Open Access

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is a human rights framework in the context of multi-level governance child protection policies central to social work education and practice (United Nations, 1989). In line with this statement, children’s rights-based education introduces undergraduate social work students to the principles of the CRC, namely participation, protection, harm prevention and provision, to facilitate knowledge acquisition by building core competencies for critical practice (IFSW, 2002). It equips social workers with analytical and advocacy skills that foster critical thinking and creativity in the juxtaposition between child protection, autonomy and self-determination. This chapter provides insights for social work education to locate and analyse the underlying casualties of social problems using a problem and resource framework, the w-questions (Geiser, 2015). The framework is used to develop theory driven social work interventions as illustrated against the backdrop the anonymised case study, Amira, an accompanied child asylum seeker in Austria (Fritsche, Glawischnig, & Wolfsegg, 2019). Correspondingly, CRC is addressed along a continuum between human needs fulfilment and human right entitlements (Obrecht, 2009; IFSW, 2002; Ife, 2012). The concept of need is understood as tension in our concrete biological and psychological bio-values and states (Obrecht, 2009, p. 27). The assertion is that when children lack support or are obstructed from achieving their equal right to education due to social, cultural or economic barriers, this exacerbates social marginalisation because it deprives them of membership in the school social system. Social marginalisation thwarts the fulfilment of needs and weakens social cohesion by causing alienation and anomie (Mayrhofer, 2015). The tentative conclusion is that knowledge and practice models that link human needs and children’s rights equip social workers with the expertise to reduce children’s vulnerability whilst strengthening their protection, autonomy and self-determination.

For a given set of banks, how big can losses in bad economic or financial scenarios possibly get, and what are these bad scenarios? These are the two central questions of stress tests for banks and the banking system. Current stress tests select stress scenarios in a way which might leave aside many dangerous scenarios and thus create an illusion of safety; and which might consider highly implausible scenarios and thus trigger a false alarm. We show how to select scenarios systematically for a banking system in a context of multiple credit exposures. We demonstrate the application of our method in an example on the Spanish and Italian residential real estate exposures of European banks. Compared to the EBA 2016 stress test our method produces scenarios which are equally plausible as the EBA stress scenario but yield considerably worse system wide losses.