Transformative justice (TJ) is a dynamic set of emergent strategies and abolitionist political commitments focused on responding to and transforming violence, harm, and abuse at the root. It encompasses values, beliefs, and community-based responses that aim to do so without resorting to further violence, punishment, or revenge and without relying on state mechanisms (e.g., prisons, police, courts) that produce and reproduce violence. TJ emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, led by and for communities most affected by criminalization and state-sponsored violence. This includes women of color, Indigenous communities, Black communities, people of color communities, immigrant communities, trans and queer communities, disabled communities, poor and low-income communities, sex workers, and youth. As such, TJ is deeply intertwined with the larger abolitionist movement. Its key concepts include recognizing structural violence as a root cause of interpersonal harm and focusing on trauma-informed care for healing justice. It also involves centering disability justice, adopting liberatory harm-reduction methods, and understanding accountability as a complex process involving individual and community aspects. Additionally, TJ embraces emergent strategy in social change, seeing everyday simple interactions as building blocks for complex systems that can foster more just and life-affirming worlds.
While most social workers face institutional constraints, such as mandatory reporting, that prevent them from practicing TJ, the principles of TJ can still inform social work. This TJ-informed social work approach involves shifting away from punitive and surveillance methods in social work to advocate for individual, organizational, community, and systemic changes consistent with liberatory harm reduction. Social workers can integrate TJ principles and practices within their professional roles to better align their practice with their ethical commitments. For example, social workers can differentiate between politicized and charity-based approaches to social services, learn about and integrate pod practices in their personal and professional lives, and commit to cultivating a TJ mindset. These actions could contribute to the broader aims of both social work and TJ while carefully avoiding the appropriation of TJ principles.
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Transformative Justice
Jelena Todic, Xhercis Méndez, Mel Webb, Calista Castellanos, Ruben Soto, Sheila M. McMahon, and M. Candace Christensen
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Comparative Social Welfare
Neil Gilbert and C. Taylor Brown
Comparative social welfare or comparative social policy may be defined as the comparative study of welfare states, policies, and programs. Social workers have been instrumental in the development of the field of comparative social welfare and continue to make significant contributions to its international knowledge and practice base. With roots in Europe and the United States in the 1960s, comparative social welfare research evolved from descriptive case studies of welfare programs to causal and quantitative studies, all aimed at understanding and improving domestic social welfare policy through comparison with other nations. The 1990s marked a significant increase in the number of studies on comparative social welfare motivated largely by interest from the European Union, though the field has benefited from contributions by a global community of scholars since then. Although the field continues to evolve, comparative social welfare can roughly be split between theoretical studies of welfare state development and empirical studies of welfare policies, programs, and outcomes. Studies in comparative social welfare can be classified by their method of comparison, nature of comparison, and level of comparison.
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Critiques of Trauma-Informed Systems
Wendy Shaia, Temeka S. Bailey, Christopher Beegle, and Maura Tennor
Much of the trauma experienced by individuals, families, and communities, especially in historically marginalized areas, has been created by a series of social phenomena such as structural oppression, racism, and discrimination. Public-serving systems are uniquely positioned to counter the perpetuation of retraumatization that disproportionately impacts oppressed groups. Therefore, trauma-informed care (TIC) and trauma-responsive care (TRC) must evolve through the conscious application of an antiracist and antioppressive approach, thereby preventing the further harming of already marginalized groups. Macro accountability is established by analyzing power systems through a culturally responsive lens rather than blaming and pathologizing individuals impacted by historical and persistent racialized trauma. Applied to TIC and TRC, the SHARP framework renders more effective social work services at the personal and individual, professional and organizational, and political and societal levels more just and humane. A compare and contrast analysis of adverse childhood experience studies, summarizing TIC and TRC, and a case study of the application of the SHARP framework to human services work may shed light on guiding public-serving systems and promoting opportunities for posttraumatic growth and transformative change necessary for dismantling policies, protocols, and practices that increase vulnerability and long-term adverse outcomes in socially disadvantaged communities.
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The Movement for Black Lives
Troy D. Harden and Aislinn Pulley
The phrase “Black Lives Matter” has become an identifiable phrase across the globe. Accelerated by social media in an online platform and social action, it is marked by a mass of not only Black folks, but a multiracial collective that has also manifested in direct action protests against police violence toward Black people. Initially a hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, the phrase emerged into one of the most significant social movements in modern times. The Black Lives Matter Movement, along with the term Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), has centered on the historically ignored killings of Black men, women, and youth at the hands of state-sanctioned violence in public discourse, and offers an inclusive approach to organizing for social change.
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Reparations
V. Nikki Jones and Cathy G. McElderry
Reparations are a form of redress for harms or wrongdoings committed against individuals and their descendants in the interest of justice and individual and collective healing and restoration. Reparations entail material and non-material restitution. A framework for effective and equitable reparations includes comprehensive, targeted, and backward- and forward-looking measures that are corrective, restorative, and evidence-based. Various arguments in opposition and support of reparations exist. In the United States, most of the arguments against relate to liability, practicality, and lack of public support. Those who oppose reparations argue that current citizens are not financially liable for past injustices, reparations are unattainable due to statute of limitations (i.e., enslaved people are no longer living), and reparations remain politically divisive. In contrast, reparationists assert that taxpayers are responsible for the acts committed by the government. The U.S. government has a history of making reparations for harm, which is indicative of the practicality of this framework. Public division does not negate government accountability in the interest of justice. Advancing reparations aligns with the mission of social work to enhance human well-being and achieve the goals of justice, human rights, and dismantling systemic and structural inequities.
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Racism and Accountable Policing for Black Adults in the United States
Robert O. Motley Jr. and Christopher Baidoo
Racism is a public health concern for Black adults in the United States given its prevalence and association with adverse health outcomes for this population. The frequency of high-profile cases involving police use of gratuitous violence against Black adults has raised concerns regarding racially discriminatory law enforcement practices. In this article, racism is defined and a discussion is offered on its impact on the health and well-being of Black adults in the United States; the intersection of racism and policing; contemporary racialized policing practices; emerging evidence on prevalence rates for exposure (direct and indirect) to perceived racism-based police violence and associated mental and behavioral health outcomes; and police accountability through executive, legislative, legal, and other remedies.
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Gender Identity and Gender Expression
Jama Shelton
Gender identity and gender expression are aspects of personal identity that impact an individual across multiple social dimensions. As such, it is critical that social workers understand the role of gender identity and gender expression in an individual’s life. Many intersecting factors contribute to an individual’s gender identity development and gender expression, as well as their experiences interacting with individuals, communities, and systems. For instance, an individual’s race, geographic location, disability status, cultural background, religious affiliation, age, economic status, and access to gender-affirming healthcare are some of the factors that may impact experiences of gender identity and gender expression. Gender identity and expression are dimensions of diversity that social workers will interact with at all levels of practice. As such, it is important for social work educational institutions to ensure their students are prepared for practice with people of all gender identities and expression, while also understanding the historical context of the social work profession in relation to transgender populations and the ways in which the profession has reinforced the sex and gender binaries.
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Abolitionist Social Work
Noor Toraif and Justin C. Mueller
Abolitionist social work is a theoretical framework and political project within the field of social work and an extension of the project of carceral abolitionism more broadly. Abolitionists seek to abolish punishment, prisons, police, and other carceral systems because they view these as being inherently destructive systems. Abolitionists argue that these carceral systems cause physiological, cognitive, economic, and political harms for incarcerated people, their families, and their communities; reinforce White supremacy; disproportionately burden the poor and marginalized; and fail to produce justice and healing after social harms have occurred. In their place, abolitionists want to create material conditions, institutions, and forms of community that facilitate emancipation and human flourishing and consequently render prisons, police, and other carceral systems obsolete. Abolitionist social workers advance this project in multiple ways, including critiquing the ways that social work and social workers are complicit in supporting or reinforcing carceral systems, challenging the expansion of carceral systems and carceral logics into social service domains, dismantling punitive and carceral institutions and methods of responding to social harms, implementing nonpunitive and noncarceral institutions and methods of responding to social harms, and strengthening the ability of communities to design and implement their own responses to social conflict and harm in the place of carceral institutions. As a theoretical framework, abolitionist social work draws from and extends the work of other critical frameworks and discourses, including anticarceral social work, feminist social work, dis/ability critical race studies, and transformative justice.
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Climate Change and Macro Social Work
Kelly Smith
The compounding and escalating effects of environmental degradation, which include climate change, threaten the human-earth system with severe implications for the future of macro social work. Systems of power and oppression, including racial, economic, and gendered inequities, are exacerbated by environmental changes with significant impacts on human rights, public health, and various measures of well-being. While climate change is often not the root cause of inequality, it compounds existing inequities, making it substantially more difficult for marginalized populations to rebound from escalations of the myriad acute and chronic consequences due to climate change and environmental collapse. Experiences of environmental change consistently highlight the expanding resource and resiliency gaps among vulnerable populations, leading to disproportionate repercussions felt initially and, to an arduous degree, by marginalized groups. Simultaneously, these circumstances create opportunities for social workers to intervene and advance the causes of social justice. Macro-level interventions and climate solutions can emerge from social work development and support of policies and interventions that overcome short-term thinking to produce beneficial outcomes for populations and the environment by building capacity in the human-earth system and economic policy systems. Social work is ideally situated to confront climate change by balancing immediate needs with long-term ecological sustainability and relying on its historical understanding of systems to improve policy development and practical climate change mitigation approaches.
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Locating School Social Work in the Reconstruction Period
Samantha Guz
The origin of school social work in the United States is frequently traced back to the early 20th century’s visiting teachers movement. To expand on previous scholarship, school social work can be situated in the 19th century by focusing on the organizing impact of Black communities on public education during Reconstruction. First, history provides context for public education during chattel slavery and for the formation of racialized politics in education. This historical context primarily focuses on how access to education was used as a tool to stratify citizenship in the South. Next, the work of Southern Black communities, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and Northern abolition organizations advanced efforts during Reconstruction, specifically the coalition-building to establish Freedmen’s Schools and the advocacy to make education a publicly funded institution. Thus, coalition-building and policy advocacy within school social work’s practice history have the potential to impact contemporary school social work practice.
