In-home Child Welfare Services

In-home services represent a wide range of approaches to supporting and strengthening families that child welfare agencies implement to achieve the important outcomes of child and family well-being, safety, and permanency. In-home services are an essential component of the child welfare service system, but often receive less explicit attention in child welfare practice and research than other system components such as foster care, adoption, and child protective investigation. In-home services have been known by different terms over time, from services to children in their own homes, home-based, family-based, or family-centered services, family preservation, or others. Child welfare service systems differ considerably across states and localities, and in-home services probably demonstrate the highest degree of variability in target population, design, and implementation. New federal legislation, the Family First Prevention Services Act (2018), has renewed interest in in-home services. Family First creates mechanisms for states to access federal Title IV-E funds, the primary funding stream for foster care, to use for preventive services, but it also requires that these services demonstrate a sufficiently high level of research evidence of their effectiveness. With increasing emphasis on evidence-based practice, the field is challenged to implement programs and practices that demonstrate efficacy as well as practicality within the budgetary and bureaucratic constraints of public child welfare systems. This bibliography reflects a changing landscape for in-home services. The focus is on specific program models, and the extant evidence base of these models. Most are used with families who are receiving in-home services because the child welfare agency opened a service case due to an allegation of child maltreatment with the goal of preventing repeat maltreatment or the child’s removal from home. Some jurisdictions also use in-home services, including some of the specific program models described in this bibliography, prior to a report of child maltreatment, during the assessment or investigative process, or as part of an aftercare program to facilitate family reunification following a placement. Some attention is also given to in-home child welfare services provided when a child’s behavior, rather than the parent’s, poses a risk for removal. Included in this review are differential response systems, which numerous states have implemented to provide in-home services earlier and without formally opening a child welfare case; however, home visiting and family support programs of a more primary prevention nature are excluded from this review.

Kunnskap om barns kollektive ansvarserfaringer og implikasjoner for tjenesteutøvelse i barnevernet

A major goal of the Child Welfare Services is to provide the best possible support to children in challenging life situations, including cross-cultural children, in Norway. However, there is inadequate knowledge about cross-cultural children’s responsibility taking and its implications for service delivery in Norwegian municipalities. This chapter discusses the importance of increased knowledge of the responsibility-taking practices of cross-cultural children for Municipal Child Welfare Service workers’ service delivery. The authors based the chapter on literature from studies on responsibility-taking experiences of children from Peru, Norway and other countries outside Europe. The literature indicates that many children have responsibilities to work and contribute to the sustenance of their families. Often, the children experienced feelings of identity, belonging and pride in mastering work roles. It is, therefore, difficult to understand the practices of these children as destructive parentification. On the contrary, the expectation that children provide for the upkeep of their families often attracts the destructive parentification label in European countries. Also, we argue that nuanced understanding of cross-cultural children’s responsibility-taking practices and identities may equip Child Welfare Services workers with competence that may enable them to provide the best possible support to cross-cultural children in Norway.

Un/Doing Ethnicity in Intervening Swiss Street-Level Bureaucracy. A Police Service and a Child Welfare Service – an Ethnographic Perspective

The article presents the empirical findings of a multi-site ethnography in two organizations in Swiss street-level bureaucracy. We examined both a municipal child welfare office and the police force of a medium-sized city. The focus was on the question as to whether and how ethnic differentiation takes place in such public agencies and what role it plays at work. The findings suggest that un/doing ethnicity follows an instrumental logic and that it is executed in manifold and ambivalent ways.

Implementasi Program Pusat Pelayanan Kesejahteraan Anak Integratif (Ppkai) Di Kabupaten Gowa

The results of the study show that the implementation of the Integrative Child Welfare Service Center program in Gowa regency. The method of the research is descriptive qualitative. The kind of the implementation that used in the research is Sorean c winter type that consist of three indicators, they are organizational and inter-organizational behavior, street level bureaucrat behavior and target group behavior. The technique of data collection consists of observation, interview and documentation which researcher did around three months. The results of the study show that the implementation of the Integrative Child Welfare Service Center program in Gowa regency is seen from the organizational and inter-organizational behavior, namely the maximum commitment, while the coordination has not been maximized. Lower level bureaucrat behavior is seen from policy discretion which is still lacking and has not gone well. The behavior of the target group is seen from the positive response, namely the target group strongly supports the program but the negative response is that there are still many who are not aware of the existence of a child welfare service center program because there is but a fail of socialization carried out and the absence of a complaint secretariat at the sub-district or village level. Keywords: policy implementation, Behavior, Servis, PPKAI program, integrative children. ABSTRAKPenelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui implementasi program pusat pelayanan kesejahteraan anak integratif di Kabupaten Gowa. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah kualitatif yang bertipe deskriptif. Model implementasi yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah model Sorean C. Winter yang terdiri dari 3 Indikator yaitu, perilaku organisasi dan antar organisasi, perilaku birokrat level bawah dan perilaku kolompok sasaran. Adapun teknik pengumpulam data meliputi observasi, wawancara dan dokumentasi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa implementasi program Pusat Pelayanan Kesejahteraan Anak Integratif di Kabupaten Gowa dilihat dari, perilaku organisasi dan antar organisasi dilihat dari komitmen sudah maksimal sedangkan koordinasi yang dilakukan belum maksimal. Perilaku birokrat level bawah dilihat dari diskresi kebijakan, masih kurang dan belum berjalan dengan baik. Perilaku kelompok sasaran dilihat dari respon positifnya yaitu kelompok sasaran sangat mendukung adanya program tersebut tetapi respon negatifnya yaitu masih banyak yang belum mengetahui adanya program pusat pelayanan kesejahteraan anak karena masih kurangnya sosialisasi yang dilakukan dan tidak adanya sekretariat aduan pada tingkat Kecamatan atau Desa. Kata Kunci: Implementasi Kebijakan, Pelayanan, Perilaku, Program PPKAI, Anak Integratif

The eristic of newsworthiness in the representation of Barnevernet controversy: A case study of the Norwegian Child Welfare Service

This study offers a critical evaluation of news values by four selected contemporary media outlets: BBC News, The Federalist, OneEurope and Dagbladet. The material covers the controversy around the Norwegian Child Welfare Service with cases of children being taken away from their families, thus it involves cultural and legal aspects of the issue. The analytic categories are based on news value research guidelines that were introduced in the study by Johan Galtung and Mari H. Ruge (1965). In parallel, the philosophical reference is construed through the works by Artur Schopenhauer and Anton Powell. This, in turn, allows evaluating the language that construes newsworthiness from an eristic perspective. The study demonstrates how the eristic application of news values may influence the fair presentation of an issue, at least when a case is presented as involving a controversy. The focus is on the eristic tools of news value enhancement which lead to channeling consumers’ attention in a desirable manner.

Å beslutte med henblikk på risiko? – Når politikken dytter ansvaret over på barnevernets ansatte

Artikkelens tema er hvordan barnevernet, gjennom sine kommunikative beslutninger, skaper praksis. Mer konkret har jeg undersøkt hvordan saksbehandlerne i barnevernetsundersøkelser kommer frem til beslutninger gjennom å forholde seg til ulike forventninger. Gjennom analysen synliggjøres det hvordan barnevernetsundersøkelser langt på veiblir styrt av forventninger den enkelte saksbehandler og forelder ønsker å innfri. Disse handler for eksempel om å ha minst en samtale med barnet, samt å følge en undersøkerplan. Dermed blir det å ikke følge undersøkerplanen eller det å ikke snakke med barnet sett som usikre handlingsvalg mot målet om å sikre ”den gode undersøkelse”. Barnevernets beslutninger vil dermed inngå i et i et rasjonaliseringsprogram hvor hensikten eller målet er å unngå risiko. På den måten synes barnevernetsundersøkelser å være styrt av en risikopolitikk som tjenerhensikten å være på den sikre siden og hvor fremtidens nødvendige uvisshetblirbarnevernets problem. Risikopolitikken bringer barnevernetinn i enpraksis det ikke selv har definert og setter dermed barnevernetinn i en tilstandav fare. Politikken påleggerbarnevernet å omsette alle svake punkter tilforebyggelsesprogrammer med den hensikten å sikre ”den gode praksis”. Detbetyr en praksis hvor standardisering og maler blir de mest opplagte svarene.På den måtenblir det barnevernet som organisasjon som bærer ansvaret foreventuelle feilvurderinger – ikke den politikken som ligger til grunn for handlingene.Ansvaret dyttes dermed over på barnevernets ansatte. Søgeord: Niklas Luhmann, risikopolitikk, barnevern, beslutninger, sosialtarbeid ENGELSK ABSTRACT: Hilde AnetteAamodt: Making decisions due to “risk” The purpose of this article is to analyze how child welfare services create practice through communicative decisions. It analyzes how caseworkers in child welfare investigations arrive at their decisions by dealing with different expectations. The analysis showed that child welfare investigations are controlled to a great extent by a predetermined template that defines what will happen during these investigations. The caseworkers have clear expectations as they attempt to follow fulfill the plan. These include having at least one conversation with the child, as well as following the examination template. Therefore not doing one or either of these is considered an unsafe action as regards “doing a good examination.” Decisions about the child’s welfare will therefore be part of a rational program, where the purpose or goal is to avoid risk. In that way, child welfare investigations appear to be governed by a risk policy that serves the purpose of being on the safe side, and where any uncertainties in the future become the problem of the welfare agency. This risk policy means that the child welfare service practice is not clearly defined, hence endangering child welfare. The policy requires the child welfare service to transform all weak points in the prevention programs to ensure “good practice”. This means that standardization and templates are the most obvious answers to good practice. In this way, the child welfare service is an organization which bears responsibility itself for any errors of judgment – not the policies themselves. Responsibility is hence transferred to the child welfare service employees. Keywords: NiklasLuhmann, risk politics, social work, child welfare, decisions