When I started walking through the streets of poor neighbourhoods, I remember thinking to myself that the names used for these neighbourhoods – such as ‘slums’, ‘ghettos’ and ‘projects’, which carry connotations of crime, violence and neglect – do not really fit them. What I saw in them was their vulnerability, as expressed in the broken light near the stairwell and the neglected areas around the structures that were supposed to be gardens. It was also expressed in the predominance of mental health services and services for people with disabilities that more affluent neighbourhoods did not want in their backyard, and the absence of banks or other ‘respectable’ public services. What would happen if instead of calling these neighbourhoods ‘slums’, we called them ‘areas of suffering’ or ‘zones of pain’? Would it be a less accurate or less valid way to describe these neighbourhoods? I do not think that the residents of the neighbourhoods would like any of these names. However, the idea intrigued me and made me think about the unconscious process of denying the pain that accompanies poverty.

Introduction

The anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992: xii) describes the field of research as a place of pain:

The researcher would prefer not to be in the ‘field’. As they are already there, they are forced to write. Writing is the ultimate fulfilment of the commitment to act as a witness. It serves as an escape, both because it is a way to process meaningfully what the researcher has seen and experienced, and because it is a means of communication. Through writing, the researcher not only works through their pain, but also transforms it into shared knowledge, changing it from a personal wound into a social problem.

Social work operates daily in places of pain. We are exposed to human pain on an almost unbearable level.