Social Work

One of the United States' great promises is that all children will be given the opportunity to work in order to achieve a comfortable standard of living. That promise has faded profoundly for American children who have grown up in poverty, particularly black and Hispanic children, and many of the deepening fault lines in the social order are traceable to this disparity. In recent years the promise has also begun to fade for children of the American middle class. Education and hard work, once steady paths to economic success, no longer lead as far as they once did. But that does not have to be the case, as this volume shows. America can provide true opportunity to all its children, insuring them against a lifetime of inequality; and when it does, the walls dividing the country by race, ethnicity, and wealth will begin to crumble. Long a voice for combating child poverty, the author takes a balanced approach that begins with a history of economic and family policy, from the Great Depression and the development of Social Security, and moving onward. He details the extent of economic inequality in the U.S., pointing out that this wealthiest of countries also has the largest proportion of children living in poverty. Calling for reform, the author proposes several viable universal income-security policies for vulnerable children and families, strategies that have worked in other advanced democracies and which also respect the importance of the market economy. They aim not just to reduce child poverty, but also to give all children meaningful economic opportunity. Just as Social Security alleviates the sting of poverty in old age, asset-building policies can insulate children from the cumulative effects of disadvantage and provide them with a strong foundation from which to soar.

Child abuse and neglect are serious social problems. Preventing maltreatment from occurring and, when prevention fails, intervening to protect children, are vital concerns for policy makers, the public, and professionals in social work, mental health, medicine, nursing, law enforcement, and law. Millions of dollars are spent on the child protection system. Yet, maltreatment continues. To appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of today's child protection system, it is important to understand the historical development of child protection. Part I traces the history of child protection in America from colonial times to the present. With the history in place, Part II begins with an analysis of the numerous causes of child abuse and neglect. Once the causes of maltreatment are revealed, the discussion shifts to roadblocks to reducing maltreatment. Despite roadblocks, progress is possible, and Part II outlines broad strategies for reducing the amount of maltreatment. The book ends with specific recommendations to improve the child protection system, including proposals to strengthen foster care and reform the juvenile court.

This book builds upon and advances the comparative analysis of child protection systems that was conducted in the mid-1990s and presented in the ground-breaking book Combatting Child Abuse: International Perspectives and Trends (Gilbert, 1997). Chapters provide a detailed analysis of how the systems have changed during the period with a particular focus upon: Each chapter also considers two broader and key questions: It becomes clear that all the countries have witnessed considerable change and the Conclusion summarizes the main themes. While there are important similarities in the changes experienced there are also important differences. In the process the chapters identify important developments in the two alternative orientations to the problem identified in Combatting Child Abuse – the child protection and family service orientations and the emergence of a new and significant orientation a child-focused orientation.

This book engages the first-person narratives of a group of Roman Catholic clergy in depth and detail, offering a thorough analysis of the perpetrators' accounts of how and why they sexually abused minors. It develops a new way of conceptualizing the problem of sexual abuse by clergy, one that is not rooted exclusively in individual pathology but that fully accounts for systemic and context-specific factors, such as the very institution of priesthood itself, the Catholic take on sexuality, clerical culture, power relations, governance structures of the Catholic Church in Ireland, the process of formation for priesthood and religious life, and the complex manner in which these factors coalesce to create serious institutional risks for boundary violations, including child sexual abuse. This book weaves together the stories of abusive priests, church history, and recommendations for institutional change that confront the Church's inadequate response to scandal after scandal.

Children are at increased risk of becoming a victim of crime. Too frequently, children become victims of theft, burglary, violence, sexual assault, abuse, bullying and domestic violence. Yet current criminal justice systems are not designed to assist them in their struggle to overcome their victimization. Restorative justice, an alternative approach to justice which brings victims and offenders together to find their own ways to restore the harm, has a lot to offer for young victims. But there are many risks in a face-to-face encounter between a child victim and an older offender. This book establishes an integrated needs-rights perspective to look at these issues. The human rights of child victims are those stated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most consensual treaty ever accepted by the UN. The needs of child victims are those based on many empirical studies and theories developed in the psycho-social literature. Together, they create a detailed template that uncovers the shortcomings of the criminal justice system in addressing the needs-rights of child victims, and provide guidance as to how to practice restorative justice in cases of childhood victimization in a child-inclusive manner. Among the central findings of the book are the importance of participation and control, sense of fairness, apology, and acknowledgment of harm for child victims. Eight heuristics provide starting points for the development of safe, child-inclusive and respectful restorative justice programs addressing childhood victimization.

The landmark National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW) study represents the first effort to gather nationally representative data, based on first-hand reports, about the well-being of children and families who encounter the child welfare system. NSCAW's findings offer an unprecedented national source of data that describe the developmental status and functional characteristics of children who come to the attention of child protective services. Much more than a simple history of placements or length of stay in foster care, NSCAW data chart the trajectory of families across service pathways for a multi-dimensional view of their specific needs. The NSCAW survey is longitudinal, contains direct assessments and reports about each child from multiple sources, and is designed to address questions of relations among children's characteristics and experiences, their development, their pathways through the child welfare service system, their service needs, their service receipt, and ultimately, their well-being over time. The topics covered in this book are key to child welfare practice and policy, but are also of compelling interest to other child service sectors such as health, mental health, education, and juvenile justice. The authors of chapters in this volume are esteemed researchers within psychology, social work, economics, and public health. Together they represent the future of child welfare research, showcasing the potential of NSCAW as a valuable resource to the research community, and providing glimpses of how the data can be used to inform practice and policy.

Research has already been a significant factor in child welfare policy in recent years, but this book demonstrates that it has taken a leading role in the field to spur and guide change. The chapters in this book assess the effect of research on the full spectrum of child welfare services. The book covers every base. The opening chapters situate child welfare research in the modern context; they are followed by discussions of evidence-based practice in the field, arguably its most pressing concern now. Recent years have seen historic rises in the number of children adopted through public agencies and, accordingly, permanent placement and family ties are critical topics that occupy the book's core, along with chapters broaching the thorny questions that surround decision-making and risk assessment. The urgent need for a more effective use of research and evidence is highlighted again with looks at the future of child protection and how concrete data can influence policy and help children. Finally, in recognition of the growing importance of a global view, closing chapters address international issues in child welfare research, including an examination of policies from abroad and a multinational comparison of the economic challenges facing single mothers and their children.

This book presents a vision of childhood victimization, one that unifies the conventional subdivisions like child molestation, child abuse, street crime, bullying, and exposure to community violence. It shows how children are the most criminally victimized segment of the population, with over one-in-five facing multiple, serious “poly-victimizations” during a single year. Developmental Victimology, the book’s term for this new integrative perspective, looks at how victimization changes across the span of childhood and offers insights about how to categorize juvenile victimizations and how to think about risk and impact developmentally. It presents new data about unexpected declines in childhood victimization during the 1990s and early 2000s and suggest some of the reasons for this drop. The book also provides a new model of society’s response to child victimization — the Juvenile Victim Justice System — and a fresh way of thinking about barriers that victims and their families encounter when seeking help.

Research in children's mental health lags behind research for adults, in part because it is intrinsically context-bound. Children are embedded in families, in schools, and in communities who have responsibility for their care. Making research findings useful and ensuring that they are applied to improve the lives of children and families require attention to these contexts. This entails a process of collaboration with many partners: teachers, nurses, healthcare providers, church leaders, neighborhood group directors, and other community leaders. The process of collaboration in children's mental health is complicated, but the products that it yields have the potential to benefit both children and families. This volume, with the toolkit and casebook that it contains, distills the process of collaboration into manageable steps, and provides concrete examples of how researchers have addressed specific challenges. The premise of this book is that collaborative research, in contrast to traditional research paradigms, will yield findings that are more ethical, valid, and useful. Highlighting the transformation of science from ivory tower theories to action-oriented practices, this book offers practical advice for researchers and practitioners interested in using data to inform and transform children's mental health. Concrete examples of projects that have involved community leaders and researchers provide an insider's guide to conducting successful collaborations that can yield better results than traditional top-down research paradigms.

This book reviews the evidence-based treatments relevant to family treatment in human services and social services settings. It addresses some of the main reasons families are seen in mental health and social service settings: child maltreatment, intimate partner violence, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct problems, substance use disorders, schizophrenia, depression, and dementia. For each problem area, a detailed case study provides step-by-step guidelines on how the evidence-based theory can be applied in practice. Interventions include psychoeducation, behavioral parent training, solution-focused therapy, cognitive-behavioral treatment, structural family therapy, and multisystemic treatment.