Social work and parent support in reaction to children's antisocial behaviour: constructions and effects

This article focuses on STOP4-7, an ecological early intervention programme for children with serious behavioural problems in Belgium, which includes social skills training for children, management training for parents and classroom management training for teachers. We argue how this type of social work benefits from empirical research on its effects on children and parents. Yet social work research that addresses these questions needs to extend its focus to overt and covert inclusion and exclusion mechanisms that operate through social work. Finally, we argue that, in the case of STOP4-7, social work is embedded in the process of social and political framing of the problems it is supposed to solve. By extending the focus of social work research to the very construction of social problems, we show how social workers may perform their agency as reflective practitioners, rather than being objects of interventions.