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Critical Issues in Child Welfare

Joan Shireman author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Columbia University Press

Published:7th Jul '15

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Critical Issues in Child Welfare cover

Reorganized for more effective classroom use, the second edition of Critical Issues in Child Welfare begins with an updated, thorough overview of the challenges currently facing at-risk children and families. A description of the child welfare system highlights issues that are discussed in more detail throughout the book. The text explores protective services, family preservation, foster care and residential care, adoption, services for adolescents, and training and retention of staff. New material highlights the recent discoveries of the impact of early trauma and stress on children's development, and the modifications currently taking place in the child welfare system in response to this new information. The book also examines the critical challenges of poverty and substance abuse, the importance of the community in shaping child welfare services, racial disproportionality in the system, the changing response of the system to LGBT issues, and services to ameliorate the difficulties of youth leaving the system.

Critical Issues in Child Welfare is substantive, historically and contemporarily. The book will serve as a solid go-to introductory text that will likely appeal to many social work programs. -- Jennifer Bellamy, University of Houston Joan Shireman's second edition is an excellent comprehensive resource on policies and practices impacting child welfare service delivery today, such as family preservation, permanency planning, child protective services decision making, open adoptions, transracial adoptions, kinship care, international adoptions, and service delivery to youth in transition and youth with disabilities. Shireman highlights the need for workers to know the communities from which families come; social justice issues, such as the disproportionate representation of children of color in the child welfare system; and the potential impact of subtle, sometimes unrecognized racial biases. This book should be required reading for child welfare courses and for training child welfare practitioners and other service providers working with children and families, as it provides a unique contextual look at the intersection between systems (juvenile justice, mental health, and child welfare) and social issues (poverty, substance abuse, and violence in the community). -- Ruth McRoy, Boston College Graduate School of Social Work

ISBN: 9780231160780

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

368 pages

second edition