Reflective Essay: Exploring Social Work Interests, Readiness, Goals

This reflective essay, written by a student, explores their motivations for pursuing a career in social work, specifically within the international relations (IR) stream. The essay details the student's innate desire to help vulnerable populations, particularly victims of rape in developing countries, and their interest in working at the micro level to provide individual support and advocacy. It discusses the student's readiness for field placement, acknowledging anxieties and outlining strategies like problem-solving, task-centered practices, and narrative therapy to address challenges. The essay further identifies learning goals related to acknowledging diversity, ethical practice, social justice, professional development, and service. The student's strengths, including empathy, boundary setting, and active listening, are highlighted as assets for their social work practice. The essay concludes with a description of the placement search process, including the organization's target population, community needs supported, and how the placement aligns with the student's interests and goals.

Running Head: SOCIAL WORK – REFLECTIVE ESSAY
Social Work – Reflective Essay
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1SOCIAL WORK – REFLECTIVE ESSAY
Table of Contents
1. Interests...............................................................................................................................2
1.1. Motivation to be a Social Worker in the IR Stream....................................................2
1.1. Social Issues that are of Interest to Me........................................................................2
1.2. Social Work Interests in Relation to the Micro, Mezzo and Macro Continuum.........3
2. Readiness............................................................................................................................3
21. Feelings Prior to Entering the Field................................................................................3
2.2. Strategies for Social Work..............................................................................................4
2.3. Strengths that I hold that can serve me Well in Social Service Placements..................5
3. Learning Goals....................................................................................................................5
3.1. Acknowledging and Respecting Diversity..................................................................5
3.2. Ethics...........................................................................................................................6
3.3. Social Justice...............................................................................................................6
3.4. Professional Development...........................................................................................6
3.5. Service.........................................................................................................................7
4. Placement Search Process...................................................................................................7
4.1. Name of the Organization and Location.....................................................................7
4.2. Target Population that is supported by the Organization............................................7
4.3. Community Needs Supported by the Organization.....................................................7
4.4. Scope of Practice Addressed by the Organization......................................................8
4.5. How the Organization Matches my Interest, Readiness and Goals.............................8

2SOCIAL WORK – REFLECTIVE ESSAY
References and Bibliography.....................................................................................................9

3SOCIAL WORK – REFLECTIVE ESSAY
1. Interests
1.1. Motivation to be a Social Worker in the IR Stream
What has motivated me to become a social worker in the first place, is my innate desire to
do good for others. I have an innate love for humanity and have a strong urge to spend my
energies and my time in helping out people who are in need. There are hundreds and
thousands of vulnerable people in the world, who are in need of care and assistance and who
have no one to help them out (Beckett et al., 2017). I want to be a caregiver for such people.
I want to help vulnerable people access justice, and to lead their lives with dignity and respect
instead of being ostracized and downtrodden by society for being marginalized and
vulnerable in the first place. My desire to work in the IR stream is something that is
influenced by one reason and one reason only. I reside in a privileged country, where the
number of have-nots is few. In the developing world on the other hand, especially in the
countries of Asia and Africa, poverty rates are high and large numbers of national
populations in such countries are in dire need of external assistance and aid (Dominelli,
2017). I believe that if I am to be an effective social worker and do good for others, I should
help out the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, and these are the people I can access only on
international shore, in developing nations.
1.1. Social Issues that are of Interest to Me
As a social worker, some of the issues that I would be interested in working on are
related to the domains of justice and advocacy. I am particularly interested in helping victims
of rape access justice and the support mechanisms that they need in order to recover and re-
assume their dignity in society. I am passionate about helping out people who really need
assistance and care and protection and I believe that rape victims, especially in developing

4SOCIAL WORK – REFLECTIVE ESSAY
countries, do not get the attention, the acknowledgement, the care and the justice that they
need so as to go back to leading a normal life. Rape is something that is very difficult to
recover from, for those who are unfortunate enough to experience such a crime (Gould,
2017). Legal counsel and access to justice is often unavailable to rape victims in the
developing nations, and I want to be active in such places to help the rape victims acquire the
representation that they need before law and order units as well as care giving units like
social service organizations to survive their predicament.
1.2. Social Work Interests in Relation to the Micro Continuum
The social work interests that I have, that is, the interest in helping rape victims in
developing countries to gain access to justice and acquire support needed to lead a healthy
and normal life, falls within the framework of the Micro Continuum. This is because I am
interested in working with rape victims on an individual or one to one basis in order to get a
thorough understanding of their plight, to counsel them and then work towards getting them
the support that they need. The community at large will not be my focus, and neither am I
interested in helping out social work organizations or NGO’s in doing their jobs. I just want
to practice social work on a micro level and interact with rape victims on a personal level, to
gain their confidence and help them out on doing so.
2. Readiness
21. Feelings Prior to Entering the Field
I will not deny that I am quite nervous about travelling all the way to a developing
part of the world to do my social work. I am interested in visiting Nairobi in Kenya and
helping out in the refugee victims here. There are many refugees in Kenya from Tanzania and
other parts of the Great Lakes region of Africa. Refugees are my area of focus largely

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because of the fact that their plight is internationally recognized and acknowledged. I want to
work with the rape victims among these refugee populations and I am particularly nervous
about how I am going to approach them. I do have a set of questions ready, and everything
else that I need to do field work, but to simply start the process itself takes a good deal of
confidence. What does keep motivating me and giving me the impetus to actually go ahead
and do this social work is the desire that I have to help mankind. I really upset about the
plight of rape victims and that too among a vulnerable population like refugees, and the
desire to help them out and make their lives if only a little better, is what I want to do.
2.2. Strategies for Social Work
Problem solving, task centered practices and narrative therapy are the three strategies
that I will deploy in order to carry out my social work in the developing countries of the
world. I will apply problem-solving methods in order to help the victims that I am helping out
to hit upon the solutions to the problems that they are faced with, on their own. I will be
establishing specific measurable goals that can be achieved with ease, which is why the task
centered practices will come greatly to my aid in the process of social work. The narrative
therapy will help me to understand the perspective of the victim after which I can organize
aid practices and solutions to help them out, in addition to the solutions that are arrived at as a
result of problem solving methods. All the three processes of problem solving, task centered
practices and narrative therapy will involve engaging with the rape victims on a personal
level through communication (Howe, 2017). This effective communication is what is needed,
as communication often poses as a barrier to social work practices, with victims seldom ever
opening up to their care givers (Kadushin & Harkness, 2014). The three strategies of problem
solving, narrative therapy and task centered practices involve a lot of talking and dialoguing,
and will give me the scope I believe, to reach out to the rape victims and let them know that I
understand their situation and that I am there to help them.

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2.3. Strengths that I hold that can serve me Well in Social Service Placements
Empathy, boundary setting, and active listening are three attributes that any social
worker must have (Greene, 2017). These are attributes that I have myself. I therefore believe
that I am suitably well-positioned to carry out social work. I can empathize with the rape
victims needs and concerns to some extent, as I grew up in an abusive household and suffered
sexual abuse when I was in my teens, Boundary settings is something that I always respect
and believe in doing when talking to people I am not well acquainted with. I often establish
boundaries of my own and expect other people to respect them, so I can do the same with the
victims that I work with. Active listening is also something that I can capable of doing,
because when I listen to a person speak I listen with all concentration. I follow every word
and every mannerism and take it all in without getting distracted, hence hearing out the
victims narrative and then adopting social work practices and measures to help them out is
definitely what I can do.
3. Learning Goals
The following learning goals are what I wish to accomplish as a part of the social service
work I do.
3.1. Acknowledging and Respecting Diversity
I believe that acknowledging and respecting diversity among any population in any
part of the world is extremely important. It is also necessary to remember that marginalized
people usually hail from ethnic and cultural backgrounds that do not relate or identify with
the mainstream (Hepworth et al., 2016). The refugees that I intend on working with in Kenya,
and the rape victims in particular, are likely to be from different cultural and religious
backgrounds as they are forced migrants, seeking shelter in Kenya from the atrocities being
committed in their home countries like Tanzania and the other countries in the Great Lakes

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region. I believe that the social work that I do here with help to understand cultural, ethnic
and religious diversity, and learn what makes people from different ethnic and cultural
backgrounds stand out, especially in situations of vulnerability and oppression where they
become easy targets of the oppressors.
3.2. Ethics
Learning how to do social work in as ethical a manner as is possible is something that
I wish to learn from the field. It is necessary to adopt an ethical approach when working with
groups of people or with individuals, irrespective of whether they are privileged or
underprivileged. I wish to learn how to do social work ethnically. This entails asking the rape
victims the right questions at the right time, not forcing victims to answer my questions if
they don’t want to and to conduct interviews and group discussions only at a time that is
deemed to be comfortable to the groups or individuals I will be working with.
3.3. Social Justice
The concept of social justice is something that I believe I am going to learn about
greatly as a part of the whole social work process. Since I will be working on helping rape
victims gain access to justice, I will be learning about what the law making procedures
associated with helping victims of rape. I specifically want to learn how legal counsels are to
be approached to help rape victims, what compensation can be achieved for rape victims in
addition to other forms of justice like imprisoning the rapists for a lifetime etc.
3.4. Professional Development
The social work that I do, even if on a very rudimentary level, will I believe position
me for a professional career as social worker someday. The experiences that I gain as a result
of this social work, that is the experience gained through speaking to rape victims, helping
them to find solutions to their problems and enabling them to survive in society again, will go

8SOCIAL WORK – REFLECTIVE ESSAY
a long way, in my view, in helping me gain the skills and attributes that I need to do social
work on a professional basis someday.
3.5. Service
Learning how to render service, to help out people in need unconditionally, without
wanting anything in return is going to be an inevitable outcome of my social work, I believe.
My primary purpose in doing this social work is to give service to the needy, to serve them in
accessing mechanism of justice and social support to survive the dire situation that they find
themselves in.
4. Placement Search Process
4.1. Name of the Organization and Location
The name of the first organization, where I am interested in doing my social work at
is the Centre for the Victims of Torture. It is located in Nairobi in Kenya. The second
organization that I am interested in helping out with is HIAS, also in Nairobi, Kenya. It
works primarily with the urban refugees in Kenya and aims at protecting them and
empowering them.
4.2. Target Population that is supported by the Organizations
People who are supported by the Centre for the Victims of Torture are refugees in
Kenya, who have been fleeing oppression and violence in the neighboring African countries.
The people supported by HIAS are urban refugees who have been fleeing conflict situations
from all over Africa, be it the coast of Ivory, South of Sudan etc, Nigeria, the Central African
Republic etc.

9SOCIAL WORK – REFLECTIVE ESSAY
4.3. Community Needs Supported by the Organizations
The first organization provides such refugees, especially those who are victims of
torture and rape, with the mental counseling services they need to survive their plight and
move on in life. The second organization, HIAS, gives refugees the protection that they need
in the form of legal help, advocacy and counseling to overcome their predicament.
4.4. Scope of Practice Addressed by the Organizations
The scope of social work practice addressed by the first organization is micro. It
extends support and services to victims of torture and rape among the refugee population in
Nairobi by providing individual care and counseling. The scope of social work practice
addressed by the second organization is also micro. It focuses on specifically helping the
urban refugees in Nairobi on a one to one basis.
4.5. How the Organizations Match my Interest, Readiness and Goals
Since I am eager to work with rape victims on a one to one basis in order to help them
access social justice, I believe that both organizations are ideal for me to work with as both
the organizations can give me access to the refugee victims of torture who I can do social
service, for.

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References and Bibliography
Beckett, C., Maynard, A., & Jordan, P. (2017). Values and ethics in social work. Sage.
Dominelli, L. (2017). Anti-racist social work. Macmillan International Higher Education.
Gould, N., & Taylor, I. (2017). Reflective learning for social work: research, theory and
practice. Routledge.
Greene, R. R. (2017). Human Behavior Theory and Professional Social Work Practice.
In Human Behavior Theory and Social Work Practice (pp. 31-62). Routledge.
Hepworth, D. H., Rooney, R. H., Rooney, G. D., & Strom-Gottfried, K.
(2016). Empowerment series: Direct social work practice: Theory and skills. Nelson
Education.
Howe, D. (2017). An introduction to social work theory. Routledge.
Kadushin, A., & Harkness, D. (2014). Supervision in social work. Columbia University Press.
Netting, F. E., Kettner, P. M., McMurtry, S. L., & Thomas, M. L. (2016). Social work macro
practice. Pearson
Padgett, D. K. (2016). Qualitative methods in social work research (Vol. 36). Sage
Publications.
Parrott, L. (2014). Values and ethics in social work practice. Learning Matters
Payne, M. (2015). Modern social work theory. Oxford University Press.
Rothman, J., & Mizrahi, T. (2014). Balancing micro and macro practice: A challenge for
social work. Social Work, 59(1), 91-93.

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Rubin, A., & Babbie, E. R. (2016). Empowerment series: Research methods for social work.
Cengage Learning.
Rubin, A., & Babbie, E. R. (2016). Empowerment series: Research methods for social work.
Cengage Learning
Sue, D. W., Rasheed, M. N., & Rasheed, J. M. (2015). Multicultural social work practice: A
competency-based approach to diversity and social justice. John Wiley & Sons.
Turner, F. J. (2017). Social work treatment: Interlocking theoretical approaches. Oxford
University Press.