The Political Role of Social Work: Grasping the Momentum of Working Through Interorganizational Networks in Belgium

ABSTRACT

This article explores how social workers deal with the ambiguity that arises from their ability to transform the private needs of individuals into issues of public concern. It is argued that the current shift towards joined-up working, which is epitomized by the creation of interorganizational networks, could encourage new opportunities for social work. These horizontal and nonhierarchical forms of cooperation serve as platforms for debate to ensure regular discussions about the causes of and potential solutions to complex societal problems. This article relies on a case-study of bottom-up networks in two Belgian cities where social workers from various policy fields voluntarily joined forces to look after hard-to-reach groups of homeless people. The primary data were obtained from document analysis, semi-structured interviews with network participants, and direct observations of network meetings. These data were analyzed by conducting a directed content analysis. The examination shows that the joint creation of welfare services leads to substantial debates among social workers about the criteria which homeless people must meet in order to be provided with welfare services and primary care. The paper shows that despite being aware of differing viewpoints by their engagement in such debates, social workers are reluctant to challenge the dominant conceptualizations underlying their own day-to-day practices, and that this impacts on the potential to induce local policymakers to take further action with regard to reducing homelessness.     

‘Not a good person’: family stigma of mental illness from the perspectives of young siblings

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine family stigma as one form of the stigma of mental illness in child and youth mental health. Presented are the outcomes of a thematic content analysis of in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews conducted with seven (n = 7) young siblings, ages 13 to 21 years old, with a brother or sister identified as having a mental‐health issue. The focus of the interviews was on the ways the siblings experienced their other sibling's mental health and how those experiences shaped their sense of self and family. From the analysis, young siblings had predominately negative experiences, struggled with making sense of their brother or sister and the family as ‘flawed’ against the mental illness as ‘bad’ and experienced considerable family stress and overt family stigma. Current practice theories fail to consider the complexity of these factors and, in doing so, fail to adequately explain the nature and extent to which stigmatization occurs for immediate family members. The importance of peer support and understanding stigma in social work practice with children and their families is discussed.     

Legal gambling availability and youth gambling behaviour: A qualitative longitudinal study

In many countries, gambling has gained status as a socially accepted form of entertainment. Studies of how and to what extent young people are influenced by changes in gambling availability are relatively inconclusive, and knowledge of why youth gambling behaviours increase or decrease under changing conditions is sparse. This study addressed this situation by examining qualitatively how young people experience and respond to changes in gambling opportunities. The research presented in the article is part of a large longitudinal study of gambling behaviours among Danish adolescents. Data were collected over a period of 3 years with three waves of interviews with a 10- to12-month frequency. A number of issues were identified and these were integrated into four overarching analytical themes: legislation, conditions of entry, proximity and technological innovations. Implications for further research and policy are considered.     

Curious erasures: the sexual in wartime sexual violence

Wartime sexual violence is especially egregious precisely because it is a sexual form of violence that causes particular harms. Yet, curiously, and in contrast to feminist theory on sexual violence more generally, the sexual has been erased from frames of understanding in dominant accounts of wartime rape. This article places the seeming certainty that “wartime rape is not about sex (it’s about power/violence)” under critical scrutiny and poses questions about the stakes of the erasure of the sexual in explanations of conflict-related sexual violence. It argues that the particular urgency that accompanies this erasure reflects the workings of familiar distinctions between war and peace, as well as efforts to clearly recognize violence and separate it from sex. Erasing the sexual from accounts of wartime rape thus ultimately reinscribes the normal and the exceptional as separate, and reproduces a reductive notion of heterosexual masculine sex (in peacetime) that is ontologically different from the violence of war.     

Just Before I Recognize Myself: The Role of Featural and Multisensory Cues Leading up to Explicit Mirror Self‐Recognition

Leading up to explicit mirror self‐recognition, infants rely on two crucial sources of information: the continuous integration of sensorimotor and multisensory signals, as when seeing one's movements reflected in the mirror, and the unique facial features associated with the self. While visual appearance and multisensory contingent cues may be two likely candidates of the processes that enable self‐recognition, their respective contribution remains poorly understood. In this study, 18‐month‐old infants saw side‐by‐side pictures of themselves and a peer, which were systematically and simultaneously touched on the face with a hand. While watching the stimuli, the infant's own face was touched either in synchrony or out of synchrony and their preferential looking behavior was measured. Subsequently, the infants underwent the mirror‐test task. We demonstrated that infants who were coded as nonrecognizers at the mirror test spent significantly more time looking at the picture of their own face compared to the other‐face, irrespective of whether the multisensory input was synchronous or asynchronous. Our results suggest that right before the onset of mirror self‐recognition, featural information about the self might be more relevant in the process of recognizing one's face, compared to multisensory cues.     

Challenging the neoliberal view of education: the Center for Ecoliteracy as a transformative educational practice

The neoliberal rationality of recent decades has, as one of its maxims, that of extending market logic to the rest of social dimensions on the basis of competition. However, the spreading of this neoliberal ‘drug’ requires profound political reforms. It calls for a cultural engineering of the public sector which has been fostered by the New Public Management (NPM). This form of governmentality controls current power relations and gives a new meaning to the management of public services, including the educational sector. In this paper, we maintain that there are ‘spaces of resistance’ against the neoliberal educational rationality. We analyse the Center for Ecoliteracy (CFE) as a transformative experience which integrates a holistic perspective into educational practice. We compare the principles of the NPM with those of the CFE, showing that there are more humanistic approaches to education which aim to teach students the need to live in sustainable communities.     

Sexual Risk,Behavior, and HIV Testing and Status Among Male and Transgender Women Sex Workers and Their Clients in Lima,Peru

Objectives: To determine the socio-demographics, sexual practices, and HIV prevalence of male sex workers (MSWs), transwomen sex workers (TSWs), and their male clients in Lima, Peru. Methods: Following ethnographic mapping of sex work venues, the authors revisited randomly selected venues to survey MSWs, TSWs and their clients. Results: MSWs and TSW clients are more educated than MSW clients and TSWs. Only 50% of TSW clients have received HIV testing. Self-reported HIV positivity is highest among MSW clients and TSWs. Conclusion: Notable differences exist between MSWs and TSWs and their clients that can affect the health of these groups and warrant intervention.     

Child and Household Deprivation: A Relationship Beyond Household Socio-demographic Characteristics

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on poverty and social exclusion by analysing the type of deprivation of the household where the child lives and the level of deprivation that child experiences. Using the EU-SILC 2009 module on deprivation for Spain, we find that the level of child deprivation varies among household types, that is, even after controlling for the socio-economic characteristics of the household and parents, the lack of certain items at the household level induces a more intense child deprivation. Therefore, we can conclude that there exists an association between child deprivation and the household deprivation profile that surpasses the socio-demographic characteristics of the household and parents.     

Does Consumer Confidence Forecast Household Saving and Borrowing Behavior? Evidence for Poland

Consumer confidence plays an important role in households’ decision-making processes. This study investigates the effects of consumer confidence on household saving and borrowing behavior that are unsatisfactorily considered in previous discussions. The questions of interest are first, whether indexes of consumer confidence have any predictive power on their own for future household saving and borrowing rates, and second, whether they contain information about future household saving and borrowing rates aside from the information contained in other available indicators. In addition to aggregate confidence indicators, their components are used to provide more precise information. Overall, the multiple linear regression analysis (OLS technique) of Polish time-series data gives positive answers to both questions. This finding supports the recommendation of combining the strengths of objective indicators (such as economic fundamentals) and subjective indicators (such as consumer confidence) to improve household financial behavior forecasts.     

The Role of Family Policy in Explaining the International Variation in Child Subjective Well-Being

The article proposes an innovative analyse for cross-national differences in the subjective child well-being introducing new indicators and measures. This dimension addresses the issue of welfare support to parents and child early education. The question of this research is to what extend family policies can explain the variability of subjective child well-being components in different European countries. Based on this question, the two objective of this proposal are: (1) to review the existing literature with respect to conceptualization, measurement, and correlates of children’s subjective well-being, with a special emphasis on the context of family policies and family well-being in different European welfare states, and (2) to analyse the relation between these policies and subjective child well-being. In order to get these aims we have elaborated two indexes: the index of child subjective well-being and family policy index. Data for HBSC (Health Behaviour in School-aged Children) for the first index and data from OECD Family Database is used to build these indicators. We found that the index of child subjective well-being is comparatively higher in those countries where family policies are more generous in the areas of preschool education, family services, family spending and duration of paid parental leave.