Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Karen Partridge

The development of the social GGGRRAAACCCEEESSS is a real contribution to social work from systemic therapy. And it gives you a way to really begin to unpick issues about differential power, both within the service, within families and in wider society.

The GGGRRAAACCCEEESSS is a mnemonic. And it stands for a number of different positions, if you like, which might describe people, which confers on them positions of power or disables them from positions of power. For example, as a White woman, I have the grace of gender and of race, and those two aspects both enable me and disable me in different contexts.

One of the things that’s really important is naming these differences. And the idea is that if you name them, it’s on the table. You’ve identified the power differential between you and the family or you and the client, and you can explore what the effects of that are.

So for a social worker who is going to be working with a wide variety of different families from many different cultures, many different colours, many different religions, identifying those kind of differences and exploring them can really make a difference to your connection with the family. And it can really give them the opportunity to get into an expert position about their culture and their experience, the way they see the world.

So I mean, it fits with the concept of reflexivity, that the way that we think about the world is so tied up with our position within it. And in order to challenge our very basic assumptions about what is reality, what is the world, what does it mean to be a person, the GGGRRAAACCCEEESSS is a kind of gentle way into those kind of questions.

[MUSIC PLAYING]