Helen Cosis Brown and Christine Cocker,Social work with lesbians & gay men

Reviewed by: Mark Henrickson, Massey University, New Zealand

It is sometimes tempting to critique a book for what it is not, rather than for what it is. Social Work with Lesbians & Gay Men is not, despite its title, a how-to book for the social worker. It is a tidy consolidation of contemporary social work theory and policy debates and developments in the United Kingdom related to lesbians and gay men. As such it will primarily be of use to British researchers and students of policy, and to academics who are teaching students to ground social work practice in theoretical frameworks. Brown and Cocker consider a variety of critical theoretical perspectives and approaches to working with these marginalised communities, including radical theory, anti-discriminatory practice, anti-oppressive practice, and more generally, the practice implications of postmodernism, and argue for a ‘new radicalism’ that challenges the status quo.

After the first five chapters which address theoretical issues (including, notably, a rare, if limited, discussion on religion and social work practice), the final three chapters consider practice with older adults and adults with learning and physical disabilities; mental health; and children with families. Presumably these areas were chosen because they are the fields in the UK where the majority of social workers practice.

Oddly, the extended quotations in the book are printed in a greyed typeface which is very difficult to read without a bright light. This was not a good design choice.

The authors note that, in the UK at least, statute is ahead of social work practice, and that many academic disciplines other than social work have developed a complex understanding of diversity politics. They write:

If social work is to meet the challenges of working effectively with diversity more generally and with lesbians and gay men in particular, we need to think differently about our practice in terms of whose interest we serve; whether the current knowledge base for social work and the academic disciplines from where this knowledge comes is still relevant; the complexities of relationships between individuals and the many communities to which they and we belong; and social work’s relationship with the mainstream. (p. 58)

This call to update and upskill ourselves is perhaps the most useful contribution this book makes to the social work discourse on working with sexual minorities. Social work is at its core a social justice profession, and social workers do not have the option of disapproving of, or avoiding working with, sexual minorities. That, I should have thought, would be obvious in 21st-century democracies, but clearly it still needs to be said. Social work practitioners, academics, researchers and policy-makers do not have the option of ignoring these still-marginalized communities.

The absence of any acknowledgement of the profound impact of HIV on the history of policy development and social work practice is very surprising. HIV is the Banquo’s ghost of the latter part of the 20th century that exposed gay male and MSM (men who have sex with men) communities (at least) as never before, and was the catalyst for a number of the policy reviews and changes to which the authors refer. While we hope that HIV is no longer the inevitably fatal disease it was just a few years ago, it has transformed social work health care practice and policy.

Languaging this area is complex, and the authors acknowledge that terms like ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ are contested: citing Bianco, they note that ‘[T]hese categories of identification are, in short, limiting, but, at the same time, they are all that we have’ (p. 2). However, I would suggest that this language is not all that we have, and that the role of social work academics and practitioners is to continue to challenge the lenses that we bring to the phenomena of human sexuality. The complex formulations of human sexual identity require careful thought, and the discussion of identity development in this book is limited almost to a single page (p. 56). Hammack’s useful heuristic (2005) on the integration of sexual identity as a part of the life course – an ideal model for social work – for instance, is not acknowledged. It is disappointing that the various constructions of sexual identity in non-European cultures for which words like ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ have little relevance are not acknowledged. Surely the fluidity of populations and cultures in our contemporary world demands that polymorphous constructions of sexuality need to be considered. The Western hegemony of sexual constructions must be challenged and discarded; this is particularly important for women, whose sexual identity is largely relational, fluid and evolves over the life course (Diamond, 2005). In challenging that hegemony, social work would place itself not only ahead of statutes, but also in the forefront of diversity politics. That would truly be radical.