Surinder Guru

Divorce: obstacles and opportunities – South Asian women in Britain

As divorce rates appear to rise amongst South Asian communities in Britain the repercussions for their members remain invisible and neglected in the research literature. The paper argues that this oversight needs to be addressed as it explores the findings from two separate studies to highlight some of the possible ramifications of divorce on South Asian women. The experiences presented here show that whilst divorce can have the most devastating effects on women in terms of their exclusion, it also presents some opportunities and optimism for their future. Furthermore, divorced women can not only bring positive change to their own lives, but also in the process, transform the cultures in which they live.

Childhood Radicalisation Risk: An Emerging Practice Issue

Terrorism, radicalisation and risk are contested terms — converging around particular children and young people in England to construct an emergent category of abuse — ‘childhood radicalisation’. With little practice-based research to date in this issue and expected responses via the state, social work needs to step up and engage with the present terrorism debates. In this paper, we argue against peremptorily defining this as a child protection issue. Rather, we think that more debate is needed about the role of social work and policy influences because social work can find itself unwittingly posing a risk to the very families we set out to help. Moreover, social workers might find themselves pawns in an ideologically driven moral panic without the benefit of debate about how we can make a contribution to families, and to this emerging practice issue. This paper offers some suggestions to bolster the confidence and skills needed in approaching this new practice issue. Social workers are themselves at risk of becoming the guardians of radicalisation risk work. This needs resisting if social work is to offer something complementary to the policing and securitisation needs of an anxious politic and ever-hovering media, hungry for sensationalised risk stories.

Between Political Fad and Political Empowerment: A Critical Evaluation of the National Muslim Women's Advisory Group (NMWAG) and Governmental Processes of Engaging Muslim Women

Established in 2008 and launched by the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, the National Muslim Womens Advisory Group (NMWAG) brought together 19 British Muslim women to advise Government on ways to empower Muslim women and increase their participation in civic, economic and social life. This article critically considers the NMWAG as a vehicle for improving how government sought to engage Muslim women within the context of a political and policy agenda that sought to prevent violent extremism. The article begins with a consideration of the ways in which womens groups - including those which might represent more than one constituency, BME women for instance - have traditionally emerged and mobilised as a means of advocating and lobbying on behalf of those they represent. From here, the article considers how government has engaged with faith communities, paying particular attention to governmental dialogue with Muslims, the reasons for this, and where - if at all - Muslim women have featured. From here, the article approaches the way in which the establishment of the NMWAG is anomalous in comparison to historical processes, putting forward some observations and theories to explain why this might have been so whilst also considering the impacts - both potential and actual - within the context of the post-9/11 era. In conclusion, this article considers the impact of the NMWAG as a means of improving learning about the role and process of governmental engagement.

Developing a social work curriculum on political conflict : Findings from an IASSW-funded project

This paper presents the findings from an innovative project funded by the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) and undertaken by an international team of academics investigating the development of a global curriculum for social work in the context of political conflict. Coupled alongside the emerging research and literature on the subject, our small-scale survey findings indicate support for the need for social work educators to address political conflict more systematically within social work curricula at both undergraduate and post-qualifying levels of social work education. This paper illuminates the opportunities for creative pedagogy whilst also examining the threats and challenges permeating the realisation of such initiatives. In this way, the implementation of a proposed curriculum for political conflict is given meaning within the context of IASSWs Global Standards for social work education. Given the exploratory nature of this project, the authors do conclude that further research is warranted in regard to potential curriculum development and suggest using a comparative case study approach with more in-depth qualitative methods as a way to address this.

Reflections on research: Families affected by counter-terrorism in the UK

Following the terrorist attacks on New York and London, the counterterrorism legislation in the UK strengthened surveillance and national security and led to the incarceration of many Muslim men. Whilst the treatment of prisoners and detainees received considerable attention in public debate, the families that are left behind have been neglected by politicians, academics, the media and service providers alike. This article reflects on the experiences of conducting a small exploratory study amongst such families in the West Midlands and highlights some of the ways in which the heightened concerns about national security impinged upon the research process.

Working with asian perpetrators of domestic violence — The British Experience

Close work with male perpetrators of domestic violence has never found a comfortable compromise within feminist perspectives and strategies to tackle violence against women. However, interventions with perpetrators within mainstream white discourses have addressed this side of the coin whilst providing some level of safety to women and children. In Britain, such strategies have not, as yet, been explored in relation to men from ethnic minorities since other more serious issues of race and gender oppression have demanded the immediate attention of practitioners and researchers. This article explores the need for engaging in work with men in a culturally sensitive manner, with a view to reducing male aggression against women and children.

Parents of foreign “terrorist” fighters in Syria – will they report their young?

ABSTRACT The mounting tide of foreign fighters leaving Britain for the Middle East to fight, sacrifice or find new lives has blighted European governments and led to the further tightening up of counter-terrorism measures. Since the first British arrest of a Syrian returnee (Choudhury) in 2014, the latest figures of foreign fighter returnees have surged to approximately 800. A number of strategies aimed at thwarting these trends have surfaced including a call upon Muslim parents to scrutinise their children’s attitudes and behaviour and to be watchful of their radicalization. Based on a study in the West Midlands (in the UK), the paper provides a snapshot of how Muslim parents have received calls upon them to report their actual or potentially radicalized children to the police. We argue that current practices are likely to be ineffective unless more democratic spaces are provided for free political expression.

A Risky Time for Muslim Families: Professionalised Counter-radicalisation Networks

In July 2015, a new statutory duty was sanctioned in the UK for a range of professional practitioners, including social workers, to pay ‘due regard to preventing terrorism’. The duty has contributed to a shifting of social work practice and decision-making from the fields of advocacy and promotion of ethics, social justice and human rights, towards risk-work more analogous to that of the security services. Social workers are caught up in pre-emptive risk work, operating in a pre-crime space. Further, an ‘ethic of silence’ has emerged because social workers are not speaking back or challenging the duty due to the ensnared nature of the dominant securitised discourses, which prevent counter-discourses from emerging. Utilising an autoethnographic approach, this paper shows that the new duty is reorganising and rearranging new networks of practitioners with securitisation a dominant feature, and this significantly affects practice decisions. Latour’s actor network theory (ANT) helps us to examine the ethical and practical implications for decision-making. Shifting notions of ethics, rights and as yet unforeseen consequences of PREVENT concern us. This being said, humane and socially just social work practice within the duty is possible; strengths-based risk practices provide practical and ethical ways forward and these are discussed.

Working with PREVENT: Social Work Options for Cases of ‘Radicalisation Risk’

‘Radicalisation risk’ and the associated practice and organisational responses to it are accepted, rather uncritically, as legitimate activity for statutory social workers. Yet, the policy backdrop driving much of this development has not been matched by practice debate or learning about how best to work with these cases. The 2015 PREVENT Duty mandates social workers and many other practitioners ‘to pay due regard’ to possible radicalisation concerns, without offering practical or ethical ways to do so. This paper attends to that gap, and brings together learning from a series of practitioner events and draws on strengths-based approaches to offer practical ways forward. By doing this, the paper offers practice guidance to this growing area of work. Occupational and professional paradigm differences emerged as an issue for the workers we talked to, and this is discussed. Moving beyond the dichotomous and divisive debate of the PREVENT Duty as ‘good or bad’, and about its legitimacy as a concern for social work, we take a pragmatic approach to show how social workers can operate ethically and co-operatively within it, importantly because presently they must do so.

Understanding International Social Work

This book is an important contribution to a much neglected area of international social work and the ongoing debates within it regarding the universality and the diversity of the profession and the professional hegemony of the North over the South. It discusses the need to understand the specificity of social work and how in each country it is shaped by specific historical, welfare and cultural context, and argues for a recognition of the similarity in the tapestry of social problems with which social workers are concerned throughout the world. Whilst Hugman supports the universal paradigm, the book fully explores the constant tensions between universality and diversity and between micro and macro approaches, attributed to the North and South respectively, which are threaded through each of the chapters. Chapter 1 outlines the European origins of social work in the nineteenth century and the early efforts to establish an international framework within European boundaries, before describing the uneven spread of social work, through colonialmechanisms to the colonised world particularly after 1950, as countries became independent and began to question the appropriateness of Northern values and approaches and to assert the need for indigenised and authentic ways to address local needs. Chapter 2 discusses the various visions and interpretations of international social work ranging fromwork abroad in other countries, to work in one’s own country with service users originating from different parts of the world, to collaboration between countries and international organisations as well as a consideration of the impact of global developments on local situations. Case studies from different countries illustrate the lessons learnt through collaboration between nations and underline the importance of learning each other’s histories and cultures andmore importantly, to question one’s own. The social problems most often associated with globalisation (e.g. forced migration, child labour, human trafficking and poverty) are covered with examples of some of the ways in which these have been addressed within different countries (Chapter 3) and also globally with regards to poverty in terms of the Millennium Development Goals (Chapter 4). The necessity to focus upon macro level concerns, to develop greater economic, political and international awareness than is demonstrated in the largely micro levels of social work found in Northern approaches, is emphasised in these chapters and in Chapter 5. The examples, drawn from a wide range of countries, serve