Social Work Concepts, Theory, and Values in Practice with Family and Gendered Violence

The increasing momentum of cultural, economic, and political violence across the globe is often expressed in cultural and social media, in local communities, and in intimate relationships within families and in social relationships. Human connectedness and social cohesion and solidarity are confronted with interpersonal violence, including gendered and racialized violence. Social professions concerned with responding to threats to human well-being, including social work, analyze and conceptualize how violence and its interpersonal expression may be understood and create practice interventions to address, prevent, and respond to the personal and social consequences of communal, family, and gendered violence. This chapter explores how social work theorized and understood cultural and social violence and its human consequences over time and how social work services responded to and intervened with family and gendered violence. Shifts in social work conceptualizations have taken place, influenced in particular by feminist thinking. Cultural acceptance of using authority, power, and violence has been challenged by complex discourses of power and empowerment practice. While gendered and family violence have always been present in social work practice, it has not been well theorized except by feminist thinking, even though feminist discourse within social work has been more concerned with other feminist issues.