As the sun sets on our editorship of this journal, we in the UK, like many parts of
the world, are having to live with the ‘new normal’ of sharing our lives with the
potentially deadly virus, COVID-19. Across the globe, countries are adopting variations
on how to manage this threat, including serious restrictions on travel, social distancing
and lockdowns. As the pendulum swings between severe measures and easing of measures,
recording and accounting for death tolls, realising the longer-term health, economic
and social consequences and grappling with plans for recovery, reviewing our five
years as editors pale in significance. Nevertheless, in our time as Editors, we have
sought to draw attention to the social, political, economic and ethical contexts in
which social work operates, including the implications of this current pandemic. In
recent Editorials, we have focused on the heightened vulnerability of certain groups,
many of whom are long-term users of social work and social care services, as well
as the impact on those trying to manage without the supports which have previously
been their lifeline. Others may be structurally disadvantaged in society or in the
workforce; although the virus can be deadly, and there is no vaccine or cure as of
yet, not all people are equally threatened. It appears, at least, that Black, Asian
and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities have a higher mortality rate and significant
overcrowded housing makes people vulnerable as does older age and underlying health
conditions.
Much is still to be learnt, including for social work practice. The impact of lockdown
and social distancing presents, at first sight, a significant threat to the relationship-based
skills on which social work has traditionally relied and reasserted the importance
of in the last decade. Home visits using visors and other personal protection equipment;
the prohibition of reassuring touch with fearful, distressed or confused individuals;
online conferencing and meetings replacing more inclusive and potentially supportive
multi-professional decision-making fora: these are just some of the changes forced
upon us which challenge our preferred modes of interaction. In some specialist fields,
such as hospital and hospice social work, social workers have had to cede the mediatory
and supportive roles they traditionally perform with patients and their families to
already over-stretched nurses and doctors. Not all is bad, however, as bureaucracy
is reduced and more efficient ways of working are also emerging. There is a new respect
for frontline social care workers who are caring for the most vulnerable often at
great risk to themselves. One thing that is clear, is that social work, along with
allied professions, must adapt and change but do so without losing sight of its core
ethos and skills.
In so doing, as classical crisis theory taught us (Caplan, 1964), we must draw on
previous experiences of loss and challenge as we seek the way out of this current
crisis. Here is where theory and research must play its part and the British Journal
of Social Work will, we are confident, prove up to the task of dissemination of emerging
responses and critical debate—as it has in the past.
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In considering the content of this our valedictory Editorial, we returned to the plans
for the journal which we had outlined at the outset. Our aims were 3-fold: we wanted
to facilitate front line debate between research and practice, embracing ethics, policy
and education alongside; we wanted to support the visibility and development of the
social work research community and specifically highlighted social work Ph.D.s; we
wanted to strengthen and widen the international appeal of the BJSW. All three of
these objectives are critical for social work to go forward after what has been termed
the greatest threat to human society of modern times. Arguably, however, this is a
very first-world perspective. Globally, the poorest and most socially disadvantaged
people are also the worst affected by climate change and the developing field of green
social work needs to be high on our agenda. The threat of pandemic and climate change
are interconnected and economists, for example, are beginning to see green solutions
as also the way forward in economic recovery. Recovery of a sense of well-being after
the stress, loneliness, isolation and anxiety or fear experienced by many of the most
disadvantaged and vulnerable in our communities, must cause us to consider what resources
those of us more fortunate have been able to draw upon—and how to support service
users in finding and connecting with these, whether it be accessing a green space,
engaging in a therapeutic activity or reconnecting with buried spiritual resources.
The literature on spirituality (religious and secular) and especially eco-spirituality
may assist here:
There will be moments when the deeply negative aspects of our work, indeed of human
existence, threaten to overturn and crack open our carefully constructed world-views
as we try to make new sense of it all …. This journey into the relatively unknown
territory of social work and spirituality is, we suggest, a new way of ‘knowing’,
fit for purpose when facing the challenges of contemporary social work. (Holloway
and Moss, 2010, p. 182)
The articles which we publish in this issue each address one or more of our three
initial aims. They also show social work striving for new knowledge, or ‘ways of knowing’
as it grapples with both new challenges and those well-rehearsed ‘wicked problems’.
Supporting social work research
Although all articles published in the BJSW are, of course, evidence of social work
research, the five grouped together at the start of this issue show some of the new
directions being taken as well as providing evidence of the growing strength of the
social work research community at all levels. First, an Australian team (Waling, Lyons,
Alba, Minichiello, Barrett, Hughes, Fredriksen-Goldsen and Edmonds) presents their
qualitative study of older trans women’s perceptions of residential care. Their findings
show how past experiences of discrimination and abuse had fuelled fears about institutional
care in the future, including that they might not have appropriate health care and
treatment options available, to the extent that many were actively putting in place
alternative care plans. This study was funded by the Australian Research Council and
has the potential to influence health and social care services for the trans community
not only in Australia but also wider. Next, a UK team (Wilberforce, Abendstern, Batool,
Boland, Challis, Christian, Hughes, Kinder, Lake-Jones, Mistry, Pitts and Roberts)
looks at what service users want from mental health social work. Pointing out that
most studies of mental health social work present the views of social workers, this
research was co-produced with services users. Funded by the National Institute for
Health Research (NIHR) School for Social Care Research, this research also makes an
important contribution to the interprofessional literature by distinguishing the hallmarks
(as rated by service users) of good social work practise in mental health. A single-authored
ethnographic study follows, from Mira Sörmark. Located in Sweden, this study nevertheless
looks at an issue of growing international concern, intimate partner violence perpetrated
by men towards female partners. Interestingly, Sörmark also suggests that the only
way to understand these men’s accounts (and hence to develop effective social work
interventions) is through a rich appreciation of their lived experience, which incorporates
both internal individual worlds and external structural explanations. This research
is representative of the social work tradition of small, theory-driven qualitative
studies conducted by a single researcher. The next article comes from Ireland and
is an example of a growing trend in social work research—the longitudinal qualitative
study. Burns, Christie and O’Sullivan looked at the problem of retention amongst child
protection and child welfare social workers, identified as an issue in a number of
European countries. However, whilst much attention has been given to turnover, particularly
in the early years post-qualification, this study found that those social workers
who stayed the course beyond five years became progressively more embedded and committed
to this specialism. This has important implications for the duty and motivation of
employers to offer a supportive environment in which social workers may develop confidence
and expertise. The critical effect of the work environment is emphasised by Astvik,
Welander and Larsson, who also looked at worker retention in another longitudinal
study, this time of Swedish social services. Their focus was on the impact of the
new public management style on social workers’ levels of stress and burnout, rather
than the content of the work per se, but the overriding conclusions mirror that of
the Irish study.
International agenda
In this section, we have selected articles which illustrate the range of issues and
location of authors across the globe which find their way into the pages of the BJSW.
First, Hassan, Siddiqu and Friedman analyse through a quantitative study the impact
of infertility on women in Pakistan. The authors show how an issue which in the west
might seem to belong primarily to health care not social work, becomes very much social
work’s concern in a context in which infertility is critically bound up with stigma,
marginalisation, oppression, intimate partner violence and consequent negative effects
on women’s health and well-being. Next, a Chinese-American team (Wang, Victor, Hong,
Wu, Huang, Luan and Perron) applied a systematic review of empirical intervention
studies to explore the care of children left behind in mainland China whilst their
parents seek employment abroad. Funded by the National Social Science Fund of China,
the authors suggest that the sheer scale of the problem of children made vulnerable
and at-risk by this practice, demands priority attention from the still new profession
of social work in China. Again, although not unknown in countries with well-developed
child welfare systems, this research shines a light on a practice little studied to
date.
Moving to Australasia, Petersen and Parsel examine a problem common in developed countries—homelessness—looking
specifically at the plight of homeless older people. Although their conclusion that
housing, older people’s care and health services must intersect to tackle this problem
is not new, their placing this into the context of troubled family relationships as
a cause of older people’s homelessness highlights an angle, central to social work,
which is not usually the first consideration. From New Zealand, Raewyn Tudor looks
at an increasingly important field for social work in the twenty-first century in
an article looking at how social workers responded to natural disaster in the aftermath
of the 2011 Earthquake in Christchurch. Tudor used a positive critique to examine
the practice accounts of school social workers, putting them alongside the main features
of recovery policies which provide for individual assistance for vulnerable groups
who are unlikely to access community self-help initiatives. The social workers used
therapeutically inclined relational work with their clients to encourage their well-being.
The increasing involvement of social workers in post-disaster work will be returned
to in a forthcoming special issue of this journal.
To round up this focus on international social work, the next two articles (from Norway
and Belgium, respectively) examine how social workers respond to the intractable social
problem of poverty and suggest that poverty-aware social work requires a critical
and sustained commitment to move beyond individual self-reflection towards critical
analysis of the political, economic and social policy contexts in which we work. Throughout
Europe, there has been a trend towards increased levels of child poverty; although
this is greater in Southern and Eastern countries, no country has challenged this
trend. Malmberg-Heimoneen and Tϕge used a cluster-randomised design to examine government
and family interventions in Norway and their impact upon child poverty. Roets, Van
Bevern, Saar-Heiman, Degerickx and Vandekinderen focus on students’ understandings
of poverty in a study conducted in Flanders, Belgium. Building on the central notion
that social workers need to be able to understand poverty in a conceptual framework
embracing individual, cultural and structural explanations of poverty in order that
they can adopt a way of working that is both critical and reflexive, their article
offers a qualitative analysis of the reflections that students made about the learning
process in a post-academic course and suggest ways in which teaching can help social
workers better understand social issues. Both these studies emphasise the need for
structural explanations and a social work practice that is rooted in the community.
Research and social work practice
This final group of articles all provide examples of research directly informing social
work practise in different ways. The first article (Mendes and Rogers) examines young
people who are moving from Out-of-Home Care and looks at what lessons Australian social
work practice can learn from the extended care programmes in the USA and England.
They examine public evaluations of extended care programmes and make recommendations
for future Australian programmes for care leavers. The next article (Talbot, Fuggle,
Foyston and Lawson) has an interconnected theme of care services and provides an evaluation
over ten years of the Adolescent Multi-Agency Specialist Service, an edge of care
service provided in Islington, England. It also represents effective co-working between
academics and practitioners. It is generally agreed that late entry to the care system
often has poorer outcomes for the individual and if care can be prevented for adolescents
then this would be beneficial. The complex needs of the adolescent and family provide
significant challenges for social work services and other agencies. Continuing the
theme of children in care, Shaw and Greenhow report on recent research that examined
the perceptions of professionals about the sexual and criminal exploitation of children
in care. Based in the north-west of England and using focus groups and semi-structured
interviews they provide further evidence of the vulnerability of children who are
‘looked after’ and how this can be exploited. Significantly they raise the issue of
an approach that is all too often prosecution-led rather than seeing children as a
vulnerable group open to exploitation.
Few could doubt that at the present time many countries have to work out how to respond
to the arrival at their borders of large numbers of asylum seekers. So, the article
by Larkin and Lefevre is timely in that they examine the complex inter-subjective
encounters of unaccompanied minors (under age eighteen years) who usually have little
understanding of the role of social workers. These are a diverse group of young people
who are generally underrepresented in the literature and this article helps to shed
light on the many challenges they face.
Niamh Flanagan, in a single-authored article, takes a step back from the notion of
research informing practise to consider the wide range of sources which practitioners
use to inform their practice. She suggests that social workers adopt a pragmatic approach
to the gathering of information that includes, but by no means is limited to, research.
One such example is provided in the next article in which an academic researcher and
a researcher–practitioner based in Seville, Spain, evaluate a project utilising the
role of theatre in social work. The article by Muñoz-Bellerín and Cordero-Ramos covers
a decade of working alongside homeless individuals in which theatre is used as a tool
to promote capacity within the group with consequent empowerment. With echoes of community
social work in the UK and the powerful writing of Boal (1979), the article makes for
informative reading demonstrating how it might be possible to create informal spaces
where marginalised people can interact meaningfully with mainstream society.
This seems an appropriate note on which to conclude our final Editorial. We wish the
new editors and future writers in the BJSW good courage and good fortune as they take
up the reins and look forward to seeing the journal go from strength to strength.