Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of PreK-12 Students by School Personnel

ABSTRACT

The abuse of students by PreK-12 school personnel continues to be a multifaceted issue that affects students, staff, parents, and communities at an alarming rate. This two-part special issue builds on the dated and limited literature in this topic area and includes qualitative and quantitative research on prevalence, victim and offender characteristics, barriers to prevention, and frameworks and standards for prevention. Together these articles highlight the need for systematic data collection, policy implementation, accountability, and training and awareness. The findings from these articles provide specific practices that schools can adopt and follow to prevent school employee sexual misconduct.     

Introduction to the Special Issue: Global Perspectives on Vocational Guidance

This special issue of The Career Development Quarterly presents the outcomes from an international symposium, titled International Perspectives on Career Development, jointly sponsored by the International Association for Educational and Vocational Guidance and the National Career Development Association. The articles in this special issue discuss international perspectives on and comparative approaches to educational and vocational guidance that differentiate career development practices in different nations. In addition to the articles in this issue, a selection of papers presented at the symposium has been jointly published in a thematic issue of the International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance, 5(2).     

Self–care practices among social workers: do they predict job satisfaction and turnover intention?

ABSTRACT

The current health and mental health care delivery system in the United States strives to provide efficient quality care at a lower cost. This cost-effective approach and recent budget cuts have created new challenges for social workers. This study explores the relationships between self-care strategies, role stress, job autonomy, and job satisfaction and turnover intention. Four-hundred sixty-nine social workers were surveyed to assess multiple measures of self-care including professional support, professional development, coping strategies, and professional resilience, and their effects on job satisfaction and turnover intention. Role stress and job autonomy were also examined in relation to job satisfaction and turnover intention. The results supported the main hypotheses that claimed that self-care strategies are associated with both job satisfaction and turnover intention. The author discusses the important implications of these findings in education and training of both students and practitioners.     

Self-care: There’s a badge for that

ABSTRACT

Social work education has embraced a major shift towards competency based education. A core component of competency based education is that students must actually demonstrate competence. The ability to define terms or even to explain principles of effective social work practice is no longer sufficient. In this vein, social work educators are tasked with providing students a means of demonstrating an ability to practice necessary social work skills. Digital badges are a recent trend in higher education that can facilitate the shift towards competency based education. With this shift in mind, this paper outlines the requirements and benefits of a self-care badge. Students who completed the self-care badge completed readings on self-care, completed self-assessments and worksheets, developed written self-care plans, enacted the plans, monitored progress and completed a final report on the self-care practices. Overall, students described the benefits of the badge and the focus on actually practicing self-care rather than simply increasing their knowledge about self-care.     

Integrating self-care into clinical practice with trauma clients

ABSTRACT

Self-care is recognized as an important aspect of social work practice. Beginning in educational settings, developing social workers are encouraged to learn about and practice self-care. However, self-care is typically promoted through strategies and approaches outside of the practice context. Social workers are oftentimes encouraged to use individualized self-care plans, which often feature a variety of relaxation and secondary techniques; focus on self-awareness and self-reflection; and have proper use of supervision. Although these strategies are invaluable, they do little to directly benefit the social worker during direct practice or while in session with a client which is a time period when clinicians are particularly vulnerable to distress or burnout. The importance of real-time self-care strategies is particularly critical for clinicians, especially those who engage in trauma work, given the sensitivity of topics that clients may have endured or benefit from assistance in processing. Further, little information has been published on the use of self-care techniques during a session with a client or in a clinical context. The purpose of the present paper is to discuss self-care strategies that can be useful both outside of and within a clinical setting and present a model of such strategies that focus on integrating self-care in clinical practice particularly for those engaging in trauma work. The paper will conclude by discussing the relevancy of the developed model in practice.     

Prevalence and Predictors of Social Work Student Food Insecurity

ABSTRACT

Food security is an essential component of material wellness and social justice. This study draws on a 2013 survey of 496 students within a school of social work in a Pacific Northwestern U.S. public university to (a) provide the first estimate of the prevalence of food insecurity among social work students and (b) investigate coping strategies used and resources accessed by students. It was determined that 43% of students had experienced food insecurity in the preceding year. In addition, students in the BSW program, students of color, females, and first-generation college students were more likely to be food-insecure. Based on these findings, the article describes strategies for addressing the material and self-care needs of social work students and practitioners.     

Prevention of preK-12 School Employee Sexual Misconduct and Abuse

ABSTRACT

The abuse of preK-12 students by school personnel is a pervasive, understudied topic that has behavioral, psychological and monetary consequences for victims, their families, and their communities. This special issue is the second of a two-part series and focuses on studies of school employee sexual misconduct prevention training programs and prevention issues and frameworks. This compilation of articles presents evidence that effective training can lead to improved awareness and behavior changes, concerns about policy implementation that may contribute to continued prevalence, and presents strategies and guidelines for prevention. These articles provide considerations for prevention including training, loopholes, and frameworks.     

Alternative Domesticities

Abstract

This special issue responds to a growing body of literature at the nexus of studies on queer/sexuality and home/domesticity. It builds on this existing research that seeks to destabilize the heteronormative ideology of home and domesticity, while also opening up this important space—and its constituent practices—for a plurality of identity formations and subjective experiences. Additionally, it addresses calls from lesbian, gay, and queer studies to shift our attention from public spaces and community places to the domestic. This special issue introduction speaks to continuing investigations of how different groups of people seek to creatively construct intimate relations across time, space, and place. Towards this end, the five articles in this special issue are introduced in the context of their contribution to a cross-disciplinary approach to alternative domesticities.     

Romaphobia and the media: mechanisms of power and the politics of representations

ABSTRACT

This special issue of Identities, entitled ‘Romaphobia and the media’, examines entrenched and ongoing media coverage of Roma, Gypsy and Traveller people across Europe. The focus is on how the media problematises the Roma, how it constructs a ‘conceptual map’ about Roma people and what this tells us about the societies we live in. This special issue includes five academic articles all examining the constructions and stereotypes used in the media in various formats and European countries. After these academic articles, this special issue then deviates from the normal journal structure by including three commentary pieces from professionals from varying Roma backgrounds to give their views and experiences on how they tackle Romaphobia and the media. The inclusion of these commentary pieces are very powerful in offering a perspective of active interventions and resistance that we should not forget amidst the depressing continued circulation of racialised stereotypes.     

Building competency in self-care for social work students: a course-based case study

ABSTRACT

There is increasing recognition that social work educators must do more to ensure that social work students transitioning into the profession are prepared to engage in adept self-care practices. However, documented curricular efforts targeted at meeting this aim are few. This paper documents the impact of a credit-bearing self-care course on student (N = 40) competency about self-care. The course occurred in a social work education program at a large public institution in the United States. The researcher used a pre-experimental (e.g. pre/post) design to assess course outcomes. Results indicate significant improvements in student knowledge about self-care, skills related to engaging in self-care practices, and value related to self-care. After a review literature, this paper will provide a foundational overview of the course, delineate outcome variables and measures, explicate evaluative findings, and discuss salient implications derived from this endeavor.     

Introduction to meta-cognitive processes of thought separation: an illustrative overview / Introducción a los procesos metacognitivos de separación del propio pensamiento: una visión general ilustrativa

Abstract

The main goal of this introductory article is to provide an overview of some of the main empirical illustrations relevant to the psychology of separating from one’s thoughts. Separating from our own thoughts often involves thinking about our own thoughts (meta-cognition). We describe meta-cognitive processes relevant to how individuals calibrate and control the impact of their thoughts on judgement and behaviour. Amongst other things, this special issue presents us with an opportunity to examine the similarities and differences between key contributions focused on correction and suppression processes, decentering approaches and separating from thoughts by using a variety of techniques. In addition to these paradigms covered in the articles of this special issue, we review other approaches that also involve reducing the impact of thoughts, with special attention to invalidation processes. Additional frameworks relevant to mental separation included in this review are those relevant to non-evaluative observation of thoughts, psychological distance and mental hygiene.     

Chapter 5. Self-Care in Caregiving

SUMMARY

This chapter discusses strategies to facilitate caregiver self-care from a social work perspective. The functional age model of intergenerational treatment (Greene, 1986, 1994, 2000) is used to explore the context of caregiving, including the developmental course, challenges, rewards, coping methods, and consequences of caregiving for a variety of clients, followed by an exploration of the process of assessing and intervening with the caregiver to foster healthy self-care practices.     

Teaching self-care: The utilization of self-care in social work practicum to prevent compassion fatigue,burnout, and vicarious trauma

ABSTRACT

Field practicum is paramount to social work pedagogy in the preparation of emerging direct practice professionals. Field students integrate foundational knowledge as they implement practice skills learned in the classroom during the social work practicum experience. Working with clients who are suffering is inevitable in direct social work practice and field practicum students can be exposed to a broad range of intense emotional experiences as they assist clients in need. Integrating self-care skills, techniques and strategies into daily social work practice becomes essential to prevent compassion fatigue, burnout, and vicarious trauma. Incorporating self-care skills into the field practicum enhances opportunities for transformative student learning and helps to strengthen professional socialization during this critical educational experience. This article highlights the implementation of professional self-care instruction, use of activities and written student critical reflection assignments designed to enhance the practice experience through incorporating self-care education and strategies among undergraduate students within the field practicum seminar.     

Made wrong,excluded, and ignored: Introduction to a special issue on lesbians and the law

Abstract

For some time now, the specific experiences that lesbians have with the law have been considerably overlooked. This is because there is a focus on how gay males have contact with the law, as gay males are the group whose same-sex intimacies are most often criminalized in legislative frameworks. It is rare for the same-sex intimacies of lesbians to be targeted explicitly in legislative frameworks. This special issue therefore focuses on how lesbians have contact with the law. It features articles focused on what the guest editors conceptualize as how lesbians are being made wrong, being excluded, and being ignored by the law, and each of these are outlined in further detail in this introduction. The articles highlight the relational nexus between lesbians and different frameworks, processes, rules, policies, institutions and applications of law, and the far-reaching impacts this nexus produces in the lives of lesbians around the world.     

Extra-capitalist impulses in the midst of the crisis: perspectives and positions outside of capitalism

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the current special issue, Extra-capitalist impulses in the midst of the crisis. Those seeking alternatives to capitalism, and egalitarian social change more generally, face a chronic undecidability. In this context, the special issue considers episodes of what we term, extra-capitalism. By this, we mean those instances, examples, strategies, tactics, experiments, programmes, moments, ruptures and revolutions that have sought to find a way either to challenge or to move outside of capitalism. The article highlights three key dimensions of difference that tend to face those seeking alternatives to capitalism: on the question of scale; regarding the attitude towards institutions of authority, and especially the state; and over the mode of internal organization. Each of the articles of the special issue connect with these questions, and the way in which we might learn from episodes of extra-capitalism, both historically and in the present.     

Workplace support and European fathers’ use of state policies promoting shared childcare

ABSTRACT

Social policies such as paternity leave and parental leave offer fathers the opportunity to be more involved in childcare than earlier generations of fathers. While such policies are increasingly offered by governments around the world, research by the International Network on Leave Policies and Research shows that many European fathers do not take advantage of these benefits, despite fathers’ growing interest in participation in early childcare. This article introduces a special issue devoted to understanding how the workplace can impact European fathers’ interest in and abilities to take leave, a topic that has received relatively little research attention. The articles in the special issue suggest that barriers to European fathers’ leavetaking are deeply embedded in workplace culture and work practices and will be difficult to eradicate without a dramatic challenge to the concept of the male ideal worker, who prioritizes work above family.     

Occupying Subjectivity: Being and Becoming Radical in the Twenty-First Century: Introduction

Abstract

Critical theory has long concerned itself with the exploration of radical political subjectivities, of the various ways in which social movements, revolutionary classes and everyday communities reshape themselves and their relations in order to survive, transform or defeat oppressive forces. This special issue brings together a series of articles examining different forms (and spaces) of contemporary radical subjectivities, situating them in a global context. This short editorial introduction highlights the major themes of the special issue (placing particular attention on the relationship between theory and the subject), and outlines the eight pieces that follow.     

Introduction to the Volume on Relocation Issues in Child Custody Cases

ABSTRACT

Recent JCC articles on the topics of gender bias in domestic violence research and practice and parental alienations syndrome are critiqued, with a brief preview of related articles on these topics scheduled for the upcoming special issue on domestic violence. The problem of false negative and false positive errors in evaluations of abuse allegations are discussed and the social psychological factors that contribute to systems failure in family courts are examined.