Professional Interactions with Sex-Trafficked Migrant Women in Spain: Everyday Discretion, Practices, and Challenges

While social work education has come a long way, some of the most valuable lessons are learnt not in the class but in the field. This article explores the relationship between the practice of research and social work practice through my struggles within my final social work placement. How does one come to terms with the relationship between everyday social work practice and the practice of research? How does one reconcile what many see as a gap between research and the practice of social work? Is it possible to incorporate research into everyday practice? In the end it must be argued that both have comparable underlying goals and follow almost identical processes. In many ways a researcher carries out similar investigations utilising similar skills as those of a social worker. Thus being skilled in research and being able to integrate research into everyday practice will produce a better social worker.

Psychotherapy and social pedagogical care, help and support in relation to children placed in out-of-home care are typically perceived as two separate forms of practice. In its typical form, psychotherapy is pictured as a meeting between therapist and client in a ‘therapeutic space’ separated out from daily life and activities, while social pedagogical care, help, and support is carried out in close proximity to everyday life in what is regarded as the person’s home. This article analyses an alternative relationship and way of collaborating between psychotherapy – more specifically play therapy – and everyday social pedagogical practice in residential care for children with severe emotional and behavioural problems. This is done by drawing on an empirical case study of the relationship between everyday practice and expertise of social pedagogical practice and play therapy in a children’s home in Denmark. Meeting the needs of children who have been severely neglected and/or abused is challenging in different ways, and it requires highly developed relational, emotional, and reflective skills. The authors argue that play therapy has a particular potential in foregrounding and developing core social pedagogical knowledge and skills. When designed and carried out as an integrated part of everyday social pedagogical practice, play therapy can support practitioners in integrating a reflective and conscious approach to understanding and meeting the children’s emotional and relational needs with the ability to create and enter into ‘playful encounters’ with the children that challenges one-sided and taken-for-granted power relationships, practices and norms.

The paper describes a study conducted in Rwanda involving 12 participants selected from a larger cohort of 24 final‐year university students who were part of a group‐based training programme. The programme was about how to search, retrieve, and use web‐based literature. Empirical data were collected through interviews and focus group discussions. The purpose was to explore ways of using information and communication technology (ICT) in student teachers' everyday learning practice. The study draws from a sociocultural perspective and emphasis is put on a literature review involving ICT in teacher education. The findings reveal that utilization of ICT pertains to three major types of variation among student teachers who use ICT: passive, reluctant, and active users. The active ICT users demonstrated a capacity to cross group boundaries and play a central role as agents of change in learning practice. The point is that more experienced student teachers can assist their colleagues in the zone of proximal development and, therefore, enhance the integration of the new technology in teacher education. This implies that having access to ICT together with some instruction is not sufficient to prompt students to start using this technology as a pedagogical tool. Moreover, confrontation of different experiences regarding the use of ICT can spearhead change in student teachers' learning practice through critical reflection.

A trauma bond is an emotional attachment between an abuser and victim. Trauma bonds in sex trafficking compel victims to submit to continued exploitation and protect the trafficker. This scoping review examines trauma bonds in sex trafficking situations, its conceptualizations, and key characteristics. Ten databases were searched using sex trafficking AND trauma bonding–related terms; sex trafficking AND Stockholm syndrome, attachment, coercion, and manipulation. Articles were included if they featured trauma bonding, were published in English after 2013, or featured sex trafficking victims or traffickers in a Western country. Fifteen articles were included. The features of trauma bonding identified in these articles were (1) imbalance of power that favors trafficker, (2) traffickers’ deliberate use of positive and negative interactions, (3) victim’s gratitude for positive interactions and self-blame for the negative, and (4) victim’s internalization of perpetrator’s view. We also identified four aspects related to trauma bonding: (1) prior trauma made victims vulnerable, (2) victim’s feelings of love remained even after exiting trafficking, (3) love is why victims do not prosecute traffickers, and (4) traffickers’ intentional cultivation of the trauma bond. No article indicated how trauma bonds could be severed and replaced with healthy attachments. These findings reveal the need for practitioners and law enforcement and criminal justice professionals to address trauma bonding in both trafficking and posttrafficking situations. The findings also represent potential targets for urgently needed interventions that promote the replacement of trauma bonds with healthy attachments.

Studies examining the relationship between sex trafficking victimization and race/ethnicity are typically limited to organizational or national-level data. State-level and local-level analyses are limited and typically do not occur simultaneously. The aim of the current study is to examine the race/ethnicity of sex trafficking survivors relative to the population on state and local levels in the state of Missouri. Data were derived from survey responses involving 107 social service, healthcare, law enforcement and legal service professionals who reported working with 402 human trafficking survivors (sex trafficking alone, n = 349, sex and labor trafficking combined, n = 53) accessing services in the previous year. Results indicate disproportionate sex trafficking victimization of people of color on local, regional and state levels. The results underscore the necessity for anti-oppressive practice on micro, mezzo, and macro levels. Engaging in critical consciousness and integrating cultural strengths in practice, incorporating the role of structural oppression and including diverse case scenarios in trainings, including diverse images on organizational outreach and training materials, recruiting and hiring people of color in service provision, and working to address structural oppressions and risks on a policy level are recommended.

Understandings of knowledge in social work, in the UK at least, are based on an assumption that theory – increasingly derived from ‘scientific’ or ‘evidence-based’ perspectives – can be abstracted and applied to practice. Essentially, knowledge acquisition and utilisation are seen as transactional, instrumental endeavours. Such a view does not fit with the realities of everyday social pedagogical practice. This article begins to develop an alternative conception of social work/social pedagogical knowledge from an Aristotelean position, within which the relationship between theory and practice happens in the domain of praxis; this is not a direct mapping of theory onto practice but operates in a constant dialectic within which one informs and indeed collapses into the other. Effective praxis requires Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of phronesis (practical reasoning or judgement). Phronesis understands practice within its wider moral purpose and foregrounds the virtues and dispositions of practitioners rather than a set of rules. Knowing and being (epistemology and ontology) therefore come together in how practitioners engage in everyday practice. This proposition challenges dominant technical and instrumental conceptions of knowledge and, more generally, of the way in which professional practice is currently understood.

Purpose With the increased attention to the principles of evidence-based practice (EBP), social workers are challenged to adapt their daily interventions accordingly when treating clients. They usually work with individual clients, all with their own specificities. Single-Case Experimental Designs (SCEDs) can be used to inform a social worker about the effectiveness of an intervention at the individual client level. In everyday social work practice, however, it is difficult to meet methodological requirements of SCEDs to find causal explanations. A concern is that repeated measurements prior to an intervention are required in most situations. This study aims to provide researchers with alternatives to repeated measurement when using the logic of SCED to apply EBP in their everyday practice. Methods In this study, we reviewed published single-case designs between January 1 and December 31, 2019, on types of SCEDs in the social domain, and how is dealt with baseline conditions. Results SCEDs and quasi-experimental alternatives are hardly published in situations when baseline data are not available. Four underused quasi-experimental strategies that can be employed when repeated measurement during baseline is not possible are as follows: retrospective baselines, theoretical inference, multiraters, and triangulation with qualitative data. Discussion and Conclusion The suggestions to work with single-case designs with quasi-experimental elements are meant to enable social workers to evaluate their interventions in a way that enhances mere narrative evaluations of the experiences of an intervention.

This themed section brings together the disciplines of sociology, social work and social policy in order to examine the ways in which contemporary familial diversity is recognised in comparative welfare state regimes. Contributors interrogate the ways in which such diversity is supported in national legislation, policy developments and acknowledged in everyday social work practice. In doing so, the section examines if and how these demographic trends and sociological conceptualisations are reflected in comparative welfare state systems and/or policy related to family. Selected articles will also consider if and how social workers, as ‘street level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky, 1980), incorporate these changes in familial structures, and related policy, into their decision making processes and everyday practice.

There is abundant literature that teaches social work graduates to be culturally competent and critically reflective on issues of cultural diversity. However, it is evident that many competency based approaches do not effectively address issues of privilege, power and diversity. Such approaches can fail to challenge entrenched and/or unconscious biases concerning other cultures. This paper argues we need to move away from over-prioritizing the teaching and use of competency based models for dealing with diversity in disciplines such as Social Work. Using Sara Ahmed’s work on diversity and critical reflection, we present the findings from a survey of social work students. The positive news is that students’ reflections in critical essays and their responses to the learnings they achieved from a unit on race, suggested they were becoming more aware of how privilege and power worked in everyday interactions as well as professional interactions. The other side of the coin was their understanding of the social, political and ethical grounding of values was limited. Students tended to focus more on declaring their allegiance to social work values of ‘honesty, integrity or social justice’ to the point they were mere declarations or saying which become substitutes for actions.

There is a problem investigating and eliminating sex trafficking. This problem has negatively impacted victims of sex trafficking, especially those who are trafficked into prostitution rings. A possible cause of this problem is the high male demand for commercial sex and the lack of education about the factors involved in sex trafficking. The purpose of this research study is to explore the prevalence of task force involvement in the prosecution of human/sex trafficking cases as well as the possible solutions that can be used to close the gap in the prosecution of human/sex trafficking cases (Brents, Jackson, Hausbeck, 2010) (Farley, 2007). There is a gap in the research specifically regarding the challenges that the legal system has in eradicating sex trafficking. By doing research into the different elements that contribute to sex trafficking, and conducting interviews with law enforcement, task forces, and researchers through a qualitative method, this study found in all the responses combined show patterns in the need to address the gap with law enforcement. Ways this can be done include training across the whole department, the use of victim advocates and trauma-bonding, setting up safety plans in school, creating more awareness, and having better prevention methods. All of these solutions start with law enforcement being a part of a task force.

Local and international evidence suggests that professional social work education often fails to effectively prepare graduates to implement social policy objectives within their everyday practice. This paper critically analyses the development of social policy subjects within one particular Australian social work course. Particular attention is drawn to subject objectives, content, reading material, teaching methods and assessment. Some suggestions are made for new educational initiatives that could potentially lead to more effective social policy practice.

Recent concern over the standard of social work practice, as evidenced by inquiries into child abuse cases, have led to something of a crisis in trust in the profession. As a result, there is now an emphasis on increasing practitioners' competency to practice in complex situations. Critical reflection is seen as key to achieving this increase in competence, and is stressed in both professional guidance and educational policy. National standards for continuing professional development encapsulated in post-qualifying social work awards formalise the processes of reflection on practice and learning through reflection. While most literature concentrates on reflection within the context of educational courses, the research presented in this article describes the extent to which practitioners use reflective and critical thinking skills in everyday practice. Analysis of qualitative interviews reveal that practitioners value the opportunity that post-qualifying awards provide to step back and reflect in-depth on a piece of practice, but that there is neither the time or often the support, to transfer these skills to everyday practice. Reflection emerges as an important tool for learning, but given the complex context of social work practice, it is important that it continues outside of formal education programmes. Barriers and enablers of this process are discussed.

The objective of this paper, based on interviews with 95 human smugglers (coyotes) involved in agriculture and 51 in prostitution, is to provide a comparative analysis of the networks transporting (mostly) male migrants intending to work in US agriculture and those recruiting women/girls for the US sex industry. Networks carrying females for sex work are bigger and use more fraudulent recruitment strategies. However, migrant smuggling for agriculture is not totally different from sex trafficking; similarities between the types of networks analysed dwarf their differences. Smugglers frequently use some form of deception to convince their would-be clients/victims to undertake risky journeys. I conclude that both networks are demand-driven. Smugglers serve the interests of US agribusinesses and sex business owners rather than those of the males and females they recruit.

While antitrafficking federal and state policies, service programs, and advocacy efforts have expanded significantly since the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000, little is known about how social work research and practice engage with the distinct vulnerabilities of foreign-national minors subjected to labor trafficking. This scoping review examines existing social work scholarship on labor trafficking of immigrant children and youth. The authors' findings suggest that while human service professionals play a critical role in identifying and supporting trafficked youth-often through schools, healthcare settings, and social service agencies-research remains disproportionately focused on sex trafficking. Although the 12 studies partially addressed child labor trafficking, their primary focus was on domestic child trafficking more generally, often using aggregated data that combined sex and labor trafficking survivors under the broader category of human trafficking. The authors highlight key gaps in research and propose directions for strengthening social work's engagement with labor-trafficked immigrant youth, ensuring more informed and effective responses to their needs.

The voices of Indigenous women social workers continue to be underrepresented in the production of knowledge and academic social work debates, illustrating how the supremacy of whiteness and intellectual racism persists. This article discusses the scope of feminist perspectives on the exercise of micropolitical power -that which occurs in the everyday practices- of women social workers of Mapuche origin in Chile. From an autoethnographic perspective, and based on biographical interviews, we reconstructed the professional life histories of three Mapuche women social workers. In this article, we analyse how Mapuche women social workers confront the racist and patriarchal culture in their daily work. The findings suggest that their daily disputes have significant emancipatory potential but also entail significant professional fatigue, and at times, reproduce the precepts they are trying to combat. Articulating individual struggles into collective projects remains a challenge for these women, as Mapuche activist circles tend to have a male imprint, and social work activist circles remain monocultural. Drawing on the contributions of decolonial feminisms, we examine the barriers and opportunities that social work faces today in dismantling exclusionary logic within the profession and discipline itself.