Mandated prevention in child welfare: Considerations from a framework shaping ethical inquiry

Summary: This article outlines a framework for approaching ethical dilemmas arising from the development, evaluation and implementation of child welfare policies. As such, it is relevant to policy-makers, social researchers and social workers. The central tenets of the framework are developed by drawing on ideas from moral philosophy and critical social theory. These ideas are presented as axioms, theorems and corollaries, a format which has been employed in the social sciences to offer a rational justification for a set of claims. • Findings: This process of reasoning leads to four principle axioms that are seen to shape the ethical scrutiny of social policy: 1) problematizing knowledge; 2) utilizing structured forms of inquiry to enhance understanding; 3) engendering enabling communication with those affected by the ethical concern; and 4) enhancing self-awareness. • Applications: The four axioms are then applied, by way of example, to the current and contentious, 'third way' policy of mandated prevention in child welfare, where the aim is to obviate deleterious outcomes in later life. It is argued that the framework can be applied beyond this specific concern to other pressing, ethical challenges in child welfare.

Getting In and Getting On? The Experiences of Young People with Visual Impairments and Hearing Impairments in Third-Level Education

Young disabled people continue to be under-represented throughout further and higher education settings. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory of habitus, capital and field, this paper explores the practices of domination and oppression that have made it difficult for young people with visual impairments and hearing impairments to participate in third-level education on the same basis as non-disabled people. Twenty young people with hearing impairments and visual impairments were interviewed about their educational experiences. In addition, 31 interviews were conducted with third-level education providers, policy-makers and non-governmental organisations. This article has two aims: firstly, to critically examine the experiences of young people with hearing impairments and visual impairments in accessing and engaging with support provisions in further and higher education settings; and secondly, to identify and explore the diversity of ways in which these young people have managed and responded to the practices they have encountered. This article emphasises the journey from ability to dis-ability that young people with hearing and visual impairments experience in their quest for educational achievement. The ambiguities of “inclusion”, “widening participation” and “support” are highlighted and critiqued for their extensive failure to challenge taken-for-granted discourses.

Emotions and Power: Reconciling Conceptual Twins

While the existence of an ‘emotional turn’ within the social sciences is now widely acknowledged, some areas have garnered less specific attention than others. Perhaps the most significant absence within this literature is an explicit exploration of the relationship between emotions and relations of power and domination. This article will attempt such an endeavour. In doing so, I will draw on some key work from within the sociology of emotions, such as Barbalet, Collins, Kemper and Turner, and from the power literature within social theory more generally, including Dahl, Elias, Foucault, Giddens, Gramsci and Lukes. The main thrust of the argument is that power and emotion are conceptual twins in need of a serious theoretical reunion, and that emotions have played a largely unacknowledged, ‘under-labouring’ role within most theories of power. The need for a more unified approach to these two concepts is highlighted.

Emotions & Power:Habitus and Change in Late Modernity

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Developing critical social work in theory and in practice: child protection and communicative reason

This paper argues that a critical analysis of the ideologies that inform contemporary child care has been missing from the ‘re-focusing debate’. Such an analysis points up the necessity of reasserting a critical social work position in order to provide a basis for reconstructing practice and engaging with other social actors and their ideologies in an open and creative fashion compatible with Habermas’ aspiration of ‘communicative reason’.

The role of theory in promoting social work values and its potential effect on outcomes in work with domestically violent men

This article is concerned with the ethical conflicts that arise for social workers when dealing with males that perpetrate violence against women and children with whom they have or had intimate relationships. In particular, the article seeks to highlight how a strong social work value base is essential when working with perpetrators whose apparent wilful violent controlling behaviour creates a major ethical dilemma for the practising social worker. The argument contends that strategies designed to protect and enhance the welfare of domestic violence victims, particularly those aimed at the re-education of perpetrators, are weakened when social workers do not adhere to a social work value base.