Social work as a career: What relevance to Yemen? [Archives:2006/953/Community]

By: Essam Al-Shaif
Social work as both a concept and a career path is relatively new to Yemeni society. While its arrival in Yemeni is recent, social work in advanced and other developing countries, including Arab and Islamic ones, has developed into a stable and well defined endeavor.

As a humanist branch of study, social work is geared to help human beings meet their various demands, problems they face in their daily lives, as well as helping find the resources to build a person's competence and social stamina, which in turn will modify a person's behavior accordingly. All of these components are packaged in a social worker's endeavor to help the person they assist into leading a normal and effective life within the person's particular circumstance.

In an effort to understand and advance the historical roots of mankind's behavioral needs in the context of its social life, social work has become on of the modern careers of the 20th and 21st centuries. In general careers like social work are in themselves social constructs used to act on social designs as they exist and help modify the individuals of these societies so that they try to find their place in society, effectively integrating themselves regardless of their original condition. In essence social work is part of the material that acts as a cohesive element in an evolving society. Its nature therefore is essential and vital to a functioning society whose unrelenting demands need constant modifying and gratifying.

If we were to “map-out” on transparent overlays how social work would and does permeate with in society, we would have to go ahead and map out a conceptual plan of the basic design of societal needs and the resources available to meet these needs. Because of the structure found in almost all developing societies by default all plans would be developed at different levels. Our map, therefore, would have various layers that when placed one on top of the other would show first where the needs for basic human functioning are located. Then the next layer would delineate where the resources to fulfill theses needs are located. The next layer would show the societal connections made between the needs and the resources, which in essence are the various systems of institutions set up as parts of networks whose prime interest is to serve as links between resources and needs. The next layer would reveal the gaps that social work would find and have to fulfill as linking agents. These gaps are found in the breakup of societal structures of Family, Tribe, and Neighborhood as well as the more outwardly, public structures of Political and Social Institutions.

With this top layer we come to the realization of social work's importance as a constructed back-up to the linking institutions that dispense the resources necessary for human needs. In nature it is both invasive and persuasive, since it necessitates the social worker to get to the root of the person's needs and then become the agent that would reach out to the institution with the necessary resources to meet these needs to comply with the agent and the individual. The range of human needs is as varied as the humans who at various stages in their lives require an unending need of evolving resources. From infancy through adolescence through adulthood to the end of one's life a human needs change with age, health and social circumstance. Social work is geared to help at all these levels and all of its permutations.

Social work is specifically tailored to fit into societies where the needs of infants, women, adolescents, senior citizens and those with what are called special needs with regards to health and education need to be addressed on a constant basis. Many of these needs also come into play post natural and man-made disasters such as wars or other types of conflicts. The general assumption is that Social work is indeed for all societies and for all times; it is a field of study and endeavor that necessitates for every society to seriously look at its social defaults and allow social work to help address them and in concert help dissolve them.
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