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Child protection is one of the most high profile and challenging areas of social work, as well as one where children’s lives and family life are seen to be at stake. Vital as child protection work is, this book argues that there is a pressing need for change in the understanding and consequent organization of child protection in many English speaking nations. Grounded in the recent and contemporary literature, research and scholarly inquiry, this book capitalises on the experiences and voices of children, young people, families and workers who are the most significant stakeholders in child protection. It will be an essential read for those who work, research, teach or study in the area.
This book proposes what, to many professionals in the child welfare field, will appear a radically different explanation for our society's decisions to protect children from harm and for the significant drop in substantiated child abuse numbers. At the center of this conceptual and analytic approach is the contention that social outrage emanating from horrific and often sensationalized cases of child maltreatment plays a major role in CPS decision making and in child outcomes. The ebb and flow of outrage, we believe, invokes three levels of response that are consistent with patterns of the number of child maltreatment reports made to public child welfare agencies, the number of cases screened-in by these CPS agencies, the proportions of alleged cases substantiated as instances of real child abuse or neglect, and the numbers of children placed outside their homes. At the community level, outrage produces amplified surveillance and a posture of "zero-tolerance" while child protection workers, in turn, carry out their duties under a fog of "infinite jeopardy." With outrage as a driving force, child protective services organizations are forced into changes that are disjointed and highly episodic; changes which follow a course identified in the natural sciences as abrupt equilibrium changes. Through such manifestations as child safety legislation, institutional reform litigation of state child protective services agencies, massive retooling of the CPS workforce, the rise of community surveillance groups and moral entrepreneurs, and the exploitation of fatality statistics by media and politicians we find evidence of outrage at work and its power to change social attitudes, worker decisions and organizational culture. In this book, Jungian psychology intersects with the punctuated equilibrium theory to provide a compelling explanation for the decisions made by public CPS agencies to protect children.
This book provides new and empirically grounded research-based knowledge and insights into the current transformation of the Russian child welfare system. It focuses on the major shift in Russia’s child welfare policy: deinstitutionalisation of the system of children’s homes inherited from the Soviet era and an increase in fostering and adoption. Divided into four sections, this book details both the changing role and function of residential institutions within the Russian child welfare system and the rapidly developing form of alternative care in foster families, as well as work undertaken with birth families. By analysing the consequences of deinstitutionalisation and its effects on children and young people as well as their foster and birth parents, it provides a model for understanding this process across the whole of the post-Soviet space. It will be of interest to academics and students of social work, sociology, child welfare, social policy, political science, and Russian and East European politics more generally.
Exploring the current and historical tensions between liberal capitalism and indigenous models of family life, Ian Kelvin Hyslop argues for a new model of child protection in Aotearoa New Zealand and other parts of the Anglophone world. He puts forward the case that child safety can only be sustainably advanced by policy initiatives which promote social and economic equality and from practice which takes meaningful account of the complex relationship between economic circumstances and the lived realities of service users.
"Children's rights": the phrase has been a legal battle cry for twenty-five years. But as this provocative book by a nationally renowned expert on children's legal standing argues, it is neither possible nor desirable to isolate children from the interests of their parents, or those of society as a whole. From foster care to adoption to visitation rights and beyond, Martin Guggenheim offers a trenchant analysis of the most significant debates in the children's rights movement, particularly those that treat children's interests as antagonistic to those of their parents. Guggenheim argues that "children's rights" can serve as a screen for the interests of adults, who may have more to gain than the children for whom they claim to speak. More important, this book suggests that children's interests are not the only ones or the primary ones to which adults should attend, and that a "best interests of the child" standard often fails as a meaningful test for determining how best to decide disputes about children.
"Despite efforts to create, revise, reform, and establish an effective child welfare system in the United States, the system continues to fail to ensure the safety and wellbeing of maltreated children. Out of Harm's Way presents four specific changes that would lead to a more effective system"--
Helping vulnerable children develop their full potential is an attractive idea with broad common-sense appeal. However, child well-being is a broad concept, and the legislative mandate for addressing well-being in the context of the current child welfare system is not particularly clear. This volume asserts that finding a place for well-being on the list of outcomes established to manage the child welfare system is not as easy as it first appears. The overall thrust of this argument is that policy should be evidence-based, and the available evidence is a primary focus of the book. Because policymakers have to make decisions that allocate resources, a basic understanding of incidence in the public health tradition is important, as is evidence that speaks to the question of what works clinically. The rest of the book addresses the evidence. Chapter 2 integrates bio-ecological and public health perspectives to give the evidence base coherence. Chapters 3 and 4 combine evidence from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, the Multistate Foster Care Data Archive, and the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being to offer an unprecedented profile of children as they enter the child welfare system. Chapters 5 and 6 address the broad question of what works. A concluding chapter focuses on policy and future directions, suggesting that children starting out, children starting school, and children starting adolescence are high-risk populations for which explicit strategies have to be formed. This timely volume offers useful insights into the child welfare system and will be of particular interest to policymakers, academics with an interest in Child Welfare Policy, Social Work educators, and Child Advocates.