Improving refugee security: a clinical social work intervention proposal

Abstract

This article pursues two fundamental aims: first, to show the insecurity to which refugees are subject, and second, to highlight the possibility of using clinical social work as a tool to reduce the impacts that such insecurity may have on their lives. In order to achieve the first of these aims, we briefly describe the international situation resulting from Europe’s refugee crisis to explain the need, from the perspective of this reality, to consider how insecurity is present in the lives of these people. This sometimes manifests as objective insecurity (war, violence, attacks) and on other occasions takes the form of uncertainty over an unpredictable future. With respect to the second aim, we explain how clinical social work offers single interventions from an interdisciplinary psychosocial perspective in processes involving uncertainty and insecurity for refugees, echoing the various phases of the migratory process.