Honestly I think that some (not all) people who go into social services do it because it gives them power over poor people and people of colour. I don’t want to paint all social workers with the same brush because there are also people who work in those systems, or adjacent to those systems, who go into that line of work because they want to help people like themselves, but from what I’ve seen - and what I’ve heard from people in these fields - people who do that often do face an uphill battle in terms of institutionalized attitudes towards “at-risk populations” etc. But it’s like... depending on what sort of work people do in these fields they might work closely with cops, they might work with or in healthcare institutions with abusive practices, etc... I think social work is probably appealing to people who approach the idea of “helping” in fundamentally fucked up and power-trippy ways, and who see people who are marginalized in ways they aren’t as inherently stupid, immoral, etc and in need of state-enforced guidance that often comes in the form of punishment and even criminalization.
Like. This is obviously a really complex issue and I do not want to oversimplify it! My perspective on this is mostly personal but also comes from having professionally done “peer advocacy”/crisis intervention/anti-DV etc work... these institutions have major, major foundational problems with racism etc and there are nowhere NEAR enough aspiring social workers who are aware and critical of this, and way too many who just want to enact their weird fucked up bullshit on people who can’t refuse it.
