Case Study Of Child Abuse And Neglect Social Work Essay

Case Study Of Child Abuse And Neglect Social Work Essay The following describes a case study scenario in which I am an experienced, protective services worker about to do the first home visit with a new family. It goes on to speculate what might happen, the families reactions, cultural variations and engagement tools and recommendations. While many service bureaucracies focus on a single family member as the client or patient, my site visits suggested that the needs of children in particular (and probably other family members as well) may be impossible to solve, and perhaps even to diagnose, if a programs focus is on the individual child rather than the family. In fact, programs may need to learn a great deal about the family as a whole if they are to diagnose and solve the problems of children. At the simplest level, an example is a problem for a baby that is caused by interaction between a teen mother and her own mother, the babys grandmother: [One caseworker:] Most of the grandparents will tell them, Dont hold the baby, youre going to spoil it. . . . I spend a lot of time trying to talk to grandparents. [Another caseworker:] [You] have to go back to the grandparents. These kids [the teens] all they hear is Youre stupid. I didnt do it that way. So after a while they figure, If I touch this baby, its wrong. So, Her e, momma, take it (Jones, 2004). Two examples are shown below, to illustrate more fully the way in which childrens needs are nested in a family context and intimately connected with the parents and other family members own personal well-being. The first example comes from Oklahomas Integrated Family Services (IFS) System, which serves multiproblem families: A seven-year-old boy came to the attention of a school principal because of both physical and emotional health problems. The boy had long been prone to seizures and self-destructive behavior and was just starting to threaten other children. When the principal called IFS, he found that IFS was already working with the family because the mother was on AFDC and herself had multiple problems. The IFS worker called a meeting of all of the agencies who had contact with the family to talk about the childs needs. As a result, the boy was admitted and sent to a diagnostic center for several months of testing and treatment; the mother received needed services such as mental health treatment and literacy training; and the Child Protective Services worker changed her mind about the possible outcomes for the case and concluded that the mother had the potential to be an adequate parent (Huston, 2003). In this example, the needs of the child turned out to be related to the needs of the mother and, perhaps more important for the service delivery system, part of the solution to the childs needs lay in providing services to the mother so that she could help him. According to an IFS case worker, What the child really [may] need is a mother who can cope (Herr, et al 1999). In the second example, in which meeting a childs needs again depends on an adults well-being, serving the child depends critically on the service deliverers relationship with the adult. The illustration comes from a site visitor who accompanied a case manager on a home visit: The case manager made a home visit to a young (18-year-old) mother who had suffered physical and sexual abuse as a child. During the visit, the case manager picked up and played with the young womans 8-month-old child and observed how the child responded. Then she asked the mother a specific question about her experience with the child: Did she ever feel as though she were climbing the walls and just had to get out of the house when the baby was crying? The young woman said yes, and the case manager asked what she did at such times: Was there anyone she could leave the child with so that she could go on a walk? The teen responded that either she left the baby with her friend downstairs and went for a walk, or she put the child in the crib, closed the door partway, and went into another room. The case manager seemed satisfied with these responses, and she later told the interviewer that, while she has no reason to suspect any abuse or neglect in this case, she realizes that the teen i s somewhat unstable and under great stress, so she likes to keep close watch on what is going on (Pelton, 2008). In this example, the case managers key contribution to the childs wellbeing comes through her attention to and friendship with the mother. Only the case managers strong personal relationship with the teen enabled her to keep a constant eye on the case while not being perceived by the teenager as intrusive, only the strong relationship permitted her diagnosis that the child was doing fine, and only the relationship permitted her to provide preventive services in the form of low-key advice. These links between a childs needs and the well-being of the family as a whole reinforce the conclusion that effective family service deliverers need a trusting relationship with the family and an ability to reach out across systems (Crosson, 2010; pg 12). In particular, the links between child and family well-being suggest that serving children in multiproblem families requires that the service deliverer know both child and family well and be able to reach out across the service system to help all family members. 2.) We shall now discuss the three types of preventions with examples. Many of the preventive services offered by the sites (Wolock, 1984) parenting education and support for parents ability to nurture their children-occur not through formal services but through the relationship between the family and the case manager. However, several of the sites also provide more formal services, such as support groups, classes, or workshops. For example, all three of the teen parent programs provide teen support groups that touch on parenting issues as well as other topics such as self-esteem, health and nutrition, and family planning. In addition to knowledge about parenting, these programs generally emphasize providing mothers with the warmth and support that they are seen to need in order to be warm and supportive, in turn, to their children. Some of the programs also emphasize the actual practice of new attitudes and skills in interacting with children (Herr, et al 1999). For example, in the TASA Next Step program, teen parent support groups are paired with on-s ite child care, and the sessions are planned so that mothers meet without their children for the first portion of the visit and with the children for the second. What exactly does it mean to serve children through this case management relationship? What does the relationship offer besides referral to specific, functional services like those already discussed? More generally, the family-oriented case managers in the site programs serve children by: 1 Keeping an eye on children themselves and helping families gauge how their children are doing; 2 Providing parents with support and friendship, assistance in improving important family relationships and in dealing differently with their children, and information about parenting or children; 3 Providing friendship, support, and role models for a child directly; and encouraging other service deliverers to respond more effectively to a childs needs. In several programs, case managers struggle to bring together their role in relation to a single client, such as a teen mother or a school age child, with their role in relation to the family as a whole. In these successful examples, case managers reported integrating those roles to see the child in a family context rather than advocating for one family member against another, but not all experiences were as successful. In addition, case managers operated with quite different levels of training in child development and family functioning; again, the examples illustrated in this paper show what is possible with training and, in several cases, expert backup support. 3. The following discusses the societal changes that should be made to protect children in the twenty-first century. Children who are growing up in poverty or other kinds of need are likely to come into contact with other large public agencies besides the welfare system: the public schools, community health clinics or city hospitals, and, perhaps, sadly, the states child protective services agency. What are the implications of the findings presented here for the other large public agencies that see poor children and families? To put the question slightly differently, what principles would we apply to each system if we wanted to create a coherent network of services to children? While this study was not designed to investigate other service systems in any detail, the research sites do suggest several intriguing speculations (Crosson, 2010). First, other agencies besides the welfare department can and should consider what it means to be two-generational. As the research sites and the evidence of other researchers suggest, family needs are often intertwined, whereas the services offered by many of the large systems are limited to a single family member (Jones, 2004). A number of program examples from the site visits and other sources illustrate what it means for service providers other than the welfare department to be two-generational in their focus: à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢ The PACE program in Kentucky, with its combination of adult literacy and preschool education operates within the public schools. In addition to offering two-generational services to families that are directly enrolled in PACE, the program director sees PACE as a vehicle for changing the thinking of the public schools toward a greater inclusion of parents and other family members. Child protective services workers in several of the research sites found that working with intensive case managers helped them appreciate the demands on parents that made it difficult for the latter, in turn, to respond to the needs of the child. This insight lies behind a variety of family support and family preservation programs now being deployed as part of the child welfare services continuum in a number of states. The aim of these programs is to offer services to both parent and child to improve family functioning and enable the child to stay in the home (Wolock, 1984). Visiting nurse programs enable health care providers to see parents and children together and serve the whole family. Maternal and child health clinics with other collocated services also offer the opportunity to meet the needs of several family members. In several locations in New England, Head Start programs are planning or already operating programs jointly with education and training programs for mothers on welfare. These programs include cooperative projects with vocational high schools and with a community training agency. The ways in which welfare agencies have overcome these barriers may well offer insights to other agencies (Jones, 2004). For example, welfare agencies at the successful sites have overcome the limitations of their initial mandate by developing a clear and sustainable mission that makes dear why services to children and families are part of the welfare agencys job. In order to expand services, schools, health clinics, and child protective services agencies may similarly need to articulate connections between an initial, narrower mission and the broader, family-centered mission that they would like to achieve (Crosson, 2010). Thus, schools may conclude that they cannot teach children without a collaborative rel ationship with parents, that they cannot teach children without addressing the problems that keep them from being ready to learn, or that they cannot teach teen mothers effectively without addressing their roles as parents as well as students. Child protective services agencies may conclude that functions such as enhancing family stability and averting foster care are more effective over the long run than providing after-the-fact treatment. 4.) Discuss the key similarities and the differences between the residual effects of neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. What implications does this knowledge have for future prevention, intervention and treatment efforts? While both formal and informal services at the sites are geared to preventing child abuse and neglect, program case managers sometimes find that they need to take stronger, more drastic measures to ensure a childs safety and well-being. Case managers in a number of the programs call on child protective services workers for informal consultation and help when they are worried about a family, and several said that they had made child protective referrals (hotlined a family) at least once (Pelton, 2008). The informal consultation appears to go both ways: Child protective services workers in several locations reportedly ask the site case managers to keep an eye on families which they worry about but cannot serve themselves, given their caseload of even more urgent crises. The worker must be able to cross professional boundaries to meet a wide variety of family needs. In order to serve the child, he or she must also develop a relationship with the whole family, since the childs well-being is often intimately bound up with the well-being of other family members. No agency attempting to move in a two-generational direction should expect the change to be easy (Wolock, 1984). Many of the obstacles experienced by welfare agencies apply just as forcefully to the other large service systems for poor children and families. For example, difficulties of mission plague both schools and child welfare agencies that consider reaching out to parents, just as they hamper welfare agencies that consider reaching out to children. In the school setting, teachers, administrators, and elected overseers may worry that a mission of academic excellence will be compromised by too much attention to the multiple needs that children and their families bring into the classroom. For child welfare agencies, the conflict is even more stark: In an agency whose mission is to protect children, many of whom are in urgent danger, how can it be legitimate to pay comparable attention to their parents? Similarly, each system suffers isolation from other service deliverers and lack of expertise in the multiple problems of families. Each experiences its own set of demands on workers and on the organization as a whole, demands that must be balanced against the needs of families in any successful solution.

Understanding Counter Reformation Essay -- Catholic Church Political R

In order to understand the Counter Reformation one must consider the political factors and motivators behind them as well as the belief factors when examining clashes with the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church during 16th century experienced a reformation that was both politically and belief driven. The Catholic Reformation also known as the Counter Reformation allowed the church to clearly define its position, eliminate unchristian practices and examine its role in world. This paper will address the political motivators of the Counter Reformation, the unchristian practices that fueled corruption and the clearly defined religious concerns of reformers. It will establish that the use of patronage and nepotism ultimately undermined the spiritual piety of the church. Also, the movements that brought spirituality back to the church will be addressed along with those movements that led to separation from church. In detailing the events and character of this era and analyzing the outcomes of reform it will be concluded that the Counter Reformation was the beginning of a stronger church and an end to an era that quite possibly could have led to the dissolution of the Catholic Church. One must understand the political make up of the Catholic Church during this period prior to addressing the reforms to the church. The church was far more than a religious institution. The Catholic Church was supreme in Europe. The power of the pope was total and this was supplemented by the power the Holy Roman Emperor had as temporal defender of the Catholic Church. Even though the church had no determinate territory it was a state. It had a monarch as a pope, it princes in prelates and its subjects in Western Christendom. It had legislative assemblies in ecumenical councils, a constitution in cannon law, and fiscal agency in the Curia. It went to war, negotiated treaties and collected taxies. The church was the Holy Roman Empire with a stronghold throughout Europe. But this would quickly change.(www.History) At the time of the reformation there was great concern that the Old Church with all its history and tradition was in trouble. This concern came from both within the church and outside the church. Protestant and Catholic reformers alike were troubled by the corruption in the church and its inner workings. Reformers saw that the Christian faith had in many ways been taken... ...ounter-Reformation after the Council of Trent a large shift in power occurred in Italy. The Pope who was once a large political figure in Italy had lost his political power but gained Religious Power. Patrons, who had dispersed kin as clergy members all over Italy, also lost power. Their power of placement of clergy was no longer allowed and bishops were given the choice of where clergy members should be located. The Political power that had once belonged to both the Pope and the Patrons had now been given to the sovereigns of the separated nations, who full well knew that in the Council of Trent their power would grow. The Council of was a turning-point in the Catholic Church. There was a certainty in practices and beliefs, the church’s foundation had been strengthened and there was a base to grow. Catholicism had reestablished itself and it was a force to be dealt with. By the end of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church was still making some serious reforms. This reform movement which extended into the seventeenth century raised moral and educational standards of the clergy. All inspired by the church with a new zeal and morale. One must conclude that reform was needed. Understanding Counter Reformation Essay -- Catholic Church Political R In order to understand the Counter Reformation one must consider the political factors and motivators behind them as well as the belief factors when examining clashes with the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church during 16th century experienced a reformation that was both politically and belief driven. The Catholic Reformation also known as the Counter Reformation allowed the church to clearly define its position, eliminate unchristian practices and examine its role in world. This paper will address the political motivators of the Counter Reformation, the unchristian practices that fueled corruption and the clearly defined religious concerns of reformers. It will establish that the use of patronage and nepotism ultimately undermined the spiritual piety of the church. Also, the movements that brought spirituality back to the church will be addressed along with those movements that led to separation from church. In detailing the events and character of this era and analyzing the outcomes of reform it will be concluded that the Counter Reformation was the beginning of a stronger church and an end to an era that quite possibly could have led to the dissolution of the Catholic Church. One must understand the political make up of the Catholic Church during this period prior to addressing the reforms to the church. The church was far more than a religious institution. The Catholic Church was supreme in Europe. The power of the pope was total and this was supplemented by the power the Holy Roman Emperor had as temporal defender of the Catholic Church. Even though the church had no determinate territory it was a state. It had a monarch as a pope, it princes in prelates and its subjects in Western Christendom. It had legislative assemblies in ecumenical councils, a constitution in cannon law, and fiscal agency in the Curia. It went to war, negotiated treaties and collected taxies. The church was the Holy Roman Empire with a stronghold throughout Europe. But this would quickly change.(www.History) At the time of the reformation there was great concern that the Old Church with all its history and tradition was in trouble. This concern came from both within the church and outside the church. Protestant and Catholic reformers alike were troubled by the corruption in the church and its inner workings. Reformers saw that the Christian faith had in many ways been taken... ...ounter-Reformation after the Council of Trent a large shift in power occurred in Italy. The Pope who was once a large political figure in Italy had lost his political power but gained Religious Power. Patrons, who had dispersed kin as clergy members all over Italy, also lost power. Their power of placement of clergy was no longer allowed and bishops were given the choice of where clergy members should be located. The Political power that had once belonged to both the Pope and the Patrons had now been given to the sovereigns of the separated nations, who full well knew that in the Council of Trent their power would grow. The Council of was a turning-point in the Catholic Church. There was a certainty in practices and beliefs, the church’s foundation had been strengthened and there was a base to grow. Catholicism had reestablished itself and it was a force to be dealt with. By the end of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church was still making some serious reforms. This reform movement which extended into the seventeenth century raised moral and educational standards of the clergy. All inspired by the church with a new zeal and morale. One must conclude that reform was needed.

The Characteristics Of The Modern Period As Related To Thomas Hardy`s “Hap”

The modern period is characterized by accelerating social, technological and economic advancement. It is also weight by the build up of universal empire controlling almost all of the economies of the world (â€Å"An Analysis of Hap by Thomas Hardy†). Great bulk of wealth has been transferred and controlled by some countries. However, some just lag behind and unable to stand with the sudden crash that happened. Time has changed and everything has changed but some still insisted with ancient mindset that has been coined a long ago.Mindset that was not acceptable this modern period. In his poem â€Å"Hap†, Thomas Hardy pointed out modern changes and the unsystematic landscape of life. This was the time of transition. The presence of somebody in existence that was liable in all the changes that was happening was wondered and inquired about (Davidson). The idea of great economic, social and technological changes was new. It was not yet clearly defined and established.All the advancement that was happening to their way of life was an idea that was fallen from the sky and was just credited to somebody he thought to be compassionate God was responsible (â€Å"Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)†). All modernization in technology, culture, beliefs, traditions, mindset and even religion was worked out by man for thousand of years. These are all products of their unveiling thirst for knowledge and betterment of the way of living.The information age has approached. Information was transferred in only a flash wherever you are in the world. We always see new creation and innovations everyday like in the world of computers. Computer has been the greatest achievement of man for centuries. It started just like a size of the entire room with only little functions(â€Å"When Was the Computer Invented? â€Å"). Now it has evolved to almost absolute functions even in its diminutive size and continuously developing.

Dark Quotes About Life from Oscar Winner American Beauty

In the cult film American Beauty, no one is who they seem. The movie touches upon dysfunctional families, which may look picture-perfect on the outside.  Ã¢â‚¬â€¹American Beauty is a dark satire—a profoundly complex, yet brilliantly executed movie that tells you a tale you didnt want to hear.  It is a thought-provoking, incisive movie with a message that each family is special in its own way.​ Review the main characters and read a compilation of some of the best lines from this classic 90s movie. The Main Characters Lester Burnham  is a middle-aged non-achiever—a father with a boring career. His deadpan voiceover as the narrator communicates his lack of enthusiasm. For him, life is nothing but a series of repetitive, boring menial tasks. Beneath his patient and subservient exterior lies a frustrated man, hungry for love and recognition.Carolyn Burnham is  Lester Burnhams obnoxious and overbearing wife. Carolyn is also a character with many colors. She obsesses over every detail, often overriding her familys views to suit her whims. She is driven and capable of going to extremes to achieve her ends, but beneath her abrasive surface lies a person who is frustrated, fearful and sexually bored.  Jane Burnham,  the teenage daughter of Lester and Carolyn, suffers from an inferiority complex. She is frustrated, insecure, and depressed. She is ashamed of her parents  and is disturbed by their incessant quarrels and selfish pursuits. Jane can’t stand it when her dad lusts after he r best friend Angela.Angela Hayes, who visits the Burnham family, is not without flaws. Beneath her gorgeous looks and mellifluous voice, she is a narcissist, obsessed with her looks and her desirability quotient with men. She has no qualms about the fact that her best friends father is lusting for her, and she seduces him further. Her overtly sexual aura is a facade to hide the deeply cracked insecure disaster within. Lester Quotes My name is Lester Burnham. This is my neighborhood; this is my street; this is my life. I am 42 years old; in less than a year I will be dead.   Our marriage is just for show. A commercial for how normal we are when were anything but. Both my wife and daughter think Im this gigantic loser. I didnt lose my job. Its not like Whoops! Where did my job go? I quit. Remember those posters that said, Today is the first day of the rest of your life? Well, thats true with every day except one: the day that you die. I feel like Ive been in a coma for the past twenty years. And Im just now waking up. This isnt life, its just stuff. And its become more important to you than living. Well, honey, thats just nuts. Carolyn Quotes Dont you mess with me, mister, or Ill divorce you so fast itll make your head spin! There happens to be a lot about me that you dont know, Mr. Smarty Man. Theres plenty of joy in my life. Well, I see youre smoking pot now. I think using psychotropic drugs is a very positive example to set for our daughter. Oh, you dont complain? Then I must be psychotic, then! What is this? Yeah, lets bring in the laugh-meter and see how loud it gets. Jane Quotes And well always be freaks and well never be like other people, and youll never be a freak because youre just too... perfect! I know you think my dads harmless, but youre wrong. Angela Quotes I dont think that theres anything worse than being ordinary. Everything thats meant to happen does. You want to have, like, ten thousand of his babies. Quotes by Other Characters My dad thinks I paid for all this with catering jobs. Never underestimate the power of denial. – Rocky Fitts Shes not your friend. Shes just someone you use to feel better about yourself. – Ricky Fitts But it helps me remember... I need to remember... Sometimes theres so much beauty in the world, I feel like I cant take it, and my heart is just going to cave in. – Ricky Fitts In order to be successful, one must project an image of success at all times. – Buddy Kane