Child Welfare Essay

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Social work has many areas of study. The area of study this paper is going to focus on is child welfare. Child welfare is essential in empowering children and families by trying to keep them together in a safe and healthy environment. The writer feels that child welfare can be helpful when it comes to children’s well-being even though child welfare has been questioned by many. In this paper the writer will discuss the historical background on child welfare, and its relevance to social welfare. Adoption, foster care, abuse and neglect will be discussed in this paper as they make up child welfare. The current perspective of child welfare that was collected from the sources will be touched on as well as the social and political responses to this …show more content…

Brace’s concern was the copious amount of immigrant children sleeping in the streets. He had witnessed children living in poverty with unfit parents who abused alcohol and drugs. (J. Hansan, 2011) Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society, which created orphanages, and other programs for children. This was the start of adoptions. Brace started the Orphan Train Movement, which lasted from 1859-1929 and which placed about 200,000 of the homeless kids to homes in the mid the west. The rest of the children that remained in the streets were in the care of public or private institutions. (Rowen, Beth 2015, October). The author of this passage discussed Charles Loring Brace’s perspective on the programs provided by the Children’s Aid Society, he believed it was an apt way to save children from the negative influences of urban life. According to the author, Brace’s view on how he was going to help children did not go as expected. Although children were delivered to selected foster families, the needs of abused and neglected children and their families were not addressed. Until a now famous case of a young girl who was severely being abused treated worse than an animal in her foster home. Although agencies were being contacted to report the maltreatment, no one intervened in this case. It was until the attorneys of New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals took her case, and argued that they found that the young girl fell under the rubric of animal. The case was taken to court, and the young girls foster mom was convicted of assault and battery and was sentenced to 1 year. The outcome of the case was the creation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. As a result of this case, other effort was made focusing in children’s need like health, and the environment they lived in. The Charity Organization society

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