”Det brinner i knutarna”- En kvalitativ studie om socialarbetares upplevelser av arbetet med gravida missbrukare.

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to find out how social workers handle and experience working with substance abusing women who are pregnant. We were interested in finding out how they experience their role as social workers in their professional relationship with the woman and how they look at the pregnancy in relation to motivation. Further on, we wanted to know their thoughts of how collaboration between professionals works and their opinions on LVM for pregnant women who are substance abusers. To achieve our purpose we interviewed nine social workers, of whom six are persons in authority and three have working assignments that are more counseling. Thereafter we used power as an analyzing perspective, focusing on how the relationship between the social worker and the woman is uneven in terms of power. Our main results were that the social workers sometimes find it tough to work with women who have a substance abuse during pregnancy and that it is important to be aware of and clear with the fact that the social worker has a lot of power. They often experience that the pregnancy itself is a source of motivation for these women to stop using alcohol and/or drugs. Some of the social workers thought that there should be a change in the law to protect the fetus, while some thought it to be unnecessary and mean that the existing law gives enough protection. Lastly, the social workers experience collaboration as well functioning although they believe that there are a relatively high number of women who never come to the social services knowledge.