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Shortly after the Berlin Wall came down and after the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted by the United Nations, images of malnourished children in institutions in Romania were broadcast by international media. They showed inhumane conditions in which children were living in residential institutions in Romania. Those visiting the institutions were surprised that the babies were silent. The so-called Romanian orphans made headlines for many years to come and they became subjects of several international research studies. To become a member of the European Union, Romania had to reform its child protection system. This book sheds light on the lived experiences of those born around 1990. Their childhoods were subject to successive reforms and sometimes divergent external influences. Most of them became adults around 2007 when the country joined the EU. Uniquely, the book brings together the accounts of those who stayed in institutions, those who grew up in foster care and those adopted, in Romania and internationally. Their narratives challenge stereotypes about these types of care.

This book brings together contributions from a range of social welfare settings, including child welfare, unemployment, mental health and substance abuse treatment, to examine how the ambitions of interprofessional collaboration and service user participation are realised or challenged in multi-agency meetings. It provides empirically grounded analyses of specific aspects of multi-agency work and offers a distinctive conceptual framework for understanding and analysing interaction during meetings in social welfare settings. Based on audio and video recordings of actual meetings, the authors examine examples of exchanges between service users and social welfare professionals and demonstrate how the realisation of collaborative and integrated welfare policy is contingent on effective interactional practices between professionals and service users.

This book examines a participatory approach in child protection practices in Norway and the United States, exploring ways of empowering children. The book shows how children can be encouraged to develop and express their own opinions and explores tools for child protection workers to negotiate complex boundaries around the inclusion of children in decision-making. The goal of the book is to show in what ways child protection caseworkers employed by public child protection agencies in Norway and the United States can create citizens by promoting the participation of children and young people in their everyday practice. Public child protection agencies are only one part of the citizenship piece, but they are a salient one in the lives of children and young people who encounter them. Child protection caseworkers working in public child protection agencies, make very important decisions about children and young people's lives and provide children, youth, and families with pertinent services. The book presents valuable insights from front-line child protection professionals' unique perspectives and experiences within two very different systems, and evaluates the impacts of different organizational practices in promoting children's participation.

Amidst a context in which the burden of early-years care continues to fall heavily on women, Sharing Care examines the experiences of the minority of fathers who take on an equal or greater share of caregiving for babies and young children. Drawing on detailed qualitative research in the UK, the book outlines the nature of equal and primary carer fathers’ experiences, paying particular attention to what prompted them to take on their unusual roles, how they and their families adjusted over time and the nature of the challenges they encountered. The authors argue that, for many such fathers, taking on an equal or primary care role represented a significant and unexpected shift in their horizons and the beginning of a journey towards experiencing themselves as largely interchangeable with their partners in their role as parents. Yet the book also explores how cultural and practical context around them generated challenges to the development of fathers’ caregiving, leaving certain responsibilities still centred on mothers. The book’s conclusions highlight the potential for fatherhoods and masculinities to be transformed by the experience of taking on of everyday care responsibilities, but also how such journeys can be constrained by enduring assumptions of default maternal responsibility that remain embedded in understandings, interactions and policy.

This book aims to approach the phenomenon of shame, especially in the context of social work. It explores the profoundly damaging experience of shame on the identities and potential of many service users, who, through, for example, the stigmatised experiences of poverty or abuse, are silenced within and disconnected from full participation in societies and communities. The book considers shame as a social, moral, and politically generated phenomenon, but equally focuses on the powerful, painful experience of each individual subjected to shaming. Having set out key contextual issues and theoretical approaches to understand shame, the book turns its attention to service users, more specifically young people and the poor. Finally, it offers examples of shame in relation to how social workers experience this in organisations and through, for example, human mistakes and limitations. In relation to shamed social workers and shamed service users, attention is given to how it might be possible to begin to address this painful state.

This book describes the new Poverty-Aware Paradigm (PAP), which was developed in Israel through intense involvement with the field of social work in various initiatives. The paradigm was adopted in 2014 by the Israeli Ministry of Welfare and Social Services as a leading paradigm for social workers in social services departments. The book draws from the rich experience of the implementation of the PAP in practice and connects examples of practice to theoretical ideas from radical/critical social work, critical poverty knowledge, and psychoanalysis. The PAP addresses poverty as a violation of human rights and emphasizes people’s ongoing efforts to resist poverty. In order to recognize these sometimes minor acts of resistance and advance their impact, social workers should establish close relationship with service users and stand by them. The book proposes combining relationship-based practice and rights-based practice as a means of bridging the gap between the emotional and material needs of service users. In addition to introducing the main concepts of the PAP, the book also contributes to the debate between conservative and cultural theories of poverty and structural theories, emphasizing the impact of a critical framework on this debate. The book consists of four parts. The first, “Transformation”, addresses the transformational nature of the paradigm. The second, “Recognition”, is based on current psychoanalytic developments and “translates” them into social work practice in order to deepen our understanding of relationship-based practice. The third, “Rights”, describes rights-based practice. The fourth, “Solidarity”, presents various ways in which solidarity might shape social workers’ practice. The book seeks to reaffirm social work’s core commitment to combating poverty and furthering social justice and to offer a solid theoretical conceptualization that is also eminently practical.

This book presents new research on the extent to which parents and children participate in decision making when childcare social workers are involved and it considers two key meetings in depth: child protection conferences and child in care reviews. There is currently a great deal of interest in how social workers can work more effectively with families and in particular give children a voice. There is also considerable public and media interest in the child protection system, in particular relating to how children are safeguarded by social workers. This book will argue that unless we listen to (and act upon whenever possible) the views of children it is very difficult to safeguard and offer them an effective service. The unique selling point of the book will be that it is based on original solid empirical research following interviews with multiple stakeholders across two local authorities in England including children (n=75), parents (n=52), social workers (n=11, independent reviewing officers (n=8) and senior managers (n=7). This book will consider how 10 years of austerity has impacted on the child protection system and it will have a particular focus on how current practice leads to children and parents often feeling oppressed and excluded in decision making about their lives. The book promises to be authoritative and informed on issues on the ground and very relevant to both policy and practice.

2020 is the 50^th anniversary of a turning point in the development of social work in the UK. It is half a century since the creation of a unified association of social workers, the development of a unified training for social workers regardless of the setting in which they worked and the passage of the Local Authority Social Services Act.

As the number of people affected by dementia continues to rise, this is the first in-depth examination of related services dedicated to the unique demands of remote and rural settings. Contributors from the UK, Australia, North America and Europe explore the experiences and requirements of those living with dementia and those caring for them in personal and professional capacities in challenging geographical locations. For practitioners, researchers, academics and policy makers, this book is an essential review of evidence and strategies to date, and a guide to future research needs and opportunities for improvements in rural dementia practice.

Comparative research has identified two broad types of child welfare system. In child protection systems the principal remit of welfare agencies is to identify and respond to actual or potential incidences of child abuse or maltreatment. In contrast family service systems are characterised by a stronger spirit of partnership between the state and families and an emphasis on working to prevent the need for coercive state intervention. This book examines the development of children’s services reform in England over recent decades to explain a shift from family service polices towards a narrower child protection approach. Successive waves of reform in England have invariably been framed as responses to high-profile child abuse inquires and media generated scandal including the cases of Victoria Climbié and Baby P. However, this book challenges the idea that it is the apparent failings of local agencies, including child and family social workers, that drive successive waves of reform. Instead, it turns the spotlight on the process of policy-making at the national level, and highlights the role played by party political leaders and senior government ministers in driving reform. The book is informed by 45 interviews with key decision-makers including ministers, senior civil servants, children’s charity leaders, local authority directors and social work researchers.