Every year, thousands of young people arrive in the Netherlands because they have had to flee their country of origin. Having left behind life as they had known it, they must become accustomed to a new, unfamiliar society. This dissertation focuses on young people (aged 8 to 17 years) who have been granted official ‘refugee’ status and resettled in the Netherlands together with family members. It aims to understand how they experience the years immediately after resettlement.
LINK
The objective of this study is to illuminate the effects of intensive aid on the self-reliance and independence of single mothers, and to show what is and what can be done to improve the empowerment of this group. Firstly the paper focuses on the effects of intensive social aid on the self-reliance and independence of single mothers, and how this affects the process of regaining social inclusion in each of the home countries. Secondly the results are compared with the second country, in respect of the socio-economic and cultural circumstances. This study is based upon a comparative data collected from randomly selected single mothers in each country. In the Netherlands information was collected during in-depth interviews; in Cyprus semi-structured interviews and questionnaires were used. The aim is to shed light on the issues that impact on the lives and the well-being of these mothers and their children in their social context. This chapter presents sections of two large research projects which attempted to investigate the single-mother families from the woman’s perspective, and it aims to analyse the following: • Factors that hinder and improve the independent life of a single mother • Choices that women make during the offered aid period and their motives • The results of this change.
DOCUMENT
Each of us has a story that comes alive as we wake up in the morning, develops throughout the day, and holds layers of meaning as we lay our heads down at night – it might be called a narrative of our identity. When loss occurs, our story fragments into unfamiliar pieces, and who we identify as becomes scattered – sometimes even shattered. We must work to reconstruct meaning in our lives and to rebuild our identity. As leading author on this editorial, with an article of my own in this issue, I confronted this when my father died. I felt his story slipping away, becoming blurred, forgotten, and for some, erased – and the same held true for me. The chaos of my shattered identity exacerbated the deep pain of losing him and I experienced complicated grief. I had to reshape my narrative to remember the authentic parts of me and rebuild a new self in a fatherless world. This journey is in part what motivated me to become a symposium co-editor for the journal. All four of us editors of this special issue have experienced “living with loss” following the premature loss of either our father or spouse, and I wanted to see what lived experience and knowledge we could bring to the readers about loss in the fields of both guidance and counselling.
MULTIFILE
