Abstract

Social workers are professionals working within institutions which also have the task of regulating the conduct of people considered deviant. Since these professionals have a Code of Ethics by which they should (also) orient their practices, the question of the relationship between the aim that the social worker should pursue based on the code of ethics and the ways in which social control is exercised is central. I address this question adopting a specific social work theoretical perspective, that of "critical social work". In this article I shall analyze a particular phase of the control of deviance in social work: the phase in which social workers collect information, through specific fact-finding modalities, in order to decide whether and in what way social services should intervene.