Derechos de la infancia en la era digital

La brecha digital exacerba desigualdades en el acceso a información y conocimiento, socialización con pares, visibilidad y manejo de herramientas básicas para desempeñarse en la sociedad. Reducir esta brecha permite sinergias virtuosas de inclusión social y cultural entre niños, niñas y adolescentes, con impactos positivos en el desarrollo de capacidades y generación de oportunidades para toda su vida. Si bien las nuevas generaciones están conectadas y sus miembros son nativos digitales, persisten desigualdades entre grupos socioeconómicos, aun cuando se han reducido gracias a los programas de conectividad en las escuelas públicas de la región. El artículo central de esta edición de Desafíos aborda –con información actualizada– las brechas y los avances en esta materia. El acceso es solo un primer paso; luego, es necesario proteger a niños y adolescentes contra los riesgos de la conectividad y potenciar los aprendizajes pertinentes y plenos de sentido, promoviendo usos más articulados con el currículo educativo. Por último, el artículo plantea que hay que vincular las políticas de conectividad con el cumplimiento de los derechos de la infancia en el marco de la Convención sobre los Derechos del Niño. Junto al artículo central, y como es habitual, se informa de encuentros y conferencias en la región durante el año y de publicaciones recientes en la materia. También se presentan buenas prácticas en el Perú para reducir brechas de género y una iniciativa conjunta de los operadores móviles y el UNICEF para proteger a la infancia en la era digital. En Puntos de vista se incluye la opinión de especialistas acerca de la potencialidad de las TIC como una herramienta a tener en cuenta para el ejercicio o vulneración de los derechos de niños, niñas y adolescentes.

Children’s rights in the digital age

The digital divide exacerbates inequalities in access to information and knowledge, making it more difficult to socialize with peers and limiting awareness of and the ability to use basic tools for life in society. Reducing this gap sets in motion virtuous synergies of social and cultural inclusion for children and adolescents, facilitating skills development and generating lifelong opportunities. Although the younger generations are connected digital natives, inequalities persist among socioeconomic groups, though these have been tempered by connectivity programmes in public schools in the region. The main article of this edition of Challenges uses current information to examine the progress made and the gaps that remain in this area. Providing children and adolescents with access is merely a first step. They then need to be protected from the risks associated with information and communications technologies (ICTs), which must be harnessed for purposes of meaningful learning, promoting uses that are more in line with the educational curriculum. Lastly, the article posits that connectivity policies must be linked to the fulfilment of children’s rights in the framework of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. As is customary, this issue also contains information on meetings and conferences held in the region during the year and recent publications in this field. Mention is also made of good practices from Peru in reducing gender gaps and a joint initiative between mobile operators and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to protect children in the digital age. Viewpoints includes expert opinion on the potential of ICTs as tools that can facilitate the exercise of the rights of children and adolescents, but also lead to violations of these rights.

Política de cuidados en El Salvador: opciones, metas y desafíos

Este estudio aborda las discusiones conceptuales y las oportunidades y desafíos institucionales para la construcción de una política integrada de cuidados en El Salvador, realizando un diagnóstico sociodemográfico de las necesidades de cuidado para las distintas poblaciones destinatarias y planteando recomendaciones para contribuir al debate interinstitucional, actualmente en marcha, sobre esta política en El Salvador.

Pobreza y privaciones múltiples en la infancia en Uruguay

El estudio multidimensional de la pobreza ha ganado espacio en diversos ámbitos en la última década. Por un lado, en el ámbito académico han evolucionado los desarrollos conceptuales sobre el bienestar de los individuos y sus dimensiones, y, de la mano de ello, la construcción de mediciones que las toman en cuenta. Por otro lado, algunos países han avanzado en las mediciones multidimensionales como medidas oficiales de pobreza, o están avanzando en consensos para llevarlas a cabo con el objetivo de orientar las políticas públicas. Además, en diversos países se utiliza el enfoque multidimensional en diferentes estudios elaborados por los gobiernos, aun cuando no tengan el estatus de mediciones oficiales. En Uruguay, si bien la medida oficial de pobreza es la monetaria, cada vez existen más estimaciones complementarias, elaboradas tanto en la academia como en el Estado, que incorporan otras dimensiones (Arim y Vigorito, 2007; mides, 2013; Castillo y Colombo, 2014). De hecho, la reducción de la pobreza monetaria tornó más importantes estas medidas multidimensionales en el diseño de las políticas sociales, porque dan cuenta de privaciones específicas en determinados grupos de población y dimensiones, lo que permite mejorar la focalización.

Redes sociais temáticas: o caso das redes sociais de assistência à criança e ao adolescente em Presidente Prudente (SP) e suas representações sociais

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Efeitos do fogo sobre comunidades de aves no Pantanal Mato-Grossense

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

História de vida, concepções sobre a família, maternidade e práticas parentais de mães atendidas pelo judiciário por denúncia de negligência materna

Pós-graduação em Saúde Coletiva - FMB

Impactos da idéia de pobre e de pobreza na institucionalização de crianças e adolescentes em regime de abrigamento

Pós-graduação em Ciências Sociais - FFC

Episcopal Church Home For Children Records - Accession 31

The Episcopal Church Home For Children Records are a valuable source on the Church’s historical effort to extend its services for the social improvement of South Carolina (in this case the Episcopal Diocese’s program for destitute children.) The Episcopal Church Home was established in 1850 in Charleston, S.C. for orphan girls and was chartered by the S.C. General Assembly in 1852. The collection consists of a history, minutes, reports of the annual meetings, general correspondence, superintendent’s records, health records, attendance registers, financial records, newsletters (both bound and unbound), and photographs.

Semiotic Analysis in the Study of Social Work

Research and professional practices have the joint aim of re-structuring the preconceived notions of reality. They both want to gain the understanding about social reality. Social workers use their professional competence in order to grasp the reality of their clients, while researchers’ pursuit is to open the secrecies of the research material. Development and research are now so intertwined and inherent in almost all professional practices that making distinctions between practising, developing and researching has become difficult and in many aspects irrelevant. Moving towards research-based practices is possible and it is easily applied within the framework of the qualitative research approach (Dominelli 2005, 235; Humphries 2005, 280). Social work can be understood as acts and speech acts crisscrossing between social workers and clients. When trying to catch the verbal and non-verbal hints of each others’ behaviour, the actors have to do a lot of interpretations in a more or less uncertain mental landscape. Our point of departure is the idea that the study of social work practices requires tools which effectively reveal the internal complexity of social work (see, for example, Adams & Dominelli & Payne 2005, 294 – 295). The boom of qualitative research methodologies in recent decades is associated with much profound the rupture in humanities, which is called the linguistic turn (Rorty 1967). The idea that language is not transparently mediating our perceptions and thoughts about reality, but on the contrary it constitutes it was new and even confusing to many social scientists. Nowadays we have got used to read research reports which have applied different branches of discursive analyses or narratologic or semiotic approaches. Although differences are sophisticated between those orientations they share the idea of the predominance of language. Despite the lively research work of today’s social work and the research-minded atmosphere of social work practice, semiotics has rarely applied in social work research. However, social work as a communicative practice concerns symbols, metaphors and all kinds of the representative structures of language. Those items are at the core of semiotics, the science of signs, and the science which examines people using signs in their mutual interaction and their endeavours to make the sense of the world they live in, their semiosis. When thinking of the practice of social work and doing the research of it, a number of interpretational levels ought to be passed before reaching the research phase in social work. First of all, social workers have to interpret their clients’ situations, which will be recorded in the files. In some very rare cases those past situations will be reflected in discussions or perhaps interviews or put under the scrutiny of some researcher in the future. Each and every new observation adds its own flavour to the mixture of meanings. Social workers have combined their observations with previous experience and professional knowledge, furthermore, the situation on hand also influences the reactions. In addition, the interpretations made by social workers over the course of their daily working routines are never limited to being part of the personal process of the social worker, but are also always inherently cultural. The work aiming at social change is defined by the presence of an initial situation, a specific goal, and the means and ways of achieving it, which are – or which should be – agreed upon by the social worker and the client in situation which is unique and at the same time socially-driven. Because of the inherent plot-based nature of social work, the practices related to it can be analysed as stories (see Dominelli 2005, 234), given, of course, that they are signifying and told by someone. The research of the practices is concentrating on impressions, perceptions, judgements, accounts, documents etc. All these multifarious elements can be scrutinized as textual corpora, but not whatever textual material. In semiotic analysis, the material studied is characterised as verbal or textual and loaded with meanings. We present a contribution of research methodology, semiotic analysis, which has to our mind at least implicitly references to the social work practices. Our examples of semiotic interpretation have been picked up from our dissertations (Laine 2005; Saurama 2002). The data are official documents from the archives of a child welfare agency and transcriptions of the interviews of shelter employees. These data can be defined as stories told by the social workers of what they have seen and felt. The official documents present only fragmentations and they are often written in passive form. (Saurama 2002, 70.) The interviews carried out in the shelters can be described as stories where the narrators are more familiar and known. The material is characterised by the interaction between the interviewer and interviewee. The levels of the story and the telling of the story become apparent when interviews or documents are examined with the use of semiotic tools. The roots of semiotic interpretation can be found in three different branches; the American pragmatism, Saussurean linguistics in Paris and the so called formalism in Moscow and Tartu; however in this paper we are engaged with the so called Parisian School of semiology which prominent figure was A. J. Greimas. The Finnish sociologists Pekka Sulkunen and Jukka Törrönen (1997a; 1997b) have further developed the ideas of Greimas in their studies on socio-semiotics, and we lean on their ideas. In semiotics social reality is conceived as a relationship between subjects, observations, and interpretations and it is seen mediated by natural language which is the most common sign system among human beings (Mounin 1985; de Saussure 2006; Sebeok 1986). Signification is an act of associating an abstract context (signified) to some physical instrument (signifier). These two elements together form the basic concept, the “sign”, which never constitutes any kind of meaning alone. The meaning will be comprised in a distinction process where signs are being related to other signs. In this chain of signs, the meaning becomes diverged from reality. (Greimas 1980, 28; Potter 1996, 70; de Saussure 2006, 46-48.) One interpretative tool is to think of speech as a surface under which deep structures – i.e. values and norms – exist (Greimas & Courtes 1982; Greimas 1987). To our mind semiotics is very much about playing with two different levels of text: the syntagmatic surface which is more or less faithful to the grammar, and the paradigmatic, semantic structure of values and norms hidden in the deeper meanings of interpretations. Semiotic analysis deals precisely with the level of meaning which exists under the surface, but the only way to reach those meanings is through the textual level, the written or spoken text. That is why the tools are needed. In our studies, we have used the semiotic square and the actant analysis. The former is based on the distinctions and the categorisations of meanings, and the latter on opening the plotting of narratives in order to reach the value structures.

That Wall is Around My Heart: Family Centered Practice

The author uses a clinical case study, in which he works with a teenager and his adoptive parents to illustrate how placement and adoption decisions can provide physical safety while at the same time exacerbating and extending overlooked and destructive effects of child abuse. The case study highlights the continuing impact of childhood trauma on the interpersonal patterns of behavior within the family, whether biological, kinship, foster or adoptive. The tendency for patterns of aggression and reactivity to be repeated by the victim and his or her caregivers in a foster or adoptive home, and then to extend into the next generation, is an integral aspect of the cycle of child abuse and underscores a critical challenge for skilled and patient staff in family-based service programs.

Grandparents in Kinship Care: Help or Hindrance to Family Preservation

The phenomenon of grandparents and other relatives raising children is a tradition rooted in the African American culture. However, a substantial increase in the number of relatives raising children has drawn attention to the child welfare system. Many of the biological parents are incarcerated for drugs or suffering from other social ills. Kinship care is an important component of family preservation and prevents court intervention based on child protection concerns and avoids formal placement of children in the child welfare system (Wilkerson, 1999). The child welfare system, however, is not conducive to this phenomenon. Placing children with grandparents and relatives allows them to live with people they know and trust; reduces the initial trauma of living with unknown persons; supports the transmission of identity, culture, and ethnicity; facilitates connections with brothers and sisters, and strengthens a family’s ability to provide the support they need.

Partnering with Parents: Promising Approaches to Improve Reunification Outcomes for Children in Foster Care

Family reunification is one of the central tenents of the child welfare system, yet research supporting effective practices to promote safe reunifications is limited. As a departure from previous initiatives, the Parent Partner (PP) program enlists as staff mothers and fathers who have experienced child removal, services, and reunification. This study examines outcomes for children served by the PP program. The experimental group includes 236 children whose parents were served by a Parent Partner and a matched comparison group of 55 children whose parents were served by the public child welfare agency in 2004, before the Parent Partner program was established. Cases were examined 12 months following case opening to determine reunification status. Results from the outcome study indicate that reunification may be more likely for children whose parents were served by Parent Partners. Although there are limitations to the data, findings from this study suggest that the Parent Partner model may hold promise as a child welfare intervention designed to support reunification.

Low-Income Fathers’ Barriers to Participation in Family and Parenting Programs

This exploratory study used semi-structured focus groups to examine: 1) where and from whom fathers obtain information about parenting; 2) the types of parenting services men are aware of, and their attitudes about participating in such services; and 3) fathers’ perceived norms about the acceptability and utility of various parenting practices. Low-income men (N = 17) were recruited from a human services agency in Detroit, Michigan. Four major themes emerged. First was the need for male-focused community resources for fathers. Second was that men were aware of and used positive disciplinary strategies. Third was emphasis on fathers’ positive and effective communication, with male children in particular. Finally, men suggested that constructive and concrete activities, such as engaging with children in activities or mentorship programs with other adult men in the community, were preferable to traditional parenting class such as those offered through Child Protective Services.