Latest News
The following news is syndicated from the British Journal of Social Work.
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
Looked After Children and the Ethic of Care
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
This paper draws on the growing field of literature that discusses the relevance of the ethic of care to social work. It is argued that an ethic of justice predominates in looked after children policies and practice, which can serve to underplay the relevance of the traits associated with an ethic of care. Using case examples from a small-scale longitudinal qualitative study of looked after children and care-leavers, the author notes that care is likely to be found in relationships beyond formally ascribed carers and that relational aspects of interactions with social workers are important, despite the lack of opportunity to develop these relationships. Like most people in society, these young people are care-givers and care-receivers, reminding us of the interdependency of human relationships and potentially alleviating some of the ‘othering’ of these young people as care-recipients. It is suggested that the care system pays attention to informal, complex networks of care relationships that may be held by young people and encourages continuity in formal and informal care relationships. It is also suggested that interdependency be acknowledged and valued alongside a goal of self-sufficiency for care-leavers.
Brothers and Sisters of Disabled Children: The Experience of Disability by Association
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
This paper examines the impact of childhood disability on brothers and sisters in the family. Evidence is drawn from two research studies undertaken by the author, mainly within the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire region of the UK, and demonstrates that siblings experience ‘disability by association’ due to the interactive effect of living with a disabled brother or sister. The intent is not to suggest that disability itself is causal in this relationship; rather, it is to improve our understanding of how disability impacts on the family, is reacted to by others in the wider social setting and how, in turn, this impacts on siblings. This research comments on the family experience, utilising both quantitative and qualitative data drawn from 116 families with 344 children, of whom 118 had a disability. The experience of living with a disabled brother or sister is evidenced by both positive and negative effects on the families participating in the research. Themes explored include the nature of siblings' caring activities, disadvantage and restrictions, together with a need to inform professional assessments of sibling needs.
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
This paper explores ‘child abuse-related deaths’ (CARD) and possible CARD rates of children aged from birth to fourteen years over the period 1974–2006. It uses the latest available WHO mortality data to compare England and Wales outcomes with the other major developed countries (MDC), to see how much progress has been made in reducing actual and possible CARD in England and Wales and the other MDC. The results tell a relative ‘success story’ for England and Wales, whose violent CARD rates of children have never been lower since records began and who have made significantly greater progress in reducing violent possible CARD than the majority of the other MDC. Moreover, England and Wales were only one of four MDC whose CARD deaths, primarily the responsibility of the children protection services (CPS), fell significantly more that ‘All Causes of Death’, the primary responsibility of medicine. Though there is an overlap of services, the greater improvement in the CPS-related deaths than those primarily related to child health reflect well on the CPS. This should help to offset something of the media stereotypes and be a boost for the morale of front line staff of the CPS and the families whom they serve.
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
This study compares quality of life (QOL) assessments of two groups of Israeli children at risk, those kept at home and those removed from home, made by four assessors: the caseworker who made the decision, a professional uninvolved in the decision, the child, and a parent. Findings based on 120 assessments of 30 children showed that all four assessors rated the QOL of the children in alternative care higher than that of the children at home, that the children and their parents consistently rated the children's QOL higher than the professionals, and that there was no significant difference in the ratings of the case workers and the uninvolved professionals. Despite the study's methodological limitations, these findings point to the possible benefits of placement for children at risk, and provide grounds for believing that caseworkers' QOL assessments are not biased by attempts at self-justification.
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
Hayes and Houston's positive review of Habermas's contribution to discourse in family group conferences (in this journal) has been challenged by Garrett. In this paper, one of the authors replies to Garrett but extends the analysis through a more considered, developed and detailed examination of Habermas's thoughts on power in social life. This leads to a conceptual framework that enables the participants in the conference to exercise power in a positive manner. In developing this earlier analysis, the paper also acknowledges Garrett's argument that Bourdieu helps us to understand the nature of constraining social structures in child protection. However, Bourdieu's ideas are subsequently challenged on the grounds that they lack a competent formulation on human agency—a faculty that Habermas cogently elucidates. This enlarged understanding of agency, it is argued, offers a theoretical resource that fits better with the ethos of emancipatory social work.
'Making Social Work More Habermasian?' A Rejoinder in the Debate on Habermas
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
My earlier contribution to this debate (
A Critically Informed Perspective of Working with Resettling Refugee Groups in Australia
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
Although there have been many critiques of the central role that trauma plays in social work practice with refugees, nevertheless, trauma discourse maintains a powerful shaping force on service delivery in Australia, intersecting with, and gaining power from, managerial discourses that specify individually focused approaches to practice. The outcome is a double bind for refugee populations, who quickly learn that, in this country, identifying themselves as vulnerable is a pathway to resources, yet, who then find themselves caught in processes that have precarious effects for agency. Trauma work, the paper argues, however necessary at some points, is overemphasised and over-legitimised, and a range of critiques are drawn on to substantiate this. Revisiting some of the traditional disciplinary bases of social work and human services may facilitate organisations and practitioners to engage more proactively and reflexively with people who arrive as refugees across a broader range of tasks associated with re-establishing themselves in a new country.
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
In the past decade, social capital has been explored internationally in the disaster and social work literature, particularly in terms of historical oppression and limited economic resources of disadvantaged communities. Social capital in the United States, however, has had less integration. Using a qualitative grounded theory approach, we examine the different types of social capital (bonding, bridging, and linking) through a social work lens. We examine how social capital operated in the lives of 40 families following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana. We attempt to understand how residents utilized their social capital to survive the storm, relocate, and rebuild their lives and communities. Results indicate residents, especially those with low incomes, relied on, built upon, and collapsed all levels of social capital for individual, family, and community survival. Participants described a process through which close ties (bonding) were important for immediate support, but bridging and linking social capital offered pathways to longer term survival and wider neighborhood and community revitalization. This paper also discusses how social capital inclusion in social work can strengthen or hinder individual and community development following a catastrophic event.
Moral Sources and Emergent Ethical Theories in Social Work
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
This paper examines the feminist ethics of care as an emergent ethical theory that casts ethical dispositions in a different way to the deontological focus on duties and rules and consequentialist–utilitarian focus on minimising harm. It is closer to, though different from, virtue ethics with its focus on moral character. The paper highlights the philosophical tensions within and between these disparate theories, suggesting nevertheless that discussions about ethics are enriched by these diverse influences. Since it is not possible within the scope of this paper to deal with all of these ethical theories in depth, following a brief overview of the more established theory of deontology, virtue ethics and the ethics of care are discussed. While the feminist ethics of care attempts to provide a more complete view of morality and ethics in social work, there are important philosophical problems with which social work needs to engage in order to discern whether it offers a better understanding of morality than existing approaches in social work ethics and whether it can address the complexities of the problems social workers deal with and the harsh practice environments in which they work where the ‘practice of value’ is becoming ever more difficult and strong reasons to care must be found.
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
The Mental Capacity Act (England and Wales) 2005 (MCA) introduced the Independent Mental Capacity Advocate (IMCA) service to ensure that the views of adults who lack capacity to make particular potentially life-changing health and social care decisions are represented to substitute decision-makers. This paper presents quantitative and qualitative data from an evaluation of the pilot IMCA service that preceded the introduction of this new, statutory, form of advocacy. Importantly, our findings suggest that in more than half of the decisions completed during the period of the evaluation (54 per cent of 109 completed cases), clients were able to provide some indication of their wishes, enabling them to participate directly in personal decisions that they were unable to make autonomously. We discuss the implications of our findings both for the development of statutory advocacy in England and Wales and for other models of substitute decision-making.
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
There is growing emphasis on prevention, personalisation and self-care or active citizenship in England. This paper reports on the Smarter Working in Social care & Health (SWISH) study of the development of an information technology system that allows older people to assess their own health and to receive personalised feedback and considers the implications for social work practice and commissioning. The study took place in two London areas (2005–7). Its objectives were 1) to refine a method to improve access to information and services, and to identify older people at risk, and 2) to examine the potential of the method to enrich public sector information and to profile local populations to inform local commissioners. A multi-method approach consolidated findings from focus groups and interviews with older people and professionals. Under the first objective, views were mixed. The existing health risk assessment tool was seen as comprehensive, with the capacity to identify low-level risks to well-being, although possibly burdensome. Under the second objective, social workers and managers were uncertain how to make use of local population data and to the capacity of local resources to meet information needs. Messages for practitioners and managers are drawn.
Developing New Understandings of Independence and Autonomy in the Personalised Relationship
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
The personalisation of adult social care has the potential to create support that is individualised, and it is the reality of this support relationship that forms the basis of this article. To date, there have been few studies that focus on the association between care users and their workers. Here, we consider research from a Ph.D. study that allows for comparison between two sets of relationships: between disabled adults and homecare workers employed by a local authority, and between disabled adults using direct payments to employ their own personal assistants. The research pays attention to the meanings attached to the concepts of independence and autonomy, with a model of autonomy applied to aid clarity and develop our understanding of complexities in support relationships. The research uses a grounded theory approach with qualitative interviews of matched samples of respondents, providing new evidence about the personalised relationship. Based on the research, we argue that direct employment of support workers appears to facilitate greater autonomy for disabled adults than traditional homecare relationships. However, the research goes on to suggest that greater autonomy for disabled adults may have a downside for support workers.
Professional Boundaries: Crossing a Line or Entering the Shadows?
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
This article explores the professional boundaries guidance for social workers. It presents research findings from the formal literature, from agency codes of practice, from telephone interviews with regulatory and professional bodies and from an exercise using ‘snowballing techniques’ in which informants responded to brief scenarios illustrating boundary dilemmas. The findings suggest that formal research plays little part in the guidance that individuals use to help them determine professional boundaries. Similarly, only 10–15 per cent of informants made regular reference to regulatory and professional codes of practice, with an even smaller percentage quoting specific sections from these codes. A slightly larger group (15–20 per cent) made fairly regular reference to their agency's policy documents. However, a clear majority relied on their own sense of what is appropriate or inappropriate, and made their judgements with no reference to any formal guidance. Agency guidance tended to ignore the ambiguous areas of practice and seemed to act as an insurance policy, brought out and dusted off when something goes awry. The authors caution against ever-increasing bullet points of advice and prescription, and advance a notion of ethical engagement in which professionals exercise their ethical senses through regular discussion of professional boundary dilemmas.
A Critical Reflection on the Involvement of 'Experts by Experience' in Inspections
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
Recent research conducted in the UK for the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) suggested that there was no evidence to indicate that the involvement of service users and lay assessors in service inspections improved the quality of inspections. However, recently, CSCI has initiated a project to involve ‘experts by experience’ in their service inspections. Here, the term ‘expert by experience’ has been adopted to describe users of social care services. However, the appropriateness of this usage has not been without some challenge and various conceptual difficulties have been raised in how the term is used. Reflecting on reports published by CSCI, this paper considers whether the choice of the word ‘expert’ in this context is really appropriate and also whether, although well intentioned, the involvement of ‘experts by experience’ is too confused in its rationale to actually empower the people using the services being inspected. The paper concludes by suggesting that the current inspection body—the Care Quality Commission—would do well to review both the terminological and conceptual confusion in respect of this practice.
Developing Anti-Oppressive Services for the Poor: A Theoretical and Organisational Rationale
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
The present article aims to encourage social services to adopt an anti-oppressive perspective in the development of services for people living in poverty, and proposes some theoretical and organisational considerations to transform these services. In the last three decades, neo-liberal and managerial ideologies have consistently favoured social policies that generate high levels of poverty, an anti-welfare political climate, punitive welfare reforms, periodic budgetary cutbacks and the subsequent decay of the social service sector. These processes impaired the capacity of many social services to respond to the needs of the most vulnerable constituencies. They also undermined the social workers' ability to fulfil some of their main social missions: promoting social change and pursuing social justice. The present article calls for social services for the poor to restore this fundamental social mission by adopting an anti-oppressive approach. The article is organised around three sections: first, it examines the relationship between poverty and oppression; second, it reviews the relevant literature on anti-oppressive organisations; and third, it lays down the theoretical and organisational principles of the development of anti-oppressive social services for the poor.
Intervention in a Shared Traumatic Reality: A New Challenge for Social Workers
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
Shared traumatic reality refers to those situations in which social workers help survivors cope with the very traumas that they themselves have been threatened by and/or exposed to, given the reality that they live and work in the same community as their clients. This paper is an initial attempt to present the knowledge gathered to date about providing treatment in shared traumatic realities. It reviews the various definitions and uses of the concept in the literature, the negative and positive impact derived from working in these situations, the unique characteristics that define and might help explain the resultant consequences of working in them, and practical and future research recommendations.
Spouses of Persons with Spinal Cord Injury: Impact and Coping
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
The objective of this study is to gain a better understanding of the impact of spinal cord injury (SCI) on spouses. Twenty-four spouses (eighteen women and six men) of persons with SCI were interviewed individually. Analysing the interviews revealed that the impact of SCI is focused primarily on three main areas: leisure, domestic tasks and family responsibilities, and sexuality. Spouses apply several strategies to overcome the difficulties they encounter, such as setting aside time for hobbies without the spouse, hiring staff to reduce the increased task load, reshuffling roles to coincide with the capabilities of the person with the spinal cord injury and maintaining open, honest communication with one's spouse on the topic of sexuality. All these techniques, implemented and proven by experienced spouses, can be used as courses of action for clinical practitioners who work with spouses of people with disabilities in order to help them achieve a healthy balance in their life.
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
Over the last quarter of a century, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) have grown in prevalence as a primary human rights intervention for post-conflict reconstruction. Building upon restorative justice theory, TRCs investigate past abuses, listen to the experiences of victims and perpetrators, and seek to repair the social fabric damaged by violence. TRCs constitute an unrecognised opportunity for social work to contribute to the welfare of communities recovering from violence. This paper introduces TRCs to social workers, highlights the relevance of TRCs to social work, identifies how social workers have engaged with TRCs in the past, sketches the history and core elements of TRCs, and addresses how social worker can improve TRCs. Social workers can contribute to TRCs by facilitating interviews and eliciting testimonials from victims of violence, lending their ethical commitments of self-determination and social justice, advocating at various levels of governmental and community groups, working in legal settings and with courts, practising cultural competence, promoting the work of reconciliation through dialogue and mediation, conducting social work research and emphasising the material welfare of victims by encouraging TRCs to address structural inequalities and include social development programs.
Local, European and Global: An Exploration of Migration Patterns of Social Workers into Ireland
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
Whilst the project to increase workforce mobility is part of a common labour force policy across the European Union, for some social workers, it has also been coupled with an aspiration to develop a pan-European identity within the profession (
Out and Proud? Social Work's Relationship with Lesbian and Gay Equality
09/02/2010 06:39 PM
Major changes in the UK legislative framework to promote the rights of lesbians and gay men have challenged and challenge long-standing heteronormative and heterosexist frames of reference in both social work practice and professional education and the way these are organised. At the same time, government policy within ‘transformation’ and ‘integrated’ agendas and recent reviews of the role of social work provide many opportunities for social work to respond in new and different ways to the proposed changes. This Critical Commentary looks at the implications for increased visibility of sexuality within social work and the complexity of managing identities. We will examine how these are debated within the current social, political and legislative environment.
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