R S Singh – författare

Social work is a “helping” profession; the professionals in this field assess their clients and determine their strengths and needs, soliciting their ideas about what they want to accomplish. The social worker’s “client” can also be a community, such as several at-risk youth needing an outlet for their energy and creativity. Here, the social worker assists them as they decide how to help themselves. Social workers help their clients access needed services; they can also help access “hard” services such as a food bank. An Introduction to Applying Social Work Theories and Methods is a practical guide for social work students to use both in the classroom and as a reference guide while on placement. Equally, this book is a useful reference for social work practitioners.

Social work has its roots in the social and economic upheaval wrought by the Industrial Revolution, in particular the struggle of society to deal with poverty and its resultant problems. Because dealing with poverty was the main focus of early social work, it is intricately linked with the idea of charity work, but it must now be understood in much broader terms. For instance, it is not uncommon for modern social workers to find themselves dealing with the consequences arising from many other “social problems” such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and discrimination based on age or on physical or mental ability. A closer working partnership might be of mutual benefit, contributing some more effective working methods to community development and enlarging the horizon of social work by forcing it to apply its knowledge and skills on a broader scale. This work, encyclopaedic in nature, covers all important issues pertaining to the theme.

Growing realization of governments, activists, elite, opinion builders and constitutionalists that constitutions of most of the nations believing in rule of law incorporate explicitly or implicitly the provisions of various International Covenants on Human Rights in one way or the other. For example, the Founding Fathers in India incorporated in the Constitution most of the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration in two parts - the Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principle of State Policy that covered almost the entire field of Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Social work has a vital role to play in shaping an effective global response to the environmental crisis and to the human rights issues that accompany it. This book is an overview of human rights ideas and laws for social workers that stresses the importance of human rights in all types of social work policy and practice.