This study explores how undocumented mothers in the United States experience immigration-related fear and how they perceive that fear being transmitted to their U.S. citizen children. Using a secondary qualitative analysis of interviews originally collected for a study on guardianship decision-making, this research focuses on a subset of participants—Latina mothers raising children without their husbands due to separation or deportation. Guided by feminist motherhood theory and emotion socialization theory, the analysis highlights how legal precarity, gendered caregiving responsibilities, and exclusion from essential services shape daily life and parenting. Although the original interviews did not focus specifically on fear transmission, mothers described living with constant anxiety and adapting their behavior, routines, and emotional expressions to protect their children. They also reflected on how their children came to recognize and internalize that fear, often without direct conversations. This study contributes to feminist social work by illuminating the emotional and structural burdens undocumented mothers carry alone and by urging practitioners to recognize the ways fear is absorbed within families. It calls for trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and community-based interventions that address the layered vulnerabilities of undocumented single mothers and help them better support their children under conditions of chronic uncertainty.

This article examines informal care in the Swedish welfare state from the perspectives of informal carers (ICs) and the frontline social workers who support them, known as informal care advisors (ICAs). Using a theoretical framework that integrates the neoliberal governance of social work, the concept of gendered responsibilization from Wendy Brown, and Julia Twigg's typology of ICs, the article explores how ICs are positioned within and between informal and formal care systems, how gender and responsibility are managed in this process, and how psychosocial support provided by ICAs plays into these dynamics. Based on in-depth interviews with ICs and focus group discussions with ICAs, the article introduces boundary-setting as an empirically grounded concept that highlights how ICs are encouraged to define the limits of their caregiving, while simultaneously being relied upon to compensate for gaps in public provision. The findings show that while ICAs offer vital psychosocial support, their individually oriented practices may inadvertently reinforce gendered responsibilization and the retreat of public responsibility. In doing so, the study illustrates how neoliberal rationalities are embedded in Swedish welfare and social work practice and thus contribute to the broader field of critical and feminist social work.

This study explores the post-divorce experiences of Syrian refugee women living in Türkiye, employing a feminist social work lens with an emphasis on intersectionality. It examines the multidimensional challenges these women face, the coping mechanisms they adopt, and the empowerment strategies they develop in response. Guided by two central research questions—(1) What challenges do Syrian women encounter after divorce, and how do they cope? (2) What empowerment strategies emerge from these experiences?—the study frames participants as simultaneously navigating identities as women, refugees, and divorcees. Based on qualitative data from semi-structured in-depth interviews with 16 divorced Syrian women, the findings highlight intersecting legal, socio-cultural, and economic barriers shaped by gendered and displacement-related inequalities. The findings indicate that these women face intersectional challenges across legal, socio-cultural, and economic spheres due to their gender and refugee status. Additionally, the analysis reveals that the existing social services provided by both public and non-governmental organizations focus primarily on economic assistance rather than empowerment, highlighting the need for feminist social work and intersectional approaches to guide more transformative and rights-based interventions.

Drawing upon embodied and feminist knowledge, arts-based research (ABR) is a methodological approach aimed at advancing work that is liberatory both in its findings and its processes. To examine this phenomenon, three social work scholars engaged in a reflective research process to study the meaning of arts-based research through a methodology blending arts, collaborative autoethnography (CAE) and phenomenology. The team explored our own experiences of using art in research, and the implications for feminist social work. This article begins with a brief overview of ABR before introducing the strategic use of art creation and discourse within our CAE. We present the findings uncovered through analysis of our qualitative data - including our own artwork - and the experiences they represent. Thematic findings include: power dynamics in research and academia as revealed through ABR, and the liberatory components of ABR. Lastly, we discuss the implications of the findings, strengths, and limitations, and suggest future research. Implications for social work practice and research include: opportunities for integrating humanistic and engaged praxis as tools of liberatory knowledge production; the promotion of feminist-based inquiry as resistance to social pressures; and the use of ABR as an anti-oppressive research approach.

Through interviews with 16 social workers, drawing on the concept of “willful subjects”, the aim of this paper is to analyze how social workers working in Swedish municipal social services make sense of, adapt, and/or challenge routine questions about intimate partner violence, and how such routines affect their professional role and agency. We found that participants renegotiated standardized ways of asking by stressing the need to use such questionnaires with care, and stating that the individual judgement and agency of the social worker is paramount. The participants also renegotiated the purpose of asking; while their routine questions about IPV seldom led to a disclosure of ongoing exposure to violence, social workers considered it important to ask because it “opens the door” and signals the possibility of receiving help in the future. We argue that social workers are not necessarily stripped of agency when following standardized protocols and routines, despite increasing efforts to include controlling mechanisms in their everyday practice. However, our results also show that social workers’ legal obligation to report to child protection services, if there are children in the household, limits their room for discretion and how the routine questions about violence are asked and perceived by clients.

After implementing the Domestic Violence Prevention Act (DVPA) in 1998 in Taiwan, standardized protocols were implemented to provide social services to survivors of domestic violence (DV). This article examines how DV services have become institutionalized in Taiwan through a feminist method of inquiry, Institutional Ethnography (IE). Firstly, through interviews with social workers in the outsourcing organization, the IE journey leads to the way institutional texts coordinate social workers’ everyday work. Practices have shifted from empowerment (“women's work”) to risk management (“protection work”), which deprives survivors of their autonomy. Secondly, tools like the Taiwan Intimate Partner Violence Danger Assessment (TIPVDA) and digitized case monitoring systems now structure the case management process. Outcomes are oriented toward a bureaucratic risk-management agenda instead of clients’ needs. Thirdly, the expert-NGO-bureaucrat complex dominates policymaking, excluding survivors’ experiences and workers’ voices. The DV prevention network's ruling relations have strayed from feminist origins toward state control in a patriarchal way that excludes the participation of both survivors and frontline workers. Through the IE lens, this article demonstrates how depoliticised “protection work” embedded in the expert-NGO-bureaucrat complex can paradoxically disempower the survivors it aims to serve. The limitation of this research is its data collection from one outsourcing organization and cannot fully reflect the experiences of DV survivors.

In 2018, Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford's accusations of sexual assault against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and sexual assault convictions of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein prompted questioning of why sexual assault victims do not report incidents of sexual violence to law enforcement. A hashtag movement, #whyididntreport was started wherein people began sharing their stories of sexual violence and the reasons they didn’t report. Even though research investigating barriers to reporting sexual violence exists such open, voluntary accounts have not existed before nor have been studied. This study used data from a social media website Reddit to capture barriers to reporting sexual assaults. A qualitative thematic analysis was used to identify six themes through the lens of feminist and social control theories. These findings indicate that even with more readily available knowledge about sexual assault, understanding of consent is still lacking. In addition, the current political climate is adding to fear of consequences when reporting sexual assaults. The implications of these findings for social workers indicate the necessity of social worker's role not only in reporting and clinical work, but also in advocacy and policy work relating to sexual assault.