Browse

This book incorporates data from multiple public housing sites in large U.S. cities to shine much-needed light on the symptoms and behaviors of African American youth living in non-HOPE VI public-housing neighborhoods. With findings grounded in empirical research, the book gives practitioners and policy makers a solid grasp of the attitudes toward deviance, alcohol and drug abuse, and depressive symptoms that characterize these communities and links them explicitly to gaps in policy and practice. It initiates new, productive paths for research into this vulnerable population and contributes to the development of preventive interventions that may increase the life chances of affected youth.

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.

Evidence-based policymaking has, in recent decades, become a focus of program innovation in social care, engaging foundations, universities, as well as state and federal governments. Rigorous research, epitomized by randomized controlled trials, has become the benchmark for demonstrating efficacy and efficiency in social programming. Building Better Social Programs situates evidence-based policymaking with respect to the welfare state, describes key organizations driving the evidence-based movement, and proposes innovations designed to extend benefits to the working class. Interviews with leaders in the movement animate the discussion. Building Better Social Programs will be essential reading for faculty, program managers, foundation program officers, and research students.

The phenomenon of bullying is highly complex. Bullying issues span individual to societal variables, including individual characteristics and vulnerability, peer and family relationships and dynamics, classroom and school milieu and societal values and attitudes, including stigma, and discrimination. Moreover, new forms of bullying such as cyber bullying have emerged, with unique implications for prevention and intervention. The prevalence of bullying suggests that bullying may be one of the underlying issues when youth struggle with social, emotional or academic difficulties, although bullying is likely not mentioned or even considered to be part of the presenting problem. The impact of the child or youth’s involvement in bullying, as victim or as the aggressor, might consequently go unrecognized—by the child or youth and their parents and/or by a practitioner. There is a tremendous amount of research on the prevalence, associated factors and effects of bullying; on the theoretical approaches applied to bullying; and on the evaluation of anti-bullying prevention and intervention school wide programs. This book is a compilation of relevant information on bullying. Challenges and obstacles to addressing bullying are reviewed as are practice principles to address barriers in prevention and intervention with children and youth who are bullied and who bully.

Since 2005, the bullying, school violence, and school safety literatures have expanded dramatically in content, disciplines, and empirical studies. However, with this massive expansion of research, there is also a surprising lack of theoretical and empirical direction to guide efforts on how to advance our basic science and practical applications of this growing scientific area of interest. Parallel to this surge in interest, cultural norms, media coverage, and policies to address school safety and bullying have evolved at a remarkably quick pace over the past 13 years. For example, behaviors and populations that just a decade ago were not included in the school violence, bullying, and school safety discourse are now accepted areas of inquiry. These include, for instance, cyberbullying, sexting, social media shaming, teacher–student and student–teacher bullying, sexual harassment and assault, homicide, and suicide. Populations in schools not previously explored, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer students and educators and military- and veteran-connected students, become the foci of new research, policies, and programs. As a result, all US states and most industrialized countries now have a complex quilt of new school safety and bullying legislation and policies. Large-scale research and intervention funding programs are often linked to these policies. This book suggests an empirically driven unifying model that brings together these previously distinct literatures. This book presents an ecological model of school violence, bullying, and safety in evolving contexts that integrates all we have learned in the 13 years, and suggests ways to move forward.

So often, the ills of society are blamed on negligent parenting, leading to the development of social service policies built around the concept of early intervention. Interrogating this concept, this book explores the history of our understanding of children, family, and parenting, and its implications for society. With a particular focus on the intersection of brain science and social policy, the authors challenge our long-held consensus on early intervention. Accessibly written and highly topical, this book is a comprehensive and critical assay of our contemporary belief that so-called bad parents raise substandard future citizens unfit for the new capitalism.

Numerous books have been written about Victorian child-care pioneers, but few biographical studies have been published about more recent child-care and welfare pioneers. This book looks at the lives of six inspirational individuals who have made significant contributions to the well being of disadvantaged children over the course of the twentieth century. Each of the six discussed – Eleanor Rathbone, Marjory Allen, Clare Winnicott, John Stroud, Barbara Kahan, and Peter Townsend – has been important in establishing present systems of ch ild care and child welfare, and in stimulating debate around issues that remain high on policy and practitioner agendas today.

There are, sadly, children whose lives are severely blighted by abuse, by neglect and by separation from their parents. Ways have been devised to protect and care for them. Some have been encouragingly enlightened while others have been deeply misguided. These essays describe and explain the significant political, economic, legal and ideological factors that have shaped this history from the mid-1850s up to the present day. In this, as much emphasis has been given to accounting for the unchanging nature of certain problems, issues and assumptions as to what has changed: hence the title. However, the essays look forward as well as looking back and in doing so endeavour to discern the likely pattern of future developments in the nature and scale of the problems with which the children’s services grapple and in the policies to which they give rise. Two key questions follow. How far will such policies be informed by well-founded evidence and how far by uninformed political conviction or by the legacies of the past? And will there be the necessary skill, commitment and compassion for the lives of our most vulnerable children to be enhanced, not least by forestalling the ills that are liable to befall them?

The general well-being of British adolescents has been the topic of considerable debate in recent years, but too often this is based on myth rather than fact. Are today's young people more stressed, anxious, distressed or antisocial than they used to be? What does research evidence tell us about the adolescent experience today and how it has changed over time? And how do trends in adolescent well-being since the 1970s relate to changes in education, leisure, communities and family life in that time? This unique volume brings together the main findings from the Nuffield Foundation's Changing Adolescence Programme and explores how social change may affect young people's behaviour, mental health and transitions toward adulthood. As well as critiquing research evidence, which will be of interest to a wide academic audience, the book will inform the wider debate on this subject among policy makers and service providers, voluntary organisations and campaign groups

Child Abuse and Neglect in Canada: A Guide for Mandatory Reporters offers a concise guide to mandatory reporting in provincial and territorial jurisdictions with specific attention to the context and unique realities of northern Canada. As an introduction to mandatory reporting, the book opens with an exploration of the historical rise of the child welfare system, mandatory reporters’ ethical duties around reporting, types of abuse and neglect, risk and protective factors, and the ascendancy of child abuse in an online environment. The latter half of the book first explores decision-making factors (legal, clinician, situational, professional, and relationship) to assist human service professionals with their decision-making. This section then explores the reporting process and offers relationship repair strategies (reporting, information, affect regulation, advocacy, resource, and cultural). The book culminates in a comprehensive, empirically based conceptual framework to assist human service professionals with decision-making and maintaining the relationship. Predicated on the author’s dissertation research Child Abuse and Neglect in Canada: A Guide for Mandatory Reporters offers students a comprehensive framework for fulfilling their professional, fiduciary obligations and provides educators with accessible teaching tools to further their students’ understanding of this area.

Child poverty is rising across affluent western societies and how it is measured is vital to how governments act to prevent, alleviate or eliminate it. While the roots of childhood poverty are fiercely debated and contested, they are all too often misrepresented in policy and media discourses. Seeking to redress this, Treanor places children’s experiences, needs and concerns at the centre of this critical examination of the contemporary policies and political discourses surrounding poverty in childhood. She examines a broad range of structural, institutional and ideological factors common across developed nations, and their impacts, to interrogate how poverty in childhood is conceptualised and operationalised in policy and forge a radical pathway for an alternative future.

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.

Health and social care professionals are constantly exhorted to work collaboratively. This book reports on research which examines inter-professional work with families in which mothers have a mental health problem and where there are also concerns about child protection. Breakdowns in inter-professional collaboration, issues of risk and relevant resources are all addressed. Mothers' views and experiences are contrasted with professional perspectives. The book reports on a survey of 500 practitioners working in health, social services and the voluntary sector, presents data from in-depth interviews with mothers with severe mental health problems, identifies weaknesses in inter-professional coordination in this area of work, and suggests a new model for work with families where mental health problems and child protection concerns co-exist.

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 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.

Most slave trades were abolished during the nineteenth century, yet there remain millions of people in slavery today, amongst them approximately 210 million children in slavery, trafficked, debt bondage, and other forms of forced labour. This book, drawing on experience worldwide, focuses on child slavery and shows how children remain locked in slavery, the ways in which they are exploited, and how they can be emancipated. It examines child labour, child trafficking, and child exploitation in various countries such as Nepal, Turkey, Uganda, South and Southeast Asia, India, Central America, and the United Kingdom.

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.

The book addresses one of the most important, but least researched proceedings, where the State intervenes in the private family sphere to remove children at risk to a place of safety, adoption, or other form of out-of-home care. It is an intervention into the private family sphere that is highly controversial. The state’s interventions into the family are decided within legal and political orders and traditions that comprise a country’s policies, welfare state model, child protection system, and children´s position in a particular society. We lack a cross-country analysis, however, of the various models of decision-making in an European context. This book aims to present new research at the intersection of social work, law, and social policy concerning child protection proceedings for children in need of alternative care. The book explores the role of court-based decision-making in child protection proceedings, specifically its effects, dynamics, and meanings in seven European countries and the United States. It analyses the tensions and dilemmas among children, parents, and sociolegal professionals. The book consists of eight country chapters, plus introduction and conclusion chapters. The range of countries represented in the book covers the social democratic Nordic countries (Finland, Norway, and Sweden), the conservative corporatist regimes (Germany and Switzerland), the neoliberal (England, Ireland, and the United States), and related child welfare systems.

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.