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Child Welfare Agencies (child + welfare_agencies)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences50%

Selected Abstracts

Changes in Maltreated Children's Emotional,Behavioral Problems Following Typically Provided Mental Health Services

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ORTHOPSYCHIATRY, Issue 3 2010
Julie S. McCrae
Child welfare agencies serve as gate keepers for children's mental health services (MHS). Yet, the impact of offered services on behavioral outcomes has not been well studied. Data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW) were examined to measure caregivers' reported change in children's emotional,behavioral problems. Over 600 children in three age groups were matched and problem levels compared across 3 years. Although behavioral problems for the total group improved across time, scores for children who received MHS slightly worsened. Children who received MHS scored 1.4,3.7 points worse than children who did not receive MHS. Additionally, young Black, Hispanic, and other racially identified children had more problems than young White children, regardless of service. Higher behavior problem scores were noted for school-age children and adolescents. Although child welfare appears to rely on a cluster of MHS, including school-based counseling and private practitioner services, future service delivery should expand from improving access to achieving outcomes. [source]

System Change through Collaboration,Eight Steps for Getting from There to Here

JUVENILE AND FAMILY COURT JOURNAL, Issue 4 2002
JUDGE SHARON S. TOWNSEND
ABSTRACT Family courts and child welfare agencies across the country are charged with protecting the safety of our children. That mission has become more challenging with increasing federal legislation and decreasing funding. In Buffalo, N.Y., the Family Court and the Department of Social Services have teamed up to respond to this challenge. With minimal additional staffing and resources, they have led a collaboration of agencies and service providers to change the way business is done in child welfare. By engaging each other in an interagency system change effort, the amount of time children spend in foster care has been reduced. The collaboration has been able to accomplish in a relatively short time what no agency had previously been able to accomplish on its own. The beneficiaries have been the children and families of Erie County. [source]

Working with managers to improve services: changes in the role of research in social care

CHILD & FAMILY SOCIAL WORK, Issue 1 2004
Harriet Ward
ABSTRACT The setting of specific objectives for children's services and the identification of key outcome indicators, together with the development of a core information specification for children's services with its practical application in the implementation of the Integrated Children's System, all mean that substantially more data are now available to child welfare agencies. Not so long ago in the UK it was the role of research teams to collect and analyse such data. Now that so much of it is already available to agencies, are researchers who work in this area of applied social policy research becoming redundant? Using data from the cohorts of looked after children being studied at the Centre for Child and Family Research, Loughborough University, the paper demonstrates how researchers can work in consultation with the managers of child welfare agencies to make better sense of the data at their disposal. It considers three issues: what additional variables need to be explored to help agencies better understand their performance; how groups of children could be identified who follow predictable pathways through social care; and how qualitative information is necessary to gain a true picture of what is happening. All of these examples demonstrate a fundamental role for researchers in working with social services personnel to identify how services can be improved. [source]

Psychological abuse between parents: associations with child maltreatment from a population-based sample

CHILD: CARE, HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT, Issue 6 2008
Richard Reading
Psychological abuse between parents: associations with child maltreatment from a population-based sample ChangJ. J., TheodoreA. D., MartinS. L. & RunyanD. K. ( 2008 ) Child Abuse & Neglect , 32 , 819 , 829 . Objective This study examined the association between partner psychological abuse and child maltreatment perpetration. Methods This cross-sectional study examined a population-based sample of mothers with children aged 0,17 years in North and South Carolina (n = 1149). Mothers were asked about the occurrence of potentially neglectful or abusive behaviours towards their children by either themselves or their husband/partner in the past year. Partner psychological abuse was categorized as no psychological abuse (reference), husband perpetrates, wife perpetrates or both perpetrates. Outcome measures for psychological and physical abuse of the child had four categories: no abuse (reference), mother perpetrates, father/father-figure perpetrates or both parents perpetrates, whereas child neglect was binary. Adjusted relative risk ratios (aRRRs), adjusted odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated with regression models. A relative risk ratio was the ratio of odds ratios derived from multinomial logistic regression. Results Children were at the greatest risk of maltreatment when parents psychologically abused each other versus no abuse: the aRRR for child psychological abuse by the mother only was 16.13 (95% CI 5.11, 50.92) compared with no abuse, controlling for child age, gender, Medicaid welfare and mother's level of education. Both parents psychologically abuse each other versus no abuse also results in an aRRR of 14.57 (95% CI 3.85, 55.16) for child physical abuse by both parents compared with no abuse. When only the husband perpetrates towards the wife, the odds of child neglect was 5.29 times as much as families with no psychological abuse (95% CI 1.36, 20.62). Conclusions Partner psychological abuse was strongly related to child maltreatment. Children experienced a substantially increased risk of maltreatment when partner psychological abuse was present in the homes. Practice implications This study observed that intimate partner psychological abuse significantly increased risk of child maltreatment. Increased public awareness of partner psychological abuse is warranted. Primary prevention should include education about the seriousness of partner psychological abuse in families. Domestic violence and child welfare agencies must recognize the link between partner psychological abuse and child maltreatment and work together to develop effective screening for each of these problems. [source]