Explain the importance of case work as a 10 method of social work.
Answers
Social case work is the method of affecting the understanding of the needs, resources and reactions of individuals. Social case work is a method employed by social workers to help individuals find a solution to problems of social adjustment which they are unable to handle in a satisfactory way by their own effort.
Social casework was practised in India under the cover of religious and social sermons. Indians had their own ways to achieve and accomplish the individual purposes. It is not surprising and unnatural to find traces of social casework in any culture as every culture has its own ways to deal with and tackle the individual’s sufferings and problems.
This is very much true of Indian culture too which becomes clear from our various scriptures where the most common techniques used to help the individual clients have been:
(1) Story-telling,
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(2) Imparting knowledge,
(3) Prayer,
(4) Yogic exercises,
(5) Fasting,
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(6) Learning and practising behaviour in the company of saintly persons, and
(7) Demonstration or modelling behaviour (setting examples), though in Gita, Lord Krishna has used techniques of re-educating, informing, imparting knowledge, clarifying the reality to enable Arjuna to perform his roles.
These techniques of helping individuals could not be popular perhaps because these were available only in Sanskrit—a language of elite in those days of India. It remained confined only to certain class of people and certain areas of nation. And, even during the British rule, only few attempted to present it into a systematic way for the consumption of common people. We were encouraged under the then policies of education to study English and import knowledge available in English from the western hemisphere.