Child protection and family support practice in Ireland: a contribution to present debates from a historical perspective

This paper takes the opportunity of the current child welfare system change in Ireland to promote the value of learning from history to better understand the interface between family support and child protection. The paper draws from the histories of child protection and family support to illuminate the commonalities and differences that have come to define the two practices. Using findings from two historical studies – one on family support and the other on child protection – the paper demonstrates the unique features and the many integrated elements of family support and child protection in Ireland. It is argued that students and practitioners need to be provided with a stronger sense of the historical developments that have shaped the present. This will enable comprehension of the complex context within which current relations between ‘protection’ and ‘support’ are negotiated and help to avoid operating in a vacuum of a present only viewpoint. The paper concludes with reference to the need for students and practitioners to navigate the complex relationship between family support and child protection at practice, policy and organizational level through a well‐informed knowledge of the historical as well as the present context.     

Malta: Language,Literacy and Identity in a Mediterranean Island Society

Available documentation for the early modern period indicates that the Malta harbour towns achieved literacy earlier than the countryside. The Maltese townsmen lived on a trading route, and it was necessary for them to learn the lingua franca, as the language of trade in the Mediterranean. The educated élite were able to acquire fluent speaking knowledge, as well as the ability to write, Tuscan (a dialect then in the process of becoming standard Italian), while continuing to employ their local Maltese 'dialect' on numerous occasions. By and large, the erosion of the position of Maltese as the subordinate language was an inevitable by-product of this development. The Maltese language was able to attain the function of a literary language in the nineteenth century but it had no standard orthography until 1931 and was only adopted as Malta's official language in 1964.     

Power and Knowledge: The Case of the New Epistemology

This paper is in part a critique of the new epistemology. However, its focus is not the content of the new epistemology, but rather the process of the generation and legitimisation of knowledge which is represented by the new epistemology. It is argued that the new epistemology has been embedded in foundationalism, or a framework that poses epistemology as the (legitimate) base of thinking, knowledge and practice. This is a very conservative process of knowledge, as it allows the censorship of other ideas and knowledges in family therapy. My critique is part of a wider project of exploring the relationship of knowledge and power. To this extent, the new epistemology can be used as a case to illustrate the powerful effects of knowledge, and to remind us of the importance of allowing the space for differences in knowledge to enrich the field of family therapy.     

Essential Conditions for Research with Children with Autism: Issues Raised by Two Case Studies

This article discusses conditions for research into the social experiences of children with autism in real‐life contexts using material from case studies of two boys with autism and their friends in mainstream school settings. It is argued that essential conditions for research with children with autism in ordinary social contexts should include a participatory approach, take a wide perspective of group processes, and account for multiple influences on social behaviour. Socially focused, participatory research design allows the social competencies that children with autism do have to be seen and produces multiple perspectives on children's social activity. Children and adults thinking together and sharing their ideas about the nature of experience for a child with autism and their friends allows for shared interpretations and reduces the very real possibility of one researcher alone making wrong assumptions about the nature of the investigation.     

Three Journeys Toward The Reflecting Team

The experience of familiestrainee and supervisory therapists involved in reflecting team work are explored through the metaphor of ‘journey’ and by asking a small number of our colleagues and clients about their experiences. Ideas gained from this approach are tentatively used to raise some questions about the reflecting team specifically and the current direction of family therapy. More rigorous research into this area is invited.     

Postmodernism,constructionism and the idea of reality: A contribution to the ‘ism’ discussions

There has been a tendency to negate the idea of an external reality in the current systemic uses of postmodernist and social constructionist ideas. Postmodernism challenges us to abandon the modernist idea of reality, but as therapists we are still left needing to understand the social and emotional worlds which our clients inhabit. Social constructionist theory has become attractive in the attempt to advance new understandings of those realities. However, there is a critical distinction between a version of social constructionism which defines the realities of the social world as being (simply) social constructions, versus a version which uses the idea of social construction to understand how we come to know and experience the social world. Both versions are often run together in the systemic discussions, but it is the second version which allows the acknowledgment of the existence of external realities separate to our constructions of them. This paper argues that it is important to allow the space for an understanding of ‘the subject, the world and the space in-between’ in thinking about the idea of reality in the domain of therapy.     

Severe self-neglect: an epidemiological and historical perspective

Older adults with severe self-neglect have multiple deficits in various social, functional and physical domains, and often live insqualor. These individuals often present with poor personal hygiene, domestic squalor and hoarding which results in a threat to their own health as well as personal and public safety. Severe self-neglect occurs along a continuum with older adults often having cognitive and affective disorders compared with younger individuals presenting with psychiatric illnesses. In cases of severe self-neglect with hoarding, evidence has shown this behavior occurs in diverse social strata and not among the wealthy and professionals alone as believed earlier. Due to the multiple conditions associated with severe self-neglect, this population will require an interdisciplinary, multidimensional approach to reduce morbidity and mortality rates including nursing home placement. Research on this group has been limited and is rarely described in the medical and nursing literature. Future research is needed to provide practitioners with effective screening instruments and interventions on cases of severe self-neglect.     

Reflective learning in social work education: Scaffolding the process

This article examines the contribution of reflective learning in social work education to professional self-construction of social workers in Ireland. It suggests a framework for scaffolding this process on a post-graduate programme and gives an account of the issues and dilemmas faced by the authors in implementing this framework. The article focuses on the construction of a 'learning community', which facilitates and scaffolds reflective teaching/learning, in two particular course modules, the Use of Self in Social Work and the Practice Skills Laboratory. The authors document the underlying theoretical constructs utilised and the practical implications for the learning environment.     

The Therapist's Imagination of Self in Relation to Clients: Beginning Ideas on the Flexibility of Empathic Imagination

The therapist's capacity to imagine is one specific part of the endeavour of empathy which lies at the heart of the processes of the therapeutic relationship. This article offers beginning ideas about the significance of therapist's imagination of self in relation to her/his clients in the task of trying to understand their experience. In seeking to ‘understand’ the experience of others, the therapist is able to move between an imagination of sameness/identification with the client/s, and an imagination of difference/‘foreignness’. The family therapy orientation of curiosity and ‘not‐knowing’ relies on the imagination of self as different to our clients; more traditional understandings of empathic connection rely more heavily on the imagination of sameness/identification with clients. This article argues that flexibility in the therapist's use of self in moving between these positions allows an expanded capacity for therapeutic connectedness. These ideas have special valence in the practice territories of impasse and intercultural therapy.