Suchergebnisse

The public child welfare system is plagued with high turnover, which is consistently associated with job-related stress. However, the COVID-19 pandemic introduced challenges that impact both the work and caseworkers' decision to stay in their job. To better understand stressors and intention to stay amid the COVID-19 pandemic, one state-level agency implemented a survey, completed by forty-eight percent of public child welfare caseworkers in the state. The current analysis employs multinomial logistic regression to predict intention to stay in the job and in the field and narrative analysis to describe caseworker experiences. Expanding on prior research, findings suggest that caseworker perception of an organization's response to COVID-19 challenges is associated with a caseworker's intent to leave. Further, this study highlights the distinction in commitment to the field compared to commitment to one's job, introduces challenges associated with work during the COVID-19 pandemic, and describes worker-identified benefits of those work changes.

The majority of alleged abuse or neglect reports to the U.S. child welfare system are either screened out prior to an investigation (i.e., at the "hotline" stage) or investigated only to be closed with no finding of immediate child safety concerns. Yet while many of these children and families are at risk of subsequent incidents of child maltreatment or child welfare system involvement, they are not systematically offered services or benefits intended to reduce this risk at the point that child protective services (CPS) ends its involvement. This article provides an overview of the "front end" of the child welfare system, commonly referred to as CPS, highlighting which families are served and which are not. We then argue for a systematic and coordinated child maltreatment prevention infrastructure that incorporates elements of "community response" programs that several U.S. states have implemented in recent years. Such programs are focused on families that have been reported to, and sometimes investigated by, CPS, but no ongoing CPS case is opened. We further argue that such programs need to pay particular attention to economic issues that these families face.

This volume of The ANNALS aims to increase awareness among scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners of the size, scope, and functions of child welfare services in the United States. We aim to promote a wider understanding of the broad impacts of child welfare policies and point to ways in which child welfare services can be better incorporated into cross-cutting social policy debates. The articles in this volume offer concrete recommendations for policies and practices that can reduce child maltreatment, and for systemic approaches—both within the purview of child welfare services and across the broader community and social policy landscape—that can better identify and respond to the needs of children and families in which maltreatment has already occurred or where there is a risk of abuse and neglect. This introduction sets a foundation for understanding the contents of the volume: we provide an overview of child welfare services in the United States and highlight current challenges that the U.S. child welfare systems face.

The authors used data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being to examine associations of child protective services (CPS) caseworkers' perceptions of caregiver substance abuse with their perceptions of the severity of risk and harm a child experienced as a result of alleged maltreatment, as well as with whether a family experienced a range of CPS outcomes. The outcomes included whether the family received services from CPS, was substantiated for maltreatment, experienced child removal, and was subject to a termination of parental rights (TPR) petition. The authors also compared the magnitude of the association between caseworker-perceived caregiver substance abuse and each outcome to that of the association between other maltreatment-related risk factors and each outcome. Findings suggest that, all else equal, caseworker-perceived caregiver substance abuse is associated with increased caseworker perceptions that children have experienced severe risk and harm and also with an increased probability of each of the CPS outcomes except TPR. Moreover, these associations are equal in magnitude or larger than those between the other risk factors and the outcomes. These findings imply that CPS decisions are heavily influenced by caseworker perceptions of caregiver substance abuse, regardless of the presence of other risk factors for child maltreatment.