Librería Portfolio

This book studies welfare systems in Europe and beyond from the standpoint of women in vulnerable positions in society. These systems are under major transformations with new models of service delivery and management, austerity measures, requirements for cost-effectiveness, marketization, and the prioritization of services.

Divided into three parts:

Welfare service systems (not) responding to vulnerable situations of women
Women's encounters with the welfare service system
Contradictions of informal support

this book considers the experiences and encounters with the service system of women in poverty, homeless women, women with substance use problems, women sentenced of crime, girls and young women in care, and refugees and asylum-seeking women.

Drawing upon research and critical discussions from Finland, Canada, Israel, Slovenia, Spain and the UK, this book provides new empirical findings and critical insights, and a valuable resource for the academics and students in social work, social policy, sociology and gender studies, but also for policy makers and professionals in social and health care.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction: women, vulnerabilities and welfare service systems
Marjo Kuronen and Elina Virokannas

PART 1 Welfare service systems (not) responding to vulnerable situations of women

2 Vulnerability as lived experience: marginalised women and girls in the UK
Kate Brown, Katie Ellis and Kate Smith

3 Finnish welfare service system from the standpoint of women in vulnerable life situations
Elina Virokannas, Ulla Salovaara, Suvi Krok and Marjo Kuronen

4 Interpreting vulnerabilities facing women in urban life: a case study in Madrid, Spain
M. Victoria Gómez and Marjo Kuronen

5 Risky mothers: state-family relations, risk and the gendered reproduction of vulnerability in Canadian child welfare
Mandi Veenstra

PART 2 Women's encounters with the welfare service system

6 The right to have a child: an institutional response to the motherhood of drug users in Slovenia
Vesna Mejak and Vesna Leskosek

7 Incarcerated women, welfare services and the process of re-entering society in Finland
Ulla Salovaara

8 The reform of the Finnish income benefit system from the standpoint of lone mothers
Suvi Krok

9 Social framework for understanding women´s substance abuse, treatment and vulnerability
Teija Karttunen

PART 3 Contradictions of informal support

10 Low-income breadwinning Israeli mothers negotiating economic survival: the exchange of sex for material resources
Einat Lavee

11 Vulnerability and agency: women after prison in the Basque Autonomous Community, Spain
Estibaliz de Miguel-Calvo

12 Peer support among female substance users in Finland
Elina Virokannas

13 Concluding remarks: a need for women-specific services
Marjo Kuronen and Ulla Salovaara