Intimate partner violence remains a persistent scourge in American culture. It’s hard to determine how frequently it occurs, given survivors’ fear of reporting. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates roughly 41% of women and 26% of men in the U.S. have experienced sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner.

An astonishing one in five American homicide victims dies at the hand of an intimate partner, the CDC says. For American women alone, the figures are even worse. More than half who die by homicide are killed by men who are or were their intimate partners.

Of course, people can be abused without being physically touched. More than 61 million women and 53 million men in the U.S. have survived psychological aggression from an intimate partner, according to the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey.

Intimate partner violence can strike anyone. It doesn’t discriminate by gender, sexual orientation, class, race, education, or age. While most abusers are men, women abuse, too.

Slowing such a widespread problem will take a clear understanding of the types of abusers, ways they may abuse, what we know about effective treatment, and how to prevent the behavior in younger generations.

Read the full story in the NASW Social Work Advocates magazine here.

How much social media is too much for a teen? No one knows for sure, but the issue of social media addiction has many people concerned. One study, published in 2016, not only showed that 59% of parents believe their teens are addicted to their mobile devices, but 50% of teens themselves believe they are addicted. That in and of itself is alarming. However, consider that this now eight-year-old research was done prior to the widespread adoption of other more sophisticated platforms, like TikTok.

TikTok is a social media app that curates short-form videos for users and is now one of the most popular platforms used by teens 13-17 years old. It has the potential to be particularly addictive due to its computer algorithm, which allows it to analyze user behavior and curate content to match user interests—whether that’s viewing, mentioning or “liking” dance videos, study tips or acts of violence. (Plus, the opportunity to scroll never ends, so no cues exist that remind teens to stop and move on to a different activity.)

Concerns don’t just span roles and ages, nor are they confined to specific groups. At a time in history when differing beliefs are causing painful divisions within the nation, people across the political spectrum are coming together in unwavering agreement—social media is harming children and teens and something must be done. As of June, the bipartisan “Protecting Kids on Social Media” bill was pending, which would establish guidelines for social media, including banning children under age 13 from having accounts.

Read the full story in the NASW Social Work Advocates magazine.

Maria Rangel earned her MSW in May from Loyola University Chicago and already has a job. The 50-year-old native of Mexico, who is fluent in Spanish and English, was offered a full-time job by the community service agency where she did one of two internships prior to graduation.

Jaileene Arriaga is a year away from earning her MSW at the University of Connecticut but has already been offered a full-time job at the community service agency where she interned. The 27-year-old Hartford native, who is of Puerto Rican descent and is fluent in Spanish and English, is hoping to postpone her start date until after she graduates.

Rangel and Arriaga are bilingual, bicultural social workers, which makes them highly sought after by social service employers. They enrolled in MSW programs that offer coursework in Spanish and English and focus on producing graduates with the skills to serve Spanish-speaking populations in their communities.

The social work profession needs people with this kind of professional and linguistic skill set to serve an increasingly diverse U.S. population. Experts say there is a shortage of social workers who are fluent in a language other than English.

Kimberly Warmsley, LCSW, executive director of NASW’s California chapter, said there isn’t a database that shows precisely how many bilingual social workers the country needs, and how many there are.

But there is clearly a shortage of social workers in general, and the problem is that much more acute when it comes to finding social workers who are skilled in more than at least one language besides English, Warmsley said. That’s certainly the case in California, the nation’s most populous state and one of its most diverse.

Read the full story in the NASW Social Work Advocates magazine. 

More than 650,000 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States on one night in 2023. Those were the results of the 2023 Point-in-Time Count, an annual count of individuals experiencing both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The results showed an increase from the year prior, as more than 70,000 more individuals were counted as compared with 2022. Additionally, “The 2023 Point-In-Time (PIT) count is the highest number of people reported as experiencing homelessness on a single night since reporting began in 2007. The overall increase reflects the increases in all homeless populations. Homelessness among persons in families with children experiencing homelessness rose by 16 percent. Similarly, the rise in individuals experiencing homelessness was 11 percent,” according to the 2023 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress.

This data is just a glimpse of the current housing crisis and also is likely an underestimate of the actual number of people experiencing homelessness—a number that does not even include those on the brink of homelessness, unable to pay for their housing or unable to pay for other necessities once housing has been covered.

Of course, today’s crisis is not the first housing crisis in the United States. “It sometimes feels like we’re on this hamster wheel. It feels like it’s never ending,” says Emily Kenney, LCSW, systems change director at Impact in Milwaukee. However, that does not change the hardship of it and the need for action to mitigate it.

For social workers, effecting change in the housing crisis requires an understanding of the systems at play and the ways in which they need to evolve to help the individual.

The Housing Crisis

There are a number of factors that impact housing and individuals’ ability to afford and maintain housing at present. “When we think about the driving forces behind the housing crisis, we think of two main things that are happening: There’s a severe shortage of housing that’s available and affordable; and there’s a widening gap between income and housing costs. Both of them are systemic failures,” says Sarah Saadian, senior vice president of public policy and field organizing at the National Low Income Housing Coalition in Washington, D.C.

In fact, The Pew Charitable Trusts estimate there is a shortage of between four million and seven million homes in the U.S.

“Communities across the country, not just the big cities, are dealing with massive housing shortages overall, especially for affordable housing. Additionally, this is often happening in the context of population increase within those communities. As demand increases, the supply rarely keeps pace,” says Amanda Aykanian, PhD, assistant professor of social work at the University at Buffalo in New York.

Read the full feature article at NASW Social Work Advocates magazine.

The theme was The Elder Mistreatment Ecosystem: Emerging Innovations and Evolving Ideas.

The Georgia Anetzberger Award was presented to Patricia Kimball, executive director of the Elder Abuse Institute of Maine (EAIME) and founder of the Restorative Justice Institute of Maine. This biennial award, established in honor of NASW Social Work Pioneer® and Ohio Chapter member Georgia Anetzberger, recognizes an individual who has contributed outstanding service to the field of elder abuse. 

Anetzberger, a consultant in private practice and adjunct faculty member in the schools of Medicine and Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, has devoted 50 years—as a practitioner, planner, administrator, researcher, educator, and author—to preventing and addressing elder abuse. 

The award in Anetzberger’s name was bestowed upon Kimball for EAIME’s involvement in the implementation of an evidence-based model to respond to and prevent elder abuse and self-neglect. Under Kimball’s leadership, RISE—Repair Harm, Inspire Change, Support Connection, Empower Choice—was implemented in Maine in partnership with the state’s Adult Protective Services. The model was described in detail during the symposium Canadian social worker David Burnes, professor at the University of Toronto, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, and Canada Research Chair on Older Adult Mistreatment Prevention. 

From left: Laura Mosqueda, director, National Center on Elder Abuse, and professor of family medicine and geriatrics, both at the USC Keck School of Medicine; Patricia Kimball, and Georgia Anetzberger. (Photo credit: USC Tamkin Symposium on Elder Abuse).

In the photo, from left are, Laura Mosqueda, director, National Center on Elder Abuse, and professor of family medicine and geriatrics, both at the USC Keck School of Medicine; Patricia Kimball, and Georgia Anetzberger. (Photo credit: USC Tamkin Symposium on Elder Abuse). 

Among the social workers presenting posters at the symposium were NASW Michigan Chapter member Joy Swanson Ernst, who co-presented a poster entitled APS Administrative Data Initiative (AADI): A New National Network.

Visit https://eldermistreatment.usc.edu/tamkin-symposium-2024/ to read the symposium program, slides, and posters. 

Caption for banner photo: From left, Jeanine Yonashiro-Cho, postdoctoral fellow, USC Keck School of Medicine, Sandra Edmonds Crewe, dean at Howard University School of Social Work; E-Shien (Iggy) Chang, assistant professor of gerontology in medicine, Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College; and Chris Herman. (Photo credit: USC Tamkin Symposium on Elder Abuse). 

The aging baby boomer population is reaching critical mass. In 2020, according to the Census Bureau, that group numbered some 73 million—the second-largest segment of the U.S. population after Millennials—with 55.8 million of boomers, or 16.8% of the U.S. population, being age 65 or over. By 2030, all boomers will have hit 65 and their share of the population will be around 20%.

In the face of this dramatic surge in older Americans—disparagingly referred to as the “Gray Tsunami”—there is an enormous need for social workers, and lots of job opportunities. The challenge has been getting more social work students interested. “Students generally don’t come into social work thinking they can work with older adults,” says Dr. Susanny J. Beltran, assistant professor, University of Central Florida School of Social Work. “They think about trauma, about children, about police work, maybe policy work—the popular notions of what social workers do.” In fact, the total number of elder-focused social work students in the U.S. has often been below 5%.

The joint goals in elder-care education at many social work schools have been: (1) trying to increase the number of students focusing on older adults, and (2) giving all students some aging-related content, says Dr. Nancy Kusmaul, associate professor, University of Maryland-Baltimore County School of Social Work, whose own interest in working with older adults stemmed from early experience. “I was a kid who hung out with my great-grandmother at family gatherings. She and I made pasta together and played cards. I have good associations with that.”

Read the full story in the NASW Social Work Advocates magazine.

Kelly Bremken is a new kind of veterinary social worker. She personifies how much the practice area has evolved since its inception 21 years ago. Back then, the handful of veterinary social workers sprinkled throughout the country pretty much focused on one thing: helping people cope with the loss of their companion animals.

Today’s VSWs do so much more than that. To name a few items on their growing list of responsibilities, they help veterinary professionals manage workplace stress and build better relationships with their human clients. They watch for signs of animal and domestic abuse. They detect and investigate cases of animal hoarding. They help students and staff at veterinary schools develop sound coping strategies.

Bremken, MSSW, VSW—the first VSW hired by the Oregon Humane Society in Portland—wears many hats, but her work is entirely focused on the human-animal bond.

OHS has a community veterinary hospital and an animal shelter and is the largest facility of its kind in the state. It’s a busy place where Bremken is uniquely positioned to play a pivotal role given her skill set—she worked in animal services for some 20 years before returning to school to earn an MSW and a veterinary social work certificate from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in 2021.

Bremken helps ease the grief and loss people feel when they decide to end the lives of their ailing or aging pets. But she also resolves a host of other pet-related problems for the humane society’s clients: landlord disputes; referrals to community social services; and the like. Another focus of her work is to connect owners with the right resources to help them keep their pets rather than giving them up to the animal shelter.

“We may not have the community program they need, but I am going to find out,” Bremken said. “Animal welfare as a whole has shifted to the idea that keeping people and pets together is the best plan. That requires us to build programs and increase access to care in a way that a social worker knows how to do best.”

Read the full story in the NASW Social Work Advocates magazine.

Imagine if an entire classroom of students died—every single week.

It’s hard to overstate the horror. And, unfortunately, we don’t have to imagine it. An average of 22 adolescents (14 to 18 years old) died from drug overdoses in the U.S. each week in 2022. That makes drug overdoses and poisonings the third leading cause of pediatric deaths in the nation (behind gun injuries and motor vehicle accidents). And most of these deaths can be attributed to illicit fentanyl.

Fentanyl is now involved in at least 75% of adolescent overdose deaths. Worth noting is that 84% of these deaths are categorized as unintentional. That’s because fentanyl is often added to other illicit drugs, which makes them cheaper, more powerful, more addictive—and extremely dangerous.

Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health, characterizes the current opioid overdose crisis as the worst in U.S. history and among the gravest crises facing the nation. “Overdose rates are increasing across race/ethnicity and sex categories, and in all age groups, including among young people,” Volkow says.

While the deadly drug fueling this crisis doesn’t discriminate—it crosses all demographics and impacts every corner of this country—some regions and groups are hurting more than others. The New England Journal of Medicine found that from 2020 to 2022, Arizona, Colorado and Washington state had adolescent mortality rates nearly twice the national average, or higher.

Read the full story in the NASW Social Work Advocates magazine.