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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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The poverty rate is one of the most visible ways in which nations measure the economic well-being of their low-income citizens. To gauge whether a person is poor, European states often focus on a person's relative position in the income distribution to measure poverty while the United States looks at a fixed-income threshold that represents a lower relative standing in the overall distribution to gauge. In Europe, low income is perceived as only one aspect of being socially excluded, so that examining other relative dimensions of family and individual welfare is important. This broad emphasis on relative measures of well-being that extend into non-pecuniary aspects of people's lives does not always imply that more people would ultimately be counted as poor. This is particularly true if one must be considered poor in multiple dimensions to be considered poor, in sharp contrast to the American emphasis on income as the sole dimension. The book provides detailed discussions of specific issues from a European perspective followed by commentary from American observers. The volume considers current standards of poverty measurement in the European Union and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, challenges in extending those measures to account for the value of the provision of in-kind and cash benefits from the government, the interaction of poverty measures with social assistance, non-income but monetary measures of poverty, and multi-dimensional measures of poverty.

Creating Trauma-Informed Schools: A Guide for School Social Workers and Educators provides concrete skills and current knowledge about trauma-informed services in school settings. Children at all educational levels, from Early Head Start settings through high school, are vulnerable to abuse, neglect, bullying, violence in their homes and neighborhoods, and other traumatic experiences. Research shows that upward of 70% of children in schools report experiencing at least one traumatic event before age 16. The correlation between high rates of trauma exposure and poor academic performance has been established in the scholarly literature, as has the need for trauma-informed schools and communities. School social workers are on the front lines of service delivery through their work with children who face social and emotional struggles in the pursuit of education. They are in a prime position for preventing and addressing trauma, but there are scant resources for social workers to assist in the creation of trauma-informed schools. This book will provide an overview of the impact of trauma on children and adolescents, as well as interventions for direct practice and collaboration with teachers, families, and communities. Readers of this book will discover valuable resources and distinct examples of how to implement the ten principles of trauma-informed services in their schools to provide trauma-informed care to students grounded in the principles of safety, connection, and emotional regulation. They will also gain beneficial skills for self-care in their work.

Professionals working in child welfare and child protection are making decisions with crucial implications for children and families on a daily basis. The types of judgements and decisions they make vary and include decisions such as whether a child is at risk of significant harm by parents, whether to remove a child from home or to reunify a child with parents after some time in care. These decisions are intended to help achieve the best interests of the child. Unfortunately, they can sometimes also doom children and families unnecessarily to many years of pain and suffering. Surprisingly, despite the central role of judgments and decision making in professional practice and its deep impact on children and families, child welfare and protection training and research programs have paid little attention to this crucial aspect of practice. Furthermore, although extensive knowledge about professional judgment and decision making has been accumulated in relevant areas, such as medicine, business administration, and economics, little has been done to help transfer and translate this knowledge to the child welfare and protection areas. This book represents our aspiration to fill this critical gap in the child welfare and protection research agenda, while providing an up-to-date resource for practitioners and policy makers. It is our purpose to provide the reader with the ideas, methods and tools to improve their understanding of how context and decision-maker behaviors affect child welfare and protection decision making, and how such knowledge might lead to improvements in decision-making.

This book considers a key moment in the history of how disabilities are envisioned in Japan: the transition between two different understandings of what it means when children have difficulties learning in school. After the special education reform in 2007, Japanese children with mild cognitive and behavioral disabilities, including learning disabilities, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and high functioning autism, became eligible to receive special education services. Then, children formerly viewed as “difficult” or “slow” were officially recognized as having “disabilities” and in need of special intervention. Using ethnographic methods, we describe how educators, parents, and children at “Greenleaf Elementary School” experienced this transition and how traditional Japanese educational beliefs and practices shaped the implementation of new educational policies. This glimpse into the everyday experiences of these Japanese children, their parents, and educators reflects culturally widespread challenges faced by children with disabilities such as stigma, but also the distinctly Japanese cultural hue of adults’ and children’s responses. At Greenleaf Elementary School, adults and children addressed the “dilemma of difference” arising when children are singled out on the basis of deficits to receive necessary educational support that is different from that of their peers, and thus potentially stigmatizing. They creatively and flexibly adapted to changes, weaving new policy-generated perspectives of disabilities into traditional, Japanese cultural beliefs and practices. The Japanese case provides us with a unique vantage point to reflect back on our own policies and practices.

School social work enters its 2nd century as a profession still conflicted about its central mission. Are school social workers meant to be “in-house” clinicians providing services to kids in need, or are they meant to be involved in program development to enhance the social and emotional learning of all students in a school? How much time should they devote to serving whole families, or consulting with teachers? Whatever school social workers claim to do in their schools, it’s clear that they are going to have to prove that they are effective doing it. The demands of federal legislation and state requirements for certification are making it increasingly necessary that school social workers demonstrate that they are highly qualified school-based mental health and social service professionals who can demonstrate outcomes that impact school “bottom line” issues like student achievement, attendance, and behavior. Rather than recoil from this pressure, school social workers can utilize the skills of evidence based practice (EBP) to help them enhance both their effectiveness and their knowledge of interventions that work to help students, teachers, parents, and staff in school contexts. This book demonstrates how EBP can be integrated into school social worker’s daily practice, advancing the debate about where social workers can and should intervene, and how to do so effectively. Highlighting primary clinical issues, family problems, and school-wide needs faced by school social workers, helps practitioners make the best use of evidence to be flexible, effective advocates at all levels of practice.