Should social caseworkers be held liable for failing to prevent child abuse? When Steffanie’s foster father demanded a kiss, she pushed him away, she said. But as a 15-year-old living in his home, she said she couldn’t fend him off for long, and a week later he began to rape her daily. She said she complained to her caseworker about the home in the past, and afterward her foster mother “berated her,” forced her to clean the bathroom with pure bleach, and told her she wasn’t allowed to talk to the caseworker alone. “He always said, ‘Hey, how are you?’ I would say, ‘Fine,’ and he would never go deeper, or say, ‘Let me investigate more. How is school? How is home?’” Steffanie said of her caseworker. “He would visit and I would think, please just …show more content…
However, in a survey of former social workers, one participant said, "In 1999, I had 18 kids. In 2012, I had 51. I could only put out the fire of the day. I was always the one who knew all my kids and families, but with 51 kids, I couldn 't keep a thing straight. It was too hard to even make a dent or be effective." When child welfare caseworkers possess an exceedingly number of cases, they begin to concentrate on extinguishing fires and stabilizing wherever possible. Since the attention is on dowsing out fires and stabilizing unstable circumstances, foster children who are perceived as comparatively stable can be set on the back burner. Undemanding requests and uncomplicated questions, even imperative ones, will occasionally be unaddressed for weeks and even months. As the years progressed, matters have only worsened; “at one point during the last year, investigators in South Texas averaged as many as 85 cases each. Caseworkers are so bombarded with paperwork that they spend just 26 percent of their time with children and families.” (Ball & Dexheimer, …show more content…
“When I started as a case manager, my caseload was six times that recommended by the Council on Accreditation. In order to visit every child on my caseload monthly as was mandated by the child welfare agency, I would have had to work a minimum of 80-100 hours a week. And that is assuming that there would be no emergencies.” (10 Things Case Managers Wish Their Foster Parents Knew, 2013) These employees are always on the road, traveling long distances, struggling to see each kid in their current residence each month. Visualize yourself having to keep your eye on 60 children spread across more than 9,000 square miles with a population of nearly four million. Envision needing to visit each of those children in their state of residence every 30 days and visit their biological parents as well, all while arranging services for the children and their parents. Additionally, caseworkers must compose a monthly report for each child, transcribe numerous court reports, accumulate evidence and data for the Attorney General 's office, and deliver reports to the judges. When a mentally unhealthy child has a crisis, the caseworker may expend hours or days setting up assistance and services to alleviate the situation. When a child requires relocation, the caseworker must attain a bed for the child, and as revealed before, there is too great a deficiency of foster parents that children are slumbering in offices.
The job of a child welfare worker appears to be a demanding profession that promotes the child’s safety, but also strengthens the family organization around them in order to successfully raise the children. This child welfare workers work in the system known as the Child Protective Services whose initiative is to protect the overall welfare of the child. The short novel From the Eye of the Storm: the Experiences of a Child Welfare Worker by Cynthia Crosson-Tower demonstrates the skills necessary to deal with the practice of social work along with both its challenges and its happy moments. The novel consists of some of the cases involving Tower’s actual career in social work. In reading the book, I was able to experience some of the actual cases in which children dealt with physical and mental abuse from their families that caused them to end up within the system. Also, some of these children had issues in adapting to foster and adoptive families based on the issues they faced earlier in life. As we have learned earlier in the course, the violence that a child experiences early in life has an overall affect on the person they become as they grow into adulthood. When children deal with adverse childhood experiences, they are at a higher risk for abusing drugs and/or alcohol, increased likelihood of abusing their own child or spouse, higher rates of violent and nonviolent criminal behavior, along with several other issues throughout their lifespan.
Cunningham, M. (2012). Integrating Spirituality in Clinical Social Work Practice: Walking the Labyrinth (1 ed.). Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education Inc.
The foster care system, then as now was desperate for qualified homes. Kathy and her husband had become certified foster parents, she was a certified teacher, and they had empty beds in their home. Their phone soon bega...
There is nearly 400,000 children in out-of-home care in the United States right now (Children’s Right). Just about every day children are being shipped in and out of foster homes and group homes. Most people want the best for children in foster care and decide to take care of them until their parents can possibly recover. The foster care system can have both a negative or positive effect on children, foster parents, and biological parents because of the gaps in the system. Foster cannot not be avoided but the some aspects of the foster care system can be avoided if the missing gaps were filled.
Some parents in the world do not discipline their children and do not care what the children. All they care about are them selves. At that point the social workers take the child and put them in foster homes with complete and total strangers. Some companies just put kids with people who do not care about the children just what they get paid. They just let the children go off and do what they want and do not supervise the children’s activities. The social workers should do more thoroughly background checks. There should also be more supervision in foster homes instead of little supervision, and the workers should visit the home and the children more often than they actually do.
The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) was as a response to growing concerns about “foster care drift”; that is, children experiencing multiple, unstable foster care placements over extended periods, children virtually lost within the child welfare system (Rockhill, 2007). The ASFA has become a very important and much needed policy that helped with placement and safet...
Many children across the country are wrongfully removed from their homes everyday by workers with an anti-family mindset, who use removal as a first resort not a last. It is not only detrimental to the child’s well-being, but is also immorally abusive to the child. The goal of the child welfare system is to promte safety, permanency, and wellness among all children.
This paper will explore the behavior issues and emotional issues associated with children in foster care and the foster care system, as well as touching base on the mental health problems these children can possibly deal with. This paper will explain the different issues kids deal with, explaining how being in the foster care system affects the kids and their behavior. The examples used in this paper will be based off research, as well as a true life story, written by Ashley Rhodes-Courter, who was in the foster care system. There will also be examples based off of experience interning in the foster care system.
Haight, Wendy L., James E. Black, Sarah Mangelsdorf, Grace Giorgio, Lakshmi tata, Sarah J. Schoppe, and Margaret Szewcyk. "Making Visits Better: The Perspective of Parents, foster Parents, and Child Welfare Workers." EBSCOhost. EBSCO, 1 Mar. 2002. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
For the purpose of this paper the social worker interviewed is Ronnita Waters, MSW, RCSWi; she is currently an operations manager at the Center for Family and Child Enrichment (CFCE). The issue or area where her advocacy skills are practiced is within child welfare. Mrs. Waters mentions to the interviewee “I always wanted to work with children, then eventually for children.” when asked what developed her interest in this area of social work. Furthermore, before she became an operations manager, the social worker was an adoptions supervisor, overseeing adoption case managers and ensuring the proper implementation of policies such as the sibling placement policy and adoption policy. In addition, before achieving the role of supervisor, she was
A Child Protective Service worker is a career that can be mentally and physically exhausting with emotional upheaval and wonderfully rewarding all at the same time. This paper discusses several “best practices’, their descriptions, and how they are put in use to assist the children who need help and the parents who unwillingly become a part of the Child Welfare system; even though they count on the system to help them better themselves and the lives of their children. Child Protective Service workers require extensive training, vast knowledge, multiple values, and strong ethics to effectively assist this
Addressing many of the determinants such as income and housing (Mikkonen, & Raphael, 2010) are effective ways to deal with prevention of mental health problems in younger children. These determinants are linked (based on class discussion) and form the underlying grounds for maltreatment and neglect leading to increased mental health problems in young children and ensuing foster care placement. Although this is significant, this paper has emphasized the growing number of young children already residing in foster care with increasing mental health needs. Early childhood development directly influences young children, especially ones in foster care. The current initiatives being implemented attempt organizational change yet occur at the interpersonal level and fail to address the gaps identified earlier. As with my experience at the Children’s Cottage, interventions were at the interpersonal level. While the caregivers had early childhood training, many were lacking in how to provide proper mental health care to the foster children that frequented the facility. In depth training on the complex issues that foster children face, such as maltreatment and neglect was overlooked. Therefore, in my opinion, building upon these interventions and applying them to an organizational level allows for the reduction and or resolution of those gaps. The organizational level has the ability to promote health on a wider scale (K. Raine, personal communication, November 15, 2013). Many families use organizations such as the Cottage thus, becoming prime opportunity for collectively changing/improving mental health for all young foster children.
Problems in the society such as poverty, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, unequal education, family and community violence, and racism all can affect families and impact child welfare and the system itself (Chipungu and Goodley, pp. 76, 2004) There is often a incongruity between the services being offered to children and families in foster care and what they actually need. One example that Chipungu and Goodley (2004) made was birth parents being offered training and counseling when services such as housing assistance and childcare are more critically needed but not available (pp. 79).
The social workers in both videos gathered information regarding each of the client’s issues. Another common denominator in both videos is that both of the social workers repeated what the client had said in their own words to allow the client to feel heard and understood. In the first video, social worker Karen asked direct questions relating to Mike’s alcohol addiction while also addressing how the addiction impacts his relationships including his marriage. Karen also addressed inconsistencies with the client doing so appropriately and quickly. It appears that in the first video, Karen focuses on the reality of the issue at hand to assist the client with establishing and accepting
Case work is not only the basic practice in professional Social Work but rather, a common practice followed by all. The traditional definition defines case work as “a method of helping individuals through a one-on-on relationship’’. Every individual trained or untrained indulges in case work. The difference is made by theoretical understanding and professional ethics, practices involved in professional case work. Mary Richmond in 1915 explains casework as “the art of doing different things for and with different people by cooperating with them to achieve at one and the same time their own and society' betterment.” Social Case Work can also be defined as “an art in which knowledge of the science of human relations and skill in relationship are used to mobilize capacities in the individual and resources in the community appropriate for better adjustment between the client and all or any part of his total environment”.