Elizabeth Wickenden (1909–2001) was a social work administrator and advisor, policy writer, and advocate. In the 1950s, she launched an effective coalition of social welfare and labor organizations, known as the “Wicky Lobby.” A pioneering legal rights advocate, she advanced legal services and class action strategies on behalf of public assistance and child welfare clients.
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Tor Slettebø
As a feminist, social worker, administrator, educator, researcher, writer, and editor Kikkan Ustvedt Christiansen (1932–2020) was one of the pioneers in developing social work as a professional practice into an academic discipline and research field in Norway. Even when she ended her career as a respected researcher in child welfare, she never surrendered her identity as a practitioner and engagement for social justice.
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Deborah Bass-Rubenstein
Runaways, throwaways, and homeless youths have always been present in the United States. In recent decades, however, society has become more aware of the problems they face as the problems have become more severe. The effectiveness of new approaches to helping these youths is yet to be determined.
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Laura Lein
Child care services, enabling parents to commit themselves to paid employment while providing a supervised environment for their children, have a long and complex history in the United States. Child care services can provide children with educational and other advantages, as well as custodial care. In fact, the United States has multiple kinds of services providing child care and early childhood education. Publicly funded services have concentrated on care for impoverished children and those facing other risks or disadvantages, but many of these children and their families remain unserved because of gaps in programs and lack of support for subsidies, while other families purchase the services they need.
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Virginia C. Strand
Between 1990 and 2003, the single-parent family continued to emerge as a major family form in the United States. Individuals come to single parenthood through different routes (divorce, separation, birth outside of marriage, widowhood, and adoption). And most of them are women. Intervention implications are framed in terms of primary, secondary, and tertiary strategies. Increasing family benefits and child care provisions are highlighted as well as strategies for preventing teen pregnancy, increasing access to educational and entry to the work force for low-income women, and identifying mothers early on in the process of marital disruption.
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Hilary N. Weaver
First Nations Peoples, the original inhabitants of what is now the United States, are a diverse and growing population. There are approximately 5.2 million First Nations Peoples within the boundaries of the United States. First Nations Peoples tend to be younger, poorer, and less educated than others in the United States. The contemporary issues faced by these Peoples are intimately intertwined with the history of colonization and federal policies that perpetuate dependency and undermine self-determination. Social workers must overcome the negative history of their profession with First Nations Peoples, in particular social work involvement in extensive child removals and coercive sterilization of Indigenous women. Social workers have the power and ability to make important differences in enhancing the social, economic, and health status of First Nations Peoples, but this must begin with an awareness of their own attitudes and beliefs, as well as an awareness of how social workers have contributed to, rather than worked to alleviate, the problems of First Nations Peoples.
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Jean K. Quam
Charles Loring Brace (1826–1890) was a writer, minister, and social reformer. He worked with homeless children, initiating child welfare services, and was the founder and executive director of the Children's Aid Society of New York City.
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Philip Bernstein
Helen Gurin (1918–1991) was a leading teacher, supervisor, and guide for a generation of professionals in social work, psychiatry, psychiatric nursing, psychology, and child care. The Massachusetts chapter of NASW named her Social Worker of the Year in 1983.
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Larraine M. Edwards
Julia Clifford Lathrop (1858–1932), an advocate of child welfare and mentally ill people, helped found the country's first children's mental hygiene clinic, the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute, in 1909. She became the first director of the U.S. Children's Bureau in 1912.
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Willie Tolliver
Bogart Leashore (1947–2007) was dedicated to high standards of social work education, social justice and cultural diversity, sound social work practice, and the welfare of children. He was Dean of Hunter College School of Social Work from 1991 to 2003.
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Alvin L. Schorr
Leonard Withington Mayo (1899–1993) was concerned with child welfare, mental retardation, and public health. He was dean and vice president at Western Reserve University, professor at Colby College, and served on four White House Conferences on Children and Youth.
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Alan J. Dettlaff
Racial disproportionality and disparities have been documented in the child welfare system in the United States since at least the 1960s, yet they persist as a national problem. This article provides an overview of the history of racial disproportionality and disparities in child welfare systems, the continuing presence of racial disproportionality and disparities, and the factors that contribute to racial disproportionality and disparities. The article concludes with strategies that have been developed over the years to address racial disproportionality and disparities, including calls for abolition of the child welfare system as a means of addressing these persistent problems.
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Aakanksha Sinha and Ruth G. McRoy
Every year thousands of children are removed from their families and are placed into out-of-home care. While these children are placed in care settings with a hope of a better future, they are often faced with many challenges that impact their short and long terms growth. As of 2017, 442,995 children have been removed from their families and placed in the U.S. foster care system for an average of 20.1 months. Placement occurs for several reasons, such as neglect, parent incarceration, drug abuse, and caretakers’ inability to cope. Twenty-seven percent (117,110) have been in care over two years, and all of these children face many obstacles in life that can impact their short- and long-term well-being. One of the most significant challenges they face is access to a stable educational environment that supports positive mental, emotional, behavioral, physical, and social growth. Frequent moves, lack of coordination between schools, and underdeveloped infrastructure to support unique needs are some of the significant predictors of disproportionately poor education outcomes for children in foster care and other residential settings. The lack of stable educational environment leads to a number of challenges related to enrollment, stability, access to special services, peer relations, grade retention, and caregiver and teacher familiarity with academic strengths and weaknesses of the child. To improve their educational outcomes, there is a need for advocacy and significant changes at the at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels. Consistent efforts need to be made by stakeholders, such as state and federal government, schools, child welfare systems, and community partners to address systemic inequities, improve current policies and practices, increase accessibility to quality schools, provide mental health services, and, most importantly, establish a stable environment that will enable the youth to flourish and succeed.
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James K. Whittaker
This entry addresses the current state of therapeutic group care services for children and youth. Demographic programmatic trends and research findings are reviewed as are emergent issues and critical questions for further research and practice innovation. Suggestions for improvement of therapeutic group care services are offered in the context of an overall spectrum of services for children and families.
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John Paul Horn, Emily Bruce, and Toni Naccarato
In the United States, the child welfare system is composed of multiple services to keep children safe, either by strengthening family units, preventing maltreatment, or providing alternative care arrangements for children who are unable to safely remain at home. These services include child protection, family support and maintenance programs, reunification, and out-of-home care. Some children return safely to their families, but other children might never return home. Services for these youth might include adoption, guardianship, and/or transitional planning for youth exiting foster care to adulthood.
Case-carrying social workers hold responsibility for assessing the case, making recommendations to the court, and preparing reports for parents, court officers, and sometimes for dependent children (based on their age). These individuals are professional social workers with graduate degrees in social work. Case aids or case assistants often provide support services for the case-carrying social worker.
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Andrea Schmelz
Mentona Moser (1874–1971) was a pioneer of social work in Switzerland. Following the ideas of the settlement movement, Moser initiated and contributed to fundamental social welfare activities in Zurich until the end of World War I. As a communist, from the early 1920s on, she worked on several projects of radical social work in the context of the Red Aid.
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Katherine van Wormer
Restorative justice is an umbrella term for a victim-oriented method of righting a wrong, promoting healing following conflict, and providing a sense of safety in the aftermath of violence. Restorative justice refers not only to a number of strategies for resolving conflicts peacefully but also to a political campaign of sorts to advocate for the rights of victims and compassionate treatment of offenders. Instead of incarceration, for example, the option of community service coupled with substance abuse treatment might be favored. When the offender is an organization or governing body, reparations to affected individuals or populations might be in order. From the offender’s standpoint, accountability and truth-telling are stressed, as the offender typically offers to make amends for the harm that was done. From the victim/survivor’s standpoint, a key theme is empowerment, through receiving an apology from the wrongdoer and receiving the support of caring participants.
Several models of restorative justice are relevant to social work, including victim–offender conferencing (sometimes incorrectly referred to as mediation), family group conferencing, healing circles, and community reparations. Social work involvement in the field of restorative justice occurs at all levels of practice. Its application in the context of macro social work involves communities, policy, and organizations.
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Michael Reisch
Harold Lewis (1920–2003), social worker and activist, was Dean of Hunter College School of Social Work for twenty years. He published widely on social work values and ethics, epistemology of practice, child welfare, social welfare administration, and social work education.
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Jean K. Quam
Leah Katherine Hicks Manning (1917–1979), a Shoshone-Paiute, was instrumental in the development of the Indian Child Welfare Act. She worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and promoted a better understanding of American Indian families and culture among social workers.
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Tomi Gomory and Daniel Dunleavy
Social work is perhaps most distinctive for its clear and outspoken commitment toward improving the well-being of society’s vulnerable and disadvantaged groups, while still emphasizing the importance of respecting and defending personal rights and freedoms. Though there is a fundamental necessity for coercion, or its threat, for eliciting civil social behavior in a well-functioning society, it is professionally and ethically imperative that social workers make explicit our rationales for, justifications of, and the evidence used to support or reject coercive practices in our work. Social work’s engagement with coercion inevitably entails the ethical and social policy arguments for and against its use, as shown in a review of the empirical evidence regarding its impact on the professions’ clients, exemplified by three domains: (1) child welfare, (2) mental health, and (3) addictions. Recommendations for future improvements involve balancing the potential for harm against the benefits of coercive actions.
