Child Protection In Texas Research Paper

1064 Words3 Pages

Brooke Woodward
April 25, 2017
Professor Castillo
CRIJ1313.90L
Texas Child Protective Services The United States is responsible for providing Child Protection, the governmental agency that each state has is called Child Protective Services (CPS). Responsibilities include investigating charges of neglect, abuse or exploitation of children. CPS in Texas has undergone many issues such as faulty investigating and lack of pay for their workers which is why I think that the current CPS in Texas is not working. When a child has been abused or neglected and it has been reported the state gets involved. From there they will investigate the reports and essentially remove the child from their current situation where measures are taken to ensure the …show more content…

They are the ones who decide if there are any threats or unsafe activity towards the children in the household. When and if the caseworker decides that the child or children are not safe, that’s when they start their protective services. During the end of an investigation the caseworker makes a disposition against each and any allegation. The dispositions include “reason to believe, ruled out, unable to complete, unable to determine, administrative closure.” There are many reasons a caseworker might not assign a report for investigation some of which include “situations that do not appear to involve a reasonable likelihood that a child will be abused or neglected in the foreseeable future, allegations that are too vague or general to determine if a child has been or is likely to be abused or neglected, reports with too little information to locate the child or the child’s family or household, situations that are already under …show more content…

“Under state law, CPS must respond immediately to a report of abuse when necessary to protect a child from death or substantial bodily injury. In other cases CPS has 24 hours to respond; and in less urgent cases often those involving neglect CPS has 72 hours to respond.” CPS does not have high salaries like other government jobs do. In most cases, caseworkers quit due to the high case load and low salary pushing even more cases onto the remaining caseworkers which will eventually create a domino effect where more and more caseworkers will start to quit. Texas is also dealing with space availability. More often than not, when a case worker has to remove a child or multiple children he/she does not have a place to shelter them. “Children now regularly stay one or more nights in state office buildings or cheap hotels. Some are stuck in psychiatric hospitals because no other placement is available.” We can talk about CPS as a workplace as well. Many who work at CPS are actually not social workers like many believe. Students who graduate and plan to pursue a career in social work usually do not want to work with CPS because of its sketchy and controversial reputation. Many CPS workers currently get paid less than some of the underpaid teachers in Texas. Not only is low pay a discouraging is that they hardly get vacation time due to the case load amount. “The social work profession began within the

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