Christiane Sanderson on Counselling Survivors of Interpersonal Trauma

“…practitioners need to ensure they do not hide behind protocols and prescriptive techniques in order to create an authentic human relationship in which to truly understand their client and undo the dehumanisation inherent in interpersonal abuse.”

December 15, 2009Social work

Rhidian Hughes: “Restraint does nothing to address the underlying causes of people’s behaviour”

“…the United States was the first country to take a long hard look at the use of restraint and to develop a number of innovative restraint reduction and eradication approaches. […] Progress in other countries has followed, although at a different pace. Arguably the UK has lagged behind other countries in the attention afforded to this topic and the lack of domestic research has been criticised, a point made in the book…”

November 15, 2009Social work

Mary Wilkinson honours nine great disabled leaders

“Much had been written about disability from a medical, academic or social science stand point, but no one had looked at disabled leaders as a group, told their stories, shown how they came to achieve what they did and how the modern history of disability has been played out in their lives…”

October 15, 2009Social work

Fergus McNeill and Monica Barry on Youth Offending and Youth Justice

“…the preoccupation with ‘youth’ is at the expense of ‘justice’. Too readily such systems exist or at least function so as to punish and to challenge individual young people rather than to question the extent to which the wider society is as much, if not more, to blame for the disadvantages they face.”

September 15, 2009Social work

David Carson: What can Social Workers do to avoid being criticised – or sued?

“I had asked my social work students what additional topics they would like me to lecture upon. As a law lecturer I had explained how they could be sued for negligence and how easily they, and their evidence, could be misrepresented in court. So I should not have been surprised when they said they wanted to know how to take decisions that would avoid liability…”

September 15, 2009Education

Interview with Jan Horwath, author of The Child’s World

“For me the biggest challenge is recognising effective practice and, in the same way that we have begun to pay more attention to resilience amongst children and young people, we should be considering what makes for a resilient workforce. Why is it that some practitioners can continue to work effectively with service users when others in the same or similar settings struggle?”

September 15, 2009Adoption and Fostering

Linda Miller on the ‘5P Approach’ to behaviour management for young people with Autism

“The 5p Approach evolved over several years as a result of my work as a psychologist within schools. I grew increasingly concerned that I was often called in to deal with behaviour difficulties after the event, when a better understanding of autism and the reasons for the behaviour occurring could have prevented many problems arising in the first place…”