News (1,636 posts)

Associate Professor Erica Campbell, Ph.D., and Assistant Professor Michelle Bates, Ph.D.

Is it ethically OK to use ChatGPT or other generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools to write the first draft of a research paper — and if so, how should that be disclosed?

The Chartered Institute of Social Work Practitioners of Nigeria (C-ISOWN) has commended President Bola Tinubu’s support to social workers in Nigeria. Above: President Tinubu

Providing every new home in England with at least one “swift brick” to help endangered cavity-nesting birds has been rejected by Labour at the committee stage of its increasingly controversial planning bill. Has Labour lost it?

Methamphetamine was recently ranked New Zealand’s second-most harmful drug behind alcohol, and is the country’s most injected drug…. Safer smoking kits – including high quality glass pipes, pipe tips and lip balm – would be a useful addition to extend the programme’s harm-reduction efforts to people who smoke methamphetamine. But when it comes to assisting people who smoke methamphetamine, New Zealand offers very little.

Exclusive State Department records show: As the administration abandons its humanitarian commitments, diplomats are reporting that the cuts have led to violence and instability while undermining anti-terrorism initiatives. Above: Malawi’s sprawling Dzaleka refugee camp, home to more than 55,000 people. The World Food Programme has been forced to reduce food rations in the camp by a third.

How did we get here? The uncomfortable truth is that progressive academics themselves bear part of the blame. The issue, in short, is groupthink.

Worcestershire County Council’s learning disabilities team explains why they’ve ditched duty service in favour of the named social worker model

Estrangement between parents and their children is surprisingly common – this is what research says about making such a difficult decision.

Hong Kong NGO ImpactHK’s proposed site for a homeless shelter in Cheung Sha Wan on May 20.

A major legislative reform package passed in New South Wales is reshaping the child protection landscape, establishing a new standard for how governments engage with First Nations families and communities. The NSW Government recently introduced a suite of changes that give full legal force to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child and Young Person Placement Principle. This means the state must now make every effort to keep Aboriginal children connected to family, kin and culture when they enter the out-of-home care system.

Canada’s nightmarish opioid crisis has renewed calls for involuntary drug treatment. Does the government have a right to force users to get help?

The new political divide splitting young Americans in half.

An eBay customer support agent who quit after being written up for failing to explain four minutes of inactivity on his computer to his manager’s satisfaction has lost his claim for constructive dismissal…. His former manager said: “Anything over 60 seconds is considered work avoidance.”

Having access to shelter based on your gender identity is still the law, but HUD won’t enforce it, and is working to remove that protection. The result may be an even greater rise in unsheltered homelessness.

Jacinta Yu, a social worker, volunteers with Pride Lab on the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT) on May 17

Our analysis also found:
– This flow of weapons is connected to the drug trade in the U.S. and is enabling increased gang violence in Mexico, causing more people to flee across the border.
– An increase in guns trafficked to Mexico from the U.S. is directly related to a significant increase in Mexico’s homicide rate.

This is not the first time Burkhalter has been charged with this exact crime. He’s scheduled to go to trial in June for several counts of the same charge for incidents from March 2019 through January 2022.

In June, MPs will vote on proposals to reform disability and health related social security. If the reforms pass, the incomes of millions of sick and disabled people across the UK will be dramatically reduced. Evidence from across the Citizens Advice network in Scotland shows that disabled people already experience disproportionate harm with many forced to endure poverty and inequality.

The number of children and young people waiting for a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) assessment has fallen slightly in the Western Health and Social Services Trust (WHSCT) area in the last quarter. However, the number has risen in comparison to this time last year.

Yes, graduates should be employable. And yes, some degrees deliver clearer financial returns than others. But higher education is also about developing individual potential, nurturing intellectual curiosity, and enabling people to make meaningful contributions to society beyond just income. If we ignore these dimensions, we risk undervaluing not just certain degrees, but the wider purpose of education itself.

Child advocates and union concerned as Northland’s social workers handle more cases than the national average. Insets: (Left) Chief Children’s Commissioner Dr Claire Achmad and PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons.

Volunteers manning the Aces Care HelpLife. Aces Care has noticed an increase in the number of seniors calling over issues related to mental health.

We also live in an age of social fragmentation, in which experts, worried about loneliness and isolation, are puzzling over how to bring people together. To foster more connections, we’ll need to reexamine our emotional rules—which ones are worth preserving and which ones we might be better off without. As a historian, I can tell you this: If we want to reimagine the terms of friendship, we can.

Things didn’t shift until my understanding of disability did. I came to understand that the way I navigated the world would have to change, and that included how I wrote.

These thoughts proved a starting point for Beyond Opposition – our project which, since 2020, has been looking at the lives of people who are reticent about or object to the perceived liberalising of societies’ sexual and gender laws in Great Britain, Ireland and Canada. The idea of this research is not to defend their positions. Nor is it to explore their politics around sexualities and genders, which we and many others do in research into anti-gender movements. Rather, we wanted to understand the experiences that might drive these politics.

Currently, Gary is a community consultant for national studies focused on culturally adapted therapies and offers secondary supervision for interns at Moving Forward. His extensive training in clinical supervision and commitment to professional development make him a valuable asset in the field.

In life imitating art, people are getting themselves branded, but instead of using heat, they are using freeze branding. The branding iron is cooled using dry ice, isopropyl alcohol or liquid nitrogen, and then pressed against the skin to leave a permanent mark.

Because… really… what is more important?

New studies reveal that both the public and healthcare providers often overlook social connection as a key factor in physical health, even though loneliness rivals smoking and obesity in health risks.

The council was reprimanded by the data protection watchdog earlier this year over delays with the handling of requests from people who want to view their own records.

The new awards are part of a wider campaign by BASW and the Social Workers Union (SWU) to improve the public’s perception of social work. Entries and nominations were sought across eight categories covering mainstream print, broadcast and trade journalism, as well as podcasts and television programmes.

Using data from Zillow, the Rent Brigade estimates that there were more than 5,000 likely cases of rent gouging between Jan. 7 and March 16. While calculating the exact number of landlords involved in those cases is difficult because of LLCs and ownership structure, they found 3,553 unique addresses associated with the rent-gouged listings. Volunteers cross-referenced existing registries and ownership data to track down the owners of these listings, which are often nested in LLCs with nondescript titles. What the group found was a combination of corporate mega-landlords and real estate tycoons who had in many cases lobbied against tenant protections in Los Angeles and California. Some had also paid thousands to help elect the very officials tasked with enforcing anti-price-gouging laws.

The riveting new Criterion Channel film series “Noir and the Blacklist” is distressingly timely. It’s a sampling of film noir made by Hollywood directors, writers, and actors who were targeted as communists or broadly left-wing “subversives” by their own government in the post–World War II era by a punitive right-wing body called the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

It’s hard to keep up with Canada’s measles outbreak. Last month, the federal health database reported more than 1,500 cases across the country. More recent stats from Public Health Ontario counted more than 1,400 cases and 100 hospitalizations in Ontario alone. Of these, some 70 per cent are in Southwestern Ontario, 95 per cent of patients are unvaccinated and most all can be traced back to last fall, where a large Mennonite gathering in New Brunswick unknowingly became a superspreader event that’s still unfolding today.

It’s time to change the script on social work. We’re sharing real stories of social work, and campaigning for more accurate portrayals of the profession in the media.

The stakeholders made this declaration in a communique issued at the end of a strategic meeting convened by Nigeria Association of Social Workers (NASoW) with affiliate professional bodies such as Association of Social Work Educators in Nigeria (ASWEN), Association of Medical Social Workers of Nigeria (AMSWON) and Institute of Social Work in Nigeria (ISOWN).

The number of displaced by disasters has risen massively, climbing from 26.8 million last year to 45.8 million. “The number of disaster displacements in 2024 was nearly double the annual average of the past decade.”

Scientific research over the past 30 years has revealed a patchwork of potential causes of autism. Most of them are genetic—the condition is between 60 and 90 percent heritable—and some involve nongenetic risk factors that might impact development during pregnancy. “We’ve found a great deal of the underlying [causes],” says Helen Tager-Flusberg, an autism researcher and a professor emerita at Boston University. But how these different risk factors come together as the brain develops remains a challenge to piece together. “Autism is not a simple disorder,” she says. “There are no simple answers. There are no so-called smoking guns.”

The ASPCA is best known for its focus on animal welfare; however, the organization recognizes the mutually beneficial relationship between humans and animals and works to support both. Clinical Associate Professor Katherine Compitus recently received the ASPCA’s 2025 Heroes in Human Services Award for her efforts to make life better for people as well as their animal companions.

Even those who work closely on child welfare issues in the city often don’t know ACS’ algorithm exists: several lawyers, advocates, and parents learned about it for the first time from The Markup, and those who did know about it were unaware of the factors that contribute to a score. H likely will never get confirmation how she was scored, or whether she reached the threshold for additional scrutiny into her daughter’s case. ACS tells neither families, their attorneys nor its caseworkers when the algorithm flags a case.

What does the future look like for housing associations in 2025 and beyond? What does it look like in a changing economic and social environment, one with greater commitments and fewer certainties – one where the government has promised to build 1.5 million new homes in a five-year parliament?

Recent disruptions in international aid further threaten to destabilize progress, particularly in countries with the greatest health-care needs. Sustained and predictable financing—from both domestic and international sources—is urgently needed to protect hard-won gains and respond to rising threats.

“A primary school teacher smashed their adoptive children’s heads together, forced them to swallow soap and called one of them a “black bastard”. Their partner – a barrister who also sat as a deputy district judge in the family courts – repeatedly failed to protect the children from their campaign of abuse. But despite the findings, the high court has ruled that the couple cannot be identified after The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) led a legal attempt to name them in the public interest.”

The public interest???

Ngāi Te Rangi Oranga Whānau social worker Violet Davidson (above) said many of her mental health clients required significant help and wraparound services. In her 24 years of experience, the issues had escalated and secondary health care services were “backlogged”.

Kirsten Ryder, training and development specialist with Stoney Nakoda First Nations, poses in front of Stoney Nakoda Child & Family Services building in Mînî Thnî

For Inwood native Jordana Suriel (SSW’25), growing up on Dyckman Street gave her a nuanced lens into how socioeconomic complexities can shape the human experience.

The Imprint’s recent five-part series, Medicated in Foster Care: Who’s Looking Out? revealed that states across the country have failed to properly monitor and curtail the heavy, haphazard reliance on psychiatric medication prescribed to foster youth. Dozens of young people with histories of trauma described “pain and anguish muffled, not healed,” by these quick-fix drugs.