All children require a safe and nurturing environment for optimal development. Child maltreatment is among the most serious societal problems, with severe behavioral, health, and economic costs. Preventing and responding to child maltreatment is therefore among the most critical services a society can provide. Child protection in the United States is handled by many agencies in a general sense, including law enforcement and health departments. The main agency tasked with protecting children is the Child Protective Services (CPS) system, which is charged with supporting the safety and well-being of children who may be at risk of child maltreatment. Child maltreatment is a common societal problem, with various national studies suggesting that up to a third of children may experience maltreatment before turning 18. CPS contacts about 4% of all children in the United States each year. Among children contacted, about one fifth are substantiated and a very small proportion of all children reported are placed in foster care. CPS serves poor persons at higher rates than wealthier persons, consistent with the higher need for protection faced by those under economic stress. Similarly, Black children are contacted by CPS at a rate almost twice that of White children, consistent with increased risks and stressors faced by that population, largely associated with historical and current racism, particularly as manifested in economic racial stratification. Child welfare practice innovations include, among other things, the increased use of “differential response” programs, in which situations presenting fewer safety risks are handled with less emphasis on investigation, and an increased awareness of the need for preventative services, including services aimed at supporting those under severe economic stress.
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Child Protection
Brett Drake and Melissa Jonson-Reid
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Comparative Social Welfare
Neil Gilbert and C. Taylor Brown
Comparative social welfare or comparative social policy may be defined as the comparative study of welfare states, policies, and programs. Social workers have been instrumental in the development of the field of comparative social welfare and continue to make significant contributions to its international knowledge and practice base. With roots in Europe and the United States in the 1960s, comparative social welfare research evolved from descriptive case studies of welfare programs to causal and quantitative studies, all aimed at understanding and improving domestic social welfare policy through comparison with other nations. The 1990s marked a significant increase in the number of studies on comparative social welfare motivated largely by interest from the European Union, though the field has benefited from contributions by a global community of scholars since then. Although the field continues to evolve, comparative social welfare can roughly be split between theoretical studies of welfare state development and empirical studies of welfare policies, programs, and outcomes. Studies in comparative social welfare can be classified by their method of comparison, nature of comparison, and level of comparison.
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Critiques of Trauma-Informed Systems
Wendy Shaia, Temeka S. Bailey, Christopher Beegle, and Maura Tennor
Much of the trauma experienced by individuals, families, and communities, especially in historically marginalized areas, has been created by a series of social phenomena such as structural oppression, racism, and discrimination. Public-serving systems are uniquely positioned to counter the perpetuation of retraumatization that disproportionately impacts oppressed groups. Therefore, trauma-informed care (TIC) and trauma-responsive care (TRC) must evolve through the conscious application of an antiracist and antioppressive approach, thereby preventing the further harming of already marginalized groups. Macro accountability is established by analyzing power systems through a culturally responsive lens rather than blaming and pathologizing individuals impacted by historical and persistent racialized trauma. Applied to TIC and TRC, the SHARP framework renders more effective social work services at the personal and individual, professional and organizational, and political and societal levels more just and humane. A compare and contrast analysis of adverse childhood experience studies, summarizing TIC and TRC, and a case study of the application of the SHARP framework to human services work may shed light on guiding public-serving systems and promoting opportunities for posttraumatic growth and transformative change necessary for dismantling policies, protocols, and practices that increase vulnerability and long-term adverse outcomes in socially disadvantaged communities.
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Home Visits and Family Engagement
Barbara Wasik and Donna Bryant
The importance of engaging families in home visiting was recognized more than a century ago as M. E. Richmond provided guidelines for involving families in the visiting process. She stressed individualizing services and helping families develop skills that would serve them after the home visiting services ended. During the 20th century, early organized efforts in home visiting in the United States built on methods used in other countries, especially European countries. Although interest fluctuated in the United States during the past century, since 2010 interest has increased due primarily to the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that provided for home visiting services to respond to the needs of children and families in order to improve health and development outcomes for vulnerable children and their families.
Engaging families is essential for a productive home visiting experience requiring thoughtful program activities as well as knowledge and skills on the part of the visitor. Program responsibilities begin with the need to make good employment decisions regarding home visitors and then to provide effective training, supervision, and ongoing professional development. Providing professional training in helping skills such as observation, listening, and ways of asking questions to gain or clarify information is essential to ensure visitors can engage families. Using principles for effective home visiting—including establishing a collaborative relationship with the family; individualizing services; being responsive to family culture, language, and values; and prompting problem-solving skills—can enhance the ability of the visitor to engage the family. Programs can provide opportunities for visitors to enhance their skills in developing relationships with and engaging families. Engaging families is a reciprocal process. Some families will have a positive orientation toward working with visitors to accomplish their own goals and objectives; others may be less willing to engage. Although the program and visitors have the main responsibility for engagement, they will face challenges with some families and may need to seek creative solutions to actively engage.
Just as home visitors need to engage parents in order to facilitate new knowledge and skills, parents need to engage their children to foster development. Recent research identified a set of parent–child interactions that visitors can incorporate to foster parent engagement with young children. These challenges are shared across home visit programs, as well as across cultures and countries, regardless of the professional training of the visitors or the goals and procedures of the programs.
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Climate Change and Macro Social Work
Kelly Smith
The compounding and escalating effects of environmental degradation, which include climate change, threaten the human-earth system with severe implications for the future of macro social work. Systems of power and oppression, including racial, economic, and gendered inequities, are exacerbated by environmental changes with significant impacts on human rights, public health, and various measures of well-being. While climate change is often not the root cause of inequality, it compounds existing inequities, making it substantially more difficult for marginalized populations to rebound from escalations of the myriad acute and chronic consequences due to climate change and environmental collapse. Experiences of environmental change consistently highlight the expanding resource and resiliency gaps among vulnerable populations, leading to disproportionate repercussions felt initially and, to an arduous degree, by marginalized groups. Simultaneously, these circumstances create opportunities for social workers to intervene and advance the causes of social justice. Macro-level interventions and climate solutions can emerge from social work development and support of policies and interventions that overcome short-term thinking to produce beneficial outcomes for populations and the environment by building capacity in the human-earth system and economic policy systems. Social work is ideally situated to confront climate change by balancing immediate needs with long-term ecological sustainability and relying on its historical understanding of systems to improve policy development and practical climate change mitigation approaches.
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Reducing "Extreme Economic Inequality": A Social Work Grand Challenge
Laura Lein, Jennifer Romich, Trina R. Williams Shanks, and Dominique Crump
The Social Work Grand Challenge to reduce economic inequality is one of 13 Grand Challenges guiding future practice, research, and education. This article on the Grand Challenge to reduce extreme economic inequality documents the problem, probes the mechanisms by which inequality continues and deepens, and proposes approaches for addressing this problem so interwoven into our economy and society. This article describes economic inequality in the U.S. context as well as social work–oriented responses. It briefly compares the inequality level of the U.S. with that of other countries. It explores the distinctions between poverty and economic inequality and the particular ways in which economic inequality is maintained and grows in the U.S. It also explores the kinds of policy and program initiatives addressing this grand challenge, the barriers to and potential benefits of such ideas, and the roles for social workers and the social work profession in reducing extreme economic inequality in our society.
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Reproductive Health Justice
Silvia M. Chávez-Baray, Eva M. Moya, and Omar Martinez
Reproductive health endeavors in regard to prevention, treatment, and emerging disparities and inequities like lack of access to comprehensive and equitable reproductive health for immigrants and LGBTQ+ populations are discussed. Practice-based approaches for reproductive health justice and access care models, to advance reproductive justice, are included. Implications for macro social work practice and historical perspectives, practices, and social movements of reproductive health justice in the United States to promote reproductive health justice in the context of political, legal, health, and social justice efforts are salient to advance social justice.
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Worker Justice Campaigns
Fred Brooks and Amanda Gutwirth
If one of the goals of macro social work in the United States is to decrease poverty and inequality, by most measures it has largely failed that mission over the past 40 years. After briefly documenting the four-decade rise in inequality and extreme poverty in the United States, three organizing campaigns are highlighted—living wage, Fight for $15, and strikes by public school educators—that fought hard to reverse such trends. A strategy, “bargaining for the common good,” which was implemented across those campaigns, is analyzed as a key ingredient to their success.
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Urban Planning and Social Work
Laurie A. Walker
Urban neighborhood disinvestment in the United States resulted in deferred maintenance of buildings and common social problems experienced by residents. Strategies to redevelop neighborhoods include collaboration among many subsystems seeking to collectively invest in places and people. Contemporary federal initiatives focus on incentivizing coordinated investments between existing local community-based organizations, local and federal government, and private investors. Public–private partnerships include anchor institutions with commitments to the long-term success of place-based initiatives who invest their financial, intellectual, social, and political capital. Social workers are embedded in local community-based organizations and relationships with residents in neighborhoods experiencing redevelopment. Social workers can help guide top-down and bottom-up approaches to neighborhood revitalization toward more equitable and inclusive processes and outcomes. Resident engagement in redeveloping neighborhoods takes many forms and requires differing skill sets for social workers. Urban redevelopment is a global trend with common critiques regarding relying on gentrification and market-driven strategies with private investors.
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Neoliberalism
Jessica Toft
Neoliberalism is an international, transdisciplinary, and interdisciplinary concept with political, economic, and social dimensions. Neoliberalism is a governing rationality based on market logic that protects free markets by reducing business regulations, restricting citizen and resident welfare state protections, and increasing welfare state discipline. This entails three dimensions: First, neoliberalism consists of economic governing principles to benefit free markets both globally and domestically to the advantage of corporations and economic elites. Second, this includes concurrent state governing principles to limit welfare state protections and impose disciplinary governance so service users will be individually responsible and take up precarious work. A third component is neoliberal governmentality—the ways neoliberalism shapes society’s members through the state to govern themselves as compliant market actors. Neoliberalism is at its core a political reasoning, organizing society around principles of market rationality, from governance structure to social institutions to individual behavior in which individuals should behave as responsible and accountable market actors. Among its central tenets are that individuals should behave as independent responsible market actors; the social welfare state should be downsized and delegated to lower levels of government; and public welfare should be privatized, marketized, and commodified. While neoliberal policy design sets public provision parameters, its signature tool is to govern through state public administration. New public managerialism is a common example, as is managerialism more generally; they both borrow business management principles and apply them to the management of all aspects of social services. Because of its prescriptive nature, there is concern that neoliberalism dictates practice, threatening professional authority of social workers and challenging the implicit trust the public puts in professions. Writ large, there are concerns about democracy itself as neoliberalism works against the will of the people and collective responses to social problems. Resistance to neoliberalism is growing and early examples are provided.
