2.5 Empowerment and anti-oppressive practice
‘Empowerment’ may be defined as the power that enables people to take action to improve their lives. From the point of view of service users, practitioners are often in positions of considerable power, particularly where decisions are being made about the delivery of services and intervention in people’s lives. Empowerment means that social workers need to focus on engaging service users in the problem-solving process in a meaningful way. Empowerment is linked with anti-oppressive practice in that the social worker can work with service users to enable them to overcome barriers to solving problems – whether located in the attitudes and practices of professionals, in social institutions (for example, health and education authorities) or in the beliefs of the service user or the public.
The social worker’s knowledge of service provision and the law can be critical in empowering service users. Anti-oppressive practice is ‘about a process of change which leads [service users] from feeling powerless to powerful’ (Dalrymple and Burke, 2006). Empowerment can take the form of challenging a service user to take responsibility for their actions or it can be supporting a service user to challenge discrimination, for example by using a complaints procedure or the law. Simply put, empowerment can help people to help themselves.