Susan E. Roche

Teaching About Human Rights in Social Work

Abstract This paper discusses the significance of human rights for social work and considers its importance in social work education. It relates human rights to the profession of social work and addresses challenges inherent in developing curricula and teaching human rights to social work students in both undergraduate and graduate programs. In order to expand student views of human rights, and their incorporation into their social work practice, the authors propose a four-part pedagogical method that includes readings, case examples, videos, and social action.

Beyond the Binary: Critical Feminisms in Social Work

Affilia has had 30 or more years of creating and holding space open for feminist social work scholars, activists, and poets to reflect on the nexus of their work and social justice. So why is Affilia publishing this special issue on critical feminisms and why is the journal’s corporate board organizing an upcoming conference on unsettling feminisms? Is there a need? Yes, we would answer emphatically. There is a need to open and broaden spaces for critical feminist work because much feminist social work research, practice, and education focus on ‘‘women’s issues’’ without critically exploring or analyzing structural issues and forces as they inform people’s lives. In this era of preemptive wars and increasingly globalized racial and class disparities, critical voices are systematically silenced or dismissed. Without critical feminist voices that highlight the ways in which inequalities in power and social structures distort gender, many people experience limited access to opportunities and a reduced potential for development. We join with Trevino, Harris, and Wallace (2008, p. 8) and paraphrase the much-needed contribution from critical scholarship:

Situations and Representations: Feminist Practice With Survivors of Male Violence

Four principles to guide a feminist practice with individual survivors of male violence are described and illustrated. The principles and the processes they activate address both the survivors situation and her self-representation. They involve challenging oppressive cultural discourse about gender, discourse that devalues, blames and subjugates women and girls, especially as these beliefs are internalized and impact on the survivors constitution of identity and her subsequent interpretation of experience from that position. Oppressive beliefs, internalized as truths, are repoliticized by connecting their local manifestations to the overarching cultural stories that perpetuate them. The principles and processes are predicated on social constructionist ideas and draw upon structural social work and narrative practices.

A Narrative Principle for Feminist Social Work With Survivors of Male Violence

Blame surrounds and embeds male violence against women, acting as oppressive propaganda that shapes survivors’ identities, which, in turn, reduce their options. This article challenges the notion that violence against women renders women passive and precludes their resistance. It describes a narrative practice principle—coconstructing women’s new identity stories—to guide social work in countering this propaganda with women survivors of male violence. Blame is addressed as a cultural narrative within which some women are targeted by male violence and all women construct their identities. As a feminist social work principle, coconstructing women’s new identity stories connects the political and the individual facets of male violence, expanding women’s options for action. Specifically, the article presents the principle and three processes for translating it into action.

An Emancipatory Principle for Social Work With Survivors of Male Violence

This article describes a principle to guide direct practice with survivors of male violence—undermining oppressive beliefs. This principle politicizes what has been explained at the interpersonal level as one mans violence toward one woman and the womans psychological struggle in its wake. It also explains the cultural-political infrastructure ofmale violence and makes visible the basic injustice that is often invisible because it is woven into the fabric of Western culture. The principle rests on social constructionist ideas and calls four narrative practice processes into action.

Parental preferences and considerations of cost in the selection of school-age child care

Abstract Eighty percent of single mothers and seventy-two percent of married mothers with children between the ages of six and thirteen are employed full-time. Inasmuch as there is little indication that this labor force participation is likely to diminish, the policy debate around the expansion of services for school-age children promises to deepen and intensify. This study of 836 school-age children examines child care costs and their relationship to parental resources, current care arrangements and preferences. Findings shed new light on the amount parents are willing to pay for child care services for this age group and how that amount is influenced by programmatic content. Policy implications of the findings are also discussed.

Messages from the NGO Forum on Women, Beijing 1995

This article describes two events at the 1995 Nongovernmental Organizations Forum in Beijing—the Tribunal on Womens Human Rights and the plenary session, Countering the Rise of Conservatism in Its Various Forms—in which messages promoting womens rights were presented and discusses how social workers can apply these messages in the United States.

Gentle, Angry Women Creating Change

Today, many of us in social work are ‘‘gentle, angry people’’ (Near, 2002). We live and work in a time of war and global economic crisis. Our gentleness is formed of a tender compassion for those who suffer the impacts. Our anger is directed at the greed that has led to ‘‘billions of dollars in cuts . . . in domestic discretionary . . . and entitlement programs’’ (Abramovitz, 2009, p. 106) and the harmful effects on people who did not create these problems. We know too well the loss and pain that neoliberal policies and the actions of some of the wealthiest have produced around the world. The loss of lives, jobs, and homes. The loss of dignity and futures. The worsening health and lack of medical care. The spread of hunger and hopelessness. The increase of violence in families and communities (Golie, 2006). We know that, as always, the most marginalized people bear the heaviest brunt of material and social exigency. Despite the years of cuts in domestic services, public budgets are overburdened by debt, and social services that have survived are being retrenched. As part of the retrenchment, many social workers’ already unrealistic workloads are being increased. Others’ jobs are being eliminated altogether. Under these conditions, an unfeasible job seems more preferable than having no job, and better judgment is silenced into bitter acquiescence. So far, this is a grim story. However, as in every story of struggle, there are tendrils of resistance and alternatives scattered throughout these current events. In November 2008, for example, the United States elected its first African American president through effective grassroots organizing on a platform of change. Time will tell, but so far, President Obama has held steadily to his platform. Social and economic justice and human rights continue to be central value premises articulated by social work. Social workers find many ways to express these value commitments through their practice, education, and scholarship, even now. Among its many publications, social work continues to have a thriving feminist social work journal with a transformative mission of change.

Book Reviews : Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement. By Nancy Whittier. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995, 299 pp.,

ment of Columbus, Ohio, her analyses are not individualistic or region specific. Rather, Whittier deftly applies her considerable command of scholarship to the activists’ responses in a graceful movement back and forth across the individual, organizational, community, state, and cultural levels. In doing so, she provides a wellcontextualized understanding of how different periods of activism shape the way that activists define feminism, the strategies they apply, the differences among them, and how these differences have affected the persistence of the women’s movement over time and transformed it. This understanding of cohorts and generations within the Columbus feminist movement are generalizable to the national level because of Whittier’s movement from the lived experiences of the women who were interviewed to her articulation of theory that connects the interviews and the supporting literature. As with all books, Feminist Generations has a few limitations. The first limitation, which Whittier points out early in the book, is that