This chapter is a version of a lecture given in 2013 at a conference entitled ‘Speaking Differently about Poverty’. The conference was initiated by an Israeli organisation, Shoulder to Shoulder. The participants were mostly practitioners, joined by people from local government, philanthropic causes, the business sector, third sector organisations and the Ministry of Welfare and Social Services. With the influence of the wave of mass social protest in 2011 and the establishment of the National Committee to Combat Poverty in 2013, this conference marked the beginning of renewed interest in poverty among practitioners. The warm responses that I received were an expression that this large and diverse audience was ready to think openly about poverty.

Introduction

When I was a young social worker 20 years ago, I felt that my experience and understanding of the women and men living in poverty with whom I worked was different from that of my colleagues. I felt it strongly in the language that we used when talking about service users during team meetings or when chatting in the corridor. All in all, feeling different from my colleagues was an unpleasant experience for me. I am happy that there are many more people today who talk and think similarly to me. I have been fortunate to have some of them as academic colleagues and some as fellow practitioners; others are my past and present students.

Since that time, I have been developing the Poverty-Aware Social Work Paradigm (PAP) that is currently being implemented in a fieldwork training programme for social work students at Ben-Gurion University. What I would like to present here today are six principles of the paradigm that inform the way in which we speak about poverty. Our rhetoric – the way we speak – is important because the language that we use reveals our basic, sometimes unconscious, assumptions regarding service users and regarding our own role. It denotes our social status, social class and position with regard to the subject that we are talking about. We can describe the same behaviour of a service user by saying that ‘She stood up for herself ‘ or that ‘She was aggressive and demanding.’