Arab minority social workers’ interventions in taboo topics: challenges and coping mechanisms

Abstract

The article investigates challenges experienced by minority group social workers in professional interventions to alleviate problems arising due to taboos and reveals coping mechanisms used for these challenges. A phenomenological study elicited data from semi-structured in-depth interviews with 15 Arab welfare bureau social workers. Five challenges were found: (1) Increasing flooding of the Arab welfare bureaus with inquiries related to taboo problems; (2) Taboo problems worsen over time; (3) Most taboos stem from canonical stipulations rooted in Muslim, Druze and Christian religious sources, relating to issues such as modesty and marital relations and/or the national conflict; (4) Their consequences are immense: multidimensional, catastrophic and irreversible; (5) While social workers lack prior professional training for these topics, their interventions are based on trial and error and practice wisdom. The social workers use three mechanisms to deal with taboo problems: Mobilising the resources of the environment; As individuals, social workers employ strategies ‘outside the box’; and they work in collaboration with veteran colleagues to extract tacit knowledge, and consult mentors for backup. Professional awareness should be raised concerning the authentication of taboo issues in three fields: lifelong learning, policy design (laws, procedures and guidelines) and implementation (interventions, mentoring and supervision).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.