This article investigates the way in which disadvantaged minority social workers’ professional excellence is encouraged, drawing data from an analysis of primary documents and in-depth semi-structured interviews with 21 Palestinian welfare bureau managers in Israel. It finds that the Jewish voluntary sector is the sole player encouraging Palestinian minority social workers’ excellence, but its encouragement maintains the status quo regime, politicisation and alienation, and pushes towards neoliberalism. Most of the Palestinian welfare bureaus consciously prefer to avoid encouraging social workers’ excellence to avoid confrontation with the central government in the form of the Israeli Welfare Ministry. A small group of welfare bureaus sufficed with indirect encouragement, enlisting non-governmental organisations for the task because of the paucity of resources. A small number of bureaus that granted excellence certificates and a token gift applied three considerations. Excellence awards constituted a method for coping with the challenges facing Palestinian minority social work.
The article discusses the emergency placement of children by the Norwegian Child Welfare Services. Nine mothers were interviewed about their experiences of the transfer of care of their children. Several of the mothers had their children removed due to an emergency decision. The article focuses on one of these stories and analyses the way in which emergency placement can be seen as a form of communication and practice. The purpose of this article is to generate knowledge about how the concept of ‘zero tolerance’ is used to legitimise emergency placements and how this practice might cause more harm than benefits for individual children. The article’s analytical perspective is grounded in the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann.
For-profit companies have begun competing with women’s shelters for ‘clients’ trying to escape violence. Using discourse theory, this study examines how 20 private shelters describe their business. The analysis shows that private shelters describe themselves as: (1) having a broad expertise and target group: (2) being able to tend to the individual needs of any client; and (3) being highly available and flexible. We understand this as an expression of a neoliberal market discourse and as a way to differentiate themselves from women’s shelters. This may put pressure on women’s shelters to provide similar ‘inclusion’, availability and flexibility. Furthermore: (4) private shelters contribute to shaping a desirable neoliberal subject, that is, a self-reliant woman; and (5), by articulating needs as individual and inherently mundane, they lean more towards ‘providing accommodation’ than addressing the particularities of (gendered) violence.
The online lifeworld gives adolescents various opportunities to meet their developmental needs. Not all young people benefit from these opportunities. They encounter negative experiences, have difficulties fulfilling their needs and engage in risky and harmful behaviours in the online lifeworld. This poses challenges for Dutch youth work professionals, as little is known about the digital lives of Dutch adolescents and the challenges they encounter when meeting their developmental needs in the online lifeworld. In this qualitative study, a photovoice method was used to collect screenshots from adolescents (N = 175) concerning their experiences and needs in the online lifeworld. Six types of developmental needs in the online lifeworld were distinguished. The article concludes that understanding how adolescents use online affordances to fulfil their developmental needs is a starting point for all youth work professionals in providing adequate support to adolescents in the online lifeworld.
In recent decades, a lot of Western countries have been engaged in a heated debate on how to come to terms with their colonial past. Leaving behind the idea that colonial history consists mainly of common achievements, the former philanthropic narrative of ‘modernisation’ and ‘progress’ has been critically analysed and dissected as the awareness of its painful episodes grew. In this vein, the postcolonial history in Belgium is an interesting case to examine, as it has long been one of the most criticised colonial metropoles for the way in which it deals with its colonial past, precisely because Belgium has persisted in focusing on the positive aspect of that past. Consequently, a whole part of this history has not yet been processed and is mainly part of a contested past. Social work practices have long sought to remain neutral in this discussion, but this awareness of history as a dynamic weaving of a multiplicity of different strands of identity also applies directly to the development of social work as a profession. From a social work perspective, it is impossible to retreat into a viewpoint outside of history, as we must become aware that social work practices are deeply embedded in historical and cultural habits from which we cannot disengage. In this article, we argue that social work needs to critically deal with its own confusing history, with which it is interwoven, in order to be able to clarify what contemporary social work represents.
Critical incident reflection is a set of procedures for promoting, thinking about, reflecting upon and learning about oneself or other individuals, organisations and/or processes based on direct observations of human behaviour. Critical incident reflection consists of reflections based on analysis of the surprises, discomforts and worries in practice, as well as a critical re-examination, with the aim of developing new knowledge, skills and values. Critical incident reflection was developed over a period of time and is based on such processes as theoretical analysis, meetings between researchers, practitioners and students, and two pilots and a lab. All parts of the processes originate from a Nordic network, Knowledge Production in Social Work, which has been running for almost 20 years. In this article, experiences from these developments are elaborated. It is asked how the critical incident reflection tool can be developed through co-creation, and how it can be used as an innovative approach to analyse, develop and advance social work. The main conclusion is that critical incident reflection is an evolving method that can be applied to advance social work practice, as well as a teaching method for developing student skills.
As the scale of global refugee migration has steadily increased, Germany has become a major immigration country. The social inclusion of refugee families is crucial for both the families and the receiving society, and thus represents an important societal challenge. Family centres, which already offer low-threshold, universal family support services, could facilitate this process of social inclusion. Implementing a qualitative longitudinal research study, the authors conducted problem-centred expert interviews with social workers in 2016 (32 interviews) and again in 2019 (33 interviews) to explore the local experiences of social work for and with refugee families. The systematically analysed data revealed not only various good practices of how family centres actively include refugees in family support programmes but also the frustration and exhaustion of social workers, who face several challenges that seem to hinder the inclusion of refugee families. Over the short period of three-and-a-half years, the data show evidence of a shift in activities, challenges and attitudes.
