In Sweden, the social services’ responsibility for abused women has been reinforced and clarified on several occasions since the 1990s. At the same time, the knowledge of their work is undeveloped. This article analyses the social services’ support for female victims of domestic violence with a focus on organisation, based on the concepts of specialisation and specialists. The study consists of qualitative interviews with 16 social workers in eleven municipalities. The study shows great organisational variation between the municipalities, although most have some sort of specialised units or person-bound specialisation. Colleagues, training and  external supervision are factors the social workers emphasise as important in working with female victims of violence, a social problem described as both special and difficult. The different forms of organisation and specialisation influence the support the social services offer abused women.

Social workers and social work have been criticized for failing to address violence against women in adequate ways, of blaming the victim and failing to recognize domestic violence as a problem. At the same time, it is the social services that are responsible for support to abused women, according to amendments in the Social Services Act (2001). This article examines abused women’s own experiences of support in connection with the police investigation of domestic violence. It is a qualitative study with six women who all have received support from the Relationship Violence Center (RVC) in Stockholm. The main findings in the article suggest that support in connection with the judicial process is important. Women’s earlier experiences or preconceptions of the social services might prevent them from accepting support or turning to the social services for help.

The aim of this study is to broaden the knowledge about how mothers are affected by the other parent’s problematic alcohol use. The study is qualitative and based on interviews with 23 mothers. Theories of motherhood are used in the analysis. Due to the fathers’ problematic alcohol use, the mothers are not only responsible for the child–father relationship, but also for all the practicalities concerning children and their safety. These responsibilities are, to a large extent, the same before and after a separation. For children growing up with a parent who has a problematic alcohol use, the other parent can be a protective factor. The results reveal how much stress and strain mothers face due to the other parents’ problematic alcohol use and also that they are in need of support to better handle their and their children’s situation. However, most of them experience lack of support. Support seems to be connected to the shared parenthood and therefore depending on fathers’ participation and social workers fail to acknowledge the mothers’ needs. Furthermore, the mothers’ ability to compensate for fathers’ flaws in fact plays a part in society not supporting the mothers.

This article examines the role of a civil society organisation that offers parental support to migrant parents with regard to meanings of parenthood and citizenship. It is based on the results of an action research study of a civil society organisation. The material consists of notes from participatory work in a local centre for children, youth and their parents, and of interviews with professionals, a project manager of the local organisation, and a public servant and a social worker who both work for the district council. Additional material is taken from notes of study visits to organisations working with the same target group. The results highlight four central themes. The first two themes, difficult parents in a precarious place and a place with a future?, revolves around parental needs in relation to place, the suburb. The third theme, civic parenting practices, focuses on parenting practices as civic practices. The fourth theme, gendering parent citizens, discusses the gendered meanings of the parent citizen as both an object and an agent of integration.

This study examines how childhoods are constructed within the assessment process concerning respite care for children with disabilities in Sweden. The social workers need to take into consideration the needs of the child with disabilities as well as those of the parents and siblings. The application for respite care compels the social worker to prioritise needs, evaluate children’s development and define what constitutes a good childhood. One of the results of such a process is a construction of childhood for children with disabilities which contains a strong focus on practising and developing, whereas their siblings are perceived as needing relaxation and quality time with their parents. It matches the childhood sociological concepts of ‘becomings’ and ‘beings’, where children with disabilities are stressed as ‘becoming’ and continually needing to develop their skills.

Women's position as informal carers has been taken for granted in social policy and social professions, while relatively few discussions have elaborated on caring as a later life activity for men and the impact on family care. This study explores the processes connected to informal caregiving in later life through the position of adult daughters of older fathers engaged with long-term caregiving responsibilities for a partner. A sample of eight daughters, with fathers having primary caregiving responsibility for their ill partners was recruited and in-depth interviews were carried out and analysed according to qualitative procedures. The daughters' descriptions of their relationships with their fathers show that being an older man who engages in caring can have a positive outcome on relations. Even if some of the daughters have doubts about their fathers “masculine authenticity”, all of them appear to cherish “his helping hands” as a carer and closer more intimate relationships with their fathers. Caring for an old and frail spouse may potentially present alternative ways of being a man beyond traditional ‘male activities’ and that caring might also sometimes involve a re-construction of gender identities. It is suggested that social work professionals may use a gendered understanding to assess and work strategically with daughters and other family members who support caring fathers.

This article explores social workers’ approaches to children exposed to domestic violence and children’s strategies in encounters with these professionals in the context of family law proceedings. Investigator approaches as well as child strategies are reconstructed from children’s narratives. Furthermore, possible links between the social worker’s approach described by a particular child, and the child’s own strategies are outlined. Participation can offer children validation of their experiences and support their recovery after exposure to violence. However, it is suggested that it seems to be a challenging task for social workers to both validate children’s experiences of violence and simultaneously offer them participation in the investigation process.

The globalisation of international migration is challenging social work practice in general and elder care in particular all across Europe. This article gives insight into social work practice with elderly people in Sweden by focusing on older migrants and their families. The article addresses the changes that Swedish elder care has undergone through the past few decades and how elder care is organised. The cases of two migrant families who care for their elderly relatives are described also in an attempt to draw attention to some of the specific challenges that social work practice with older migrants and their families can pose. The article argues that social work practice with these specific populations needs to become aware of the implications that understandings of ethnic ‘Otherness’ have for how elder care is planned and provided. Moreover, it is argued that the globalisation of international migration we are witnessing across Europe and the ethnic diversity in older populations that it brings about demand that social work is delivered in a more generationally aware way. Aiming to solely increase the social integration of older migrants can end up jeopardizing the social and economic integration of their families.

A strong therapeutic alliance between staff and juveniles (residents) in institutional settings is considered to be important for a positive treatment outcome. The article focuses on residents placed in coercive care in Swedish residential treatment centres (RTCs), and the aim is to explore obstacles and opportunities for establishing a therapeutic alliance between key staff members (KSMs) and residents in a one-year perspective. The key question is how residents view their KSMs’ personal involvement and active participation in their treatment process. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty-thre girls and twenty-three boys placed in ten different RTCs, and follow-up interviews were conducted after one year. In accordance with the theoretical approach, it is hypothesized that the residents’ view of KSM involvement will be more positive in the one-year follow-up. Results from the first data collection show that more than half of the adolescents perceived their KSMs’ personal involvement as mainly negative. Between the two interviews, several had developed a more positive view of the KSMs’ personal involvement, while a large group did not display any change in attitude. Positive and negative institutional conditions and processes affecting the prospects for the development of a therapeutic alliance between residents and KSMs are discussed.

The aim of this study was to improve understanding of the experiences of adolescents with disabilities concerning meetings that affect their possibility to receive personal assistance in Sweden. Qualitative inductive content analysis was used to describe their experiences. Overall adolescents were found to be reluctant to participate in meetings. Two main approaches could be discerned – taking part and taking part by proxy. The adolescents who took part in meetings tried to adapt their self-presentation to fit with the social workers’ requirements by presenting their worst self, giving requested information, using support and raising their voices. The adolescents who choose to participate by proxy were either being involved or not being involved. Being involved implied involvement before and/or after the meeting. The meaning of participants’ strategies was examined through a social constructivist lens. The results indicate that ‘performing disability’ during the meetings is a prerequisite for obtaining personal assistance. In its current form adolescents’ participation is reduced to tokenism and this raises questions about how to implement a child perspective.

This study describes and analyses the kinds of support received by different categories of informal carers, and the kinds of help that care recipients receive in addition to that provided by various categories of carers. Data were collected in a Swedish county in 2000, by means of telephone interviews. The net sample consisted of 2,697 individuals 18-84 years old, and the response rate was 61%. The results showed that relatively few carers in any care category received any kind of support aimed directly at them as carers. The most widespread form of support received by providers of personal care was relief services. Those most likely to be receiving care from the public care system were people also receiving personal care from an informal caregiver. Nevertheless, the majority of those receiving personal care from an informal carer did not receive any help from the public care system or from voluntary organizations or for-profit agencies. These results indicate that social policy and social work need to clarify the aims of the services they provide. They also need to take the needs of both caregivers and recipients into account when discussing support systems.

This article analyses informal caregiving and volunteering in organizations over 17 years in Sweden, with a focus on links between these two forms of unpaid activities. The discussion is based on results from a national survey that was repeated four times in the period 1992–2009. Links were found between the different types of activities. In all four studies a substantial group of the population was involved both in informal caregiving and volunteering. This group of ‘active citizens’ are commonly also engaged in informal social networks. This ‘double active’ group had increased over time and they provide a substantial amount of hours of involvement. Patterns outlined in this article demonstrate that unpaid activities represent a multifaceted phenomenon, and that the boundaries between informal caregiving and volunteering as forms of engagement may be more fluid than has previously been acknowledged. The results challenge the literature in which informal caregiving is viewed as a major obstacle to volunteering. At the same time, however, informal caregiving in general was found to be increasing. There might be reasons to be cautious about the possible risk that too much pressure on citizens for informal caregiving might jeopardize the type of double involvement that is outlined in this article.

In Sweden, a country with one of the highest public spending on long term care, there is also extensive informal care, i.e. unpaid care by family, friends, or neighbours. In this article, we explore the spectrum of informal caring using data from a nationally representative survey of caregivers in the Swedish population. We describe three different caregiver profiles and analyse them in relation to their panorama of care, i.e. the extent to which caring is shared with other formal- and informal co-carers. The first profile, the co-habitant family carer, consists of caregivers providing help for someone in the same household with special care needs, and were mostly alone in intensive caregiving. The second profile, persons in the care network, consists of caregivers providing help to someone with care needs in another household. They have a network of both informal and formal co-carers. Finally, the helpful fellowman consists of caregivers providing help for someone without special needs in another household. In developing relevant carer support, it is important to acknowledge that caregivers are not a homogenous group. Thus, to fulfil national ambitions to support carers across the board, policy and practice need to have a diverse group of carers in mind.

In a study on living conditions among children, 13-18 years old (n = 272) in on-going foster and residential care, concepts from welfare theory and empirical research are applied. We argue that using a welfare perspective and the concept of level of living when assessing looked after children's situation provides several advantages. From this perspective, children are agents for whom access to resources will influence their discretion and possibility to act. By using concepts from welfare research and replicated national surveys of living conditions on a population of placed children, we can assess the extent to which these children enjoy such a standard while in care. In other words, it is possible to assess the compensatory capacity of state care for a population of children that has been recognized as deprived in terms of welfare resources in their birth families. The overall conclusion concerning the welfare dimensions studied is that children in care in general have less access to resources than their peers in the normal population. This holds particularly true for children in residential care, where the differences are substantial. In other words, the care context tends to differentiate the extent to which society acts to compensate for the initial disadvantaged position from which children in care often originate

Social service provision in Europe has increasingly incorporated informal carers. Consequently, these carers are now included within the scope of all social workers, including care managers. Most support for carers is indirect support, where opportunities for respite are channelled through the care receiver’s needs assessment. This approach highlights the unique role of care managers providing carer support as they balance their public task directed towards clients with the concurrent policy-driven expectation to support carers. The aim of this article is to explore how care managers, as street-level bureaucrats, ‘make’ carer support policy on the ground. Using systematic text condensation of 10 qualitative interviews with care managers in Sweden, we present three themes to understand care managers’ experiences. Care managers work ‘Hand-in-hand’ and ‘hands on’ with carers, carers are within, yet outside one’s scope of work, and there are possibilities and practices towards a carer perspective. Following Lipsky’s dictum that street-level bureaucrats’ actions effectively ‘become’ the public policy they carry out, our results highlight care managers’ possibilities and challenges in shaping what direct and indirect carer support looks like on the ground.

This article is based on a study that explored how social workers report the casework process of designing interventions for vulnerable families. Previous research has indicated that these processes often lead to disagreements between the involved actors, and the study explored the nature of these disagreements and various strategies used to reach consensus about the forthcoming intervention. The empirical case study was conducted through child welfare investigation units in Sweden. The analysis found five main causes of disagreements: intervention feasibility, problem formulation, costs, procurement contracts and external interests. In relation to strategies for establishing consensus, social workers reported five main strategies for seeking consensus: intervention adaptation, social workers and clients accepting each other’s proposals, reinforced arguments through peer support, accepting the client´s proposal and providing research support. Using theory on street-level workers’ use of discretionary power, the analysis indicates that social workers should first assume the role of a citizen agent where interventions are designed with the focus on client needs while rules and policy are relatively insignificant, followed by assuming the role of a state agent where they argue for the desired intervention that fits the bureaucratic context.