This book explains the importance of using an anti-oppressive approach to understanding ethics and values in social work. It argues that an anti-oppressive approach is an intrinsic element of effective professional practice, not an optional extra.

Offering an original framework and making clear the connections to good practice throughout, the authors draw on a range of classical and contemporary ethical theory, including:
- The classic theories of Kant, Mill and Rawls.
- Recent writing on virtue theory and postmodernist ethics.
- Recent feminist ethical theory.

Numerous case examples are used to illustrate how anti-oppressive values apply to a range of ethical perspectives. These examples are systematically discussed in the text and readers are invited to consider their own position in relation to them. Guidance on further reading is provided throughout.

This is an important text for students taking courses on social work ethics and values at advanced undergraduate level and beyond.

DEREK CLIFFORD is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Liverpool John Moores University, UK, where he is module leader for the Anti-Oppressive Practice and Social Divisions modules of the Diploma in Social Work programme. He has taught in Australia and the West Indies as well as taught and practised in the UK and he is the author of Social Assessment Theory and Practice: A Multi-Disciplinary Framework (Ashgate, 1998).

BEVERLEY BURKE is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Liverpool John Moores University, UK, where she is module leader for the Social Work Theory and Method module of the Diploma in Social Work programme. She is the author, with Jane Dalrymple, of Anti-Oppressive Practice in Social Care and the Law (Open University Press, 1995) and has contributed chapters to Adams et al: Social Work: Themes, Issues and Critical Debates (Palgrave, 1998, 2002) and Davies (ed): Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Social Work (Blackwell, 2000).