O exercício profissional do assistente social nos espaços de acolhimento institucional à criança e adolescente: demandas contemporâneas e respostas socioprofissionais

Abstract

The present dissertation performs a analysis of the professional practice of social workers that work in the institutional reception spaces for children and adolescents in the particularity of the municipality of Natal, locus of the empirical research. Considering these occupational spaces that embody different expressions of the social question that mark the questions of care situation, the professional practice has characteristics that demand new needs, new ways of understanding and involvement of social workers within childcare services, in a way that the study set out to identify and analyze the demands made to the Social Service and the answers of he Professional category in institutional childcare services. From a critical-dialectical analysis, under the theoretical-methodological approach of a qualitative and quantitative basis, constitutes reflections about the current contours of the professional work of the social worker, with their new and traditional demands, forged in the recent framework of relations between the State and society in the country, which acquire distinct characteristics in the child and adolescent care services, in the face of social, legal and historical dimensions that guide the theme. The path established between knowledge and the concrete addressed reality and problematizated required necessary mediations highlighting what lies behind these relations: the contradictions and impasses by which the professional exercise is carried out, evidencing the link between social demands and social needs in capitalist society, which are merged in the face of the particular determinations of the Social Service and alter them in terms of the demands, users, values, criteria, corporate standards, requisitions and working conditions. In order to do so, we have included a review of the literature that covers the study proposal with the field research, and the collection and analysis of institutional documents and semi-structured interviews with 9 (nine) social workers included in the technical teams of the Temporary Shelters from Natal/RN. The results demonstrate that new demands are created that require other responses from the profession, so that it has to organize in its interior such answers, positioning itself before the social reality in question. The socio-professional responses permeate the professionals' interpretation of their professional spaces, the reading of what they consider to be their demands and the elaboration of responses to them, in a scenario of institutional requisites that often requires the immediate resolution of certain situations in a utilitarian sense in the role of protection and combat of violation of social rights. These questions point to the need to combine the theoretical-methodological, ethical-political and technical-operative dimensions and the objective conditions that underlie professional practice, so as to make real and concrete the possibility of building socio profesional and political answers in the daily life containing a evaluative critical content that recognizes the individual needs of those people in shelters as collective in the set of social struggles.