Exploring Boundaries In Social Work Practice

Exploring Boundaries in Social Work Practice: The Space In Between is designed to create opportunities for social work students and professionals to explore and expand their awareness about boundary development and expression in the context of professional helping. The book is focused on the client-social worker relationship and presents a universally understood definition of professional boundaries. Readers learn about the factors that inform how boundaries are interpreted by clients, discover opportunities to explore and clarify boundary expression, and receive practical guidance on ethical decision-making according to the NASW Code of Ethics. Discussion is interwoven throughout the book regarding the practice of ongoing self-assessment, supervision, and consultation to ensure self-awareness as the foundation for maintaining healthy professional boundaries. The book underscores the benefits of clear boundaries and also highlights how unhealthy or unclear boundaries can potentially harm clients, influence professional burnout, and have far-reaching implications for the social work profession. The text features self-reflection opportunities, practice exercises, discussion questions, and case examples to inspire self-inquiry, critical thinking, problem-solving, group discussion, and consultation. Emphasizing self-awareness and practical application, Exploring Boundaries in Social Work Practice is an essential resource for social work students and professionals.

Annotation A practical guide for judging and maintaining boundaries in relationships between worker and client.

Exploring Boundaries in Social Work Practice: The Space In Between is designed to create opportunities for social work students and professionals to explore and expand their awareness about boundary development and expression in the context of professional helping. The book is focused on the client-social worker relationship and presents a universally understood definition of professional boundaries. Readers learn about the factors that inform how boundaries are interpreted by clients, discover opportunities to explore and clarify boundary expression, and receive practical guidance on ethical decision-making according to the NASW Code of Ethics. Discussion is interwoven throughout the book regarding the practice of ongoing self-assessment, supervision, and consultation to ensure self-awareness as the foundation for maintaining healthy professional boundaries. The book underscores the benefits of clear boundaries and also highlights how unhealthy or unclear boundaries can potentially harm clients, influence professional burnout, and have far-reaching implications for the social work profession. The text features self-reflection opportunities, practice exercises, discussion questions, and case examples to inspire self-inquiry, critical thinking, problem-solving, group discussion, and consultation. Emphasizing self-awareness and practical application, Exploring Boundaries in Social Work Practice is an essential resource for social work students and professionals.

Global social work: crossing borders, blurring boundaries is a collection of ideas, debates and reflections on key issues concerning social work as a global profession, such as its theory, its curricula, its practice, its professional identity; its concern with human rights and social activism, and its future directions. Apart from emphasising the complexities of working and talking about social work across borders and cultures, the volume focuses on the curricula of social work programs from as many regions as possible to showcase what is being taught in various cultural, sociopolitical and regional contexts. Exploring the similarities and differences in social work education across many countries of the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Pacific, the book provides a reference point for moving the current social work discourse towards understanding the local and global context in its broader significance.

Human dignity: social movements invoke it, several national constitutions enshrine it, and it features prominently in international human rights documents. But what is human dignity, why is it important, and what is its relationship to human rights? This book offers a sophisticated and comprehensive defence of the view that human dignity is the moral heart of human rights. First, it clarifies the network of concepts associated with dignity. Paramount within this network is a core notion of human dignity as an inherent, non-instrumental, egalitarian, and high-priority normative status of human persons. People have this status in virtue of their valuable human capacities rather than as a result of their national origin and other conventional features. Second, it shows how human dignity gives rise to an inspiring ideal of solidaristic empowerment, which calls us to support people's pursuit of a flourishing life by affirming both negative duties not to block or destroy, and positive duties to protect and facilitate, the development and exercise of the valuable capacities at the basis of their dignity. The most urgent of these duties are correlative to human rights. Third, this book illustrates how the proposed dignitarian approach allows us to articulate the content, justification, and feasible implementation of specific human rights, including contested ones, such as the rights to democratic political participation and to decent labour conditions. Finally, this book's dignitarian approach helps illuminate the arc of humanist justice, identifying both the difference and the continuity between the basic requirements of human rights and more expansive requirements of social justice such as those defended by liberal egalitarians and democratic socialists. Human dignity is indeed the moral heart of human rights. Understanding it enables us to defend human rights as the urgent ethical and political project that puts humanity first.

Exploring various aspects of social work from an anthropological perspective, this original book uses an ‘outsider’ position to develop a reflexive dialogue with social workers from England and elsewhere in Europe. Bell, an anthropologist, worked alongside social work educators and social workers for many years. She widens our insights into social work by offering thought-provoking examples suggesting how social work practitioners view their occupation and their practice, and how wider society views them. Blending research and personal reflection to critically examine social workers’ preoccupations and contributions to society, the author explores identities and definitions in social work, making this book refreshing reading for academics, researchers, students and practitioners.

This engaging and accessible introduction to social work encourages reflective learning in preparation for practice. Direct linking of key concepts to professional standards ensures that students are able to build up an understanding through context and reflective points, and with an emphasis on diversity, ideology, and preparing for practice, students will benefit from both practical and theoretical guidance. Sections are designed to work as both integrated and standalone resources and the flexible methodology will support a range of courses and learning techniques.

This collection of innovative approaches to social work placements offers hope in the current climate of cuts to services and over-regulation. The international contributions offer practical guidance and challenge conventional approaches to placement finding, teaching and assessment in field education.

The boundary between the personal and the professional self is a site of professional and personal creativity and tension, a space that reflects some of the key ontological and epistemological issues confronting social work. Exploring the social construction of the self through the stories of fifteen Australian social workers brings these issues into stark relief. The participatory and reflexive research process facilitated the development of knowledge about how a group of culturally diverse social workers construct personal and professional boundaries in practice. The need to explore these processes and relationships was predicated on a concern that while the self is generally recognised as shaping practice, there has been a paucity of attention given to what lived experiences constitute the self. Social work practice is broadly defined as a socially constructed profession, yet the personal and professional boundary is regarded as individually constructed and defined. This discourse neglects the influence of contextual, cultural, relational and structural dimensions of the self, thus denying the possibilities of practice being continually informed by a myriad of experiences. Recognising that the socially constructed self is situated within intersections of knowledge and meaning opens up possibilities for the development of dialogical practices within an ethics of care. The research also has implications for social work practice and education and for the way that we supervise and manage social work staff. Professional dialogue, debate and practice needs to reflect a diversity of experiences and recognise that the dominant discourse about boundaries and the self leaves many workers feeling that their practice reality is not a shared one.

Should a therapist disclose personal information to a client, accept a client's gift, or provide a former client with a job? Is it appropriate to exchange email or text messages with clients or correspond with them on social networking websites? Some acts, such as initiating a sexual relationship with a client, are clearly prohibited, yet what about more subtle interactions, such as hugging or accepting invitations to a social event? Is maintaining a friendship with a former client or client's relative a conflict of interest that ultimately subverts the client-practitioner relationship? Frederic G. Reamer, a certified authority on professional ethics, offers a frank analysis of a range of boundary issues and their complex formulations. He confronts the ethics of intimate and sexual relationships with clients and former clients, the healthy parameters of practitioners' self-disclosure, electronic relationships with clients, the giving and receiving of gifts and favors, the bartering of services, and the unavoidable and unanticipated circumstances of social encounters and geographical proximity. With case studies addressing challenges in the mental health field, school contexts, child welfare, addiction programs, home-healthcare, elder services, and prison, rural, and military settings, Reamer offers effective, practical risk-management models that prevent problems and help balance dual relationships.