International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Critical perspectives and practices are fundamental to social work, yet there are only scarce exa... more Critical perspectives and practices are fundamental to social work, yet there are only scarce examples of direct critical practice in public social services, and even fewer empirical evaluations of their outcomes for service users and social workers. This article presents a rapid evidence review of 25 evaluation studies of five programs that operate in the social services departments in Israel according to the principles of the Poverty-Aware Paradigm (PAP). The PAP is a critical paradigm for direct social work practice with people living in poverty that was implemented in the welfare services by the Ministry of Welfare, targeting over 14,000 service users. The evaluation studies we reviewed encompass an overall quantitative sample of 4612 service users and 1363 professionals, and a qualitative sample of 420 service users and 424 professionals. The findings present: (1) the program’s outcomes for service users in terms of relationship with social workers, financial circumstances, fam...
This article aims to enrich the current limited body of knowledge regarding social work professio... more This article aims to enrich the current limited body of knowledge regarding social work professional discourse. More specifically, it seeks to examine the extent and ways in which the social work intra-profession discourse, as it is manifested in formal job descriptions of social workers in Israel, reflects the commitment to working with people living in poverty and to confronting poverty. We provide a brief review of the concept of professional discourse and the role of formal job descriptions in this discourse in general, and in Israel in particular. ‘Poverty-aware social work’ is then conceptualised. Against this background, we analysed 75 job descriptions in order to ascertain whether, and in what ways, references to poverty appear in defining client populations, in directions for assessing their situation, and in defining the goals and methods of professional intervention. The research findings reflect a textual silence in relation to poverty issues in job descriptions. The ana...
Social work scholars have argued that poverty reminds us of the necessary commitment to educate p... more Social work scholars have argued that poverty reminds us of the necessary commitment to educate professional social workers. Being inspired by a conceptual framework that captures how poverty-awareness can be the subject of teaching in social work programmes, this article offers a qualitative analysis of the reflections being made by a cohort of students about their learning process in a post-academic course. Five common themes are discussed: (i) from recognising micro-aggressions to tackling macro-aggressions; (ii) poverty is an instance of social injustice and requires collective indignation; (iii) notions of commitment and solidarity are ambiguous; (iv) poverty is an instance of social inequality rather than merely social exclusion; and (v) from being heroic agents to social change ‘from within’. Based on these findings, we raise the lessons learned for social work educators. First, they should invite students to reinvigorate the social justice aspirations of social work practice...
Although social service departments (SSDs) in Israel are the main institutions through which soci... more Although social service departments (SSDs) in Israel are the main institutions through which social workers provide social care to people in poverty, the dynamics between the multiple dimensions of poverty amongst service users (SUs) and the consequences of social care to these dynamics have not been systematically explored. The current study is the first study that aims to fill this gap by comparing multidimensional poverty amongst 159 SUs. The study compared two kinds of social care provided by the same SSDs: standard social care and a poverty-aware programme. Data were collected at two time points by telephone interviews and was analysed using independent samples t test, the paired-sample t test, the exact McNemar test for dichotomous variables, the Tukey test, the χ2 test and linear regression. Findings indicate that SUs who were treated in the poverty-aware programme received more assistance in a larger range of areas and a significantly positive change was found amongst them i...
The fourth chapter of Part Three brings to life the voices of activists, students, and social wor... more The fourth chapter of Part Three brings to life the voices of activists, students, and social workers as they were heard in a panel discussion that took place at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2015. The chapter is a transcription of the discussion, which reveals the participants’ personal experiences with active excercising of rights, their attitudes toward it, the characteristics needed for this kind of practice, and the pros and cons of it.
The third chapter of Part Four of the book tells the story of a social worker who came to an apar... more The third chapter of Part Four of the book tells the story of a social worker who came to an apartment following a complaint from the neighbours that young children had been left there on their own only to discover that the apartment was flooded with sewage. The response of the social worker is analysed as an example of a ‘standing against’ position. The possibility of standing by is presented in the chapter as a tentative choice.
This chapter, the fourth of Part One of the book, asks ten questions regarding poverty and the Po... more This chapter, the fourth of Part One of the book, asks ten questions regarding poverty and the Poverty-Aware Paradigm and answers them. Among the questions are the following: Are people who are busy with basic survival and the attempt to meet their primary existential needs available for emotional therapeutic processes? If structural issues have such a crucial impact on poverty, how can we understand that in the same neighbourhoods, the children of some families manage to escape poverty while others do not? Does poverty-aware social work free people of their responsibility for their situations? How can social workers avoid encouraging dependency among service users?
Arab-Palestinian families have one of the highest poverty rates in Israel. However, there is a la... more Arab-Palestinian families have one of the highest poverty rates in Israel. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding this population from a social work perspective. This article presents an analysis of 64 supervision sessions held with Arab-Palestinian social workers with the aim of identifying context-specific knowledge on the barriers service users face in their daily lives. Our findings point to three types of barriers: economic, sociopolitical, and cultural/political. The article relates to the intersections of these barriers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Young people from ethnic minority groups are at the centre of public concern in modern societies.... more Young people from ethnic minority groups are at the centre of public concern in modern societies. This article presents the findings of a qualitative study that critically examines the discourses of thirty-three social workers who work with young people of Ethiopian ethnic origin in Israel. The findings reveal three key discourses: the social inclusion discourse, the meritocracy discourse and the social conflict discourse. Alongside the dominance of conservative discourses and neoliberal perceptions of youth and sociocultural group relationships, the findings reveal the existence of a competing critical discourse. The discussion offers a critical and contextual analysis of the field of social work with youth as the basis for a renewed discussion of basic assumptions, values, professional role perceptions and work directions. It notes the critical models that recognise and oppose oppression as an alternative to policymaking, training and practice processes regarding young people from...
The second chapter of Part Four of the book considers a case in which a fire broke out in the pub... more The second chapter of Part Four of the book considers a case in which a fire broke out in the public housing apartment of a woman who had locked her children in when she left for work. Is this the story of a neglectful mother? What is the connection between the fire and poverty? What does a practice of standing by service users look like in such a case? Responding to this incident by means of community development takes into consideration the structural barriers that parents face and challenges the automatic response that blames mothers for acting neglectfully.
This book describes the new Poverty-Aware Paradigm (PAP), which was developed in Israel through i... more This book describes the new Poverty-Aware Paradigm (PAP), which was developed in Israel through intense involvement with the field of social work in various initiatives. The paradigm was adopted in 2014 by the Israeli Ministry of Welfare and Social Services as a leading paradigm for social workers in social services departments. The book draws from the rich experience of the implementation of the PAP in practice and connects examples of practice to theoretical ideas from radical/critical social work, critical poverty knowledge, and psychoanalysis. The PAP addresses poverty as a violation of human rights and emphasizes people’s ongoing efforts to resist poverty. In order to recognize these sometimes minor acts of resistance and advance their impact, social workers should establish close relationship with service users and stand by them. The book proposes combining relationship-based practice and rights-based practice as a means of bridging the gap between the emotional and material n...
The third chapter of Part Three delves into the practice of the active exercising of rights and a... more The third chapter of Part Three delves into the practice of the active exercising of rights and addresses the difficult issue of working with service users under circumstances where they have no legal rights that can be actualized. This might happen when service users do not have citizenship, or when certain needs of citizens are not covered by law. Based on examples from the field, the principles of dealing with such situations are explored, emphasizing the importance of the social worker’s analysis of these situations in the framework of poverty as a violation of human rights.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021
Based on Pearlin’s stress process model and the social inequality approach to health, this study ... more Based on Pearlin’s stress process model and the social inequality approach to health, this study used a social lens to explore the role of socioeconomic inequities in mental distress during the COVID-19 pandemic in Israel. Specifically, we examined people’s pre-pandemic sociodemographic characteristics and economic situation, and the economic effects of the pandemic itself on mental distress. A real-time survey was conducted in May 2020 among 273 adults (ages 20–68), and hierarchical linear models were employed. Findings indicated that groups vulnerable to mental distress in routine times (e.g., women, people with economic difficulties) showed the same pattern during the pandemic. Not only was unemployment related to mental distress, so too was a reduction in work hours. The pandemic’s economic effects (e.g., needing to take out loans, having a worsening financial situation) were also associated with increased mental distress. This study is one of very few studies to explore a wide ...
The third chapter of Part One deals with transformational teaching and describes the challenge of... more The third chapter of Part One deals with transformational teaching and describes the challenge of unveiling social workers’ basic conservative conceptual framework and replacing it with a critical one. Drawing upon responses of students in PAP courses, the chapter presents this challenge as containing both cognitive and emotional aspects. It addresses the issues of deconstructing conservative attitudes during teaching without attacking or blaming students, connecting knowledge and attitudes in practice, and the role of an ongoing dialogue in transformational teaching. The chapter concludes with guidelines for handling these issues.
This is the first of the four chapters that comprise Part One of the book, which is dedicated to ... more This is the first of the four chapters that comprise Part One of the book, which is dedicated to the issue of transformation. This chapter focuses on the transformation of the professional spoken vocabulary regarding poverty. Through a close look at the words that social workers use to describe service users in poverty, links are made between language (rhetoric), attitudes, and practice. The chapter presents an overview of six basic principles of the paradigm and translates them to guidelines regarding the way in which social workers should speak about and with service users. It urges social workers to be aware of the language they use and to change it.
The second chapter of Part Two deals with material assistance as a component of PAP practice. Thr... more The second chapter of Part Two deals with material assistance as a component of PAP practice. Throughout the history of social work there has been a complex relationship between responses to emotional needs and responses to material needs. In the PAP, the internal and external realms are perceived as connected. Thus, practice should seek to respond simultaneously to both. The chapter presents a case study to explore the need for material assistance in working with people in poverty. In addition, based on the experience of using material assistance in PAP programs, its characteristics—immediacy and flexibility—are discussed.
Summary Over-indebtedness of impoverished households and its relevance to the social work profess... more Summary Over-indebtedness of impoverished households and its relevance to the social work profession have not received sufficient attention in the professional discourse. It is the intention of this article to put over-indebtedness on the professional agenda, to review the literature about it, and to present initial data from a study on over-indebtedness in Israel carried out with special attention to debtors’ coping with their debts. The research was conducted as a door-to-door survey in a neighborhood with low socio-economic characteristics and included questions about the nature of the debts, the strategies people use to cope with debts and the obstacles they face while doing so. Findings The research findings indicate a severe debt problem among the participants. Out of 142 interviewees, 61% had debt that was overdue and 27% of them did not have an active bank account – a significant parameter of financial exclusion. Moreover, the proliferation of debts per household, and the hi...
Social exclusion has been identified as a prominent factor informing our understanding of young p... more Social exclusion has been identified as a prominent factor informing our understanding of young people involvement in gang life, violence and crime. While the literature on social exclusion focuses on the education and employment systems, there is a limited literature regarding the role played by correctional institutions in exacerbating social exclusion. This article explores the reciprocal relationships between young people involved in the drug trade in Israel and various educational and correctional services in their community. It focuses on a term commonly articulated by the youth, ‘not seeing with the eyes’, which they use to describe themselves as consciously, purposefully and openly ignoring and flouting societal norms. However, the educational and correctional services present a similar attitude, manifesting institutional blindness in connection with the youth and hence contributing to the double exclusion of young men. The article exposes the practices and processes through which this double exclusion takes place.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Critical perspectives and practices are fundamental to social work, yet there are only scarce exa... more Critical perspectives and practices are fundamental to social work, yet there are only scarce examples of direct critical practice in public social services, and even fewer empirical evaluations of their outcomes for service users and social workers. This article presents a rapid evidence review of 25 evaluation studies of five programs that operate in the social services departments in Israel according to the principles of the Poverty-Aware Paradigm (PAP). The PAP is a critical paradigm for direct social work practice with people living in poverty that was implemented in the welfare services by the Ministry of Welfare, targeting over 14,000 service users. The evaluation studies we reviewed encompass an overall quantitative sample of 4612 service users and 1363 professionals, and a qualitative sample of 420 service users and 424 professionals. The findings present: (1) the program’s outcomes for service users in terms of relationship with social workers, financial circumstances, fam...
This article aims to enrich the current limited body of knowledge regarding social work professio... more This article aims to enrich the current limited body of knowledge regarding social work professional discourse. More specifically, it seeks to examine the extent and ways in which the social work intra-profession discourse, as it is manifested in formal job descriptions of social workers in Israel, reflects the commitment to working with people living in poverty and to confronting poverty. We provide a brief review of the concept of professional discourse and the role of formal job descriptions in this discourse in general, and in Israel in particular. ‘Poverty-aware social work’ is then conceptualised. Against this background, we analysed 75 job descriptions in order to ascertain whether, and in what ways, references to poverty appear in defining client populations, in directions for assessing their situation, and in defining the goals and methods of professional intervention. The research findings reflect a textual silence in relation to poverty issues in job descriptions. The ana...
Social work scholars have argued that poverty reminds us of the necessary commitment to educate p... more Social work scholars have argued that poverty reminds us of the necessary commitment to educate professional social workers. Being inspired by a conceptual framework that captures how poverty-awareness can be the subject of teaching in social work programmes, this article offers a qualitative analysis of the reflections being made by a cohort of students about their learning process in a post-academic course. Five common themes are discussed: (i) from recognising micro-aggressions to tackling macro-aggressions; (ii) poverty is an instance of social injustice and requires collective indignation; (iii) notions of commitment and solidarity are ambiguous; (iv) poverty is an instance of social inequality rather than merely social exclusion; and (v) from being heroic agents to social change ‘from within’. Based on these findings, we raise the lessons learned for social work educators. First, they should invite students to reinvigorate the social justice aspirations of social work practice...
Although social service departments (SSDs) in Israel are the main institutions through which soci... more Although social service departments (SSDs) in Israel are the main institutions through which social workers provide social care to people in poverty, the dynamics between the multiple dimensions of poverty amongst service users (SUs) and the consequences of social care to these dynamics have not been systematically explored. The current study is the first study that aims to fill this gap by comparing multidimensional poverty amongst 159 SUs. The study compared two kinds of social care provided by the same SSDs: standard social care and a poverty-aware programme. Data were collected at two time points by telephone interviews and was analysed using independent samples t test, the paired-sample t test, the exact McNemar test for dichotomous variables, the Tukey test, the χ2 test and linear regression. Findings indicate that SUs who were treated in the poverty-aware programme received more assistance in a larger range of areas and a significantly positive change was found amongst them i...
The fourth chapter of Part Three brings to life the voices of activists, students, and social wor... more The fourth chapter of Part Three brings to life the voices of activists, students, and social workers as they were heard in a panel discussion that took place at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2015. The chapter is a transcription of the discussion, which reveals the participants’ personal experiences with active excercising of rights, their attitudes toward it, the characteristics needed for this kind of practice, and the pros and cons of it.
The third chapter of Part Four of the book tells the story of a social worker who came to an apar... more The third chapter of Part Four of the book tells the story of a social worker who came to an apartment following a complaint from the neighbours that young children had been left there on their own only to discover that the apartment was flooded with sewage. The response of the social worker is analysed as an example of a ‘standing against’ position. The possibility of standing by is presented in the chapter as a tentative choice.
This chapter, the fourth of Part One of the book, asks ten questions regarding poverty and the Po... more This chapter, the fourth of Part One of the book, asks ten questions regarding poverty and the Poverty-Aware Paradigm and answers them. Among the questions are the following: Are people who are busy with basic survival and the attempt to meet their primary existential needs available for emotional therapeutic processes? If structural issues have such a crucial impact on poverty, how can we understand that in the same neighbourhoods, the children of some families manage to escape poverty while others do not? Does poverty-aware social work free people of their responsibility for their situations? How can social workers avoid encouraging dependency among service users?
Arab-Palestinian families have one of the highest poverty rates in Israel. However, there is a la... more Arab-Palestinian families have one of the highest poverty rates in Israel. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding this population from a social work perspective. This article presents an analysis of 64 supervision sessions held with Arab-Palestinian social workers with the aim of identifying context-specific knowledge on the barriers service users face in their daily lives. Our findings point to three types of barriers: economic, sociopolitical, and cultural/political. The article relates to the intersections of these barriers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Young people from ethnic minority groups are at the centre of public concern in modern societies.... more Young people from ethnic minority groups are at the centre of public concern in modern societies. This article presents the findings of a qualitative study that critically examines the discourses of thirty-three social workers who work with young people of Ethiopian ethnic origin in Israel. The findings reveal three key discourses: the social inclusion discourse, the meritocracy discourse and the social conflict discourse. Alongside the dominance of conservative discourses and neoliberal perceptions of youth and sociocultural group relationships, the findings reveal the existence of a competing critical discourse. The discussion offers a critical and contextual analysis of the field of social work with youth as the basis for a renewed discussion of basic assumptions, values, professional role perceptions and work directions. It notes the critical models that recognise and oppose oppression as an alternative to policymaking, training and practice processes regarding young people from...
The second chapter of Part Four of the book considers a case in which a fire broke out in the pub... more The second chapter of Part Four of the book considers a case in which a fire broke out in the public housing apartment of a woman who had locked her children in when she left for work. Is this the story of a neglectful mother? What is the connection between the fire and poverty? What does a practice of standing by service users look like in such a case? Responding to this incident by means of community development takes into consideration the structural barriers that parents face and challenges the automatic response that blames mothers for acting neglectfully.
This book describes the new Poverty-Aware Paradigm (PAP), which was developed in Israel through i... more This book describes the new Poverty-Aware Paradigm (PAP), which was developed in Israel through intense involvement with the field of social work in various initiatives. The paradigm was adopted in 2014 by the Israeli Ministry of Welfare and Social Services as a leading paradigm for social workers in social services departments. The book draws from the rich experience of the implementation of the PAP in practice and connects examples of practice to theoretical ideas from radical/critical social work, critical poverty knowledge, and psychoanalysis. The PAP addresses poverty as a violation of human rights and emphasizes people’s ongoing efforts to resist poverty. In order to recognize these sometimes minor acts of resistance and advance their impact, social workers should establish close relationship with service users and stand by them. The book proposes combining relationship-based practice and rights-based practice as a means of bridging the gap between the emotional and material n...
The third chapter of Part Three delves into the practice of the active exercising of rights and a... more The third chapter of Part Three delves into the practice of the active exercising of rights and addresses the difficult issue of working with service users under circumstances where they have no legal rights that can be actualized. This might happen when service users do not have citizenship, or when certain needs of citizens are not covered by law. Based on examples from the field, the principles of dealing with such situations are explored, emphasizing the importance of the social worker’s analysis of these situations in the framework of poverty as a violation of human rights.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021
Based on Pearlin’s stress process model and the social inequality approach to health, this study ... more Based on Pearlin’s stress process model and the social inequality approach to health, this study used a social lens to explore the role of socioeconomic inequities in mental distress during the COVID-19 pandemic in Israel. Specifically, we examined people’s pre-pandemic sociodemographic characteristics and economic situation, and the economic effects of the pandemic itself on mental distress. A real-time survey was conducted in May 2020 among 273 adults (ages 20–68), and hierarchical linear models were employed. Findings indicated that groups vulnerable to mental distress in routine times (e.g., women, people with economic difficulties) showed the same pattern during the pandemic. Not only was unemployment related to mental distress, so too was a reduction in work hours. The pandemic’s economic effects (e.g., needing to take out loans, having a worsening financial situation) were also associated with increased mental distress. This study is one of very few studies to explore a wide ...
The third chapter of Part One deals with transformational teaching and describes the challenge of... more The third chapter of Part One deals with transformational teaching and describes the challenge of unveiling social workers’ basic conservative conceptual framework and replacing it with a critical one. Drawing upon responses of students in PAP courses, the chapter presents this challenge as containing both cognitive and emotional aspects. It addresses the issues of deconstructing conservative attitudes during teaching without attacking or blaming students, connecting knowledge and attitudes in practice, and the role of an ongoing dialogue in transformational teaching. The chapter concludes with guidelines for handling these issues.
This is the first of the four chapters that comprise Part One of the book, which is dedicated to ... more This is the first of the four chapters that comprise Part One of the book, which is dedicated to the issue of transformation. This chapter focuses on the transformation of the professional spoken vocabulary regarding poverty. Through a close look at the words that social workers use to describe service users in poverty, links are made between language (rhetoric), attitudes, and practice. The chapter presents an overview of six basic principles of the paradigm and translates them to guidelines regarding the way in which social workers should speak about and with service users. It urges social workers to be aware of the language they use and to change it.
The second chapter of Part Two deals with material assistance as a component of PAP practice. Thr... more The second chapter of Part Two deals with material assistance as a component of PAP practice. Throughout the history of social work there has been a complex relationship between responses to emotional needs and responses to material needs. In the PAP, the internal and external realms are perceived as connected. Thus, practice should seek to respond simultaneously to both. The chapter presents a case study to explore the need for material assistance in working with people in poverty. In addition, based on the experience of using material assistance in PAP programs, its characteristics—immediacy and flexibility—are discussed.
Summary Over-indebtedness of impoverished households and its relevance to the social work profess... more Summary Over-indebtedness of impoverished households and its relevance to the social work profession have not received sufficient attention in the professional discourse. It is the intention of this article to put over-indebtedness on the professional agenda, to review the literature about it, and to present initial data from a study on over-indebtedness in Israel carried out with special attention to debtors’ coping with their debts. The research was conducted as a door-to-door survey in a neighborhood with low socio-economic characteristics and included questions about the nature of the debts, the strategies people use to cope with debts and the obstacles they face while doing so. Findings The research findings indicate a severe debt problem among the participants. Out of 142 interviewees, 61% had debt that was overdue and 27% of them did not have an active bank account – a significant parameter of financial exclusion. Moreover, the proliferation of debts per household, and the hi...
Social exclusion has been identified as a prominent factor informing our understanding of young p... more Social exclusion has been identified as a prominent factor informing our understanding of young people involvement in gang life, violence and crime. While the literature on social exclusion focuses on the education and employment systems, there is a limited literature regarding the role played by correctional institutions in exacerbating social exclusion. This article explores the reciprocal relationships between young people involved in the drug trade in Israel and various educational and correctional services in their community. It focuses on a term commonly articulated by the youth, ‘not seeing with the eyes’, which they use to describe themselves as consciously, purposefully and openly ignoring and flouting societal norms. However, the educational and correctional services present a similar attitude, manifesting institutional blindness in connection with the youth and hence contributing to the double exclusion of young men. The article exposes the practices and processes through which this double exclusion takes place.
Uploads