Dimitra-Dora Teloni and Regina Mantanika because it succeeded in challenging the balance of power in this particular era of national and European anti-immigrant policies, on the one hand, and the rise in xenophobic and racist attacks, on the other. It was significant that a resolute demand for new legalisation processes was made at a time when the national and European agenda was limited to discussing border controls and migration deterrence. Theoretical and practical implications for social work Delivered by Ingenta IP : 94.67.166.95 On: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 07:25:18 Copyright The Policy Press The importance of awareness in the context of social work In the previous sections, we attempted to analyse anti-immigration policy (at both national and European levels) and its consequences, and offer a parallel discussion on the rise of racism and fascism and a basic description of the voices of resistance. The choice of focusing on the above axes was based on a number of reasons. First, knowledge of the structural causes of inequality and oppression is necessary for social workers to have in order to understand the structural causes of service users’ problems or, as Lavalette and Penketh (2014a: 15) put it, ‘the “public causes” of so much of the “private pain”’. Second, this, in turn, could promote critical reflection on everyday practice. Third, it is essential for social work to understand both the political reasons, as well as the procedures, for the demonisation of marginalised people (poor living in poverty, immigrants, Roma and so on). As it has been discussed in the first section, the media and politicians have established the ‘immigration–danger’ perception at a local level and the media have fuelled analogous perceptions at national and social levels. These perceptions easily create stereotypes, such as the immigrant threat to safety, and in Greek public dialogue they have helped to gradually establish the term ‘illegal immigrant’ (lathrometanastis) rather than the term ‘undocumented immigrant’. Social work students, like the majority in our societies, are influenced by dominant perceptions and could easily adopt media-constructed terminologies and stereotypes. For example, in the academic environment in Greece we have often experienced the use of the term ‘lathrometanastis’ by young social work students.The classification of users into illegal/legal, deserving/undeserving etc influences people’s perspective of ‘what constitutes the problem’ and eventually significantly affects the kind of intervention that is implemented. This raises the question about the significance of social work education not only in tackling such stereotypes but more importantly in disclosing and analysing in detail the structural causes of the social problem. Contemporary social work education and racism The historical and political evolution of social work has been well described by Ioakimidis (2008), who highlighted the top-down nature of its formation as well as its conservative character. For the scope of our analysis, a brief glimpse at contemporary social work education with regard to both the perceptions of students as well as contemporary curricula in relation to racism will suffice. Concerning student perceptions of homosexuality, a study by Papadaki and Papadaki (2011: 265), of social work students in Crete Technological Educational Institute (TEI)13 demonstrated that a ‘significant number of students 57.8% (n=186) said they were little/if not at all informed about homosexuality issues during their social work 196