极速赛车168最新开奖号码 social media and social work Archives - Community Care

极速赛车168最新开奖号码 More than half of practitioners feel ill-equipped to address social media’s influence on children

Anastasia Koutsounia — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 07:46:53 +0000

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

More than half of social workers feel unprepared to tackle the impact of social media on children, a Community Care poll has found.

This follows the release of Netflix drama Adolescence in March, which sparked a national debate in the UK around the growing influence of online content on children – particularly young boys.

The four-episode series follows the aftermath of a 13-year-old boy being accused of murdering a girl from his school and explores children’s exposure to misogyny and incel (involuntarily celibate) culture online.

‘An emerging and growing problem’ – Starmer

In the wake of the show’s success, prime minister Keir Starmer described the online radicalisation of boys as “an emerging and growing problem” and backed screenings of Adolescence in secondary schools.

However, he cautioned that there was not a “lever” he could pull to solve the problem, adding: “Only by listening and learning from the experiences of young people and charities can we tackle the issues this groundbreaking show raises.”

With social workers often supporting children who spend long periods online, how equipped do they feel to tackle the influence of online culture?

A Community Care poll with 640 responses found that one-third of practitioners didn’t feel “at all” equipped to address the influence of social media on children, while 25% said they were only “a little” equipped.

Only 15% stated they were “very” well-equipped, and 27% said they were “somewhat” so.

Join the conversation on The Social Work Community

Join fellow professionals in discussing Adolescence and the influence of social media on children on our forum, The Social Work Community.

Click here to sign up to the community or, if you’re already logged in, join the conversation here.

If you’d like to share or write about your take on Adolescence and working with children who spend long periods online, email our community journalist, Anastasia Koutsounia, at anastasia.koutsounia@markallengroup.com

Celebrate those who’ve inspired you

Photo by Daniel Laflor/peopleimages.com/ AdobeStock

Do you have a colleague, mentor, or social work figure you can’t help but gush about?

Our My Brilliant Colleague series invites you to celebrate anyone within social work who has inspired you – whether current or former colleagues, managers, students, lecturers, mentors or prominent past or present sector figures whom you have admired from afar.

Nominate your colleague or inspiration by filling in our nominations form with a few paragraphs (100-250 words) explaining how the person has inspired you.

*Please note that, despite the need to provide your name and role, you or the nominee can be anonymous in the published entry*

If you have any questions, email our community journalist, Anastasia Koutsounia, at anastasia.koutsounia@markallengroup.com

极速赛车168最新开奖号码 Podcast: should social workers be on social media?

Sharmeen Ziauddin — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 09:00:06 +0000

The Social Work Community Podcast is a new offering from Community Care.

In this episode, we ask whether social workers should be on social media? Sharmeen Ziauddin speaks to two social work YouTubers, Yewande and Kayleigh Rose Evans.

Yewande is an experienced social worker and manager in child protection. Her YouTube channel, Young Black Social Worker, focuses on social work content for students, newly qualified staff and experienced social workers.

Kayleigh has worked in various different adults’ services across some of the most deprived areas of England. She shares all her insights on her YouTube channel, Kayleigh Rose Evans.

Both started their channels at the beginning of the pandemic, back in early 2020, and have large numbers of subscribers and followers on YouTube and other social media platforms.

In this episode, they discuss:

Why they created a public social media profile about their work as social workers.
The positives and negatives of having a social media presence.
Confidence and the advice they would give students and newly qualified social workers on how to use social media personally, professionally and safely.

Listen to “The Social Work Community Podcast” on Spreaker.

Here is the transcipt to this episode.

Have you joined the Social Work Community?

Listen to other podcast episodes here:

极速赛车168最新开奖号码 Social workers investigate Katie Hopkins after controversial tweets

Rachel Schraer — Fri, 15 May 2015 09:25:25 +0000

Controversial celebrity Katie Hopkins has claimed she was the subject of a referral to her local children’s services because of her “damaging” Twitter feed.

The former The Apprentice and Celebrity Big Brother star revealed she had received a call from a child protection social worker, in an interview with trade title Management Today.

Fears for her children’s wellbeing

The social work department told Hopkins they had to follow up the referral after being alerted to fears for her children’s wellbeing, based on her Twitter feed in which she has accused dementia patients of bed-blocking, overweight people of being lazy and described migrants as “cockroaches”.

Social work academic, Dr Denise Turner, told Community Care that if it were true it was “another demonstration of how chaotic certain social care processes and reactions still are around social media. This is not surprising as it is in its infancy, but we should take it as more evidence of the need to build knowledge in this area.”

She said when it came to parents’ use of social media, the child protection threshold should be the same as with any other concern.

Research by Community Care has shown how much confusion there is around the role of social media in social work, and how practitioners can manage risk for their service users.

Courted notoriety

Hopkins has repeatedly courted notoriety with tweets and her column in The Sun newspaper.

Tweets criticising dementia patients for bed-blocking provoked charity Alzheimer’s Research UK to accuse Hopkins of reinforcing misunderstandings and entrenching stigma around dementia. The United Nations also condemned her comments on immigrants as similar to pro-genocide propaganda.

Divisive social media presence

Talking about her divisive social media presence, Hopkins told Management Today: “I did have a call the other day from part of social services that they were concerned about the welfare of my child based on my Twitter feed, which someone thought might be damaging them. They said they had to call to follow up.

“People will try whatever mechanism there is – petitions, the UN, social services, having a go at my kids.”