ANTI-OPPRESSIVE PRACTICE

Anti-Oppressive practice

Anti-Oppressive practice

Introduction

The term Anti-Oppressive practice is commonly applied and used in the same meaning as anti-discriminatory practice. However, there are some differences. These differences are owing to the meaning of the two key words, discrimination and oppression. The fact is that Anti-discriminatory practice seems to have a limited purpose of trying to put an end or diminish the instances of unfair treatment being given out with the purpose of removing barriers that may prevent people from gaining services which they otherwise will in case there are no discriminatory measures (Green Lister, 2011, pp 12-13).

Discrimination can be defined as the treatment of individuals unfairly due to prejudice and stereotype.

Oppression on the other hand takes into account not merely the sum of the direct and indirect acts of discrimination, but it also regards the structural dimension of power. A central concept in understanding oppression is the concept of identity. Identity happens to be fluid and instead of being static. This means that most of the people will most probably be both the oppressed ones and the oppressors at the same time. It is not easy and neither is it helpful to think of a hierarchy of oppression. For example, it will not help to think that being black means you will be more oppressed than you would be in case you were old and not black. The fact is that people tend to have not just one but more than one identities at a time. Fore example a person could possibly be both old and black at the same time. A person could also be a female and black at the same time. There are many other facets of multiple identities such as disabled. It could however be that only one of the identities dominates the others. Nevertheless, multiple identities still remain an important feature and a person at times cannot deny having more than one identity (Green Lister, 2011, pp 16-17).

Discussion

According to law, there are many legislations calling for anti-discriminatory practices. For example, there are some important features such as the Sex Equality Act 1975, the Race Relations Act 1976 and The Children Act 1989, Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the Race Relations Amendment Act 2000 and the Human Rights Act 1998 (Green Lister, 2011, pp 18).

These are only some of the anti-discriminatory measures. In reality there are many more. They have been increasing ever since. Eh truth is that oppressive measures have become a reality with regards to several different aspects such as ethnicity, race, color, gender or age (Green Lister, 2011, pp 18).

Oppressive measures are evident with regards to ethnicity and color as people find that they are being prejudiced against on account of their color or ethnicity. This is true especially in the case of minorities or the blacks. Such people find that they are being prejudiced absent in almost all forms of life. A more glaring example would be the situation that have existed for centuries in the southern state so f ...