Nature and Development of Social Work I: Definition, Scope, Principles, Goals and Process; the Development of Professional Social Work in the United Kingdom, the United States and India; and the Social Reformers of the 19th and 20th Centuries

The generic principles of social work are shared across its methods. Acceptance means receiving the person as they are, with strengths and weaknesses, without condoning every act. Individualisation means treating each person and situation as unique. Client self-determination recognises the right of people to make their own choices, limited by law, by their capacity and by the rights of others. Confidentiality protects what is shared, subject to legal duties and to the protection of others from serious harm. A non-judgemental attitude separates assessing behaviour from condemning the person. Controlled emotional involvement asks the worker to be sensitive without being overwhelmed. Purposeful expression of feelings lets the client express negative feelings safely. To these the profession adds respect for the dignity and worth of the person, social justice, participation and accountability. The first seven are Felix Biestek's principles of the casework relationship (1957), studied in detail in the casework chapter.

The goals of social work are usually stated at three levels. For people, it seeks to enhance problem-solving, coping and developmental capacities. For systems, it seeks to link people with the resources, services and opportunities they need and to make those systems work effectively and humanely. For society, it seeks to contribute to the development and improvement of social policy and to promote social justice. The helping process that serves these goals is described in generalist practice as a planned-change sequence: engagement (establishing contact and a working relationship), assessment (gathering and interpreting information about the person in their situation), planning (agreeing goals and tasks), intervention (carrying out the plan), evaluation (judging what has changed) and termination, often with follow-up. The older casework vocabulary of study, diagnosis and treatment describes the same sequence.

In England, public responsibility for the poor was codified in the Poor Relief Act of 1601, the Elizabethan Poor Law, which made each parish responsible for its poor through overseers, distinguished the able-bodied from the impotent poor, and provided indoor relief in institutions and outdoor relief at home. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 grouped parishes into unions, made the workhouse the centre of relief and applied the principle of "less eligibility": the condition of the person relieved must be less desirable than that of the lowest independent labourer. Voluntary charity grew alongside and was criticised for being indiscriminate. The Charity Organisation Society, founded in London in 1869, answered with "scientific charity": investigation of each applicant, registration to prevent duplication, coordination of charities and friendly visiting, practices from which casework later grew. Octavia Hill's work with tenants and C. S. Loch's long secretaryship shaped it.

The settlement movement took a different view: that poverty had social causes and that educated people should live among the poor and work with them. Toynbee Hall was opened in Whitechapel, East London, in 1884 by Canon Samuel Barnett. The Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1905 to 1909) produced a Minority Report, associated with Beatrice Webb, that called for the break-up of the Poor Law. The Beveridge Report of 1942 named five "giant evils", Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness, and led to the post-war welfare state, including the National Health Service and the National Assistance Act of 1948, which formally ended the Poor Law. The Seebohm Report of 1968 led to unified local-authority social services departments from 1971. Training began with the Charity Organisation Society's School of Sociology in 1903, absorbed into the London School of Economics in 1912.

In the United States the first Charity Organisation Society was founded at Buffalo in 1877 by the Rev. S. Humphreys Gurteen. The settlement idea arrived with the Neighbourhood Guild in New York (1886) and, most famously, Hull House in Chicago, founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr; Addams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. The New York Charity Organisation Society began a summer school of philanthropy in 1898, the first training course, which grew into the New York School of Social Work. Mary Richmond, who had worked in the Baltimore and Philadelphia societies, wrote Social Diagnosis (1917) and What Is Social Case Work? (1922) and gave casework its first systematic method. In 1915 Abraham Flexner told the National Conference of Charities and Correction that social work was not yet a profession, because it lacked a specific, transmissible technique of its own; the profession's next decades can be read as an answer. The Milford Conference (1923 to 1929) defined generic casework; the Social Security Act of 1935 created a public-welfare system that employed social workers; and seven professional associations merged in 1955 to form the National Association of Social Workers, whose first Code of Ethics came in 1960.

India's traditions of help are old: dana (giving) and seva (service) in Hindu thought, dāna and karuṇā (compassion) in Buddhism, zakat and waqf in Islam, the langar of the Sikh gurdwara, and the welfare duties of the king in the Arthashastra. Professional social work, meaning trained practice based on a body of knowledge, began with the Sir Dorabji Tata Graduate School of Social Work, opened in Bombay in 1936 under Clifford Manshardt, an American missionary who had run the Nagpada Neighbourhood House. It was renamed the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 1944 and became a deemed university in 1964. The Delhi School of Social Work followed in 1946, founded by the YWCA and later part of the University of Delhi, and schools at Kashi Vidyapith in Varanasi (1947), Lucknow, Baroda, Madras and Indore followed in the next few years.

After Independence the state became the main sponsor of welfare. The Central Social Welfare Board was set up in 1953 with Durgabai Deshmukh as its first chairperson, to fund and develop voluntary organisations, especially for women and children. The Indian Conference of Social Work, formed in 1947, later became the Indian Council of Social Welfare. The University Grants Commission reviewed social work education through review committees (1965 and 1980) and issued a model curriculum in 2001. Professional associations include the Indian Society of Professional Social Work and the National Association of Professional Social Workers in India. India still has no national statute regulating the title "social worker" or licensing practitioners, a gap the profession's own bodies have long argued should be filled; the practice setting is therefore defined more by agency and programme than by a council, as it is for medicine or law.

The syllabus asks for the contribution of the reformers to professional social work. Three contributions stand out. First, they identified the problems that became the profession's fields: the status of women (sati, child marriage, widowhood, education), caste and untouchability, and poverty. Second, they built organisations, schools, homes and associations that were the first welfare agencies. Third, they used law as an instrument of change, securing Acts that social workers still administer in their modern forms. Their methods ranged from petition and persuasion to satyagraha, and the tension between reform from above and mobilisation from below that runs through their history is the same tension that runs through community organisation and social action today.

Two further legal landmarks belong here. Behramji Malabari's campaign contributed to the Age of Consent Act of 1891, and Harbilas Sarda's bill became the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, the Sarda Act, which the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 replaced. The reformers also divided. Some, like Ranade, believed in gradual reform within tradition; others, like Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar, argued that caste had to be confronted directly and that reform led by the upper castes would not end it. That difference still matters: the profession's modern commitment to anti-oppressive and rights-based practice is closer to the second position than the charitable tradition was.