Women, Vulnerabilities and Welfare Service Systems

Marjo Kuronen is a Professor of Social Work at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Elina Virokannas is a University Lecturer at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Ulla Salovaara is a Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

1. Introduction: women, vulnerabilities and welfare service systems. Part 1 Welfare service systems (not) responding to vulnerable situations of women. 2. Vulnerability as lived experience: marginalised women and girls in the UK. 3. Finnish welfare service system from the standpoint of women in vulnerable life situations. 4. Interpreting vulnerabilities facing women in urban life: a case study in Madrid, Spain. 5. Risky mothers: state-family relations, risk and the gendered reproduction of vulnerability in Canadian child welfare. 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. 7. Incarcerated women, welfare services and the process of re-entering society in Finland. 8. The reform of the Finnish income benefit system from the standpoint of lone mothers. 9. Social framework for understanding women´s substance abuse, treatment and vulnerability. Part 3 Contradictions of informal support. 10. Low-income breadwinning Israeli mothers negotiating economic survival: the exchange of sex for material resources. 11. Vulnerability and agency: women after prison in the Basque Autonomous Community, Spain. 12. Peer support among female substance users in Finland. 13. Concluding remarks: a need for women-specific services