Over-indebtedness of impoverished households and its relevance to the social work profession have not received sufficient attention in the professional discourse. It is the intention of this article to put over-indebtedness on the professional agenda, to review the literature about it, and to present initial data from a study on over-indebtedness in Israel carried out with special attention to debtors' coping with their debts. The research was conducted as a door-to-door survey in a neighborhood with low socioeconomic characteristics and included questions about the nature of the debts, the strategies people use to cope with debts and the obstacles they face while doing so. Findings: The research findings indicate a severe debt problem among the participants. Out of 142 interviewees, 61% had debt that was overdue and 27% of them did not have an active bank account-a significant parameter of financial exclusion. Moreover, the proliferation of debts per household, and the high level of debt-to-income ratio also indicate high risk for financial exclusion. Notwithstanding, the findings indicate that most debtors made active efforts in order to close their debts, using two distinct strategies, namely: trying to reach a payment arrangement with the creditor or paying off the debt by increasing their financial resources. Most debtors used the first strategy, although it was found as the less successful one.

Abstract This article aims to present a Poverty-Aware Paradigm for Child Protection (PAPCP). The increasing scholarly recognition of the damaging impact of poverty, inequality and the neoliberal politics of ‘risk’ on child protection policy and practice, has highlighted the need for a justice-based and poverty-aware analytical framework for child protection social work. In order to create such a framework, we build upon Krumer-Nevo’s Poverty-Aware Paradigm (PAP)—that was first presented in a previous issue of the British Journal of Social Work—and adapt its paradigmatic premises to the context of child protection social work. By addressing ontological, epistemological and axiological questions underpinning the construction of risk and the practices utilised to deal with it, the article provides a clear, practical and applicable link between critical theories and everyday child protection practice. The PAPCP is presented against the background of the risk-focused paradigm currently dominating the child protection systems in both the authors’ countries—Israel and England.

In recent years, there has been an increase in scholarly writing on the theory and practice of critical social work with people living in poverty. Yet there is a lack of research on the experiences and perspectives of service users regarding this kind of practice. This paper presents a qualitative study that explored the practice of a special poverty‐aware social work programme in Israel, through the experiences of women who took part in it. Using an interpretative interactionist approach, in‐depth interviews with nine women were held three times over a 2‐year period. Findings reveal a high degree of satisfaction with the programme on the part of the women. The satisfaction was derived from four main experiences: the experience of visibility, the experience of the active partnership in the fight against poverty, the experience of close, hierarchy‐challenging relationships, and the experience of responsiveness to material and emotional needs. The findings are discussed in terms of three principles of practice: intervention in a real‐life context, relationship‐based intervention and the focus on both the material and emotional needs and their fulfilment.

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In recent years, scholarly writing that calls for the development of a new child protection framework that contextualizes risk and links it to poverty and social marginalization has increased. Nonetheless, there is a lack of research on the challenges of implementing such a framework in frontline practice. Based on the ongoing, rigorous documentation of the author's experience, as a social work practitioner in a community child protection centre, this article presents two single-case studies that describe and conceptualize the potential contribution of the poverty-aware paradigm to the creation of a social framework for child protection practice. Utilizing critical reflection as a method of analysis, the findings reveal two major tensions entwined in povertyaware child protection practice: the tension between focusing child protection interventions on parenting and focusing them on poverty and the tension between framing risk within a social context and framing it within the concept of the best interest of the child. Based on the case studies, seven poverty-aware practices to cope with these tensions are identified. KEYWORDS child protection, critical practice, critical reflection, poverty-aware social workWe need change … so that the kind of social work we are prompting, that which places human beings and human factors at its heart, can be developed.

In the scholarly writing on child protection, there is a broad consensus regarding the importance of parents’ participation in knowledge-production processes. However, there is limited research on the conditions required to make parental participation possible in high-risk crisis situations. In particular, there is a dearth of writing that takes into consideration the context of poverty that influences families’ lives and the power imbalances between social workers and parents that are evident in these processes. Through a case illustration of a high-risk crisis situation in the Israeli child protection system, this article examines the potential contribution of a developing critical paradigm—the Poverty-Aware Paradigm—to the promotion of parents’ participation in high-risk crisis situations. Specifically, it points to ‘relationship-based knowledge’ as an organizing axis for knowledge production, and to its derivative, ‘dialogue on power/knowledge’, as a useful practice in child protection interventions. The case analysis reveals three distinguishing features of this dialogue: (i) the social worker holds a dialectic stance regarding knowledge; (ii) the social worker and the parents negotiate their interpretations; and (iii) the social worker shares common hopes and worries with the parents.

Social work scholars have argued that poverty reminds us of the necessary commitment to educate professional social workers. Being inspired by a conceptual framework that captures how poverty-awareness can be the subject of teaching in social work programmes, this article offers a qualitative analysis of the reflections being made by a cohort of students about their learning process in a post-academic course. Five common themes are discussed: (i) from recognising micro-aggressions to tackling macro-aggressions; (ii) poverty is an instance of social injustice and requires collective indignation; (iii) notions of commitment and solidarity are ambiguous; (iv) poverty is an instance of social inequality rather than merely social exclusion; and (v) from being heroic agents to social change ‘from within’. Based on these findings, we raise the lessons learned for social work educators. First, they should invite students to reinvigorate the social justice aspirations of social work practices and take a stance in relation to their environment and the wider historical and socio-political circumstances. Secondly, a poverty-aware pedagogy requires collective and long-lasting supervision at the frontline individual, organisational and societal/social policy level. Collective critical reflection and supervision might open up avenues to collectively challenge and change socially unjust rhetoric and practice.