This collection of twelve essays represents an important contribution to the understanding of child welfare and social action in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They challenge many assumptions about the history of childhood and child welfare policy and cover a variety of themes including the physical and sexual abuse of children, forced child migration and role of the welfare state.
Recent historical work has done much to focus attention on changing conceptions of children's rights during the 19th & 20th centuries. These essays address a variety of themes including the abuse of children, & the role of the welfare state.
Recent historical work has done much to focus attention on changing conceptions of children's rights during the 19th and 20th centuries. These essays address a variety of themes including the abuse of children, and the role of the welfare state.
This collection of twelve essays represents an important contribution to the understanding of child welfare and social action in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They challenge many assumptions about the history of childhood and child welfare policy and cover a variety of themes including the physical and sexual abuse of children, forced child migration and role of the welfare state.
As we approach the year 2000, infant mortality rates, child placement dilemmas, and appropriate socialization of children continue to challenge the field of child welfare. It is thus especially significant to reflect on the history of child welfare. The carefully selected topics explored in this volume underscore the importance of recovering past events and themes still relevant. It is the aim of this volume to illumine current issues by a review of past struggles and problems. A History of Child Welfare offers many examples of practices that have direct import for those who struggle to support children. Who is not bothered by what seem to be increasing acts of violence by children against children? The role of hidden cruelty to children in perpetuating violence is illuminated by studying the past. Historians and social researchers have gone far in examining the family, and by implication, their revelations greatly increase society's complex responses to children over time from early assumptions that children were little more than miniature adults to the discovery of childhood as a special developmental period. At the start of this century women still did not have universal suffrage and brutal child labor was not unusual. Harsh legal codes separating the races were widespread, and those bent on improving the lot of children knew that reform meant commitment to an uphill struggle. By the end of the century, much has changed: child labor, while still present, has been outlawed in most industries, women vote and hold many high offices; and de jure racial segregation is largely a memory. Yet the state of children remains precarious, with poverty a persistent theme throughout the century. The fifteen articles in this volume cover a wide range of social conditions, public policies, and approaches to problem solving. Though history does not repeat itself precisely, problems, controversies about solutions, and certain themes do. A History of Child Welfare takes up social and economic conditions that correlate with increasing rates of child abuse and neglect, and an increasing number of children in out-of-home care. This volume distinguishes approaches that have been useful from those that have failed. In this way, these serious reflections help build on past successes and avoid previous errors.
This up-to-date and comprehensive resource by leaders in child welfare is the first book to reflect the impact of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997. The text serves as a single-source reference for a wide array of professionals who work in children, youth, and family services in the United States-policymakers, social workers, psychologists, educators, attorneys, guardians ad litem, and family court judges& mdash;and as a text for students of child welfare practice and policy. Features include: * Organized around ASFA's guiding principles of well-being, safety, and permanency * Focus on evidence-based "best practices" * Case examples integrated throughout * First book to include data from the first round of National Child and Family Service Reviews Topics discussed include the latest on prevention of child abuse and neglect and child protective services; risk and resilience in child development; engaging families; connecting families with public and community resources; health and mental health care needs of children and adolescents; domestic violence; substance abuse in the family; family preservation services; family support services and the integration of family-centered practices in child welfare; gay and lesbian adolescents and their families; children with disabilities; and runaway and homeless youth. The contributors also explore issues pertaining to foster care and adoption, including a focus on permanency planning for children and youth and the need to provide services that are individualized and culturally and spiritually responsive to clients. A review of salient systemic issues in the field of children, youth, and family services completes this collection.
This open access book offers an unprecedented analysis of child welfare schemes, situating them in the wider context of post-war policy debates about the care of children. Between 1945 and 1970, an estimated 3,500 children were sent from Britain to Australia, unaccompanied by their parents, through child migration schemes funded by the Australian and British Governments and delivered by churches, religious orders and charities. Functioning in a wider history of the migration of unaccompanied children to overseas British colonies, the post-war schemes to Australia have become the focus of public attention through a series of public reports in Britain and Australia that have documented the harm they caused to many child migrants. Whilst addressing the wide range of organisations involved, the book focuses particularly on knowledge, assumptions and decisions within UK Government Departments and asks why these schemes continued to operate in the post-war period despite often failing to adhere to standards of child-care set out in the influential 1946 Curtis Report. Some factors such as the tensions between British policy on child-care and assisted migration are unique to these schemes. However, the book also examines other factors such as complex government systems, fragmented lines of departmental responsibility and civil service cultures that may contribute to the failure of vulnerable people across a much wider range of policy contexts.
During the Second World War, an unprecedented number of families were torn apart. As the Nazi empire crumbled, millions roamed the continent in search of their loved ones. The Lost Children tells the story of these families, and of the struggle to determine their fate. We see how the reconstruction of families quickly became synonymous with the survival of European civilization itself. Even as Allied officials and humanitarian organizations proclaimed a new era of individualist and internationalist values, Tara Zahra demonstrates that they defined the “best interests” of children in nationalist terms. Sovereign nations and families were seen as the key to the psychological rehabilitation of traumatized individuals and the peace and stability of Europe. Based on original research in German, French, Czech, Polish, and American archives, The Lost Children is a heartbreaking and mesmerizing story. It brings together the histories of eastern and western Europe, and traces the efforts of everyone—from Jewish Holocaust survivors to German refugees, from Communist officials to American social workers—to rebuild the lives of displaced children. It reveals that many seemingly timeless ideals of the family were actually conceived in the concentration camps, orphanages, and refugee camps of the Second World War, and shows how the process of reconstruction shaped Cold War ideologies and ideas about childhood and national identity. This riveting tale of families destroyed by war reverberates in the lost children of today’s wars and in the compelling issues of international adoption, human rights and humanitarianism, and refugee policies.
This book offers a historical account of the public debates, institutional monitoring, and private experiences of youth sexuality in Britain between the 1960s to the 1990s. It uses the Brook Advisory Centre--a leading sexual health charity--as a case study to explore the changing British landscape of sexual politics during this period.
