and addictions. Practice may be concerned with community development approaches or
may be more therapeutic by encouraging self-help support among clients. In either case,
a participative approach is valuable because people want and have a right to be involved
in decisions and actions in relation to them—thus reflecting the democratic value base of
social work, increases accountability, and thus increasing service efficiency, challenge
institutionalized discrimination, and achieve social work goals. Participatory practice
may include empowerment, control, equipping people with the personal resources, and
participation.

Empowerment and advocacy moved to the center of thinking in the 1980s.

While empowerment and advocacy has been a long-standing ideal of USA social work,
this history is mainly in the area of personal helping rather than political and social
change. There are few recent developments of empowerment ideas and the emphasis in
theory development is increasingly on advocacy.

The political role of empowerment in social work includes five essential

practice ideas.
Biography analyzes clients’ experience and understanding; power needs to be
understood as potentially liberating as well as oppressive; political understanding needs
to inform practice, observing both constraints and opportunities; gaining and using
skills can empower; and the interdependence of policy and practice must be established.

Normalization and social role valorization encourages greater equality and

participation.
These are related to empowerment and provide a theory to help encourage greater
equality and participation by offering clients social roles, such as helping others and
participating in decision-making. Normalization has been used in residential care field,
persons being reintegrated into the community, and moves to focus on dignity of a
human right in care services.

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.

Three main aspects of empowerment are important in applying theory to

practice.
Three main aspects of empowerment are important in applying a quite complex range of
theory to practice. These include participation in decision-making; the capacity to
influence what services are provided and how; and entitlement to services or standards
of provision based on enforceable legal and policy decisions.
Empowerment and advocacy have connections to many other fields.
Advocacy began in the legal field; advocacy is still the term used to describe lawyers’
presentation of clients in courts and elsewhere. In legal education, advocacy is a set of
skills with an extensive literature base; similar training is not done in social work. An
important source of empowerment knowledge comes from political science and political
sociology’s study of how groups can use power to achieve outcomes against the wishes of
other groups. Economists such as Weber contributed understandings of economic
power; Marxist thinking contributed socioeconomic power ideas that led to division of
society into social classes.

Sociology suggests that elites gain dominance by a variety of means.

Elites use a variety of means and establish patterns of power, sometimes maintained
through dominant ideologies, social and ideological assumptions, forms of
communications, and other means. Overall, these ideas suggest that dominance over
people is often associated with a people’s lack of knowledge of their situation and that
overcoming social barriers comes about by an understanding of the limitations on their
opportunities to take action.

Issues

Debate continues on what should be the primary goal of empowerment and

advocacy.
Both areas focus on increasing people’s power and control in their own lives and on
influencing service provision for the benefit of clients and service user groups. The
debate about these areas focuses on whether they area critical theories of practice whose
main objective is social change or do they represent a more social democratic objective
that aims to simply improve the position of particular clients, families, and
communities?

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,

Empowerment practice does address social barriers and social injustice.

By helping practitioners think about social barriers to achieving their clients’ objectives
and motivating them to deal with the injustice affecting their clients, it encourages them
to enable their clients to participate in the decisions affecting them and increase their
capacity for change. Empowerment practice reflects a commitment to self-
determination, client participation, and the openness of practitioners and services to
being influenced by their clients. If nothing else, by being sensitive to power the
practitioner may avoid oppressive actions in their practice.
Debates over empowerment and advocacy also must take into account
client capacity.
Empowerment and advocacy fail to deal adequately with clients who are incapable of
achieving power and control over their lives. Different clients also expect different forms
of empowerment. As a result, many argue that a single generalized theory of
empowerment is insufficient; similarly advocacy must be tailored to the particular
situation due to the difference among clients and the complexity of society.

Final thoughts…

Empowerment and advocacy work is significantly helpful with vulnerable groups,

including people with disabilities, older people, and children in public care. These
theories help practitioners better see the possibilities for power being more equitably
distributed in society.

By keeping empowerment in mind while delivering services, practitioners can help

clients develop greater control over their lives and increase their skills to independently
exert power on their own behalf in the future. Empowerment ideas also offer
practitioners useful and practical ideas for including in their practice issues of
oppression, critical thinking and joint working with clients. Finally, empowerment
offers a useful way for many practitioners to think about their work. The basis for these
practices includes a wide variety of approaches including crisis intervention, task-
centered practice, social pedagogy, social development, and humanistic, strengths,
solution, and constructionist practice.

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.