Ian Butler

Two successive terms of a New Labour government have required social work practice in the UK to occupy a particular public policy context that is, at best, indifferent and, at worst, hostile to some of the professional interests and traditional constituencies of social workers. In this paper, the immediate past editors of the Journal reflect on how social work has sought to adapt and survive under these conditions, as revealed in the papers published during the period of their stewardship.

The paper reports findings from a research study that explored children's experience of divorce. It shows that children experience parental divorce as a crisis in their lives but that they are able to mobilise internal and external resources to regain a new point of balance. In doing so, children demonstrate the degree to which they are active and competent participants in the process of family dissolution. The implications of the data are then considered in relation to engaging with children involved in divorce and in relation to some of the cultural presumptions that might militate against hearing what they have to say about their experiences. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This Critical Commentary is the final product of the Economic and Social Research Council sponsored seminar series, Theorising Social Work Research to appear in the BJSW. The special edition of the British Journal of Social Work published in August 2000 carried several key papers arising from the seminar series as well as reports of some of the events themselves. The responsibility for drafting the Code of Ethics for Social Work and Social Care Research fell to me and although discussed at the Luton Seminar and at the final conference in Manchester, the text presented here is much as it first appeared. This is simply to reaffirm that it has no particular status and is reproduced in the Journal as a prompt to further discussion, precisely the purpose it was to serve for the seminar series. Before reproducing the Code, it might be helpful to revisit some of the main points which were raised in the paper presented at the Luton Seminar which set the context for the Code (Butler, 2000).