What is one danger of engaging in intervention without knowing at least some of a community’s historical context?

For this week’s discussion thread, we will be exploring the connection between historical context and Intervention. Historical context is present of everything that we do. Authors have defined historical context as the present that past and previous events have either produced or necessitated (Snowden, 2018). Historical context shows up in biases, how we, as social workers, understand the present, and ultimately, what social work professionals believe an individual, family, and community are worth and capable of. Truly, authentically, and effectively applying strengths perspective is only possible when we have an understanding — a growing understanding of an individual’s, family’s and community’s history on a macro level. Why might I be saying this? Well, as you read one of the below short readings, think of a particular community — this could be a community along racial, geographical, ethnic, religious connections. Now, ask yourself what strengths does this community offer? Hopefully, by the time you complete the group assignment, you will be able to add one or more strengths to this list that are based on this community’s historical context. Remember, future social workers: social work professionals that do not know or understand the past are destined to repeat it with their clients and the policies that they support. For our discussion, please: 1. Select one of the short readings on historical context to read as an individual (this may or may not be the same that you select with your group). 2. How might historical context, in general, be related to intervention? 3. What is one danger of engaging in intervention without knowing at least some of a community’s historical context? Remember to cite in-text and reference APA style. 5 Short Readings on Historical Context(please note that this list of the historical context of child welfare is not exhaustive, but only the tip of the ice-berg, so to speak).Short Reading on Historical Context 1: Boarding Schools for North American Indigenous CommunitiesThe boarding school experience for Indian children began in 1860 when the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) established the first Indian boarding school on the Yakima Indian Reservation in the state of Washington. These schools were part of a plan devised by well-intentioned, eastern reformers Herbert Welsh and Henry Pancoast, who also helped establish organizations such as the Boston Indian Citizenship Association and the Women’s National Indian Association. The goal of these reformers was to use education as a tool to assimilate Indian tribes into the mainstream of the “American way of life,”; a Protestant ideology of the mid-19th century. Indigenous people would be taught the importance of private property, material wealth and monogamous nuclear families. The reformers assumed that it was necessary to “civilize” Indian people by making them accept white man’s beliefs and value systems.Boarding schools were the ideal instrument for absorbing people and ideologies that stood in the way of manifest destiny; the ideology that God wanted the U.S. to expand into the Indigenous territories regardless of the cost to indigenous peoples. Welsh and Pancoast say that schools would quickly be able to assimilate Indian youth. The first priority of the boarding schools would be to provide the basics of academic education: reading, writing and speaking of the English language. Arithmetic, science, history and the arts would be added to open the possibility of discovering the “self-directing power of thought”. Indian youth would be individualized in contrast to their coming from communal societies. Religious training in Christianity would be taught. The principles of democratic society, institutions and the political structure would give the students citizenship training. The end goal was to eradicate all aspects of Indigenous culture.By the 1880s, the U.S. operated 60 schools for 6,200 Indian students, including reservation day schools and reservation boarding schools. The reservation day school had the advantage of being relatively inexpensive and caused the least opposition from Indigenous parents. The reservation boarding school spent half a day teaching English and academics, and half a day on industrial training. Regimentation was the order of the day and students spent endless hours marching to and from classes, meals and dormitories. Order, discipline and self-restraint were all prized values of White society. The boarding schools hoped to produce students that were economically self-sufficient by teaching work skills and instilling values and beliefs of possessive (also known as predatory) individualism, meaning you care about yourself and what you as a person own first and foremost. This opposed the basic Indigenous practices of communal ownership which held that the land was for all people, not a chosen ‘few’. The practice of these schools was to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man”. Source: http://www.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=airc_hist_boardingschools©2018 Fabienne Snowden, Ph.D. Social Work Department Medgar Evers College, CUNY Short Reading on Historical Context 2: British Child Migration ProgramsThe earliest recorded case of a European country sending children overseas to what is now the U.S. was in 1618 and by the Virginia Company of London (VCL). VCL was a for-profit business in England that had the goal of establishing a permanent colony in North America. Setting up a permanent presence in this ‘new’ territory would make a profit for company by giving it access to natural resources such as wood, minerals, land, precious metals, and indigenous peoples and their culture. Colonists were thus employees of the VCL. In 1618, The VCL took 100 destitute children to Virginia to help to increase the colony’s population and to supply labor to plantation owners. In the 1600s, London had very one of the largest populations for a city in Europe, newly achieved political stability, and a modernized port that gave it access markets throughout the continent. The building of roads increased traveling between towns and enabled communities to become more aware of each other and their differences in social class. However, even though the poor become more visible to the rich, this was not enough to inspire the rich to advocate for a more equal or equitable distribution of the country’s resources. For families that were neither middle or upper class, industrialized London brought with it unsafe working conditions, greater likelihood of living near toxic waste, few opportunities to earn income, and increased surveillance by police and upper classes. Premature deaths of adults and criminalizing low-income women suspected of prostitution (which generally meant any woman out at night or who turned down a sexual advance from a man) created a large number of low-income, homeless, and or orphaned children. The city government of London’s solution to this ‘problem’ the City’s answer to dealing with these unwanted children. Many were illegally kidnapped for shipped from workhouses to the territories of the ‘new’ world, such as what are now the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zeeland. The practice of sending low-income children to be a part of the colonization efforts of these ‘newly discovered’ lands continued even when laws against the practice were passed. This use of child labour continued sporadically over the next two centuries. Alongside this was the policy of transportation, which exiled prisoners overseas. Male, female and child convicts were shipped out to America and later to Australia, South Africa and Canada. Children over the age of seven were seen as adults and were punished in the same way. This practice came to an end in the mid-19th century.Sources: http://otoweb.cloudapp.net/early-child-migration.html https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/the-virginia-company-of-london.htm https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p264.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/brighter_lights_01.shtml©2018 Fabienne Snowden, Ph.D. Social Work Department Medgar Evers College, CUNYShort Reading on Historical Context 3: Enslaved AfricansMost of societies that resulted from the transatlantic slave trade depended on the constant importation of Africans to replenish the population. In contrast, the U.S. enslavement population quickly began to sustain itself through natural reproduction. It is estimated that by the time of the official end of the transatlantic slave trade in the U.S. in 1808 less than 1 million enslaved Africans had been imported into the country. After 1807, the majority of illicit trading in Africans enslaved was of children. By 1860 the population had increased to 3,952,760 — 56% of which were under the age of 20. This Statistic gives an indication of the large numbers of Africans who experienced their childhood within the system of enslavement in the U.S.Enslaved children were viewed by slave masters and society in general as valuable assets with a monetary value and an investment for the future. It would seem obvious that such assets would be protected and nurtured, even if only for economic reasons. However, in actuality the living standards experienced by enslaved communities were determined by the benevolence or charity of the masters and the resourcefulness of enslaved parents. No two experiences are identical and narratives differ accordingly, some claiming they worked continuously throughout their formative years and others that play was an essential part of their lives. By necessity the whole enslaved community needed to take responsibility for the rearing of slave children. Mothers were as a rule expected to return to work and babies were looked after by the very old and the very young. There was invariably a large number of children to look after over very long hours. Francis Fredric described that on his plantation, “[children were fed] like pigs out of a troughs and [were] supplied sparingly, [they would frequently have to] fight and quarrel with one another over their meals”. The food provided was often termed “pot liker” which is often described as a vegetable based broth. Steckel describes the lack of protein in the children’s diets and suggests that as a result malnutrition ensued, described by one slave owner by the “Shiny bodies, plump bellies and glistening ribs” of the enslaved children on his plantation. This can be seen as typical presentation of malnourishment.Clothing for enslaved children was very basic; generally consisting of a smock like garment worn by both boys and girls. The clothing of enslaved children, who in general produced very little labor was rarely a priority to slave owners. It appears to not have been unusual see naked children on a plantation. Lost and torn clothing were rarely replaced and the growing patterns of children were not taken into account. Once they took up field work boys would often have been provided with trousers and a shirt, while girls were given a dress. Shoes were not common and any footwear would have tended to be of a homemade moccasin type. Children who worked in the “big house” would have tended to have been better dressed. King describes the situation as “Slaveholders were more concerned about the cost of slaves’ clothes and shoes than about their comfort”. Brooks Brothers were among the early producers of slaves’ clothes; potato sacks sewn into shirts and tunics.Source: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/education/childhood-slavery-contextual-essay.pdfhttp://atlantablackstar.com/2013/08/26/17-major-companies-never-knew-benefited-slavery/7/©2018 Fabienne Snowden, Ph.D. Social Work Department Medgar Evers College, CUNY Short Reading on Historical Context 4: Forced Sterilization of Puerto Rican WomenSpain ceded the island of Puerto Rico to the United States in 1898, putting Puerto Rico under tight U.S. control as a territory. Puerto Rico did not gain the right to democratically elect its own governor until 1947, and since then has made strides towards greater autonomy from the U.S.The history of coercive population control policy in Puerto Rico begins with a superintendent of the US Eugenics Record Office named Harry Laughlin. Laughlin used a Model Eugenical Sterilization Law to implement the mandatory sterilization of the “socially inadequate” in 30 U.S. states and Puerto Rico. This overtly eugenic policy deliberately targeted groups of people for sterilization (e.g. the feeble-minded, the insane, orphans, low-income) and later inspired Hitler’s forced sterilization program in Europe.Laughlin’s Model Eugenic Sterilization Law spread throughout the US between 1907 and the 1930s. By 1933, US sugar companies owned 13% of Puerto Rico and forced large numbers displaced farmers into migrant agricultural labor and urban centers. The glaring poverty rates motivated a government intervention in line with the dominant eugenic discourse of the day. In 1936 Law 116 entered into force making sterilization legal and free for women in Puerto Rico while offering no other methods of birth control. The prevailing ideology was that denying Puerto Rican women motherhood was a more effective means of getting women into the workforce than providing them with affordable childcare. The Puerto Rican government and the International Planned Parenthood Federation ran a sterilization program with US government funding, and by 1968 the program had sterilized roughly one third of Puerto Rican women. Numerous studies have shown that misinformation about the procedure caused high rates of regret among sterilized women. Many women were unaware that the procedure was permanent, due in part to the euphemism of “tying tubes” leading people to think that the tubes could be untied if they changed their minds later on. Additionally, most women had no alternative affordable contraceptive methods, so they opted for sterilization.Sterilization in Puerto Rico under Law 113 was “voluntary” only in the narrowest sense of the word. Employer discrimination and a general lack of alternative options gave women a very strong incentive to participate in the procedure. The basic idea that sterilization would free women from the burden of childbearing to work in an industrialized workforce underwrote the entire program. This was done in the context of a women’s rights movement in the U.S. strongly supporting birth control as a means for women’s gaining more reproductive rights.By the 1970s U.S. mainland feminists and Puerto Rican anti-colonialists united to end the practice of forced sterilization, but the legacy of distrust of U.S. government intervention in Puerto Rican society remains.Source: https://stanford.edu/group/womenscourage/cgi-bin/blogs/familyplanning/2008/10/23/forced-sterilization-in-puerto-rico/©2018 Fabienne Snowden, Ph.D. Social Work Department Medgar Evers College, CUNY Short Reading on Historical Context 5: Chinese and Chinese AmericansAt their height, there were dozens of Chinatowns, in big metro areas like Los Angeles and Chicago and in smaller cities like Cleveland and Oklahoma City. You might think of these neighborhoods as places to eat dim sum and buy knickknacks, but the reasons they initially formed are much more complex — and political. Chinese immigrants congregated together in part because of intense anti-Chinese attacks. Seeking economic opportunity during the Gold Rush and the building of the transcontinental railroad, the first wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in the U.S. in the mid-1800s. The first Chinatowns sprang up on the West Coast. These immigrants were paid lower wages than White workers, who then blamed Chinese laborers for driving down pay and taking away jobs. After the railroad was completed and white laborers in other industries began to fear for their jobs, anti-Chinese attacks increased, including beatings, arson and murder.In Rock Springs, Wyoming, 150 armed White miners drove Chinese immigrants out of town in 1885 by setting fire to their homes and businesses and murdering 28 people. No one was charged in the massacre. It was hardly an isolated incident; 153 anti-Chinese riots erupted throughout the American West in the 1870s and 1880s, with some of the worst episodes of violence in Denver, Los Angeles, Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. Many Chinese immigrants moved east to escape the attacks, explains Beatrice Chen, “That’s really how Chinatowns on the East Coast got their start,” she tells HuffPost. At the same time, Chinese immigrants who remained on the West Coast sought safety in numbers in the Chinatowns there. The Exclusion Act of 1882 created significant legal barriers to Chinese immigrants’ being able to reunite with or care for their loved ones. Around the turn of the century, politicians played into White workers’ anxieties, pointing the finger at Chinese immigrants for economic hardship and labeling them fundamentally incapable of being a part of U.S. society. In 1877, a congressional committee heard testimony that the Chinese “are a perpetual, unchanging, and unchangeable alien element that can never become homogenous; that their civilization is demoralizing and degrading to our people; that they degrade and dishonor labor; and they can never become citizens.”Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, barring Chinese immigrants who were already in the U.S. from becoming citizens and restricting new immigration from China. The law marked the first time that the U.S. restricted immigration explicitly on the basis of race. Along with the Exclusion Act’s renewal in 1892, Congress required all Chinese-Americans — including U.S.-born citizens — to carry photo ID at all times or risk arrest and deportation. In response to exclusion, community organizations in Chinatown provided services to immigrants who weren’t protected by the benefits of American citizenship. “I think of them as sort of the first social service agencies for the Chinese,” Chen says. “That’s why you see a lot of informal networks and associations within Chinatowns in the U.S.” In San Francisco’s Chinatown, for example, The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association provided legal representation, organized a private watchmen patrol for the neighborhood and offered health services.Housing and labor discrimination kept Chinese immigrants from being able to live and work outside of Chinatown. Chinese immigrants also were barred from most industries, aside from the hand-laundry and restaurant businesses.Because of the Exclusion Act, male laborers who came to the U.S. to work on the railroad could not be reunited with their families back in China. As a result, Chinatowns before World War II were disproportionately populated by men. They were viewed by White Americans as “depraved colonies of prostitutes, gamblers and opium addicts bereft of decency”.Source: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/11/american-chinatowns-history_n_6090692.html ©2018 Fabienne Snowden, Ph.D. Social Work Department Medgar Evers College, CUNYSnowden, F. (2018).