Suchergebnisse

AbstractArab citizens of Israel constitute 21 per cent of the country's population. In April and May 2021 violent conflict erupted between Arab and Jewish Israeli citizens, more severe than ever before. It was manifested on both sides in physical brutality, destruction of property and torching of homes and places of worship. The political leadership on both sides was divided over how to respond. Some tried to restore calm; others tried to use the conflict for political gain and to divide the population. Against this background, a qualitative study, using semi-structured interviews, was conducted among forty Jewish and Arab social workers with the aim of understanding how they viewed their role in the conflict and how they were dealing with it. A thematic analysis revealed three main themes: 'What's needed is a social worker who is a leader'; 'The writing was on the wall' and 'The situation could be changed, but…'. The social workers saw importance in their profession's values of social justice and acceptance of the other but expressed difficulty in acting in a sphere that is defined as political. Recommendations are made for equipping social workers with the necessary tools for acting effectively in times of conflict.

Abstract
The Arab population in Israel is an ethnic, national, Indigenous minority experiencing discrimination and inequality, especially in education, health and welfare. This population's constant societal change is coupled with social problems such as violence, crime, unemployment and poverty. These characteristics pose many challenges to social workers, particularly those empowered by the Youth Law (Care and Supervision), 1960, known as child protection officers (CPOs). Besides the usual challenges CPOs face, additional challenges stem from the Arab population's being a traditional, collective society with a mistaken view of the CPO's role and also from the state's discriminatory policy. This exploratory qualitative study, using semi-structured interviews, of thirty Arab CPOs in Israel revealed challenges related to the role and to CPOs' representation in the Arab population, namely, as having power backed by the law and being closely linked to the national establishment and institutions. Additional challenges include the lack of community-based treatment facilities, the absence of Indigenous knowledge in training and treatment and the lack of a mechanism to protect Arab CPOs from burnout and dropout. The findings are relevant to societies with minority populations.

Abstract
The gap between fieldwork demands and academic knowledge necessitates the sharing of tacit knowledge to ensure continuity of context-appropriate professional knowledge. The research describes and explains patterns of minority social workers' sharing of their previously tacit knowledge, the knowledge's significance and the context where it was acquired. In data drawn from in-depth semi-structured interviews with twenty children and youth workers in Arab welfare bureaus throughout Israel, Arab social workers exposed tacit knowledge they had revealed and shared concerning prolonged institutional deprivation in out-of-home settings that dramatically limited their ability to ensure the minors' rights. This knowledge was shared in four ways: retention, transmission between colleagues, documentation for the future and publication. Social workers invested insufficient efforts to share their tacit knowledge, due to inappropriate relevant professional training and lack of a suitable infrastructure and organisational culture. They were aware that sharing and dissemination of their previously tacit knowledge could serve three players in the Children and Youth Services: the target population (giving them a voice), professionals (uniting their ranks for collective action) and government institutions (reflecting the reality and equipping them with data concerning service gaps). Social work should reconsider the potential value of sharing such knowledge.

Abstract
Social workers' professional failures are considered inevitable occurrences. However, virtually all research on professional failure management relates to the healthcare field. The scant literature on professional failure does not give much weight to the profound implications of context on professional functioning. This pioneer study illustrates how important it is to consider the context to understand the daily workplace occurrence of social workers' professional failures. The research traced social workers' professional failures as perceived by welfare bureaus managers. A phenomenological approach elicited data from semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty Arab welfare bureaus managers in Israel. Findings indicated that the managers encountered a lot of 'minor' individual and collective failures in different dimensions, and understood failure as a transient episode, mostly trivial and understandable. The main criterion for failure was damage attributed to a particular intervention. Responsibility for failure was not usually seen as stemming from the social workers' faulty professional-ethical considerations, rather it was attributed to factors associated with the establishment: lack of appropriate resources and non-culture-sensitive policies. Managers coped creatively with what they defined as failures, preserving their profession's inalienable assets with a 'non-confrontational' policy while ensuring individual learning from the failure, to prevent future repetition.

Abstract
The need to decolonise social work education has become prominent in curricula developed over the past years. The curriculum in social work schools defines and shapes ways of knowing largely in terms of privileged Western knowledge. It is therefore necessary to change it and adopt pedagogical approaches more suitable for populations from different cultures. This article presents a study on a dedicated training programme for Bedouin-Arab social workers in Israel. Its pedagogies are informed by decolonised and culturally adapted social work education. This qualitative study was conducted in a teacher-researcher reflexive autoethnography approach, based on documentation of thirty-six lessons and reflections by the programme lecturers and on a thematic analysis of their experiences as social work educators. The findings present several pedagogies in terms of 'bridge': the pedagogic, the cultural sensitivity, the theory–practice and the safe space bridge. These expand the knowledge base in social work education beyond Western knowledge, demonstrating how knowledge practices unique to different cultures and identities may be adopted and adapted within it. Based on these findings, it is suggested to transform and enrich social work education by decolonising it to include new knowledge from diverse populations.

Abstract
Israel's Arabs are citizens, but they are an ethnic minority and a national minority (Palestinians) in a Jewish-majority state. The decades-long Palestinian–Israeli conflict has erupted in recent years in violent outbursts between Arab and Jewish citizens. April–May 2021 saw severe violence against individuals and businesses on both sides and damage to holy sites. In this context, a qualitative study using in-depth interviews was conducted amongst 15 Arab social workers in Israel (mean age 45, mean experience twenty years), to examine their perspective regarding the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, particularly the April–May civil dispute. The findings revealed that the social workers wanted to be involved as leaders. The findings also revealed the bind in which they find themselves, caught between local government and the committee that represents the country's Arab citizens, between the demands of the community and the demands of the employer and between their personal values and their professional values. The study makes a theoretical contribution by addressing the need to create a safe space in the workplace so that social workers can discuss the conflict and its ramifications for them. The study may also contribute to the training of social workers and providing a safe space for another narrative.

Abstract
Israel's Bedouin minority, with unique socio-demographic and cultural characteristics, has a higher incidence of deafness than that reported worldwide. Because they lack suitable social services, local access to information and public transportation, deaf Bedouins live in a challenging social context. Most social workers are hearing people untrained regarding this population and lacking proficiency in sign language. This complicates the therapeutic encounter. Most of the Bedouin service users are women, who contend with triple discrimination deriving from their gender, disability and socio-ethnic affiliation. Therefore, this qualitative study using semi-structured interviews of twenty-three deaf Bedouin women focuses on how they perceive the social workers in the local social services bureaus. We found that they view the social worker as a person to whom one can complain, who is supposed to look out for one's rights, whom it is unpleasant to meet and who abandons them in a struggle. They also expressed ambivalent feelings towards their social workers: anger and frustration but also compassion and pity. The discussion focuses on the role of the social worker, the influence of acculturation and the three-way therapeutic encounter. Recommendations include equipping social workers with communication skills, knowledge about the population and skills for changing oppressive policy.

Abstract
Ethnic groups exist almost everywhere. Generally, each group is related to uniformly, although it may comprise several subgroups. An example is Israel's Palestinian-Israeli population, which consists of three ethnic–religious subgroups: Muslims, Christians and Druze. They coexist in nearly all domains of life, but maintain separate schools and family law courts. Most of the professional literature on Palestinian-Israelis, especially in Israel, ignores their differences. This qualitative study, using semi-structured interviews conducted in 2018, highlights this lacuna in the context of the demand for multicultural social work. Participants were forty-two male and female social workers—roughly one-third each Muslims, Christians and Druze—in welfare bureaus in ethnically–religiously mixed Palestinian-Israeli localities. The findings reveal that the ethnic–religious composition of the social workers in a locality does not reflect the ethnic–religious balance of the population. Despite the interviewees' lack of formal ethnic–religious-sensitive knowledge, they displayed informal knowledge. Nevertheless, the different needs of the three ethnic–religious groups met with undifferentiated responses. The welfare bureaus prefer a uniform policy rather than recognising differences, impeding the advancement of inter-ethnic cultural competence. This article contributes to world knowledge regarding cultural competence and highlights the need for culturally competent skills that are sensitive also to ethnic–religious subgroups.

Although the values of pluralism and diversity are enshrined in social work's Code of Ethics, the literature indicates that religious students will experience hostility within social work schools. This qualitative study explores how religious Jewish and Arab-Muslim social work students in Israel experience the secular academic context, in light of the profession's values. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted over a 6-month period, starting in January 2018, with third-year women students of social work at the country's largest public college – a microcosm of Israeli society in terms of ethnic, religious, and national affiliation. The participants were 20 women (10 Jewish and 10 Arab-Muslim) who self-identify as religious, in a secular academic setting. Analysis of the findings yields a broad and varied picture: the main themes include the initial encounter with the physical, social, and intellectual college environment; questioning whether academe is really liberal; and the feeling of being outsiders. These findings, which contribute to an understanding of the social and educational needs of the student who is the 'other', are relevant to social work educators worldwide. The other is everywhere.

This qualitative study presents the experiences of social workers whose clients are the inhabitants of unrecognised Bedouin Arab villages in Israel. It used in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews with 25 participants, recruited by the snowball method. These social workers reported that they are caught between their personal and professional values, on the one hand, and employer regulations, government policy and government law, on the other – which greatly limits their ability to fulfil their professional role. The social workers also comment that they are working in a 'grey area' in which the government's policy is unclear. This adds another layer of complexity to their work and reveals the differential implementation of critical social work principles by social workers with different cultural identities.

Abstract
The social work profession's worldview, which is expressed through education and practice, is 'almost exclusively secular in colour and context'. This qualitative study in the phenomenological tradition of ten religious Jewish and ten religious Arab-Muslim students of social work in Israel found that both groups coped similarly with the secularity, despite their ethnic, national and religious differences. Most of them adopted emotion-focussed coping strategies that isolated them from their academic surroundings. The religious students who adopted a problem-focussed strategy opened themselves to new knowledge. Knowing about these strategies may help faculty and other personnel in social work schools not only to be better acquainted with this minority but also to provide an environment that is receptive to and respectful of the religious student.

Abstract
The value of equine-assisted interventions that promote growth and learning is increasingly recognised in professional practice. The aim of this study was to examine how equine-assisted intervention enhanced personal and professional growth for social work professionals. Arab social workers from the social service department in the Bedouin city Hura, Israel participated in three workshops based on the Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association (EAGALA) model. Observations conducted through the workshops, debriefing sessions with participants and fourteen in-depth semi-structured interviews were analysed. Analysis exposed the importance of space in promoting development. Specifically, participants described the value of space for self-reflection, the importance of the space within and between relationships and space as a site for team building. Changes amongst the participants from dependence on external instruction to autonomous decision making, enhanced spontaneous activity with the horses and mutual assistance were identified. This is the first equine-assisted learning workshop and research conducted with social workers in Israel. The results highlight the value of equine-assisted learning as a new avenue to help grow social work professionals as they continue to work with their clientele. Results suggest that there is potential for equine-assisted interventions to support social workers internationally.