Does social work need a good spanking? The refusal to embrace BDSM scholarship and implications for sexually diverse clients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of my favorite things about the field of social work has been its strong interconnections with other fields of study, including a full range of social and behavioral sciences. Social work formally utilizes a generalist approach, thus workers are trained to be able to respond effectively to a variety of client needs and potential problems. In doing so, ethical practice is emphasized, and social workers are admonished to challenge injustice, promote client self-determination, embrace human diversity, and practice with cultural competence (National Association of Social Workers, 2008). Since 2008, the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), which accredits all social work education programs in the United States, has required that social work students demonstrate mastery of specific competencies, referred to as Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS). These competencies include a focus on ethical behavior (competency 1), embracing diversity and difference (competency 2), social injustice and human rights (competency 3), and the interconnectedness of research and practice (competency 4) (CSWE, 2015). EPAS competencies are designed to apply across social work education and practice. In this paper, I will summarize scholarship on consensual bondage and discipline – dominance and submission – sadomasochism (BDSM) and briefly explain why this topic is relevant to social work practice. I will then discuss my frustrations in attempting to publish work on this topic within the field of social work. Apart from a notable exception in the journal Canadian Social Work (Williams, 2013), the topic of BDSM is absent from the social work literature. However, what is particularly surprising and disturbing to me, based on personal experience, has been the refusal of journal editors and reviewers to accept an accumulating empirical research literature on BDSM, which then results in manuscript rejection. I will discuss my experiences of manuscript rejection and editor/reviewer biases concerning BDSM shortly. Contemporary social work, after all, is predicated on EPAS core competencies, including those mentioned above, and also emphasizes evidence-based practice (CSWE, 2008, 2015; Rubin & Babbie, 2014). While I have occasionally encountered difficulty in getting specific manuscripts published, including on the topic of BDSM, it is only in the field of social work that I have faced consistent rejection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".