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- Author or Editor: Susan Levy x
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Working with cultural diversity, and specifically asylum seekers and refugees, is an emerging field of practice in Scottish social work, little covered in social work education. This chapter explores approaches to the integration of migrants broadly and specifically within Scotland. The chapter is contextualised within cultural social work, working with difference, and developing a sense of place and wellbeing to achieve sustainable and inclusive cities. The Indicators of Integration Framework (Ager and Strang, 2004), a relational approach to integration, and the Capability Approach (CA) (Sen, 1999) are used to frame and conceptualise the work. Some of the challenges and tensions that are emerging within Scottish social work with asylum seekers and refugees are discussed, these include: (1) balancing working with UK government immigration legislation and Scottish welfare legislation; (2) social work practice with asylum seekers and refugees being located within mainstream practice; and (3) a lack of preparedness for working with cultural diversity and the complexity of issues associated with supporting migrants to transform the unfamiliar into the familiar. We call for re-imagining working with cultural diversity through an approach that is inclusive of a migrant’s evolving sense of place and belonging.
Families are an expected haven for their members but can present threats in some contexts. Part of a large-scale PhD study with 101 participants, empirical findings on the roles played by families in encouraging sex trafficking in Edo, Nigeria, are presented here. Using in-depth interviews and group discussions, data were elicited from actors within trafficking in persons. Core findings included the exploitation of roles and responsibilities in families towards enabling sex trafficking, the abuse of shared meanings of family in communities and the exploitation of vulnerable families. Vulnerable families were identified as lacking fathers or those whose parents were older adults and/or uneducated. Thus, poor women in such families were at greater risk of being trafficked. For a conceptual understanding of these family roles in sex trafficking, we employed structure–agency insights. In all, anti-sex trafficking interventions must begin with families as the smallest unit of interventions.
There is an increasing literature setting out models and good practice in service-user involvement in social work education (Skilton, 2011; Robinson and Webber, 2013; Tanner et al, 2015; Askheim et al, 2017; Duffy et al, 2017; Cabiati and Levy, 2020). Pedagogically this work is framed by approaches to integrating the voices, lived experiences and experiential knowledge of service users and carers into social work education. While these voices are becoming less marginal within social work education, the contribution of service users and carers as co-authors in this literature is less visible (McPhail, 2007; Fox, 2016; Bell et al, 2020; Levy et al, 2016, 2020). This chapter contributes to addressing this lacuna by being co-authored with three Scottish service users and/or carers, also called experts by experience. All three have written reflectively on their experiences of involvement in social work education and their perceptions of the impact of their involvement on students’ learning, social work practice and on them personally. The chapter also includes reflective accounts written by Italian social work students as part of their course work. The EBE and students all used the concept of ‘inspiring conversations’ (Cabiati and Levy, 2020) as a starting point to explore and reflect on their experiences of user involvement in social work education.
‘Experts by experience’ (EBE), rather than ‘service users’, is used in this chapter as a term that more coherently conveys the essence of experiential and tacit knowledge; that is, knowledge acquired through living with a disability, being a family carer and/or receiving social services.
