2 - Social justice

Summary

Introduction

Justice is, by definition, about fairness. Social justice is about the social context of fairness and the fairness of the social context. That is, it is not just about individual issues in specific contexts, but, rather, how those individual issues reflect wider patterns of injustice, discrimination and oppression. (Thompson, 2017, 3)

Thinking about social justice leads inevitably to thinking about social problems and wide patterns of injustice, as mentioned in the quotation that opens this chapter, for example poverty, homelessness and crime and the interrelated nature of these problems, just as the Thompson quotation illustrates. Rawls (1999) explains that the justice of a social scheme depends fundamentally on how rights and duties are assigned, and on economic opportunities and social conditions that apply to different sectors of society. He further describes how a social idea of fairness or justice is connected with ‘a conception of society, a vision of the way in which the aims and purposes of social cooperation are to be understood’ (Rawls, 1999, 51).

Human rights

Human rights and community work are interlinked. Change for individuals and groups is linked to social justice. As Beck and Purcell (2020) point out, upholding the freedoms that human rights point to indicates that we have powerful reasons for action. As community development has at its heart active citizenship, to achieve social justice we need to engage in consciousness raising of the social, economic and policy context and social mobilisation. For many, in our experience, working to maintain the status quo and preparing people to better fit into an unjust society are the main purposes of what they do. We would argue that this approach to work is insufficient and community workers should be working at micro, meso and macro levels. This means working with individuals for change; working with local systems and issues that may inhibit change; and working to change wider social and economic policies that may be linked to injustice. We think this can take courage but is perfectly possible at some level for all community workers to have a lasting, sustainable impact. To think about this, we need to start at the macro level.