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The child welfare challenge: Policy, practice and research
Pergamon
Children and Youth Services Review, Vol. 16, Nos. 5/6, pp. 453--460, 1994 Copyright © 1994 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rishts reserved. 0190-7409/94 $6.00 ÷ .00
Symposium Review of The Child Welfare Challenge: Policy, Practice and Research Authors Peter J. Pecora, James K. Whittaker and Anthony N. Maluccio with Richard P. Barth and Robert D. Plotnick. New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1992.
Reviews by William Meezan and Brian Wharf Review by William Meezan University of Southern California Any book which attempts to define a broad field of social work practice, place it in its historical context, analyze the policies which shape its service delivery system, describe its programs, and use the empirical literature to foster a critical understanding of its knowledge base and guide its practice developments, is indeed an ambitious undertaking. Yet that is exactly the task that Pecora, Whittaker and Maluccio, with the help of Barth and Plotnick, set out for themselves. And in many ways they succeed. Aimed at both inexperienced and seasoned practitioners, The Child Welfare Challenge is the first completely new, comprehensive, textbook describing the field of child welfare in the United States in many years. Though the authors conceptualize child welfare as "those areas of social service designed to improve opportunities for optimal child development, buttress family functioning, and remediate dysfunction in personal behavior or social situations" (p. xiii), the book, for the most part, limits its scope to traditional child welfare functions. While placing child welfare services in the context of family and child poverty, it emphasizes issues of child maltreatment (there are chapters on incidence and reporting on child 453
454
Symposium Review
maltreatment, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and child neglect and psychological maltreatment, and the delivery of both child protective and family-based services), and covers, to a more limited extent, content and issues in the areas of foster care, group care, and adoption. A primary strength of the book lies in its use of theoretical and conceptual models. The reader is introduced to the first of these in Chapter 2, which is an excellent exposition of family-centered child welfare practice. Using ecological, competence-centered, developmental, and permanency planning perspectives, this chapter explicates a framework which guides many of the substantive discussions found in the remainder of the book. Other models presented to the reader, which help to organize and clarify the specific programs and interventions being discussed, are a superb conceptualization of child maltreatment; an elaboration of theoretical perspectives regarding the contributing factors to child maltreatment; an approach for assessing situations in which physical abuse might be present; a model for understanding the preconditions of child sexual abuse; and frameworks for risk assessment in child protective services. Placing information within such frameworks helps the reader move beyond the descriptive by emphasizing higher-order conceptualizations and critical analysis. A second strength of the book lies in its use of tables, illustrations, and appendices (often borrowed from other authors), to summarize vast amounts of substantive, often empirically-based, material pertinent to the topic under consideration. Notable here are tables concerned with indicators of the effects of sexual abuse; issues to consider in the treatment of incest offenders; a complex conceptualization of the definition of child neglect; an explication of the treatment goals and clinical techniques used in family-based services; and a model for understanding paths to older child adoptions. A third strength of the book is that it places child welfare services in the larger context of the economic conditions of families. Plotnick' s chapter on income supports is superb, and sets the stage for subsequent discussions of poverty as a contributing factor to the need for child welfare services. In a concise, thorough, thoughtful and highly readable manner, he covers the economic status of families, current income support programs and their impact, and policy options for reducing child and family poverty in the future. An additional strength of the book is that it acknowledges and enumerates gaps in our current knowledge and discusses controversial issues in the field. For example, problems with the data bases currently available for estimating service demand and planning appropriate services, difficulties in operationalizing the concept of child maltreatment, the lack of clarity and agreement on program goals in some areas of practice, the use
The Child Welfare Challenge
455
of untested treatment approaches by some agencies, the absence of rigorous evaluations in many program areas, the administrative and organizational challenges present in the delivery of service, and issues of institutional abuse and racism, do not go unnoticed by the authors. Thus, those reading this book are not be left with the false impression that "all is well in the field" or that child welfare programs and interventions should remain static. Rather, one comes away from the book with a realistic understanding that the field is dynamic and continually struggles to meet its policy, program, practice and research mandates. Finally, each chapter of the book ends with a section on program challenges. These are extremely useful, for they alert the reader to some of the critical issues the field will inevitably struggle to resolve in the future. The enumeration of these issues will help policy makers, program managers, and practitioners focus their discussions and debates; and it is only through such focused discussions that we can hope to develop rational responses to these challenges. One critical challenge the book addresses is the need to acknowledge diversity in the design, delivery, and execution of child welfare services. While providing only limited specific direction for the delivery of culturally sensitive services, the authors recognize that issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender are important determinants of the provision of useful and meaningful services. As such, the book encourages its readers to think about the specific needs of their diverse clientele and the effects of current policy, programs, procedures and interventions on them. This is not to say that the book is without weaknesses which, on occasion, detract from its overall impact and readability. One such weakness is its somewhat limited scope. I would have liked to have seen greater coverage of the context in which child welfare services are delivered. Plotnick's chapter introduces this issue, and his coverage of poverty and income support programs is impressive. However, there is little mention of other social conditions which impact the child welfare system and its clients. Additional material on education, housing, health and employment policies and programs would have been helpful in this regard. It would also have been useful for the authors to have discussed at-risk populations (e.g., teen parents, troubled youth, substance abusers and "new" families) at the beginning of the book. Without such content, the societal context in which the field of child welfare attempts to reach its mandated goals is only partially described. Also incomplete is the coverage of family support and child abuse and neglect prevention programs. The authors acknowledge that "child welfare is now being conceptualized as a comprehensive continuum of services with a strong preventive component" (p. 38), but spend little time, describing or analyzing the current knowledge, program models or prac-
456
Symposium Review
tices in these areas. With the passage of the Family Support and Family Preservation Act of 1993 (PL 103-66), the provisions of which were being debated when this book was written, greater attention to these programmatic thrusts would have allowed the reader to better understand the importance of having a full continuum of social services available to all families. Treating child welfare as a residual system, whose services are offered only after an allegation of child maltreatment has been filed, denies this basic policy and program thrust in the field. While criticism of the scope of the book may be somewhat unfair given the extraordinary amount of material covered in this text, a second, more serious, weakness is present in the book. This is the somewhat uneven coverage of topics, which takes a number of forms as one reads the book in detail. First, some topics are covered in inordinate detail while others are given only cursory attention. For example, there is much information on the incidence and reporting of child maltreatment throughout a number of chapters, and a substantial section of one chapter is devoted to non-organic failure to thrive. Yet child neglect (the most prevalent form of child maltreatment) and psychological maltreatment are lumped together in a single chapter, the prevention of child neglect receives less than one page of text, and the conceptual model for the Hawaii Healthy Start program, the most comprehensive child abuse prevention program attempted to date, is presented but hardly discussed. Second, the excellent theoretical and conceptual frameworks and tables mentioned above are missing for some important topics. This leaves the reader to wonder why, for example, there is excellent content on the effects of sexual abuse but not on the effects of physical abuse or neglect? This is particularly puzzling given the fact that there is a substantial body of empirical literature on each of these topics. Third, there is redundancy in the explication of certain material. For example, the same legislative provisions which provide the mandate for child welfare services and shape its philosophy and service delivery system are presented and discussed in a number of chapters. While understanding these legal provisions is critically important, a more focused and integrated articulation of this material, presented in a single place, emphasizing its cumulative impact on the service delivery system, would have been more helpful for the reader. Finally, while the authors attempt to follow somewhat the same format in each of the chapters, chapter content is not consistently balanced. Some of the chapters, such as the two on foster care, emphasize program design and service delivery issues. Others, such as the chapter on group care, stress research issues and never really discuss program design. Still others, such as the chapter on adoption, focus primarily on practice issues.
The Child Welfare Challenge
457
This lack of balanced coverage is somewhat troublesome, and may present difficulties to those seeking specific information as well as those just beginning to build their knowledge of the field. Despite these criticisms, on balance, the strengths of this book clearly outweigh its weaknesses. The amount of material covered is impressive. Its use of theoretical, conceptual, and empirical material is admirable and will encourage readers to think conceptually and analytically rather than descriptively. The authors' recognition of our present knowledge limitations, their delineation of the problems in the current service delivery system, and their explications of issues which the field will face, will stimulate readers to consider innovative solutions to improve service delivery. Having recently used this book as a text in a masters level course in family and children's policy, I can recommend it to others for this purpose. However, those seeking broader and/or more even coverage of topics in their courses, as I do, will need to supplement it with a significant number of additional readings.
Review by Brian Wharf University of Victoria This is a well organized, well written and comprehensive text on child welfare. Indeed it may well be the most comprehensive text to come out of the United States since the publication of the Laird and Hartman book, A Handbook of Child Welfare in 1985. The Child Welfare Challenge begins, appropriately in my view, with three introductory chapters: Understanding the Policy Context of Child Welfare, Family Centred Child Welfare Services and Income Support for Families for Children. It then contains chapters which cover the terrain of child welfare: the incidence and reporting of child maltreatment, physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect and psychological maltreatment, the intake process, family based services, family foster care, adoption, group child care and the organizational requisites for child welfare. The presentation of material and the organization of these chapters is enhanced by stressing some common themes: historical information, the current state of programs and services, the challenges presented, attention to prevention and a concluding statement. Both the breadth of material presented and the intelligent arrangement of this material allows the reader to gain a thorough understanding of the
Children and Youth Services Review, Vol. 16, Nos. 5/6, pp. 453--460, 1994 Copyright © 1994 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rishts reserved. 0190-7409/94 $6.00 ÷ .00
Symposium Review of The Child Welfare Challenge: Policy, Practice and Research Authors Peter J. Pecora, James K. Whittaker and Anthony N. Maluccio with Richard P. Barth and Robert D. Plotnick. New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1992.
Reviews by William Meezan and Brian Wharf Review by William Meezan University of Southern California Any book which attempts to define a broad field of social work practice, place it in its historical context, analyze the policies which shape its service delivery system, describe its programs, and use the empirical literature to foster a critical understanding of its knowledge base and guide its practice developments, is indeed an ambitious undertaking. Yet that is exactly the task that Pecora, Whittaker and Maluccio, with the help of Barth and Plotnick, set out for themselves. And in many ways they succeed. Aimed at both inexperienced and seasoned practitioners, The Child Welfare Challenge is the first completely new, comprehensive, textbook describing the field of child welfare in the United States in many years. Though the authors conceptualize child welfare as "those areas of social service designed to improve opportunities for optimal child development, buttress family functioning, and remediate dysfunction in personal behavior or social situations" (p. xiii), the book, for the most part, limits its scope to traditional child welfare functions. While placing child welfare services in the context of family and child poverty, it emphasizes issues of child maltreatment (there are chapters on incidence and reporting on child 453
454
Symposium Review
maltreatment, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and child neglect and psychological maltreatment, and the delivery of both child protective and family-based services), and covers, to a more limited extent, content and issues in the areas of foster care, group care, and adoption. A primary strength of the book lies in its use of theoretical and conceptual models. The reader is introduced to the first of these in Chapter 2, which is an excellent exposition of family-centered child welfare practice. Using ecological, competence-centered, developmental, and permanency planning perspectives, this chapter explicates a framework which guides many of the substantive discussions found in the remainder of the book. Other models presented to the reader, which help to organize and clarify the specific programs and interventions being discussed, are a superb conceptualization of child maltreatment; an elaboration of theoretical perspectives regarding the contributing factors to child maltreatment; an approach for assessing situations in which physical abuse might be present; a model for understanding the preconditions of child sexual abuse; and frameworks for risk assessment in child protective services. Placing information within such frameworks helps the reader move beyond the descriptive by emphasizing higher-order conceptualizations and critical analysis. A second strength of the book lies in its use of tables, illustrations, and appendices (often borrowed from other authors), to summarize vast amounts of substantive, often empirically-based, material pertinent to the topic under consideration. Notable here are tables concerned with indicators of the effects of sexual abuse; issues to consider in the treatment of incest offenders; a complex conceptualization of the definition of child neglect; an explication of the treatment goals and clinical techniques used in family-based services; and a model for understanding paths to older child adoptions. A third strength of the book is that it places child welfare services in the larger context of the economic conditions of families. Plotnick' s chapter on income supports is superb, and sets the stage for subsequent discussions of poverty as a contributing factor to the need for child welfare services. In a concise, thorough, thoughtful and highly readable manner, he covers the economic status of families, current income support programs and their impact, and policy options for reducing child and family poverty in the future. An additional strength of the book is that it acknowledges and enumerates gaps in our current knowledge and discusses controversial issues in the field. For example, problems with the data bases currently available for estimating service demand and planning appropriate services, difficulties in operationalizing the concept of child maltreatment, the lack of clarity and agreement on program goals in some areas of practice, the use
The Child Welfare Challenge
455
of untested treatment approaches by some agencies, the absence of rigorous evaluations in many program areas, the administrative and organizational challenges present in the delivery of service, and issues of institutional abuse and racism, do not go unnoticed by the authors. Thus, those reading this book are not be left with the false impression that "all is well in the field" or that child welfare programs and interventions should remain static. Rather, one comes away from the book with a realistic understanding that the field is dynamic and continually struggles to meet its policy, program, practice and research mandates. Finally, each chapter of the book ends with a section on program challenges. These are extremely useful, for they alert the reader to some of the critical issues the field will inevitably struggle to resolve in the future. The enumeration of these issues will help policy makers, program managers, and practitioners focus their discussions and debates; and it is only through such focused discussions that we can hope to develop rational responses to these challenges. One critical challenge the book addresses is the need to acknowledge diversity in the design, delivery, and execution of child welfare services. While providing only limited specific direction for the delivery of culturally sensitive services, the authors recognize that issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender are important determinants of the provision of useful and meaningful services. As such, the book encourages its readers to think about the specific needs of their diverse clientele and the effects of current policy, programs, procedures and interventions on them. This is not to say that the book is without weaknesses which, on occasion, detract from its overall impact and readability. One such weakness is its somewhat limited scope. I would have liked to have seen greater coverage of the context in which child welfare services are delivered. Plotnick's chapter introduces this issue, and his coverage of poverty and income support programs is impressive. However, there is little mention of other social conditions which impact the child welfare system and its clients. Additional material on education, housing, health and employment policies and programs would have been helpful in this regard. It would also have been useful for the authors to have discussed at-risk populations (e.g., teen parents, troubled youth, substance abusers and "new" families) at the beginning of the book. Without such content, the societal context in which the field of child welfare attempts to reach its mandated goals is only partially described. Also incomplete is the coverage of family support and child abuse and neglect prevention programs. The authors acknowledge that "child welfare is now being conceptualized as a comprehensive continuum of services with a strong preventive component" (p. 38), but spend little time, describing or analyzing the current knowledge, program models or prac-
456
Symposium Review
tices in these areas. With the passage of the Family Support and Family Preservation Act of 1993 (PL 103-66), the provisions of which were being debated when this book was written, greater attention to these programmatic thrusts would have allowed the reader to better understand the importance of having a full continuum of social services available to all families. Treating child welfare as a residual system, whose services are offered only after an allegation of child maltreatment has been filed, denies this basic policy and program thrust in the field. While criticism of the scope of the book may be somewhat unfair given the extraordinary amount of material covered in this text, a second, more serious, weakness is present in the book. This is the somewhat uneven coverage of topics, which takes a number of forms as one reads the book in detail. First, some topics are covered in inordinate detail while others are given only cursory attention. For example, there is much information on the incidence and reporting of child maltreatment throughout a number of chapters, and a substantial section of one chapter is devoted to non-organic failure to thrive. Yet child neglect (the most prevalent form of child maltreatment) and psychological maltreatment are lumped together in a single chapter, the prevention of child neglect receives less than one page of text, and the conceptual model for the Hawaii Healthy Start program, the most comprehensive child abuse prevention program attempted to date, is presented but hardly discussed. Second, the excellent theoretical and conceptual frameworks and tables mentioned above are missing for some important topics. This leaves the reader to wonder why, for example, there is excellent content on the effects of sexual abuse but not on the effects of physical abuse or neglect? This is particularly puzzling given the fact that there is a substantial body of empirical literature on each of these topics. Third, there is redundancy in the explication of certain material. For example, the same legislative provisions which provide the mandate for child welfare services and shape its philosophy and service delivery system are presented and discussed in a number of chapters. While understanding these legal provisions is critically important, a more focused and integrated articulation of this material, presented in a single place, emphasizing its cumulative impact on the service delivery system, would have been more helpful for the reader. Finally, while the authors attempt to follow somewhat the same format in each of the chapters, chapter content is not consistently balanced. Some of the chapters, such as the two on foster care, emphasize program design and service delivery issues. Others, such as the chapter on group care, stress research issues and never really discuss program design. Still others, such as the chapter on adoption, focus primarily on practice issues.
The Child Welfare Challenge
457
This lack of balanced coverage is somewhat troublesome, and may present difficulties to those seeking specific information as well as those just beginning to build their knowledge of the field. Despite these criticisms, on balance, the strengths of this book clearly outweigh its weaknesses. The amount of material covered is impressive. Its use of theoretical, conceptual, and empirical material is admirable and will encourage readers to think conceptually and analytically rather than descriptively. The authors' recognition of our present knowledge limitations, their delineation of the problems in the current service delivery system, and their explications of issues which the field will face, will stimulate readers to consider innovative solutions to improve service delivery. Having recently used this book as a text in a masters level course in family and children's policy, I can recommend it to others for this purpose. However, those seeking broader and/or more even coverage of topics in their courses, as I do, will need to supplement it with a significant number of additional readings.
Review by Brian Wharf University of Victoria This is a well organized, well written and comprehensive text on child welfare. Indeed it may well be the most comprehensive text to come out of the United States since the publication of the Laird and Hartman book, A Handbook of Child Welfare in 1985. The Child Welfare Challenge begins, appropriately in my view, with three introductory chapters: Understanding the Policy Context of Child Welfare, Family Centred Child Welfare Services and Income Support for Families for Children. It then contains chapters which cover the terrain of child welfare: the incidence and reporting of child maltreatment, physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect and psychological maltreatment, the intake process, family based services, family foster care, adoption, group child care and the organizational requisites for child welfare. The presentation of material and the organization of these chapters is enhanced by stressing some common themes: historical information, the current state of programs and services, the challenges presented, attention to prevention and a concluding statement. Both the breadth of material presented and the intelligent arrangement of this material allows the reader to gain a thorough understanding of the