The Helping Relationships from the Eyes of Service Users—A Study on Child Incest Victims’ Experiences of Receiving Social Worker Services

• Main Authors: You Yu Chun, 游毓君
• Other Authors: Tseng Hua-Yuan
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/g5fj94

碩士 === 東海大學 === 社會工作學系 === 103 === Adopting narrative analysis, this study aims to explore the experiences of four child incest victims’ receiving social services, to present the roles social workers and service users play in helping relationships. By means of analyzing the displacement of helping relationships, this study provides practical suggestions by further examining the influence existing in the relationship contexts between social workers and service users. The results revealed that the four girls have shared similar life experiences. As child incest victims, they were raised in under-privileged families, benefited from social interventions, and protected and surveilled by child placement agencies. They all once showed their dissatisfaction with the agencies by actions. They could adapt themselves to the environments well and further facilitate self-development under the condition that they established cooperative partnership with the social workers. In addition, the results suggested that service contexts exert direct influence on the development of helping relationships; firstly, service users’ life adaptation ability and interpretation on the roles of social workers are affected by the management style of placement agencies; secondly, that pathological welfare system weakens the overall abilities of service users makes them feel underprivileged and disrespected; besides, the government comprehensively assigns child welfare services to private institutions and fails to implement individual case management, which leads to service overlaps and abortions; lastly, New Managerialism and bureaucracy cause social workers to provide defensive-styled service and further overlook the needs of service users. Regarding the displacement of helping relationships, the shifts of roles are subject to the variation of reliability and autonomy. Based on the stages and contents of services, there are four relationship patterns, “protector and savior—victim and survivor,” “supervisor—supervisee,” “manipulator—rebel,” and “friend—family,” among which the “friend—family” relationship pattern optimally expedites service development. Lastly, regarding the driving force of the displacement of helping relationships, pre-understanding, re-understanding, and deep understanding can facilitate the role shifts of service users and social workers, modify the relationship patterns, loosen contextual and structural limits, and create the possibility of change. In response to these findings, this study proposes a reflection on existing implementation of social work intervention and service delivery systems.