Client violence toward children and youth services social workers

Critical Commentary: The Impact of Work-Related Violence towards Social Workers in Children and Family Services

“…Conversely, Regehr and colleagues (2004) found physical assaults to be the most commonly reported type of violent incident, experienced by 52 per cent of their participants in the year preceding their study; however, it is important to be mindful of the limitations of their small sample. Physical assaults were described across all seven studies; however, reported prevalence was consistently low compared to other forms of aggression, with 2 -34 per cent of social workers (Newhill and Wexler, 1997;Shin, 2011, respectively) reporting having experienced physical violence compared with between 37 and 97 per cent (Newhill and Wexler, 1997;Horejsi et al, 1994, respectively) reporting having experienced verbal aggression or threats. Despite being of 'good' or 'average' methodological quality, all these studies were limited by their lack of a valid measure.…”

“…A total of 631 records were found, reduced to 515 following de-duplication. After screening article titles and then abstracts against the inclusion criteria, three papers remained (Newhill and Wexler, 1997;Regehr et al, 2004;Shin, 2011) and were included in the review.…”

“…The gender of perpetrators was discussed as a risk factor in four studies (Horejsi et al, 1994;Newhill and Wexler, 1997;Littlechild, 2005aLittlechild, , 2005b, but again no general consensus was found. One study reported that the majority of participants (63 per cent) stated that they did not believe there to be a gender difference in the perpetrators of violence (Horejsi et al, 1994).…”

“…The majority of research on violence towards social workers is based on their retrospective accounts of work-related violence, which may be subjective and lack reliability. However, asso-ciations have been found between client violence and anxiety, sleep disorders and social dysfunction (Padyab et al, 2012), which in turn has been found to increase staff absenteeism and altered working practice (Newhill and Wexler, 1997).…”

“…Within social care professions, child and family social workers have been found to be the population most at risk (Newhill and Wexler, 1997;Shin, 2011); however, the majority of research on violence has focused on learningdisabled populations. Staff in learning disability services have been found to have emotional responses to violence mediated by their attributions about the behaviour, which have in turn been found to cause staff behaviours which can serve to both cause and maintain challenging behaviour (Hastings, 2002).…”