Perceived access is one of the main factors that influence attitudes toward seeking professional help. Explanatory models may predict help-seeking behaviours if perceived access to such services is available.

The cultural competence approach has grown significantly in the North American human service professions. The reliance of social workers on cultural awareness to block the influence of their own culture in the helping process entails three problematic and conflicting assumptions, namely, the notion of human being as cultural artifact, the use of self as a technique for transcending cultural bias, and the subject-object dichotomy as a defining structure of the worker-client relationship. The authors contend that there are conceptual incoherencies within the cultural competence model's standard notion of self-awareness. The conceptualization of a dialogic self may unsettle the hierarchical worker-client relationship and de-essentialize the concept of culture. Cross-cultural social work thus becomes a site where client and worker negotiate and communicate to cocreate new meanings and relationships.

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The Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW) and its accompanying Forum of Non-Governmental Organizations were held in Beijing in the summer of 1995. An estimated 35,000 women from around the world, and including 5,000 Chinese women, attended the Forum. Preparation and other related activities were under way years before 1995. An unprecedented number of Chinese women were drawn into this process which entailed attending regional preparatory conferences abroad, organising international conferences at home, and participating in numerous meetings to hear and talk about the FWCW. These women used the term Jie Gui (connecting the tracks) to articulate their enthusiasm and eagerness to engage in dialogue and exchange with the international feminist community. This paper examines the opportunities and challenges of Jie Gui in the context of international gender politics. Our analysis is derived from, and seeks to contribute to, recent feminist debate about the politics of presentation and re-presentation of Chinese women in Sinology, and about the tension between global and local feminist activism. To analyse the political discourse of international feminist activists, we look with a critical eye at the images of Chinese women that Sinologists have presented in the last decades, as well as appraising more recent developments in the field. Likewise, our findings of Chinese women's gender and national identities call for a dialectical approach to their relationship with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) state. Focusing on debates and activism surrounding the FWCW, we compare and contrast rhetoric launched by the CCP state and by Western feminist/activist groups with Chinese women activists' interpretations of their own experiences. The term 'Western feminist/activist groups' does not suggest a monolithic, homogeneous entity. However, as we examined the rhetoric and discourse surrounding the FWCW, it became possible to identify groups whose activism was explicitly or implicitly based on a set of Euro-American-centric values and conformed to EuroAmerican practice. Thus, the term 'Western feminist/activist groups' is