Social work

What is AOP?
Multiple interventions
Caring for individuals to make situations more comfortable Links between the personal experiences of disadvantage and their structural causes
Links between therapy and the conscious deeds that enable oppressed people to change themselves and social conditions
What Does AOP Look Like? Counteracting the damaging effects of oppression Building individual and community strengths to counteract oppression
Building strengths of individuals/ groups to analyze oppressive conditions, reclaim identities, change social and psychological patterns associated with oppression
How Does AOP Differ From
Mainstream Social Work? social, cultural economic & political systems reproduce injustice
Interventions based on multiple levels
Examines the status quo as maintaining injustice
Thoughtful critique and skepticism to the medical, psychiatric and criminal labels

Mainstream social, economic & political systems are neutral
Interventions are individually based Accepts the status quo
Social problems are given medical, psychiatric, criminal labels
The Nature of Oppression
A person is blocked from opportunities to self-development, excluded from full participation in society and does not have certain rights that dominant groups take for granted or is assigned second class citizenship, simply because an individual belongs to a specific category of people
Oppression and it’s affects are maintained by social, cultural, economic and political systems.
For example:
Media
Policy, legislation
Market economies
Capitalism
Definition of oppression
Review critical reflection: “whats the hidden agenda”?
Key elements of AOP
Differences between AOP and mainstream social work practice
Name two key elements of AOP
Name two significant differences between AOP and mainstream practice
Rational Systems Approach
Part of a conscious, thought-out and rational system
Arrange human resource workers
Collective goal -