**1. Introduction**

We write this article as social work academics concerned about threats to free speech in the social work academy and in increasingly managerial and regulated practice contexts. The particular prompt for writing stems from the experience of one of the authors (Mark) who, at different points, has been subject to negative professional and press attention for questioning dominant narratives of historical abuse in residential child care. The views that elicit such negative coverage are based on extensive personal and academic experience and are published, largely, in peer-reviewed journals [1–4]. Indeed, questioning the construction of historical abuse narratives resonates with emerging international research [5–7]. It assumes a particular currency and necessity in the UK in the wake of the conviction in 2019 of Carl Beech [8] for perverting the course of justice in respect of false allegations made against a series of public figures. The Beech case destabilises current public and criminal justice policy around the default position of 'believing' those claiming to be victims of abuse, and highlights the need to be able to question such dictums, regardless of the contemporary cultural potency they have come to assume.

The reaction to Mark's published views provides a particular illumination of the cultures of the social work and child-care establishments when confronted with any view that might question orthodoxies around child abuse. It is an experience shared by others who have sought to ask such questions. Sikes [9], for instance, found herself in what she calls the eye of a storm of criticism and hostile publicity for seeking to problematise schoolteacher/pupil relationships, while Sikes and

Piper [10] discuss the difficulties they encountered from a university ethics committee in seeking approval for research into false allegations made against teachers. One reviewer admitted that he could not countenance approving a proposal that did not take for granted the truth of any allegation of abuse made by a child. The Beech case, inter alia, highlights the reality of false allegations and the consequences of these for those who are subject to them. These are issues that, in the interests of natural and social justice, academics—and indeed, social workers—ought to be concerned about.

Concerns about the implications of questioning the basis of abuse claims are set against a backcloth of wider disquiet experienced by the authors as to how to prepare students to negotiate contested identity issues in an increasingly regulated and foreclosing professional context. While the social work academy has previously engaged with questions of identity and identity politics [11,12], these sorties have been overtaken by recent cultural shifts, which highlight the threat posed to free speech and to viewpoint diversity by revivalist outbreaks of identity politics [13]. In this article, we seek to re-engage social work with debates around identity in the light of these cultural shifts. Our argumen<sup>t</sup> is that to practise ethically and effectively requires that social workers need to be aware of and to engage with identity politics and not fall back on default positions that they may feel pressured or socialised to adopt in respect of what is the right thing to say or do in particular circumstances. Rather, they ought to approach complex social issues with a critical spirit, recognising that there are rarely easy answers and around which a variety of positions might be taken.

The article covers a lot of ground and, as a result, does so with a broad brush, identifying rather than always elaborating many of the ideas presented. Some of the connections made are at this point speculative and themselves open to question; the intention is to outline current cultural trends and to sugges<sup>t</sup> their relevance to social work. The article begins by locating identity politics in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and how these have since morphed from concerns around structural disadvantage affecting major societal groupings to the expression of a myriad of personal and minority group identity claims. We sugges<sup>t</sup> that identity politics are compatible with a neoliberal worldview and its focus on individualism rather than on society. They also create victims among those who feel their particular identity positions are not respected, and this culture of victimhood has deleterious implications for erstwhile assumptions of the importance of free speech. We go on to re-state classical assertions of the need and justification for free speech and academic freedom. We argue that free speech is a prerequisite for critical thinking, a skill that is consistently called for in social work education, but which is often lacking in academic engagemen<sup>t</sup> and in professional practice. We conclude by asserting the need for social work academics to engage with and to engage their students in a range of heterodox ideas where contentious and difficult issues can be freely debated.
