Affilia

For criminalized people, particularly those who have been recently incarcerated, applying for and maintaining public assistance—cash aid and/or food assistance—is an immediate and crucial element of survival. Yet relative to a substantial body of research that documents pathways into and out of carceral citizenship, this aspect of postincarceration work has received little scholarly attention. Likewise, frontline welfare workers are often simplistically portrayed as gatekeepers who restrict poor people’s access to public assistance. In this article, we make visible the intersection of welfare and criminal-legal involvement by examining how criminalized clients are understood by welfare workers in one large, densely populated California county. Our data come from a larger ethnographic study of women’s postincarceration experiences of public institutions and include in-depth interviews with 19 frontline welfare workers and participant observation of welfare offices. We find that (a) criminal-legal awareness varies among welfare workers; (b) workers engage in substantial invisible labor, in large part to counteract the carceral logics of the welfare system; and (c) in absence of professional training, workers draw heavily on their own situated knowledge to manage the challenges of their work. Contextualizing these findings within a broader trend toward the deprofessionalization of welfare workers, we argue that the training and education of this workforce, particularly around criminal-legal issues, is an important avenue for social work advocacy.

This article examines the intersections of the child protection, immigration and criminal systems, and the carceral logics that undergird all three systems. Taking seriously Patricia Hill Collins’ (2017) call to analyze “intensified points of convergence” (p. 1464), we analyze the role of social work in perpetuating carceral systems and the tools that feminist social work provides for disrupting them. Using a case analysis of a foster child in Halifax, Canada, who in 2018 was faced with deportation after social workers failed to secure his citizenship status, we argue that a pipeline exists between child protection and a growing “crimmigration” system. The carceral logics of this pipeline not only draw from anti-Black, Islamophobic, and settler colonial histories of oppression, but they also position certain noncitizen families as unassimilable and requiring of state intervention rather than social supports. With this carceral pipeline in mind, we then draw from feminist anticarceral and intersectional approaches to consider a range of resistance strategies. Ultimately, we argue for a transformative justice approach that goes beyond reforming the pipeline and instead takes seriously the insights of abolitionist movements as an alternative to purely reformist approaches.

Frontline service providers are often tasked with providing services to criminalized populations, including individuals involved in the sex trade. These providers have been working to transform services to this population, proposing what they believe to be socially just responses in helping individuals in the sex trade transition from “criminals” to a “victims.” While frontline service providers have been advocating for trauma-informed and compassionate responses to working with individuals involved in the sex trade, they regularly temper this work with collaboration with law enforcement, propagating carceral (punishment-oriented) logics in order to “protect” vulnerable clients. This qualitative study, completed in a Midwestern U.S. state, used interviews with 30 frontline service providers who work with individuals in the sex trade to understand service providers' perceptions around their work with this population, and how this shapes collaborations with law enforcement. Findings reveal that as most frontline service providers assume that individual trauma and drug use are present in the sex trade, these individual characteristics have legitimated paternalistic service responses provided in collaboration with law enforcement. However, a minority of frontline service providers denounce these collaborations as harmful to their clients, revealing that responses to law enforcement are not homogenous across service providers. I conclude by discussing what these law enforcement–social service collaborations mean for the social work profession and provide a discussion of alternative methods to work with individuals in the sex trade.

This article uses feminist critical analysis as a conceptual framework in order to reflect upon the carceral drifts adopted by gender equality policies in Spain. This issue has been deeply analyzed in the American context, and we believe it is relevant to bring the experiences of other contexts into discussion, such the Spanish one, where the welfare state has been affected by the 2008 global financial crisis. With the aim of adding to the discussion and making a contribution from feminisms and social work perspectives, this work carries out a comparative analysis on carceral policies addressed to women, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, on protection policies for women victims of gender-based violence. Based on our fieldwork in Andalucia (Spain) for more than 10 years, as well as on legal and programmatical text analysis, we question the alleged control/protection separation, highlighting the existence of gendered carceral logics in both contexts. We highlight the social control to which women are subject and for which subjects women to the image of a “good victim” on the one hand and a “good mother” on the other.

The Swedish government’s efforts to meet the needs of women subjected to violence have intensified since 2007 when it adopted an Action Plan for combating men’s violence against women. The aim of this study was to analyze how women are discursively framed from an intersectional perspective in five of the Action Plan’s study guides. A critical discourse analysis revealed three overall discourses. First, women are divided into various categories, which is likely to lead to an understanding that it is specific groups of women that become victims of violence. Second, women are framed in a heteronormative and a gender-equal context. This neglects nonheterosexual violence and underlines the otherness of ethnically categorized women. Third, the definition of women as agents stresses both their responsibility and their lack of agency. The absence of an intersectional analysis risks an interpretation in social work practice that some social division have a greater impact on violence in some specific groups of women. When women’s individual situation and needs are not taken into account, women risk being given inadequate help and support, which might put victims of violence in danger.

It is well established in the literature that individuals who engage in sex work are more likely to experience sexual trauma/violence, but little research has examined experiences of sexual assault survivors who exchange sex from the survivor’s perspective. Sexual assault survivors and their informal support providers (SPs; e.g., family, friends, romantic partners) were interviewed separately about disclosure, social reactions, and help-seeking following assault. Sixteen survivors mentioned experiences exchanging sex, which comprise the sample for the current study as well as comments from twelve SPs. Qualitative analysis revealed several themes including violence experienced engaging in sex work, navigating stigma and the identity of both sexual assault survivor and sex worker, and how survivors’ social supports impact their recovery. Survivors endorsed their sex worker identities at varying levels, and others used their identity as a sexual assault survivor to explain why they engaged in sex work. Social work implications regarding service provision and advocacy work are discussed.

One of the fastest emerging global public health crises is the rapid increase in the population of forcibly displaced people, known as refugees. Refugee women, particularly, are at a greater disadvantage due to their social positioning related to gender norms, language barriers, and lack of resources. They are also more likely to experience structural and situational stressors. Despite myriad negative factors, studies show refugee women employ resilient strategies to overcome their stressors. This study uses a narrative analysis approach to understand how a Bhutanese refugee woman’s experiences throughout her journey of birth, double displacement, and resettlement were expressed through her resiliency and independence and culminated into a community leadership role once she was resettled in the United States. Data were collected using extensive observational field notes and multiple formal and informal interviews. The story was co-constructed with the participant through an iterative process of developing, verifying, and refining to increase accuracy. Implications for social work practice emphasize the need to identify and support women as leaders in the community, to connect refugee communities with organizational resources, and to preserve and promote the voices of women leaders and empower their position in their communities.