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Current lawsuits involving chatbots and suicide victims show that the door of liability is opening for ChatGPT and other bots. A case involving Google’s Character.AI bots is a prime example. Character.AI allows users to chat with characters created by users, from anime figures to a prototypical grandmother. Users could even have virtual phone calls with some characters, talking to a supportive virtual nanna as if it were their own. In one case in Florida, a character in the “Game of Thrones” Daenerys Targaryen persona allegedly asked the young victim to “come home” to the bot in heaven before the teen shot himself. The family of the victim sued Google.

Over the years, the promises of H-2A — such as humane working conditions, free housing and far better wages than back home — have been undermined by the relative ease of exploiting workers due to scant oversight of the program.

Oscaterin Bautista speaks with Assistant Professor Roxanna Ast during the Child Welfare Research and Evaluation class. Bautista noted “After I graduate, I want to get my master’s in social work and create a nonprofit that makes sure no family falls through the cracks.”

England’s social care system is at “breaking point”, with the number of unpaid carers increasing by 70 per cent over the past two decades, according to a report. Research for the Institute of Public Policy Research found rising demand, shrinking supply, and a growing reliance on unpaid carers.

Despite the evidence, parents and children do not feel safer than in the past.

School room in Kibagare, Nairobi, Kenya.

The Atlantic’s ongoing investigation of the books, videos, and other media used by the world’s most powerful tech companies to train their AI models.

Service Employees International Union Local 521 member Karyn Clark speaks during a press conference before a Stanislaus County supervisors meeting at 10th Street Place in Modesto, Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2025. The union is representing frontline workers in BHRS, child welfare services, Child Protective Services and health programs in contract negotiations that began in March.

Politicians like Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders may be “outsiders” among the political class, but the numbers show that their policy positions reflect mainstream American opinion. A national poll from Jacobin, DSA Fund, and Data for Progress finds broad support for democratic socialist leaders and left-wing policies.

Derbyshire UNISON Branch Secretary Martin Porter argued some of the union’s members are struggling to keep vital services going with claims that Special Educational Needs and Disability assessors in the Children’s Department are running at 40per cent of the staffing they need to support families. Mr Porter claims other social work teams are also reporting zero appointable applicants for vacant posts because the council pays significantly less than neighbouring authorities so agency staff are being used instead.

We strongly support the recommendations that:
– disabled children remain within the protections of the Children Act,
– single comprehensive statutory guidance should set out rights and responsibilities,
– a national eligibility framework should be established to end the current “postcode lottery” of provision.

The Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts congratulated the 148 graduates on their successful degrees at the graduation ceremony at the Swiss Museum of Transport… Of the 143 Bachelor’s graduates, 66 chose to specialize in social work. 51 chose to specialize in social pedagogy and 26 in socioculture. A further 5 graduates received their Master’s diplomas.

Hong Kong LGBTQ rights activist Jimmy Sham (above) said it was “deeply regrettable” that the bill did not pass and that the government’s inability to protect same-sex couples rights “would remain an open wound”.

Like any marketing campaign, warning labels on tobacco products need regular updating so they continue to attract attention and communicate the latest research evidence. Maintaining the same images risks “wear-out”, when people lose interest in campaign images and messages, or counter argue these. Our recent work found existing tobacco warnings have lost impact. Study participants had created cognitive defences and exempted themselves from the risks shown.

The movement is knitting tenants together into a self-identified class across geography that is carrying out rent strikes, winning critical policy battles, and even shaping the heights of politics. It’s a radical movement: connecting the dots between the housing system and racial capitalism, framing housing struggle as a class struggle, and critiquing the “rent relation” and commodified housing altogether. Above: Tenant leaders in South Minneapolis take action in March 2025 to demand better housing conditions from their landlord.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the entrepreneurial university was hailed as a fresh alternative to the cloistered ‘ivory tower’. But the paradox has since revealed itself. By tying itself so closely to industry and government agendas, the university has drifted into the role of subcontractor for crisis management. Corporate partnerships, once sold as innovation, now often dictate research priorities and even shape what students learn.

I ran a practice inside Brooklyn’s public defense office focused on the police department’s use of science and technology, so I am well accustomed to the department’s collection of personal information on people being investigated for crimes. But more than a decade of observing traditional police work did not prepare me for what the department is doing today: building vast, hidden repositories of data it collects on everyone in the city, with no clear boundaries on how it can be used…. The city’s police force has spent more than $3 billion amassing information that reveals where you have been, whom you have interacted with and what you have said, thought and believed. Unlike previous surveillance methods, new digital tools allow law enforcement agencies to conduct surveillance persistently, universally, at an unimaginable scale. They can do so with no special permission, no oversight and no advance planning. The results amount to a digital time machine that not only makes our past constantly available to law enforcement officers but also can provide them with predictions about our futures.

The family of a man who died at Rikers Island (above) in August is suing the city, alleging he took his own life after corrections officers ignored explicit warnings about his mental health, according to court documents…. The lawsuit claims Avila was placed alone in a cell without monitoring, even after his attorney flagged his mental health needs in open court. His death underscores the ongoing mental health crisis inside the city’s jails, which face the threat of a federal takeover following repeated failures to protect detainees.

BASW England strongly welcomes the introduction of the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, also known as the Hillsborough Law, to Parliament. This long-awaited legislation is the result of decades of tireless campaigning by the Hillsborough families and survivors who fought with extraordinary courage to ensure truth, accountability and justice. From Hillsborough to Grenfell, from the Horizon scandal to the infected blood tragedy, we have seen again and again how the state can fail victims.

Professor Kieran O’Donoghue is the Head of the School of Social Work at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University. He has published nationally and internationally in the areas of social work theory and practice, social work supervision and in relation to the social work profession. He is a registered social worker and a member of ANZASW (Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Social Workers).

A Daxbot robot in Irvine, Calif., moves along the sidewalk, assessing accessibility.

The special section in this issue of Dissent is devoted to the subject of authoritarianism and resistance. Drawing from examples from around the world, several pieces look at the relationship between democratic hopes and autocratic realities.

A new study by University of Utah Health, the U.’s health care system, finds that refugees can face high levels of food insecurity as they adjust to life in the United States — that is, limited and uncertain access to food. It outlines some of the reasons and proposes a range of strategies to help address the issue, notably increased communication efforts with them.

Fridays this fall, 82-year-old Marion Gommerman will be sitting in a Toronto classroom alongside fellow university students young enough to be her grandkids…. Dr. Raza Mirza (above) has taught the health and aging course Gommerman is taking for about a decade, and made adjustments over time. He began inviting seniors to in-class visits, which everyone enjoyed, according to the assistant professor of social work at the University of Toronto. While the elders weren’t taking the course at that time, they often stayed to listen in, for example, to lectures “about risk factors for dementia or social isolation or retirement planning.”

The Geese model combines drama and theatrical performance of complex social work situations with keynote speakers who are experts in their fields, such as Professor Harry Ferguson (home visits), Michael Sheath (child sexual abuse imagery) and Ciaran, in relation to substance misuse. Each performance has been designed and developed in collaboration with experts by experience, to ensure not only the integration of theory with theatre, but also to enable social work professionals and students to explore their responses to practice-relevant scenarios in real time. Performances also provide space to pause, reflect, and revisit decisions, all without real-world consequences.

Medicinal cannabis was legalised in Australia in 2016. But use really took off in 2021, when the TGA changed how people could access the unapproved products. Use in young men has been increasing the fastest. Generally, about one-third of use is for anxiety. This is despite TGA guidance stating medicinal cannabis containing THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) is generally not appropriate for patients who “have a previous psychotic or concurrent active mood or anxiety disorder”.

Although there is an entire treatment industry devoted to “sex and love addiction,” as well as numerous 12-step groups, there is no such diagnosis in psychiatry or psychology. The current version of the D.S.M., the diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals, leaves out sexual compulsions in the chapter on addiction, citing limited scientific evidence. Sexual compulsion would fall under what the manual calls “unspecified sexual dysfunction.” “There is an enormous controversy about the term,” said Anna Randall, a sex therapist and clinical social worker who leads The Alternative Sexualities Health Research Alliance.

For Michael Kleinman, U.S. policy director at the Future of Life Institute, the lawsuits underscore a pointAI safety researchers have been making for years: AI companies can’t be trusted to police themselves…. He told Fortune the current moment echoes the rise of social media, where he said tech companies were effectively allowed to “experiment on kids” with little oversight. “We’ve spent the last 10 to 15 years trying to catch up to the harms social media caused. Now we’re letting tech companies experiment on kids again with chatbots, without understanding the long-term consequences,” he said.

Atlantic City is one of the epicenters for food insecurity in New Jersey. A 2022 study by the New Jersey Economic and Development Authority listed city residents living in the second-worst “food desert” region in the state…. A quantitative study on Atlantic City’s food insecurity crisis by the regional think tank South Jersey Forward found that the overall satisfaction with the quality of food and produce in Atlantic City was “poor.” The study also found that residents had never heard of alternatives such as mobile food trucks, and most had to rely on public transportation to reach supermarkets outside of the city to find quality food products.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that drugs, both illicit and prescription, saved my life. They helped me when nothing else would. It’s hard to see through the haze of propaganda, the false divide that’s been placed between medications and illegal substances. But, to me, that divide is much less clear. People use illicit drugs for the same reason they use prescription ones—to quell pain, to help them focus or get through the day, to ease their depression and anxiety. What differentiates these drugs is less a matter of their purpose, and more a matter of how our laws and media treat these drugs. They’ve associated them with the ravages of poverty, they’ve criminalized them so that users of these drugs end up in a constant cycle of violence. We’ve been led to believe that drugs cause the breakdown, when in truth they are part and parcel of it. If our minds are constantly burdened, constantly being reshaped by the trauma of capitalism, of course we’re going to need ameliorants. Of course we’re going to need a break.

Recognising these underlying psychological dynamics helps us understand the enduring appeal of these movements. They may show us that to understand the world, we could first look at how we, as individuals and as a society, manage our deepest fears. The flags on our streets may not just be a political statement, but potentially a sign of a society grappling with its anxieties.

The report is a collaboration between Uniting NSW.ACT and the University of New South Wales’ Social Policy Research Centre. It expands on previous work that showed Australian families are increasingly diverse, including multi-generational, sole-parent, blended families and foster families. This work goes beyond the household to look at extended family, friends, neighbours and communities who are also involved in raising children.

Results showing the same-sex partnerships bill being voted down by the Legislative Council on Sept. 10, 2025.

Most mornings, the sidewalk outside Sunrise Community Church becomes a kind of waiting room. Before 8 a.m., a few dozen men and women, some pushing grocery carts or dragging luggage, some barefoot with dazed expressions, converge along a bull-wire fence that lines the South Austin property and take seats, inches from a busy stretch of Menchaca Road at the height of rush hour.

Missouri Western State University social work students are now one step closer to their careers, thanks to new legislation that opens the door for them to receive mentorship and sit for their licensing exam.

Artificial intelligence (AI) models are known to confidently conjure up fake citations. When the company OpenAI released GPT-5, a suite of large language models (LLMs), last month, it said it had reduced the frequency of fake citations and other kinds of ‘hallucination’, as well as ‘deceptions’, whereby an AI claims to have performed a task it hasn’t. With GPT-5, OpenAI… is bucking an industry-wide trend, because newer AI models designed to mimic human reasoning tend to generate more hallucinations than do their predecessors. On a benchmark that tests a model’s ability to produce citation-based responses, GPT-5 beat its predecessors. But hallucinations remain inevitable, because of how LLMs function.

Move comes despite election manifesto promises from Keir Starmer to improve ‘access to learning’

A Honolulu program started during the pandemic was supposed to send teams including social workers alongside EMTs to 911 calls for non-violent incidents involving people who are homeless. Instead, the Crisis, Outreach, Response and Engagement program has no social workers on staff and even its backers say it has become more of a medical triage unit.

The right’s reflexive answers to any shooting — more patrols, militarized police, more guns, and less firearm regulation — are looking less like freedom and more like a death pact. Until conservatives reckon with this, the cycle will continue. The communities they lead will continue to suffer the highest rates of murder and suicide, and even their most venerated leaders will remain in the line of fire. In the end, America’s gun violence crisis is not a red or blue issue. Right now, however, red America is paying the steepest price. The hope is that acknowledging this truth could spur the kind of cross-partisan soul-searching and reform that has so far proved elusive.

The annual SSHRC Impact Awards recognize outstanding researchers and students in the social sciences and humanities for their exceptional SSHRC-funded work to generate valuable new insights, mobilize knowledge into societal applications, and conduct effective outreach activities.

VCU’s Dr. Alex Wagaman is leading a project to study and identify solutions for students experiencing homelessness who are without a parent or guardian.

Ángela and Héctor’s home was a safe space but, after the birth, it becomes more complicated.

The Chief Statistician has released part 1 of the 2024-25 justice social work statistics. This includes information on justice social work services, as well as characteristics of the people involved. Part 2 will be published in early 2026.

In recent years, Facebook and other platforms that facilitate billions of daily interactions have slowly morphed into the internet’s largest repositories of AI‑generated spam. Research has found what users plainly see: tens of thousands of machine‑written posts now flood public groups — pushing scams, chasing clicks — with clickbait headlines, half‑coherent listicles and hazy lifestyle images stitched together in AI tools like Midjourney. It’s all just vapid, empty shit produced for engagement’s sake. Facebook is “sloshing” in low-effort AI-generated posts, as Arwa Mahdawi notes in The Guardian; some even bolstered by algorithmic boosts, like “Shrimp Jesus.”

Texas A&M University this week quickly fired a children’s literature professor and removed a department head and a dean from their administrative positions after a state representative shared a video of the instructor teaching about gender identity.

Whether motivated by animus or naïveté, the justice’s rationale for permitting law enforcement to racially profile suspects has dark implications for democracy.