Abstract
This issue of International Social Work contains seven papers from authors writing about social work policy, practice, education and research across Europe, North and South America, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
First, Sema Buz, Ozlem Cankurtaran Ontas and Burcu Hatiboglu examine the views of Turkish social work students towards social justice. They highlight the complexity of the concept of social justice for educators and practitioners and trace the development of social welfare in the Turkish context. Using a methodology based on the earlier International Social Justice Project, a cross European research project, the authors investigate the factors social work students in Turkey found to be related to injustice, as well as their views on the state’s responsibilities and the role of social workers in the struggle against injustice. The authors argue that the findings of their study underline the need for anti-oppressive social work practices that are both ethnically and religiously sensitive, emphasising too the need for social workers to advocate for and empower those subject to injustice. At the same time, the students were uncertain about their own role in criticising the state and taking part in direct actions to address political and social injustice. These are interesting findings in the context of recent political action taking place in Turkey.
Continuing the theme of social work students’ perceptions, Jessica C. M. Li, Yuning Wu and Ivan Y. Sun compare Chinese and American students’ views on responses to intimate partner violence. Using survey data from 639 students, they found that students’ views were predicted by locality, as well as by their attitudes towards, and awareness of, intimate partner violence. Chinese students were less likely than their American counterparts to favour criminal justice responses, believing instead that families of abusers could take a more significant role in dealing with instances of intimate partner violence. They argue that their findings support the work of other researchers that more individualist Western societies tend to handle domestic violence through legislation against offenders, whereas more collectivist societies, especially those with more heightened patriarchal traditions, continue to view intimate partner violence as a family problem rather than as a social or legal concern. The authors provide a range of useful recommendations about how social workers can challenge domestic violence in these different cultural contexts.
Third, Maria Pentaraki presents findings from research in rural Greek communities affected in 2007 by one of the largest fires in history in Greece. Using data from individual interviews with villagers affected by the disaster as well as from community forums organised in conjunction with village leaders, she argues that post disaster restoration policies led to class differentiated outcomes, with poorer people disproportionately negatively affected by the disaster and less able to recover from it. Pentaraki demonstrates how differences in disaster recovery in this Greek example stemmed from the failure of one-size-fits-all recovery policies to account for the different starting points for recovery between different socio-economic groups. She argues that the social work profession should employ an analytical lens on the politics of disaster in order to address the inequalities of post-disaster reconstruction.
Fourth, Marina Lalayants and colleagues describe the use of Clinical Data Mining, a mixed-method research methodology, including its strengths and limitations and its use as an applied approach for engaging social work practitioners in the process of contributing to research and knowledge formation. The authors offer a number of interesting examples of how the approach has been used across specific cultural contexts, as well as comparatively.
Fifth, Colin Pritchard, Sion Roberts and Claire E. Pritchard focus on suicide as a neglected area of social work research. They argue that suicide is often influenced by cultural factors and, as such, they investigate the extent to which female suicide is linked to family planning, comparing Western European and Latin American countries. Their aim is to give voice to an unheard group, namely young women who are suicide victims. Using data from the World Health Organisation they found a significant difference in patterns of youth suicide between the two continents, as well as a strong association between poverty, the availability of family planning and suicide in the Latin American countries studied. The argue that the findings pose particular ethical challenges for social workers wishing to support young women vulnerable to suicide due to unwanted pregnancy in cultural contexts where family planning is deemed to be morally wrong.
Next, Jotham Dhemba discusses poverty in old age in Lesotho, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The aim is to examine the nature, coverage and efficacy of social protection across these three countries in order to suggest ways through which supports for older people in poverty can be strengthened. He suggests that a major shortcoming of the public assistance programme in the three countries is that it is operated on a remedial basis and does not foster independence. Dhemba argues in favour of the adoption of holistic approaches to social security in the three countries, including non means-tested old age pensions and compulsory social insurance in order to provide for the contingency of old age.
Finally in this issue, Daniel Hailu and Terry Northcut discuss Ethiopia’s social protection system, providing a careful examination of its underlying structures, including the way its development has been shaped historically, culturally, ideologically and politically. Such an analysis, they argue, can inform decision makers in the further development of a nationally integrated system for social protection, whereby priorities are agreed and through which social policy formulation in Ethiopia moves to a more proactive, rather than reactive approach.