According with international acception of social work, respect for diversities is one of central principes of it and the social worker have as a main role to protect the rights of vulnerable social groups and to discourage discrimination. In social work practice it seems to be more complex than we think it has to be from a theoretical point of view. I don’t want to say here that practical and theoretical aspects are two separate ways to see it. The practice of a scientific profession is always based on theories formulated and tested in years or social research. I just want to highlight that social workers are also humans who can make mistakes and are influenced by the ideas of the society or community they belong to and being a social worker don’t means that automatically you will think out of all preconceptions about different people

I do not intend to explain in this article the importance of cultural diversity and how it works based on social power factors, rather I try to explain why there are some misunderstandings in the practice of social work in counties from Eastern Europe, like Romania, about cultural diversity, based on my participant observation, and why it is important for us, as social workers, to be aware of it.

If we ask social worker students why they have chosen to do that we expect to find out that they were interested in social problems and wanted to make a change in people’s lives but in reality people have different reasons which determine them to choose to do things. For exemples when I worked with social work students during their university practice period, many students told me that they chose it because they wanted to have a specialization and they thought social work is easier to do than other specializations. I don’t think that it is a bad reason, we all have different personal motivations that guide our decisions and we try different things, which is a healthy behavior. I want to say that not always we know from the beginning what we want to do with it and what it means.

I think most of the social work universities from Eastern Europe integrate with success cultural diversity in their curricula, working with professors with strong values about promoting cultural diversity and protecting minorities rights. But people don’t live only in universities, they interact with other social environments and they come in university with strong ideas, formed during the previous educational cycles and in the social backgrounds they come from, being influenced by cultural prejudices regarding the problematization of specific social groups such as, for example, in Romania, the case of Roma or LGBTQA+ people.

As Anna Kende et al. explains, in Central and Eastern Europe people are more confident about their discriminative ideas and don’t camufate it, as they do in other parts of Europe, because the social norms allow them to do that. Considering this pont of view I think the weak integration of cultural diversity principles of social workers in Romania comes from a social problem that systematically affects the entire social structure based on insufficient attention paid to cultural diversity and acceptance of differences between people and the encouragement of stigmas about those different from the dominant culture, regartles we talking about ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, class or others.

As social workers we work with people from different cultures, trying to evaluate their situation and support them to improve it. Working with people affected by social problems without a main understanding of mecanismes engaged in people privileges and desavantages and without a reference to the socio-cultural values ​​of the people we work with, we risk to avoid a intervention in a specific problem that we see as a normality based on preconception about particular social groups (for example, we can think that is normal for roma people to don’t have access to jobs because they don’t like to work, and we will avoid to considering assist them to find a suitable job). Or even if we want to support people whose standpoint we don’t understand through their lenses, our conclusions and recommendations will not suit the reality that those people live, being incomprehensible or impossible to adopt in their context.

The social workers who respect their profession and who want to provide quality social services have the responsibility to constantly improve their knowledge, from scientific sources, about the clients they work with and to try to discourage the prejudices based on misinformation that accentuate the risk situation of different people, because this is a part of it really means social work.