Client Violence Towards Social Workers in Spain: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Violence in the workplace has important consequences for workers and their own environment. Health and social services professionals are high-risk professional groups. This research has a main aim to identify the studies on client violence towards the social worker in Spain. This aim has four specific objectives to understand the phenomenon: (1) to identify those investigations that study the violence of clients against social workers; (2) to analyze the descriptive characteristics of the selected studies; (3) to analyze the methodological characteristics of the selected studies; (4) to identify the variables associated to client violence towards the social worker. In order to achieve these objectives, the method was based on a review of the literature on studies of violence towards social workers in Spain through the PRISMA-S guidelines (Rethlefsen et al., 2021). The results show that this phenomenon effectively exists, and cast a light on a situation that social workers experience in isolation. Exploring the phenomenon in a descriptive way, the review provides information on the variables studied and the current extent of violence towards social workers by clients. The lack of studies on this subject underlines the need to continue researching into the problem from both descriptive and inferential perspectives.