Abstract
The Counter Terrorism and Security Act came into force in July 2015 in the UK. This places a statutory duty on many front-line organisations, for example, schools, social services and prisons, to work within the PREVENT agenda, a policy arising from Britain's overall counterterrorism policy, CONTEST. We argue that PREVENT is representative of increasingly securitised social policies that serve to: first, view people within particular individualised neoliberal discourses and thin narratives; and, second, coerce the profession of social work into hitherto unknown areas, namely, national security and counterterrorism. We note the unapologetic linkage of traditional forms of what we term here 'welfare safeguarding', customarily the domain of social work, with what we term 'security safeguarding'. If the profession of social work in the UK, and we suspect other Western regimes, wishes to avoid becoming a profession of 'downpressor men', the uncritical incursion into issues of national security and counterterrorism must be highlighted.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 287-300 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Critical and Radical Social Work |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 12 Sep 2017 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Nov 2017 |
Documents and Links
- McKendrick, D. & Finch, J. (2017) ‘Downpressor Man’: securitisation, safeguarding and social work
© 2017 Policy Press. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copy edited version of an article published in Critical and Radical Social Work. The definitive publisher-authenticated version McKendrick, D. and Finch, J. (2017) “Downpressor Man”: Securitisation, safeguarding and social work, Critical and Radical Social Work is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1332/204986017X15029697482460.
