Children's Rights and Social Work

Asher Ben-Arieh is a Professor of Social Work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Director of the Haruv Institute in Jerusalem. He served for 20 years as the Associate Director of Israel's National Council for the Child. From 1990 to 2011 he was the founding editor-in-chief of the annual "State of the Child in Israel". He is a leading international expert on social indicators, particularly those related to child well-being. He initiated and coordinated the International Project "Measuring and Monitoring Children Well-Being", and was among the founding members of the International Society for Children Indicators (ISCI). Currently, Professor Ben-Arieh is one of the PI's of the multi-national, multi-million International Study of Children's Well-being (ISCWeB) research project. He is also the founding editor-in-chief of the Child Indicators Research journal (CIR) and the Child Well Being: Indicators and Research book series.
Hanita Kosher is an associate faculty member at the School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as of 2016. Her research interests include: children's rights; advocacy and social work; children's subjective well-being; children at-risk and child maltreatment. She had also published a few articles at scholarly journals. From 2007 to 2015 she was the head of the education centre of the National Council of the Child, which is the leading advocacy organization for children's rights in Israel.

Yael Handelsman holds a BSW in Social-Work and a BA in Philosophy Studies, both from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Yael is currently a Master student in the MA program of Non-profit Organization Management at The Hebrew University's School of Social Work. She is writing her thesis dissertation on the topic of: "Conceptualizing Abuse and Neglect: The Child's Perspective". Alongside her academic activities, Yael serves as a research assistantat the Haruv Institute. As a social worker, Yael worked with families in the social services in Jerusalem and with youth at risk at The Kemper Group House, for youth with complex psychological difficulties that were removed from their homes. Yael volunteered for two years at the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel where she served as a group facilitator for the topic of gender and sexuality.