Search

Although women play a significant role in non-profit organizations as employees, volunteers, and clients, there is insufficient knowledge about these women and their unique work experiences in the current era, which is characterized by outsourcing of social services. This study explored work experiences among women in professional care settings of social service non-profit organizations (SSNPOs). Forty in-depth interviews were conducted with women with postsecondary education working as care professionals (such as social workers and occupational therapists) in Israeli SSNPOs. The sample reflected Israel's geographical, religious, ethnic, and job (full-time and part-time) diversity. Interviewees were asked about their employment experiences, struggles, and challenges. Thematic analysis was used. The findings shed light on how care work in SSNPOs enters the private sphere and is internalized, i.e. boundaries between home and work that are continuously blurred and endanger employees' well-being. Our study suggests that women working in care professions in contracted SSNPOs are more vulnerable due to their working conditions, despite their postsecondary education and defined professions. Negative psychosocial outcomes are the major challenge for this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study is based on Travis Hirschi's social bond theory, arguing that the debut of delinquent behavior is a result of the weakening of the ties that bind people to society. According to Hirschi's social bond theory, all youth have the potential to commit delinquent behaviors, but they are kept under control by their relationships with friends, parents, neighbors, teachers, and employers. These factors could serve as protective factors from involvement in crimes. Most studies of social bond theory have been conducted in Western countries among male adolescents using quantitative methods, including cross-cultural approaches. However, the ability of social bond theory to explain youth involvement in delinquency in non-Western cultures, especially conservative and authoritarian cultures such as the Arab one, has not been widely examined. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring youth involvement in delinquency using qualitative research on Palestinian-Arab youth in Israel. Addressing youth delinquency within the unique sociocultural, economic, and political situation of the Arab minority in Israel will help us examine the theory's applicability to the explanation of deviant behavior in a variety of contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study re-examined Gresham Sykes's initial conceptualization of 'pains of imprisonment' as it applied to women inmates. It contextualized these pains within the women's social experiences both inside and outside the only women's prison in Israel. Semi-structured interviews with 42 female prisoners were conducted. Two counter-themes emerged from our analysis. The first one portrayed prison as punishment, a 'painful condition,' a stressful event that included deprivation, negative meaning, suffering, and pain. The opposite--and more dominant--theme framed incarceration as a positive experience, during which the prisoners, received nurturing, care, and treatment, which they had not been afforded in the outside world. We found that 'pains of imprisonment' was a multidimensional and complex phenomena that included contradicting emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. 'Pains of imprisonment' was part of a larger group of pains that extended beyond the time and place of prison. KEYWORDS women prisoners, pains of imprisonment, positive accounts of imprisonment DOI: 10.1080/03630242.2010.510388

Recent decades have witnessed an increasing trend towards the development of critical approaches to the study of poverty, which call upon social workers to perceive people living in poverty as active agents who resist their condition. Relatively few studies, however, have examined how women living in poverty, who embody collective-political agency, experience the encounter with the welfare services, and how their manner of organisation is shaped by this encounter. This study examines this issue based on fifteen semi-structured interviews with mothers in need of public housing in Israel who are activists in protest groups against the public housing policy. The findings reveal that the encounter with welfare services generated feelings of othering due to the meanings attributed to their homelessness and to the nature of their mothering. Conversely, activism was perceived as a practice for challenging, redesigning and reducing power relations with the welfare agencies. The findings also show that the encounter shaped the participants' manners of activist mobilisation. The study contributes to the research literature on social work with women who live in poverty, by highlighting the important role of women's activism within the encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the political context of social work practice with refugees. Specifically, it addresses the ways politics and policies that derive from them, interplay with social workers' perceptions and constructions regarding their daily practice. It is based on findings from a qualitative study that included 22 in-depth interviews with Israeli and German social workers who work with refugees. Working in a 'highly political' field meant that practitioners encountered xenophobia and racism, reinforced by the negative public discourse surrounding refugees, and faced the outcomes of exclusionary state policies towards service users and social services. The article demonstrates that working under challenging political circumstances, enhanced social workers' political awareness, termed politicisation, in that they became more attuned to their identities in relation to practice, to user-worker power imbalances, and to the ways politics and policies influence service users' well-being. Politicisation included social workers highly emotional involvement, which motivated them to take action towards social justice, as well as enhanced the risk of being overwhelmed and experiencing 'political fatigue'. The article discusses implications for the 're-politicisation' of social work research, practice and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the discursive process of criminalization of African asylum seekers in Israel. The Israeli case illuminates the way that marginalized social groups are constructed as a criminal threat, thus becoming a focal point of moral panic. Using content analysis, in-depth interviews and observations, we assert that the criminalization of asylum seekers is facilitated by their portrayal as 'infiltrators' who are beyond state control. State authorities' ostensible inability to keep asylum seekers under surveillance is dialectically constructed along two main axes: the private space axis and the public space axis. On the private space axis, the asylum seekers are portrayed as unidentified people living beyond the authorities' field of vision whose largely unreported criminality is directed against vulnerable asylum seeker women and children in the private sphere. At the same time, asylum seekers are portrayed as a prominent, faceless and animalistic presence in public space, a presence that breaches physical-spatial borders as well as social-cultural boundaries, thereby undermining the social order. Thus, asylum seekers are viewed as conspicuously invisible. This rhetoric connects border violation with criminal activity; emphasizes the pent-up potential for violence by asylum seekers; and blurs the lines between criminal threat and security threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the construction of poverty in case reports produced by social workers, who investigated the needs of nearly 500 clients of soup kitchens in Palestine during the 1930s. Ideas expressed in the reports reflected both the tenets of Zionist ideology and dominant social work thinking in the Weimar Republic, where most of the social workers were trained. The reports offer rich evidence of the ways in which notions about the poor, poverty and the role of social workers were historically and culturally constructed and designed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study analyses the controversy in Israel in the years 1958–2003 surrounding the legitimacy of casino gambling, with particular focus on how it was affected by the operations of Casino Oasis in the Palestinian Authority territory between 1998 and 2000. An interpretative narrative analysis of debates in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) and in the local press reveals that, prior to the casino's opening, most of the arguments raised were similar to those seen elsewhere in the world, with opponents objecting on moral, religious and social grounds, and those in favour emphasizing its economic and tourism benefits. However, once Casino Oasis opened its doors, the controversy took on a character not seen anywhere else in this context – opponents raised concerns about terrorism, while proponents championed the casino as a promoter of peace and coexistence – reflecting a broader, more fundamental national debate within Israeli society over the country's physical boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the evolution of rehabilitative, rights and economic discourses, and their effect on the development of juvenile justice policies in Israel during the last two decades. Israel has adopted the main features of a neo-liberal regime and severe cuts were made to major social welfare programmes, including those dealing with juvenile offenders. However, the neo-liberal ideas of individualisation and responsibilisation did not penetrate the area of juvenile delinquency. A renewed welfarist discourse in Israel was created instead. This strongly relied on traditional beliefs in rehabilitation and treatment based on a child-centred culture, incorporating concepts of rights and embedded in practical economic considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the phenomenon of Israeli civil society organizations (CSOs) providing services to women as part of the creation of an alternative women's welfare sphere in Israel in recent years, and its influence upon the welfare state and women. The creation and the existence of the women's civil society sphere can be seen as part of a move by the Israeli welfare state towards a liberal-style economic regime. The article examines the services and mode of operation of fourteen organizations offering welfare, health and educational services to women in Israel, using a qualitative research method. The study identifies four traits characterizing these organizations: their loose connections with the welfare state, the use of sectoral and selective criteria determining eligibility for their services, the mirroring of internal dynamics of the community and its response to gender issues, and the CSOs' holistic, sporadic and unprofessional services. The analysis highlights the gender dimensions of civil society organizations, the characteristics of structure and content of the services they offer, and the role and place of civil society organizations operating parallel to the welfare state. It sheds light on the complex nature of this sphere and its services, which contribute to the empowerment and improvement of women's lives but, simultaneously, strengthen and reinforce their exclusion and marginalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we examined the social construction of stigma toward HIV/AIDS in the Israeli press by comparing newspaper articles on HIV/AIDS, a highly stigmatized illness, and heart disease, a nonstigmatized illness in Israel. We carried out thematic content analysis of 242 newspaper articles published over a 12-month period. Two counter themes emerged from the analysis. HIV/AIDS was portrayed as a "foreign illness" mainly afflicting immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. In addition, HIV/AIDS was constructed as a disease of "the deviant other," particularly gay men, who pose risk to themselves and those around them. By contrast, heart disease was defined as a "local illness" of "ordinary" individuals, and an unpredictable phenomenon. The mirror images of HIV/AIDS and heart disease, which were involved in the stigmatizing process of HIV/AIDS, reflect the wider moral-sociocultural order of Israeli society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the accounts of incarcerated females in Israel, examining the extent to which they were active, rational agents making choices regarding their criminality. The theoretical framework underlying this analysis views the criminal decision-making process with the agency/structure nexus. It indicates that the women were actively seeking normative means to satisfy their feelings of belonging, to gain economic benefits and feel safe, and to fulfil normative social expectations. They turned to the major social institutions that are considered the agencies for providing the means to realize these desires. Their discovery of the limited opportunities available to them led them to choose to engage in crime, and to select the location, timing and nature of the offence and the victim of the crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the past few decades, Israel has developed a set of legal, criminal justice and other law enforcement initiatives under the broad category of 'counter-terrorism policy'. This policy attempts both to separate and manage more effectively a group of suspected and accused terrorists. This article utilizes the New Penology perspective to trace the ways in which notions of risk and dangerousness are embedded in the counterterrorism discourse and practices developed in Israel. Additionally, this article analyzes various initiatives and, in particular, laws and the institutional mechanism that administrate the management of risk posed by terrorist groups. Our analysis reveals how such initiatives and their enforcement are legitimized and grounded in a single discourse embedded with the socially and politically constructed notions of 'dangerousness', 'risk assessment' and 'security'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on the "Journal of Experimental Criminology." Focus and nature of the contributions the journal seeks to make to the field of criminology; Importance of experimental methods; Basic rationale for experimental study.

This article reports that Israel's parliament has passed the Public Defenders Act in 1995 to ensure that adults facing criminal proceedings, particularly for serious offences, have access to legal representation when they could not afford a private attorney. According to the Director of the Public Defenders Office (PDO), professor Kenneth Mann, the extension of coverage to the youngsters appearing before the Juvenile Court was a natural outgrowth of the general orientation of the PDO. Further, even before the PDO became operational, senior officials in the Attorney-General's Department and Ministry of Justice had acknowledged that the absence of legal representation in the Juvenile Court was a problem. In essence, then, public defender representation for juveniles charged with criminal offences was introduced in Israel on the coattails of a much bolder initiative in the adult criminal justice system.

Between 1999 and 2003 public defenders were gradually introduced into Israel's welfare-oriented Juvenile Courts. This article reports on the findings of a study that sought to assess the perspectives of the social work trained probation officers on the early impacts of the introduction of public defenders. The study involved in-depth interviews with 14 probation officers. The major findings of the study were that the probation officers : (1) supported the introduction of public defenders in principle but not in practice; (2) believed public defenders should be committed to the therapeutic perspective of the court and become an additional link in the treatment chain; (3) felt that their influence in the court had diminished with the arrival of public defenders; and, (4) viewed the public defenders as compromising the benefit to the young defendant of the drama of the court hearing. Many of the study's findings can be explained by Eisenstein and Jacob's (1991) model of the courtroom workgroup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the historical background and the social processes that have changed the perception of child abuse in Israel from almost complete lack of awareness to concern and formal societal reaction during the 1990s. The recent emergence of child abuse as a social problem and the consequent actions of scrutiny and surveillance through legislation, law enforcement, punishment and educational prevention is set within the cultural milieu of the past two decades. This sociological analysis shows that there was a gradual transition from a private condition to a public ‘social problem’. The social actors involved in this process primarily included social workers, professional educators, academics, the daily press, members of Israel's Parliament and law enforcement agents. For various scholars and professionals, the incident that triggered awareness and concern about child abuse in general and child sexual abuse in particular was the tragic death of young Moran Denemias in 1989. However, in our paper we posit that this single tragic incident in itself did not prompt officials or the general public to view it as part of a larger problem. The general political tendency to overreact to the emerging issue of abuse, and the rapidity with which the Law for the Prevention of Abuse of Minors and Helpless Persons was passed at the end of the 1980s can be explained by a general moral sentiment that matured decades earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1948 and 1970, Israeli society witnessed a proliferation of discourses on juvenile delinquency, adopting a critical, historically informed approach. This paper shows that debates on juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice, as well as the inclusionary or exclusionary policies they promoted, were grounded within the project of nation building and interwoven in broader attempts to reshape the social and moral order of the new society. Reflecting an emerging conception of a "normal insider" citizen, a norm against which all individuals were measured, the discourse on juvenile delinquency created a hierarchy of "others." Middle-class juvenile delinquents were seen, in spite of their criminal acts, as deserving members of the new community. Delinquency in Orientals was attributed to their lack of readiness to participate in the socio-cultural milieu, something to be treated by resocialization. Arab delinquents were considered aliens and received limited services and treatment. Discourse analysis techniques indicate that this structuring of delinquent groups by class, ethnicity and nationality was part of a broader definition of the ideal moral traits of the Israeli citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes professional discourse on masturbation to illustrate how child sexuality serves as a site for symbolic ideological struggles. Sex instruction manuals written in central Europe in the nineteenth century Palestine and Israel in the twentieth century are the basis for broader discussions on religious and scientific discourse on child and adolescent sexuality within the Jewish communities. By tracing the development of new forms of expert knowledge, we show how expert discourse on masturbation gradually transformed it from a symbolic moral evil into a medical disease and a psychological problem, before declaring it a legitimized behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1988, Israel changed its rape laws, inflicting harsher penalties on convicted rapists. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, this study compared punishment meted out before and after the reform and content analyzed the judicial discourse created in the courts in both periods. The findings revealed little change in the severity of sentencing and in judges' attitudes toward rapists, victims, and the crime. The mechanism of normalization allowed judicial authorities to make concessions to rapists, reducing the severity of the offense, while continuing to ignore the plight of the victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the effects of privatization and other forms of welfare state intervention on the long-term care program for the aged in Israel. The article introduces a conceptual framework which relates to the character of privatisation policies and their implications for the functioning of the welfare state. After a brief description of key developments in the Israeli welfare state during the last two decades, it examines the political process that underlay the formulation of the long-term care programme for dependent elderly people. Next, it analyses the implementation of the programme, focusing on the ways through which state agencies control its functioning, including the creation of a highly regulated private market of service suppliers. The analysis of the long-term care insurance programme's principles of operation in Israel suggests that privatisation policies do not necessarily mark the withering away of the welfare state nor a significant weakening of the state apparatus' control of the welfare domain. Indeed, it seems that the welfare state has become an irreversible major institution of advanced capitalist countries.

This paper examines the construction of the female offender's image through an analysis of reports published in one major Israeli newspaper over the period 1987-1989 and in another during 1994. The study reveals that, while describing the offense or the formal social response to it, reporters tended to emphasize a whole range of details not directly connected to the crime or the punishment. These indirect details feminize the female offender, highlighting her physical appearance, her behavior, and her performance as mother, wife and housewife, even when she committed serious crimes. An offense perpetrated by a woman was portrayed as a single, incidental act. The numerous stereotypical descriptions minimize her role as a criminal, so that her master status is of womanhood rather than criminality. These descriptions remove the female offender from the public sphere, keeping her in the private arena and thereby maintaining the existing gendered social order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]