Social Work Planned Intervention Process in the Context of Child Poverty: Case Study

Abstract

Poverty appears as a multidimensional concept that affects the individual’s life in many ways and prevents access to fundamental rights and causes rights violations. Children are undoubtedly one of the groups most affected by poverty. In today’s world, being born into a poor family can lead to a child not being able to access basic human rights such as life, health, shelter and education. Children who cannot access these rights have to struggle with many other problems such as poverty, being dragged into crime, social exclusion and labeling. All these problems also cause children not to have access to education, which is the most important tool they can use to get out of poverty. One of the main reasons why children cannot access their right to education due to poverty is peer bullying. A child struggling with poverty may be exposed to social exclusion and labeling by his peers due to being poor. The child who is exposed to these behaviors may experience a decrease in his/her sense of belonging to the school, which may cause him/her to move away from school. Thus, the child has not been able to access his right to education and is faced with a violation of his rights. A multidimensional perspective and a multidisciplinary intervention process is required to eliminate this violation of rights created by a multidimensional concept such as poverty. For this reason, school social work and school psychological counselor department need to work in harmony and cooperation and carry out comprehensive and multidimensional interventions. Within the scope of this study, it is aimed to convey a fictional case, aimed at eliminating the violation of rights that occurs as a result of social exclusion and peer bullying due to poverty, with applications carried out in the stages of the social work planned intervention process. The results and recommendations obtained from the multidimensional social work intervention will be discussed.