Unfaithful Angels
Social workers play a pivotal role in society. Harry Specht knew this from a young age as he watched the impact that social workers had in his community. He had an extremely difficult childhood having experienced the great depression and a life with little money. Social workers were often a feature in his life as his mother experienced regular institutionalization because of substance abuse (Sprecht & Mark 4). Social work is associated with affecting human lives in all it pluralities. Social work, however, experiences many challenges due to the complexities associated with human behavior. Many social workers struggle to place themselves in fields of social work. The broadest definitions of social workers are micro workers and macro ones. Micro workers affiliate themselves with social work that deals with clinical aspects. Macro workers focus primarily on the community and its organizations, management from a nonprofit angle and reform of social delinquents. Professionally, the two aspects should work in harmony. Rifts between them have created tension in the field thereby affecting the nature of social work. Harry Sprecht attempted to smooth out the tensions between the micro and macro sociologist advocating for the fact that the tensions do not have to exist.
According to Harry, the pre existing tensions in the profession have caused social work to coast away from social impartiality. In the beginning, when Harry first ventured into the profession, it seemed that social workers concerned themselves with helping people in all their endeavors. Many centuries ago social workers helped children that did not have parents that took care of them. Social work was about solving the problems of the community, and these aspects appealed to Harry (Sprecht & Mark 186). Nowadays, some aspects of social work like psychotherapy have created a niche for themselves among the professional and middle class clientele. People like harry who did not have money have no way of accessing such services as they are expensive and are often private sessions.
Today, majority of social work students look into getting into clinical aspects of the profession. Clinical sociology is enticing because of the monetary benefits associated with it. According to Harry, the descend of social work as a profession from what he originally viewed it as shows that Americans have excessively trusted in solutions to social problems that are solved individually or in a private manner. Harry laments that if the fissure that traditional social workers occupied continues to widen, then there will be no social works available to take care of the poor children whose mothers have substance issues or no money to ensure their survival. There is no denying that psychotherapy has its advantages, but social workers should strive to lessen the gap between the private sectors of the profession so that people from the lower class can also enjoy the private aspects of the job. Harry also encourages authorities to dedicate a large proportion of funds for traditional roles of social work (Sprecht & Mark 200).
Harry takes on a bold turn by criticizing social work especially at a time when no one would. The writings are bold especially considering how much social work meant to Harry. It is pivotal to discuss the issues related with privatization if social work because the people that are ultimately affected are the children with drunken parents like harry Sprecht was back in the day. There is no denying that psychotherapy is unique in its field, and granted it is understandable why it took on a privatization turn. However, the book is instrumental in pointing out the differences in the two fields to allow social work professionals to cooperate in a bid to find a means to incorporate the two fields for the betterment of the profession in general. After reading the book, some professionals may even seek more funding through grants to make incorporation of the two aspects possible. Institutions or schools associated with imparting the knowledge of social work should also reduce their focus in encouraging students to select micro or macro aspects of sociology. Encouraging them to branch out could be the cause of the problem in the first place. To some extent, the writer may have been correct in his view regarding disintegration of social work as a profession. However, it is pertinent to point out that every professional has to create a niche for him or herself and that could be the reason for privatization of social work. Some students also feel comfortable being traditional social workers due to the interaction element while others do not. The writer should not be too quick to pass judgment on the disintegration of social work. Instead, he should offer solutions as to how social workers can combine their efforts to incorporate the privatized more expensive sectors into traditional frameworks of social work. There are indeed subdivisions in social work that may appear to cause a rift. However, social workers should make a combined effort to reduce existing gaps in to restore faith into social workers like Harry Sprecht.
Works Cited
Specht, Harry, and Mark E. Courtney. Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned Its
Mission. New York: Free Press u.a, 1994. Print.
