Policies and interventions can be made after identifying social problems through system’s perspective. The example above covered government’s policies that disadvantage certain groups, poverty, family violence and interactions between those problems. The problems further arise from incompetent policies and systems that support children in foster care. For the issue of child protection from abuse, social workers would need to be skilled in areas of case management, advocacy, counselling, group work and providing family education and support. It is practitioner’s responsibility to investigate abuse and neglect, undertake risk assessments, write reports, act as witness at court, coordinate family support and secure alternative care. (Chenoweth …show more content…
Social work at the time appeared to take more direct actions to reduce social injustice. However, by the end of this course, I was confronted with possible systematic abuses that social workers themselves may perpetuate. For example, when children are removed from their families, it rarely has positive outcomes because they become more vulnerable to systemic abuse (Beckett, 2007). From the social worker’s perspective, regardless of the reason for separating children from their families, there is inevitable tension and conflict (Chenoweth & McAuliffe, 2015). While this may be true, Beckett (2007) described that child protection workers require courage, or else there is risk of becoming a bystander. Many practitioners are disinclined to make painful decisions, such as placing children in a care or allow the child to live with their parents despite underlying risks. Those workers are more likely to make excuses and put of decisions. There were actually cases of social workers knocking on the door few times and hurrying back to their office to record, “Visited. No answer” (Beckett, 2007, p. 9). That being the case, there was a sense of disappointment. Nevertheless, it made me more determined to become a social worker that the service user needs and not reproduce systematic …show more content…
If the social workers are overloaded with high caseloads and documentations, it becomes harder for them to frequently contact the child in the care (Chenoweth & McAuliffe, 2015). The inflexible bureaucratic system prevents the workers from communicating with the child. Moreover, it increases the risk of making poor decisions. Children who are perceived to be not in immediate risks may often be ignored or given less attention. On the other hand, social workers rush to solve problems of children in immediate risks without considering their underlying problems and long term consequences, as if the problems are fires that need to be put out. Likewise, the shortage of practitioners and high turnover in staff result in children being passed from one stranger to another, which reduces a sense of stability. The problems arise from workers prioritising the agency, their reputations more than the child. The characteristics of bureaucracy are that workers follow impersonal rules and maintain impersonal relationships (McTaggart, 2015). Consequently, it may result in depersonalisation and avoidance of reality. An example of depersonalisation is depicted in the relationship between nurse and patient. For an example, nurses often label their patients by their bed numbers or by their condition (Beckett, 2007). Most organisations require bureaucracy due to its efficiency. Weber
During the court case the judge said that lead social worker Gunn Wahlstrom was “naïve beyond belief”. This report brought over 68 recommendations to make sure cases like this did not happen again. The recommendations included putting the child first and the parent’s second. “Jasmines’ fate illustrates all too clearly the disastrous consequences of the misguides attitude of the social workers having treated Morris Beckford and Beverley Lorrington as the clients first and foremost” (London Borough of Brent, 1985,p295). The social workers in Jasmine’s c...
Child abuse and neglect are “social” issues that were addressed by the author. While children are in foster care, they may become victims of maltreatment: child neglect, child emotional, physical and sexual abuse. The terms neglect refers to when parents fail to provide a child’s basic needs and provide satisfactory level of care (Downs, Moore and McFadden, 2009). An example of a child being neglected is when parents or c...
For the purpose of this paper the social worker interviewed is Ronnita Waters, MSW, RCSWi; she is currently an operations manager at the Center for Family and Child Enrichment (CFCE). The issue or area where her advocacy skills are practiced is within child welfare. Mrs. Waters mentions to the interviewee “I always wanted to work with children, then eventually for children.” when asked what developed her interest in this area of social work. Furthermore, before she became an operations manager, the social worker was an adoptions supervisor, overseeing adoption case managers and ensuring the proper implementation of policies such as the sibling placement policy and adoption policy. In addition, before achieving the role of supervisor, she was
Handon, R. M. (2014, December). Client Relationships and Ethical Boundaries for Social Workers in Child Welfare. The New Social Worker, (winter), 1-6.
...children, young people and their families can be both complex and difficult. Social work practice is one of the most challenging as it involves work with a diverse range of both professionals and service users. However, there is more that one single reason for this. As all professionals, agencies and parents continue to work together in various different cases, a variety of skills are required including: communication, preparation, intervention skills, assessment of significant harm, research of current legislation and decision making skills, all of which contribute to the complexities and difficulties of social work. It could be argued that these difficulties are highlighted most in many public cases of child abuse; moreover these cases can be seen to be changing social work practice, affecting the difficulties and complexities of working within this profession.
Interagency working is where different professionals use their skills to work together in order to reach a common goal and vision (Ovretviet et al, 1997). This is desirable because it provides a higher quality service, and a holistic approach towards helping children and families. In addition, interagency working leads to resources being used more effectively (Hallet and Birchall, 1992). Yet, despite this, agencies often fail to collaborate with one another, leading to inadequate service provisions and serious implications for service users. This essay will first look at the reasons behind key failures of interagency working in social work practice, by reviewing some serious case examples in child protection, and will discuss how these challenges can be grappled with.
A Child Protective Service worker is a career that can be mentally and physically exhausting with emotional upheaval and wonderfully rewarding all at the same time. This paper discusses several “best practices’, their descriptions, and how they are put in use to assist the children who need help and the parents who unwillingly become a part of the Child Welfare system; even though they count on the system to help them better themselves and the lives of their children. Child Protective Service workers require extensive training, vast knowledge, multiple values, and strong ethics to effectively assist this
The job of a child welfare worker appears to be a demanding profession that promotes the child’s safety, but also strengthens the family organization around them in order to successfully raise the children. This child welfare workers work in the system known as the Child Protective Services whose initiative is to protect the overall welfare of the child. The short novel From the Eye of the Storm: the Experiences of a Child Welfare Worker by Cynthia Crosson-Tower demonstrates the skills necessary to deal with the practice of social work along with both its challenges and its happy moments. The novel consists of some of the cases involving Tower’s actual career in social work. In reading the book, I was able to experience some of the actual cases in which children dealt with physical and mental abuse from their families that caused them to end up within the system. Also, some of these children had issues in adapting to foster and adoptive families based on the issues they faced earlier in life. As we have learned earlier in the course, the violence that a child experiences early in life has an overall affect on the person they become as they grow into adulthood. When children deal with adverse childhood experiences, they are at a higher risk for abusing drugs and/or alcohol, increased likelihood of abusing their own child or spouse, higher rates of violent and nonviolent criminal behavior, along with several other issues throughout their lifespan.
The aim of this assignment is to analyse the development of British social policy, in relation to the development of children services. The author will explore the social policy responses to child protection from 1842 to 2011. This topic of social policy was chosen by the author because it is his area of social work he would like to practice in the future. In the beginning of the assignment the word will describe what social policy and child protection means in her/his own words linking it to other definitions. The essay author will analyse how child protection has develop looking at past legislation and how children’s deaths have influenced the way children services work today. Using different research the essay author will evaluate the benefits and challenges offered by inter-agency, inter-professional partnership working with children and families. In the conclusion, the authors will a brief description of what he/she have written.
'Social workers have a professional and ethical responsibility to (...) interact and intervene with clients and their environments' (Teater, 2010, p.4). According to this premise, the ecological approach in social work interventions offers an effective method of relating children, young people and their families to their environment. It is an approach that allows social workers to intervene in cases where a child is abused or neglected, while providing a good theoretical framework for social workers' direct work. This essay is going to assess the ecological model within a social work practice directed at children. It will stress the importance of this model, and explain its application in today's child protection work. Firstly, the text will introduce the ecological approach by introducing its origins and a theoretical framework. Secondly, it will be described how social workers carry out an assessment within the given model, and how it is applied in practice in a direct work of practitioners. Finally, significant strengths and deficits of the approach will be contrasted in order to assess importance of the ecological perspective. 'It is (…) important to be aware that the abusiveness of any act cannot be understood except in context' (Beckett, 2007, p.16), and thus ecological approach allows social work practitioners to explore environmental and social causes of children’s maltreatment in an afford to consequently eliminate these.
Commission for Social Care Inspection (2005) Making Every Child Matter, Commission for Social Care Inspection
Social work is a multifaceted, ever adapting profession, which has had many purposes and identities through the years. It is imperative for the vocation to constantly evolve alongside the social climate and the new ways in which we identify and treat those who are in need of support. Social workers can be required to take on the role of counsellor, advocate, case-worker, partner, assessor of risk and need, and at times (as the government seeks to push social work further and further towards the health and education sectors) a servant of the state. The profession is dramatically subject to affection by societal change, thus demanding social workers have a duty to be up to date with the latest developments in understanding how and why people get to the point of requiring social work intervention, and how best to prevent and cater for it.
As a social worker, I have never interrogated my theoretical orientation, in part because I considered that common sense, agency´s directions, and social policies guided social work interventions. In fact, Mullaly (2010) discusses that social workers do not see the relation between theory and practice, and social work is perceived as a performance of practical duties. This was my perception until now, in particular, because I have been analyzing anti-oppressive principles and I realized that my experience has many nuances of those principles. Therefore, my past interventions have some commonalities with the anti-oppressive perspective, and then some strengths and limitations compared to the Canadian social work. (1) One of these strengths is empowerment. Power is an important element of
The work of a social worker is complex and all encompassing. Social workers work in many capacities seeking justice, liberation, and equality. There work is global, as they work to put policies in place to govern practices. To keep up with societal shifts and generational changes there learning is continuous. As new questions rise so does the need for the continuation of research, not only to answer these questions but to implement into
The social work profession is defined as “a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes social change and development, social cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation of people (ISFW, ‘Global Definition of Social Work’, 2016).” The definition may be true about the profession but it is more in depth than just that. To me, the profession’s primary focus is to help others through life as much as we can while letting them make their own choices and guiding them. In society, social workers are utilized in many different nonprofit and government roles. They serve the community in many different ways from monitoring parent visits to helping people through mental illnesses. Human beings are so complex and things that happen