The Appeal: Social Workers Must Examine Their Role in Policing, Says Lecturer Jessica Kant

In an article by Mia Sato published in The Appeal, BUSSW lecturer Jessica Kant explains how current discussions about racism in the U.S. are pushing social workers to examine their own role in policing.

Excerpted from “Social Workers are Rejecting Calls for Them to Replace Police”:

Though social work can assist and provide resources to people in need of support, it can also be a punitive system that, like policing, negatively affects people of color and poor people. Jessica Kant, a member of the Boston Liberation Health Group, which endorsed SSWU-Chicago’s open letter to the NASW, uses the example of a child wearing the same clothes every day, and how some social workers may read that as neglect rather than a lack of resources—and report the situation as such. 

“It is a far cry between a family not being fit to take care of someone and not having money,” Kant said. “Those have nothing to do with each other. When a family doesn’t have money, that’s a societal failing. The idea that we have a punitive response is preposterous.”

Sato later writes:

Kant said the national discussion around race in America has forced social workers to examine their own role in policing, and what place they can have in their community, removed from such systems. This moment—and the conversation around abolition now happening at-large in the profession—has pushed social workers to think about how they can support existing community efforts, Kant said.

“If there is any place for us in systems of safety and addressing harm, it is in partnership with the people who are directly going through it,” Kant said.  

Social workers say they are critiquing the system and challenging leadership out of a desire to build a better version of the field, and to make up for lost time and harm done.

“Right now is the time to do it,” Kant said, “Because we are way too late anyway.”

Read the full article on The Appeal‘s website here.