Full Description
Child welfare systems around the world provide essential services to protect the lives of children who are abused and neglected. Yet these systems can also do great harm. These negative consequences of system involvement are primarily borne not by adults who are willfully neglecting or seriously abusing their children, but by families and communities who are struggling under generations of poverty, racism, and genocide. The harm is also to the professionals committed to helping families who find themselves in an adversarial system that, too often, compounds the problems of families and communities.
Moral Injury within the US Child Welfare System presents a fresh perspective on how we can create a US public child welfare system that both protects children physically, and minimizes the psychological harm it causes to the professionals and the families they serve. This perspective emerged from the lived experiences of young people, parents, and professionals involved in the system. It also emerged from decades of on-the-ground social work practice and research experience; and from lessons learned from history, and child welfare systems around the world (African American, Indigenous, Scottish and Japanese). In this book, Haight and Kingery identify the significant psychological harm experienced by those within the US public child welfare system and consider implications for creating a more humane, just, and, ultimately, more successful child welfare system.
Contents
Part 1. Introduction
1. Addressing Psychological Safety within the US Child Welfare System
2. Creating a More Compassionate, Just and Effective Child Welfare System: Conceptual Frameworks and Methods
Part 2. Voices of Moral Injury from within the US Child Welfare System
3. Child Welfare in the US from 1864 to the Resent: A Comparative Case Study of the Wilson, Jordan, and the Brown Families
4. The Experiences of Contemporary Parents: "Basically, I look at it like combat."
5. The Experiences of Contemporary Child Welfare Professionals: "How ethical is it to open the floodgates when you don't have the sandbags to protect the city?"
6. The Experiences of Contemporary Young People: "I knew the system was broken."
Part 3. Intervening in Moral Injury within the US Child Welfare System: Lessons from Young People, Parents, and Professionals
7. Everyday Coping with Moral Injury: Recovery Stories of Parents and Professionals
8. Reorienting Narratives Towards Positive Development: Recovery Stories of Young People
Part 4. Preventing Moral Injury within the US Child Welfare System: Lessons from Diverse Child Welfare Systems
9. A "Shadow Child Welfare System": An African American Focus on Community, Relationships, and Spirituality
10. Drawing on the Strengths of Tribal Nations and the Wisdom of Elders: An Anishinaabe Focus on Supporting our Relatives
with Cary Waubanascum, MSW, PhD and Priscilla Day, MSW, EdD
11. "Looking with Long Eyes": A Japanese Focus on Relationship Building with Vulnerable Families Over Time
with Sachiko Bamba, MSW, PhD and Misa Kayama MSW, PhD
12. Rejecting a Criminal Justice Model of Child Welfare: The Scottish Focus on Community Support through the Children's Panels
with Anne Robertson, PhD
Part 5. Building Towards a Just and Effective US Child Welfare System
13. Some Reflections on Strengthening the US Child Welfare System by Promoting Epistemic Justice, and Psychosocial Well-being
