Family counseling, place of the social work in society
We spent our Monday and Tuesday with training work, the first day’s main theme was social work and operation of the Hungarian social care system.
During the first part of the training session, the need to redefine social work – including also the word family assistance – came up, based on the several discussions and debates about social work happening in the background. The essence of the social function of social work (with other expression what society imposes on social work) is to prevent, alleviate, stop deprivation and suffering. To help directly and indirectly, temporarily or permanently to marginalized to the periphery of society and to promote the release of the oppressed people and the recovery of their autonomy, competences and reintegration into the society. There is a spread of another view that the function of social work is more than the observance of “common” social (especially middle class) norms on the periphery of the society, or vulgarly saying, only controlling and regulating the “unkind people” by the central and local government and bureaucratic office. The latter approach increases in a straight line with the welfare state’s criticism and the economic crisis.
Our approach of developing the professional work drove our attention, among other things, to the fact that social and societal problems do not know country boundaries, they appear similarly or identically in the Slovak and Romanian regions. All this reaffirms our mission to provide solutions and appropriate responses to specified cases, at a locally or at social level, taking into account the international and global experiences.