Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services

A support group can increase the self-esteem of children in substitute care by promoting self-awareness and by teaching communication and coping skills. Treatment needs of these children are discussed, with emphasis on breaking through the superficial survival roles they have assumed.

Sponsorship offers a unique opportunity for social workers accustomed to working with abusive families. In contrast to the usual clinical role, a sponsor acts as a resource in a peerlike, nondirective relationship with members of the group. The experience can be highly rewarding.

Such traumatic assaults as mugging, gunshot wound, and rape produce common responses in their victims. The authors discuss these patterns and develop principles for helping the victims. Case illustrations show how people can survive and grow in the aftermath of devastating events.

Persons studying social work at the graduate level manifest temporary self-preoccupation due to situational stress and continuing self-preoccupation because of personality traits. Study of such narcissism offers the possibility of predicting the likelihood of success as a student.

Married women have been sexually oppressed by being denied the choice not to have sex. Social work contributes to this oppression. Several issues regarding the functions of sexual behavior are examined and a positive view of sexual abstinence is presented and applied to practice.

With the birth of the first child, couples, whatever their ideological positions, need to work out sex role differentiations. Case examples illustrate the wide spectrum of options, ranging from an egalitarian distribution of roles to a more traditional model.