Asistenţa socială şi familia în România în sec. al XXI-lea [Social Work and Family in Romania in the 21st Century]

According to the Social Work Law updated in 2017, the national system of social work acts, together with other institutions, “to prevent, limit or eliminate the temporary or permanent effects of situations that might cause marginalisation or social exclusion of people, family, groups, or communities.” The responsibility of social integration and of active involvement “in the solution of difficult situations belongs with each individual and his/her family; the State creates equal opportunities and provides proper social work benefits and social services while central public authorities design the legal framework in the field of social work to develop policies for the support of the family during the entire life cycle of its members.” The national system of social work observes four values and general principles related to family: subsidiarity (local community, its associative structures and the State intervene when a family cannot ensure all its social needs); individual approach (social work measures for situations of individual difficulty, including support measures for the beneficiary’s family members); activation (social work measures encourage employment to strengthen the family nucleus); complementarity and integrated approach (social services correlate with all the needs of a beneficiary and are provided in an integrated way with measures and services from other fields – economy, education, health, and culture – “to ensure the entire potential of social functioning of an individual as a rightful member of the family.” This bibliographic study presents an analysis of the way in which all these issues are reflected by Romanian research in the first years of the 21st century as shown by the most accessed Internet sites in the field of social work.

Keywords: social work, family, protection, Romania