This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
The transition from care into adulthood is a difficult step for any young person, but young people leaving care have a high risk of social exclusion, both in terms of material disadvantage and marginalisation. In Young People's Transitions from Care to Adulthood leading academics gather together the latest international research relating to the transition of young people leaving care, outlining and comparing the range of legal and policy frameworks, welfare regimes and innovative practice across 16 countries. The book also highlights the variations that exist between different groups leaving care. Featuring key messages for policy and practice, this book will give academics, practitioners and policymakers valuable insights into how to encourage resilience and improve outcomes for care leavers.
Reaffirms the importance of the larger kinship network through analysis of extensive data on the clients of one social agency. The authors show that the less kinship-oriented caseworkers often attempt to change clients' kin relationships in the direction of less involvement, raising questions about value differences in therapeutic practice. The book also points to the importance of concepts, such as those dealing with family kinship, that will enable the caseworker to appraise the client's social relationships more fully. The authors emphasize the benefits to be derived from a closer liaison between social work and social science.
Influenced by news reports of young children brutalized by their parents, most of us see the role of child services as the prevention of severe physical abuse. But as Tina Lee shows in Catching a Case, most child welfare cases revolve around often ill-founded charges of neglect, and the parents swept into the system are generally struggling but loving, fighting to raise their children in the face of crushing poverty, violent crime, poor housing, lack of childcare, and failing schools. Lee explored the child welfare system in New York City, observing family courts, interviewing parents and following them through the system, asking caseworkers for descriptions of their work and their decision-making processes, and discussing cases with attorneys on all sides. What she discovered about the system is troubling. Lee reveals that, in the face of draconian budget cuts and a political climate that blames the poor for their own poverty, child welfare practices have become punitive, focused on removing children from their families and on parental compliance with rules. Rather than provide needed help for families, case workers often hold parents to standards almost impossible for working-class and poor parents to meet. For instance, parents can be accused of neglect for providing inadequate childcare or housing even when they cannot afford anything better. In many cases, child welfare exacerbates family problems and sometimes drives parents further into poverty while the family court system does little to protect their rights. Catching a Case is a much-needed wake-up call to improve the child welfare system, and to offer more comprehensive social services that will allow all children to thrive.
Solution-based casework is an approach to assessment, case planning, and case management that combines what we know from clinical social work with what we value about sound social work practice. It is grounded in family-centered social work and draws from clinical approaches within social work and mental health. By integrating problem- and solution-focused approaches that form the clinical and social work traditions, treatment partnerships are more easily formed between family, caseworker, and service provider. Solution-Based Casework is a skill-based, practice-oriented text that provides the specific guidance that students and new practitioners need in order to make sense quickly of the complex tasks of assessment and case planning in child welfare. The book flows out of a long practice experience, and was developed in consultation with workers and supervisors who were attempting to remedy problems viewed as contributing to recurrent abuse and neglect. It seeks to end adversarial relationships in casework and advocates case plans based on specific outcome skills rather than on those written with vague outcome goals measuring attendance in counseling. It serves as a common conceptual framework for integrating disparate segments of a response network, thereby allowing all providers in a therapeutic system to work toward common goals. The text is divided into three sections. In Section I the conceptual history and theoretical foundations of solution-based casework are presented so that the reader can place this approach to casework within the ongoing professional conversation about what constitutes sound practice. Section II addresses issues of assessment and case planning. Section III focuses on case management issues and how treatment team members experience a solution-based casework approach.
