Social Justice in Group Work


Book Description

This book spotlights the unique contribution of the Journal for Specialists in Group Work to the social justice literature, and of group work to a social justice agenda. Although the term social justice may be relatively new in the counseling and psychology literature, the underlying values - attention to inequities, advocacy, and empowerment strategies for members of marginalized and oppressed populations – are not new in group work. Group leaders have been attending to these concerns all along, and group work itself is an ideal venue for the realization of social justice concerns. However, until now there has been a limited amount of scholarship on group work with a stated focus on social justice. This groundbreaking book emphasizes action through a practical approach, featuring research and case studies of social justice group work in community and school settings. Chapters highlight how group workers infuse social justice consciousness into their work, address social justice issues, and implement social justice practice. Authors review the history, practice, and future opportunities for social justice advocacy within group modalities. They also address guidelines for the training and supervision of practitioners engaging in social justice group work. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal for Specialists in Group Work.




Becoming Strong


Book Description

Drawing on more than 150 in-depth interviews, Becoming Strong: Impoverished Women and the Struggle to Overcome Violence offers various perspectives on our understanding of trauma and resilience.













Battered Women's Protective Strategies


Book Description

Battered Women's Protective Strategies: Stronger Than You Know challenges the pervasive stereotypes that depict battered women as passive and shows how to use the strength of battered women to create better and more nuanced research and intervention. Through an alternative strengths-based framework, Hamby deftly illustrates how battered women are in fact not passive and in denial but are active and diligent in protecting themselves and their loved ones. In addition to the traditional risks of being battered, many women who experience abuse face the risk of homelessness or the threat of losing custody of their children in a divorce battle. Understanding the full range of risks is necessary to understanding the complex problem of battering, and in this book, quantitative, qualitative, and clinical data reveal a wide range of protective strategies: immediate defensive responses in the moments following an attack, protecting children and other loved ones, reaching out for social support, turning to religious and spiritual resources, and engaging formal helpseeking. Using an approach called Multiple Criteria Decision Making, this book outlines a procedure for comprehensive risk assessment, safety planning, and risk management. Many, many strategies are still largely invisible to providers and researchers, and the steps that women take that receive very little attention or acknowledgement in the domestic violence field. The author identifies the vital role that researchers can play by simply acknowledging the variety of approaches that battered women employ. In this book's two new studies, survivors of domestic violence identify 133 different protective strategies in open-ended questions. These and other insights from survivor testimony make this volume the largest and most comprehensive review of battered women's strengths to date.










Homelessness, Health, and Human Needs


Book Description

There have always been homeless people in the United States, but their plight has only recently stirred widespread public reaction and concern. Part of this new recognition stems from the problem's prevalence: the number of homeless individuals, while hard to pin down exactly, is rising. In light of this, Congress asked the Institute of Medicine to find out whether existing health care programs were ignoring the homeless or delivering care to them inefficiently. This book is the report prepared by a committee of experts who examined these problems through visits to city slums and impoverished rural areas, and through an analysis of papers written by leading scholars in the field.