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Aims: Although treatment barriers are different for men and women, research is dominated by males’ and practitioners’ perspectives rather than women’s voices. The purpose of this study in Belgium was to identify and obtain a better understanding of the barriers and facilitators for seeking treatment as experienced by substance (ab)using women themselves. Methods: In-depth interviews were conducted with 60 female substance users who utilise(d) outpatient and/or residential treatment services. A content analysis was performed on women’s personal accounts of previous treatment experiences as well as their experiences with services along the continuum of care, resulting in practical implications for the organisation of services. Results: Female substance users experience various overlapping – and at times competing – barriers and facilitators when seeking treatment and utilising services. For most women, the threat of losing custody of their children is an essential barrier to treatment, whereas for a significant part of the participants it serves as a motivation to seek help. Also, women report social stigma in private as well as professional contexts as a barrier to treatment. Women further ask for a holistic approach to treatment, which stimulates the healing process of body, mind and spirit, and emphasise the importance of feeling safe in treatment. Participants suggested several changes that could encourage treatment utilisation. Conclusion: Our findings demonstrate the need for a gender-sensitive approach within alcohol and drug services that meets the needs of female substance users, as well as gender-sensitivity within prevention and awareness-raising campaigns, reducing the stigma and facilitating knowledge and awareness among women and society.

Over the last few decades, research, policy, and practice in the field of mental health care and a complementary variety of social work and social service delivery have internationally concentrated on recovery as a promising concept. In this paper, a conceptual distinction is made between an individual approach and a social approach to recovery, and underlying assumptions of citizenship and interrelated notions and features of care and support are identified. It is argued that the conditionality of the individual approach to recovery refers to a conceptualization of citizenship as normative, based on the existence of a norm that operates in every domain of our society. We argue that these assumptions place a burden of self-governance on citizens with mental health problems and risk producing people with mental health problems as nonrecyclable citizens. The social approach to recovery embraces a different conceptualization of citizenship as relational and inclusive and embodies the myriad ways in which the belonging of people with mental health problems can be constructed in practice. As such, we hope to enable social services and professionals in the field to balance their role in the provision of care and support to service users with mental health problems.

Although social work has been assigned a pivotal role in the fight against poverty, it is also criticised for adjusting to the retrenchment of the welfare state and its weakening concern in issues of social justice. Hence, critical questions concerning its positioning towards the tension between securing and changing the underlying assumptions of the social order are pertinent. We theorise this issue while drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser, who advocates a politics of redistribution, recognition and representation, and identifies affirmative and transformative ways of dealing with injustices. Based on this theory, our central argument is that social work often tries to escape or ignore the complex nature of its engagement in the fight against poverty by sliding into one-sided affirmative or transformative anti-poverty strategies. We argue that social work should attempt to embrace reflexively the inherent tensions in which it is caught when dealing with the problem of poverty, rather than try to find ways to escape from these tensions and ambiguities. From this stance, a role for social work might be the creation of cultural forums in which public debate about the problem of poverty is stimulated.

It is argued that recent shifts and changes in welfare paradigms have induced a depolitisation of the problem of poverty, within both society and organisational settings. In this contribution, we adopt the idea that social workers are political actors who co-construct policy in practice rather than passive objects of these developments. While researching their agency, our attempt is to engage in the underexposed question of how front line workers, who are identified as supportive by families in poverty, actively use and shape this discretion in order to develop practices of support that embrace the concerns and life worlds of welfare recipients. From a systemic understanding of social workers’ political agency, we explore their strategies and decision-making processes in dynamic interaction with conditions and strategies at organisational, inter-organisational and governmental levels. Lister’s theoretical framework, which takes into account this interplay between agency and structure, provided inspiration for the analysis. Our findings address how practitioners’ commitments to seek meaningful interventions often remain hidden or risk reinforcing the same processes of depolitisation that are initially contested. We therefore suggest the development of communicative spaces, which reflect a different understanding of accountability and transparency that enables the promotion of welfare rights.

The rhetoric of risk has become a prominent issue in the field of child and family social work. As a consequence, an emerging politics of fear has re-oriented this field towards managing, controlling, and securing social work practice against risk, rather than responding meaningfully to the needs and concerns of children and families. In the available body of research, it is argued that this general tendency creates “anxious” professionals. As a response, different scholars refer to the need to “speak back to fear”. In this article, we analyze this claim in the context of a currently ongoing large-scale policy reform, named Integrated Youth Care (IYC), in the field of child welfare and protection in Flanders (the Dutch speaking part of Belgium). The debate on dealing with risk is often limited to an organizational and methodological discussion. We assert that we should reorient this debate and make a plea for a radical approach of applying a welfare perspective in child welfare and protection.

In recent years, the historical abuse perpetrated against children in residential child-welfare and protection services has increasingly been perceived as a public concern. In the context of this European and global development, several formal inquiries commissioned by authorities into the alleged historical abuse of children in social work services were perceived as a political priority to repair human injustices, and were set up as an attempt to come to terms with the failure of social welfare policies and services in the past. The number of official public apologies has continued to increase since the turn of the century. In this article, we radically question the normative truth logic that is at stake in these politics of apology as a way to give recognition on both an individual and a collective level, and argue that social work needs to critically deal with its own confusing history, with which it is interwoven, to be able to clarify what contemporary social work represents.

In this article, we focus on how social workers use their agency when implementing top-down policy measures as street-level bureaucrats. We report on findings of a case study that was conducted in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, about the top-down introduction of an electronic information system (IS) in the field of Child Welfare and Protection (CWP). Starting from insights derived from neo-institutional theory, we explore how social workers perform a role as so-called ‘institutional entrepreneurs’ by initiating critical reflections about policy rationales. In our contribution, we show that, despite social workers’ awareness of being embedded in their own field or service area, they use their field-level expertise and day-to-day experiences to disengage from this context as well. Besides unravelling the lack of coherence informing the IS’s initial ambitions of transparency and efficiency, they constantly (re)frame their views and explain their alternative ideas with the aim of convincing other social workers and managers. In this vein, we conclude by highlighting the importance of ‘distributed’ forms of agency that involve a gradual process, which is co-produced by social workers as street-level bureaucrats in close collaboration with service users, other professionals, other organisations and policy makers.

Continuity is seen as an important aim for the quality of youth-care services. However, views on continuity are predominantly guided by experts, without much attention to user perspectives. This paper focuses on youngsters’ experienced continuity in relation to youth-care services. Twenty-five youngsters, who were in residential care or reached by low-threshold youth services, were interviewed about their experiences in and out of care. In thematically exploring the biographical narratives for important experiences of continuity, three major themes emerged: (i) the need for footholds in moments of existential chaos, (ii) the importance of timing of interventions to match the youngsters’ perspectives and (iii) the importance of the youngsters’ impact on their own care pathways. This study shows the need for support that is imbedded in a relational network within the context of youngsters in vulnerable situations. Rethinking youth services towards a better connection with these contexts is essential. Furthermore, the amount of control youngsters experience in their care interventions seems to be beneficial to the experience of continuity. It is argued that continuity should be seen as a process, in order to leave more space for negotiation and flexibility throughout the youngsters’ experiences in youth-care services.

In a diversity of European countries, an ambitious pursuit of organisational reform is stressed in the field of social work policy and practice, which is rhetorically rooted in 'joined-up thinking'. Emerging criticism about joined-up working has been identified in the body of available research, particularly in terms of the construction and pursuit of joint goals. In this article, we discuss the empirical findings that were acquired during a recent qualitative research project in Belgium. The underlying assumptions of joined-up working in child and family services were examined in two disadvantaged quarters, bearing in mind the complexity of social work practices in dealing with families in poverty. The perspectives of parents in poverty situations and front line social workers were explored by means of qualitative, in-depth interviews in combination with the vignette technique. In the research findings, functional and responsive approaches to joined-up working are discussed. We assert that functional approaches to joined-up working undermine responsive and particularly reflexive social work. In that vein, we argue that social workers should discuss the values and dilemmas at play in their responses to complexity at organisational and inter-organisational levels. Such collective engagement can lead to reconstructing the foundations of joined-up working.

This article deals with the tendency within the field of social work practice to create inter-organisational networks for welfare provision. We highlight the opportunities that then arise for social work to tackle social exclusion, and to perform its mediating role between the public sphere of government and the private sphere of individuals and families. We argue that the advantages of inter-organisational networking and collaboration can be realised by overcoming fragmentation of care at the micro level of welfare provision to citizens, but also by using these networks as a forum for debate to challenge dominant conceptualisations of complex social problems across organisational and sectorial boundaries. However, we also point to the danger of a so-called 'network euphoria', and discuss some of the risks associated with working together through networks. Therefore, the central argument of the article implies that those involved in these networks need to develop a common framework, or value base, with reference to human rights and principles of social justice.