Vol. 18 No. 3 (2020): Child Maltreatment, Child Protection and Child Well-being – Research across Borders

NEW: SW&S Special Issue on “Child Maltreatment, Child Protection and Child Well-being – Research across Borders” (Vol. 18, Issue 3, 2020)

Especially in childhood studies, in social work research and in the context of social policy studies the problem of child maltreatment, child protection and the question of child wellbeing have been discussed thoroughly in the last 10-20 years. Additionally the concept of children as active agents has been put forward in the last decades. Nevertheless, these perspectives have mostly been discussed in parallel. That means that we conceptualise children on the one side as potential victims only, in need for protection; and on the other side we think of children as independent actors in general. But both of these ideas are not entirely convincing. The relevant questions are rather how the participation of children in child protection can succeed, or how the voices of children can be heard and responded to in cases of child maltreatment.

The authors of the new SW&S.Special Issue “Child Maltreatment, Child Protection and Child Well-being – Research across Borders” are dealing especially with these and similar questions in all their 12 papers and are thus responding to a crucial point in the current debates on child maltreatment, child protection and child well-being. We are therefore very pleased that Timo Ackermann from the University of Applied Science in Berlin (GER), Friederike Lorenz from the Free University of Berlin (GER) and Meike Wittfeld from the University of Duisburg-Essen (GER) have designed the new SW&S.Special Issue against the background of the second international Child Maltreatment Conference 2019. We wish our readers a very inspiring and informative read of the new SW&S.Special Issue.

SW&S Forum

The new edition of our magazine is completed by the contribution of Jonathan Parker & Magnus Frampton “By Dint of History: Ways in which social work is (re)defined by historical and social events”.

Take the time and read the articles in our new Issue of Social Work & Society (SW&S). It's worth it – as always, we think.

The SW&S Co-Ordinating Office