The manipulation of law and policy by governments to perpetuate power and social injustice (seen in every totalitarian regime before, since and including the Third Reich) is one of the toughest challenges confronting the strengths approach. This chapter is unique in exploring what a strengths approach to mobilising law and policy will involve. It aims to show through the examples how maintaining a strengths approach to legal frameworks can, in itself, subvert a government's aims to undermine human rights by such harmful means and promote social justice.

Understanding law, its purpose and function

Law is a core component of practice for professions like social work and is a way to achieve social justice at the level of collective action as well as that of the individual. In the contract between the individual and the state, it plays a key part in the regulation of power. Students and practitioners alike approach it with more than a degree of ambivalence, however – it is complex and constantly changing, not ‘set in tablets of stone’; it is not neutral but subject to interpretation; it can be contradictory in some areas and outdated in others; it is heavily influenced by political ideology, interest groups, public inquiries, the European Union, the media and moral panics.

It is characterised by inaccessible language and terminology rendering its use elitist; it is a blunt instrument incapable of covering every eventuality in a given situation. In risk-averse societies, it is increasingly deployed to impose ‘uniform solutions at the expense of private space’ (Sumption, 1999: 6) – with peers expressing concern at the ‘tsunami’ of new legislation in the UK, for example – as governments attempt to legislate their way out of trouble.