journal article
LitStream Collection
Home
doi: 10.1093/bjsw/bcad001pmid: N/A
Life Story Work (LSW) is an intervention primarily used with care-experienced young people to help them produce a coherent, co-produced life narrative. The intervention has been in circulation since the 1960s, yet it has still been vastly under-researched. This article examines two models of LSW in circulation in the UK today and concludes that each model has its advantages and limitations. However, more research into the outcomes of LSW is needed. The article offers an autoethnographic case study of the author’s own experience of LSW and its potential outcomes to help inspire more researchers examine this vital intervention for a young person’s development.
Black, Billy; Hendry, Bobby; Wright, Amy Conley; Collings, Susan
doi: 10.1093/bjsw/bcac235pmid: N/A
Contact visits, or family time, enable children in out-of-home care to sustain relationships with their birth families. In Australia, direct contact including face-to-face visits is typical for children on long-term orders, including guardianship and open adoption. Caseworkers are charged with supporting relationships between children’s birth family members and carers and ensuring contact is safe and child-centred. This article describes how people with lived experience of family time in out-of-home care have collaborated with researchers to co-design practical resources, in the context of an action research study aimed at changing caseworker practice. These resources include a book for young children and a book for older children and adolescents, which both use trauma-informed language and empower their audiences to know their rights and ask for what they need. Additional resources include co-designed tip sheets for family members and carers. People who have personally experienced the care system have unique insights into the experience of family time in out-of-home care and how it can be improved. In partnership, researchers and people with lived experience can identify the gaps in knowledge and practice resources, and co-design resources that integrate lived experience and research findings, underpinned by theory.
Sinclair, Aimee; Mahboub, Lyn; Gillieatt, Sue; Fernandes, Christina
doi: 10.1093/bjsw/bcad044pmid: N/A
The personal/professional dichotomy, present within dominant notions of professional boundaries, is an ongoing source of tension within social work. Peer workers, given their positioning as both service users and workers, are uniquely placed to contribute to pre-existing efforts in unsettling this dichotomy. Our analysis, informed by dialogic sharing and theorising with fifteen peer support workers, alongside post-humanist and critical mental health approaches, considers the oppressive effects of enacting a personal/professional dichotomy within mental health settings, and conversely, the emancipatory potential of unsettling the dichotomy. Rather than conceptualising such events as boundary ‘crossings’, ‘incursions’ or ‘transgressions’, we suggest (re)imagining professional boundaries as multiple, enacted through ever-shifting socio-material relations. Our analysis supports pre-existing calls for a relational ethic of social work and highlights how lived experience and post-humanism can support the discipline’s commitment to anti-oppressive practices. We recommend further research, informed by lived experience, to explore the complex relations that constitute boundary practices and their effects for both social workers and service users.
doi: 10.1093/bjsw/bcad049pmid: N/A
Every year thousands of young people are sent to therapeutic boarding schools (TBS) in the USA. TBS are residential programmes that combine educational classes and group therapy in self-contained facilities that operate year-round. The programmes are part of a wider ‘troubled teen industry’ that seeks to reform young people perceived as having mental health and/or substance misuse problems. Interviews were conducted with former TBS students about their experiences as youth inside these facilities. The research was undertaken from a survivor–researcher approach and was conducted by a former TBS student with former students. This article will focus on the experiences of two LGBTQ+ former students who were subjected to conversion therapy in TBS. The case studies will describe conversion practices that pressure people to change or suppress their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. Conversion therapy manifested in overt and covert forms that resulted in lasting psychological trauma. The case studies highlight the impacts of conversion therapy as epistemic injustice and the ways in which the former students adapted to and resisted institutional harm. Implications for practice include the importance for social workers to understand conversion therapy as a dynamic, evolving and potentially subtle practice.
doi: 10.1093/bjsw/bcac229pmid: N/A
In recent years, there has been growing interest in exploring the experiences of autistic adults through a lens that adopts emancipatory theorisations of autism. However, despite this changing terrain, autistic people remain a highly subjugated population. Research has begun to theorise a distinctive form of epistemic injustice they encounter in which they are denied access to epistemic resources by a society that valorises cognitively normative ways of being, knowing and existing. An under-explored aspect of this emerging literature relates to the experiences of autistic mothers who are, themselves, much more likely to have autistic children. Evidence suggests that they may be at a substantially increased risk of involuntary social work interventions. This study explores the nature of these experiences, drawing on interviews with autistic mothers as well as my own, lived experiences as an autistic mother. It finds that, through a neuro-normative lens of social work scrutiny, indicators of neuro-divergency in both mothers and children are considered perplexing and assigned malign meanings by those with hermeneutic privilege. This was particularly evident in social work responses to children’s difficulties in attending school, with these difficulties located in mothers rather than in exclusionary, hostile school environments.
Aversa, Giuseppe; Filistrucchi, Petra
doi: 10.1093/bjsw/bcad064pmid: N/A
The issue of institutional abuse (IA) in out-of-home care services is a difficult one, which we struggle to think about and which is slow to find attention and recognition: the victims are those children who, after experiencing maltreatment and abuse in the family, still suffer violence in the residential care services that should protect them. It represents the failure of the public system in protecting children, and it is often the result of institutions and professionals who allow, collude, cover, justify and minimise violence against children. Starting from a recent and paradigmatic Italian story and from the contribution of experience and thought of those who, as the first author, survived it, as well as from the analysis of the existing literature, this article examines the specific characteristics and dynamics of IA that motivate the extreme difficulty of its emergence. This article aims to improve professionals’ awareness concerning the phenomenon and their responsibilities in the prevention and early detection. For professionals and services to see institutional maltreatment implies questioning themselves, their own methodological tools and their own professional practices, as well as opening themselves to the concrete possibility of being able—at least—to make serious mistakes.
Showing 1 to 10 of 77 Articles