The social services response to unaccompanied children in England

In England, social services departments have a duty to provide care and protection to unaccompanied asylum seeking children from the point they arrive in the country. In recent years, research studies have identified a number of practice and policy issues of concern regarding the social services response to unaccompanied children. This paper focuses on three broad issues that emerge from the literature. The paper explores research concerns associated with (i) the referral and assessment process, (ii) the use of the child welfare legislative framework, and (iii) a number of issues arising from the provision of placements and other support offered to unaccompanied children. The findings of the research reviewed demonstrate that there are indeed clear grounds for concern. However, this paper argues that the evidence base is relatively weak and that as a result we know very little about the nature and context of the social work response to this group of children and young people.     

Storytelling as a tool: A family-based intervention for newly resettled Syrian refugee children

The conflict in Syria has resulted in a humanitarian emergency and one of the largest refugee crises in history. The Canadian government has welcomed over 40,000 Syrian refugees. Stressors caused by instability, conflict, and the resettlement process put refugee children at high risk for mental health problems. Anxiety is a common problem experienced by refugee children. Thus, early intervention is crucial to promote their adequate adaptation and development. This study explores the impact and value of a culturally specific family-based storybook intervention for newly resettled Syrian refugee children. Six refugee families participated. Anxiety symptoms were measured before and after the intervention, and families shared their experiences, thoughts, and feedback regarding the intervention. The results showed a significant decrease in children's anxiety symptoms. Furthermore, qualitative analyses demonstrated that the intervention was culturally relevant to Syrian refugee families and that it was effective in promoting children's overall well-being, agency, and family connectedness.     

The comfort of strangers: social work practice with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and young people in the UK

Unaccompanied children and young people seeking sanctuary as political refugees are increasingly visible within many industrialized nations, where several studies confirm their vulnerability and needs. These studies also highlight what appears to be the poor quality of social work services and practices that these minors encounter. This paper examines some of the details contained in such reports of deficiency and seeks to place them within a more optimistic appraisal of social work practice. Based on a small research study, it suggests that resettlement for unaccompanied minors is complex and contains different types of loss as well as gain. It also asserts that practice by some social workers shows they have a grasp of this complexity as they offer practical assistance, therapeutic care and companionship to the young people to help them resettle in new environments.     

气候变化所致国际损害赔偿责任研究

气候变化问题正在威胁着全人类的生存与发展,一部分国家已经遭受到了巨大的损害,这些损害应当由谁来赔偿并且如何赔偿成了困扰受害国的主要问题。从气候变化所致国际损害赔偿责任入手,研究该责任的法律依据,确定气候变化所致国际损害赔偿责任主体为全人类,通过政府间合作组织成立专项基金会的方式来分担全人类的共同责任,试图为受害国建立一个气候变化所致国际损害赔偿基金,以此来保障受害人的权利,并为进一步解决气候变化问题,加强全球合作提供一个契机。     

Syrian refugee men as objects of humanitarian care

Critical feminist scholars of conflict and displacement have demonstrated that “womenandchildren” (Enloe 1993) have become an uncontroversial object of humanitarian concern in these contexts (Carpenter 2003; Hyndman and Giles 2011). Yet very little scholarly work has attempted to understand the position of refugee men as a demographic within humanitarianism. Through an analysis of the Syria refugee response in Jordan, this article investigates how humanitarian workers relate to refugee men and think about refugee masculinities. It argues that refugee men have an uncertain position as objects of humanitarian care. Seeing refugee men as objects of humanitarian care would disrupt prevailing humanitarian understandings of refugeehood as a feminized subject position and of gender work as work that “helps women” (Cornwall 2007; Johnson 2011). It would furthermore challenge prevailing binary visions of refugee men as agential, political actors, and refugee women as in need of “empowerment” through the implementation of technocratic programming. In the context of the Syria refugee response, these gendered and racialized understandings of refugee men and masculinities are mediated by particular conceptions of “Arabness.” This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews with humanitarian workers and Syrian refugees, which was undertaken in Jordan in 2015–2016.     

Manufacturing Kinship in a Nation Divided: An Ethnographic Study of North Korean Refugees in South Korea

The South Korean government continues to practice variants of what Stephan Castles (1995) calls ‘differential exclusion’, in which citizenship in the nation state for North Koreans does not confer membership in civil society. For new arrivals from North Korea, many of whom have developed a distinct distrust of anything governmental, interaction with representatives of the South Korean state bares a chilling resemblance to that which they left behind in the North.

This article argues that for newly-arrived North Koreans the failure at state level does not mean they are entirely cast adrift, as religious and secular institutions within civil society are shouldering more of the burden of adaptation for the newcomers. This article endeavours to further our understanding of the significance of these groups as spaces where, for persons in exile, the meaning of home is recreated through acts of intimate exchange and relationships are formed that have the potential to become a form of pseudo-kinship.     

Globalisation,identity and the state

The government of Botswana had to strike a fine balance between not isolating the liberation movements, not letting them use Botswana as a military base and not appearing to harbour ‘terrorists’. The government realised that overtly supporting the liberation movements was potentially suicidal, for the country could easily be punished by South Africa: trade links could be severed and communication networks paralysed. The settler regimes did try to infiltrate and weaken the liberation movements in Botswana and carried out acts such as kidnapping, intimidation and deportation, to try to prevent the liberation movements from threatening the status quo in southern Africa. Using evidence from the Botswana National Archives, oral interviews, and newspaper reports, the article examines the means the Botswana government adopted to deal with the situation and safeguard the security of its citizens.     

PERFORMING SOMALI IDENTITY IN THE DIASPORA

Somali refugees who fled the collapse of their homeland and resettled in the US narrate ‘who they are’ within a bewildering entanglement of cultural differences layered with diasporic tensions. This analysis examines the storytelling of a young woman refugee to Lewiston, Maine, who embodies the performative tensions that animate Somali identity at this intense historical moment and in this dense cultural space. I follow her unfolding counter/narrative dance within the confluence of gazes – feminist, colonialist, multiculturalist, and academic – which dialogically inform the possibilities of her identity as she contests definitions of Somali ethnicity, feminism, blackness, and Islam. Her storytelling circulates and reworks two dominant narratives used to explain Somali identity: identity-as-culture and identity-as-religion. Performance analysis of her storytelling makes evident that Somali culture and Islamic religion are co-articulated as well as inescapably liminal and localized by the bodily differences of gender and race in the diaspora. I problematize the narrative event as a dialogic, co-constructed, and transnational encounter in which the narrator reads and talks back to regulating discourses at the same time that I question my own complicity in dominant designs. The narrative performance and analysis display a Somali ethnicity fleshed out, critically inflected, and creatively nuanced by the diaspora which inserts an emerging Somali story in US immigration narratives.     

Refugees and asylum seekers living in the Australian community: the importance of work rights and employment support

While Australian legislation allows for the mandatory detention of asylum seekers arriving without a valid visa, in recent years the Australian Government has released thousands from immigration detention prior to their protection claims being finalised. This article outlines the results of interviews with eleven men who had been released into such community‐based arrangements after long periods of immigration detention. The major challenge for most of the men who had been granted the right to work upon their release was securing employment, while being denied the right to work was the major challenge for those released without this right. This article explores the social and personal benefits that employment can offer asylum seekers and refugees and the implications it has for integration into their host country.     

The racialisation of African youth in Australia

In this paper I argue that patterns of reporting on ‘African youth’ in Australia show how both the constraints under which the media operates and the wider sources of institutional racism contribute to new applications of racialising frames. I seek to establish specific patterns of racialisation through an analysis of newspaper articles appearing in Melbourne over a roughly two month period when media attention was focused on a series of violent incidents in which African refugees were identified as either victims or perpetrators. Initial reporting is determined by journalistic reliance on police accounts of incidents involving a racially defined ‘problem group’ as evidence of the predispositions of this group within a wider narrative of worsening gang crime. The racialising premises established by police are retained even in subsequent coverage framed by the problematic of ‘integration’. Despite racism being identified and named in the course of reporting, it remains subsumed under the weight of frames which assume that the problem lies essentially with the ‘problem group’.