Social Work

The practice of adoption has changed dramatically over the past century, with profound implications for children and families. One significant example is that many categories of adults who previously were prohibited (or at least discouraged) from adopting—such as single, lower income and foster parents—have been increasingly accepted as suitable adoption applicants. Perhaps the most remarkable and controversial transformation during this time has been the growing willingness of adoption professionals to place children with sexual-minority individuals and couples. Yes, despite considerable research showing that lesbians and gay men can make good parents, they continue to experience difficulties and barriers in many parts of the United States in their efforts to adopt and raise children. Indeed, while progress in this area has been significant, it has been impeded by the homophobia and heterosexist attitudes of adoption professionals and the judiciary; by numerous stereotypes and misconceptions about parenting by lesbians and gay men; and by a lack of adequate guidelines and training for establishing best practice standards in working with this rapidly growing group of adoptive parents. This book explores the gamut of historical, legal, sociological, psychological, social casework, and personal issues related to adoption by sexual-minorities. The book aims to provide insights and specific recommendations for establishing knowledge-based empirically validated best practices for working with an important sector of our society, for treating all prospective and current parents fairly and equally.

This book focuses on the analysis of data from single case designs. The methods covered in this book range from traditional visual analysis methods to complex ARIMA statistical models. The use of graphical methods is also extensively covered. The book is most appropriate for students in doctoral programs in disciplines such as Social Work and Psychology. It should also be useful for researchers and professionals in the various helping professions that make use of single case design methodology for practice evaluation and research. The methods covered range from the very simple to the very complex.

Much has been made of the complex social arrangements that girls and women navigate, but little scholarly or popular attention has focused on what friendship means to men. Drawing on in-depth interviews with nearly 400 men and 125 women, the author takes readers on a guided tour of male friendships, explaining what makes them work, why they are vital to the health of individuals and communities, and how to build the kinds of friendships that can lead to longer and happier lives. The interviews with women help map the differences in what men and women seek from friendships and what, if anything, men and women can learn from each other. The guiding feature of the book is Greif's typology of male friendships: he dispels the myth that men don't have friends, showing that men have must, trust, just, and rust friends. A must friend is the best friend a man must call with earthshaking news. A trust friend is liked and trusted but not necessarily held as close as a must friend. Just friends are casual acquaintances, while rust friends have a long history together and can drift in and out of each other's lives, essentially picking up where they left off. Understanding the role each of these types of friends plays across men's lives, from youth to advanced age, reveals developmental patterns, such as how men cope with stress and conflict, and how they make and maintain friendships. We also learn how notions of masculinity and the women in their lives shape their friendships, and how their friends keep them active and happy. Through the words of the men themselves and detailed profiles of men from their twenties to their nineties, readers learn what friendships offer men and how to work on their own friendships.

This book presents an approach to therapeutic contact with clients that capitalizes on people's resilience, strengths, and capacities. The helper works in collaboration with the individual to identify and amplify these capacities to resolve problems and improve quality of life. Clients are empowered to find their own answers and solutions that will fit their particular worldview and their unique strengths (De Jong & Miller, 1995). These principles are operationalized through solution-focused therapy and motivational interviewing. The helper also identifies areas in which clients can use education on how to meet more effectively life's challenges. A focus on coping skills is represented by cognitive-behavioral therapy. These theoretical approaches are woven together for the purpose of maximizing a person's ability to enhance the strengths they bring and also learn new skills that can help them. The resultant strengths- and skills-building model is applied, throughout the book, to various problems and populations that helping practitioners may encounter.

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.