‘Already doing the work’: social work, abolition and building the future from the present

Abstract

Social work internationally is currently subject to debate. Some call for the abolition of social work, detailing legacies of harm, inadequate practices and theoretical limitations. Central to abolitionist thought is the tradition of community work to build alternative futures in the present, an area currently receiving less attention. This article adopts an auto-ethnographic method, drawing on the authors’ experiences of social work in the UK – in childhood and as a professional career, respectively – to consider the limitations of social work responses to childhood harm, alongside existing community harm-reduction practices. Four themes are identified that capture the limitations of social work intervention, as well as acts of community care and resistance. These are: the extent of engagement with context and community knowledge; resources for caring; legacies of harm; and the role of social work in relation to community harm-reduction work. Implications for research methods and social work practice are discussed.