Housing Decisions Among Homeless Families Involved in the Child Welfare System

The present study embedded a qualitative substudy within a randomized controlled trial of housing services for child welfare-involved families to examine housing decisions made in the face of homelessness and child protection. Participants included a representative sample of caregivers (n = 19) randomized to receive the Family Unification Program—a permanent housing intervention for inadequately housed families under investigation for child abuse or neglect—or child welfare services as usual. Qualitative interviews 12 months after randomization assessed housing decision-making processes involved in keeping families safe and stable. Results indicated a push–pull dynamic that constrained housing choices regardless of whether permanent housing was made available. Caregiver housing decisions were constrained by time limitations, affordability, and access to services, whereas child and family safety was perceived as less important. Findings emphasize the need for housing-informed child welfare services to ensure the long-term safety of children in families experiencing homelessness.     

Child protective intervention in the context of welfare reform: The effects of work and welfare on maltreatment reports

Recent changes in welfare policy have produced changes in parental work and welfare receipt. These factors are assessed in relation to investigated reports of child abuse and neglect using survey data on 1998 welfare recipients in nine Illinois counties, in conjunction with longitudinal administrative data on cash welfare benefits, employment, and child abuse and neglect reports. Trend analyses show that rates of child maltreatment reports among welfare recipients have risen since the passage of PRWORA in 1996. Findings from multivariate analyses indicate that parental employment has a protective effect on reports to child protection systems (CPS), that this effect is greatest when combined with welfare receipt, and that this effect becomes stronger over time. Those who receive welfare in the absence of employment face a significantly greater risk of CPS involvement, even compared with those who neither work nor receive welfare. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Ideals of human rights and socioeconomic realities: The larger context of Pakistan's child-protection policy

After 25 years of the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, millions of children still have their fundamental rights violated every day. It is argued in this article that the realization of the rights of these children is heavily influenced by the socioeconomic context of their countries. Taking Pakistan's child protection policy as a case, the argument is built on primary data collected from in-depth interviews with policymakers. Data analysis revealed that the Pakistani policymakers do consider socioeconomic factors, such as poverty, as a causative factor for various child protection issues, and believe that an increased level of socioeconomic development would improve protection and well-being of all children in that country. However, they lacked an appreciation of the interdependent relationship between children's broader socioeconomic environment and their right to protection in terms of policy responses to various child protection issues.     

No One To Stand By Us: Reintegrating Formerly Abducted Child-Mothers in Uganda

The returnee child-mothers who have survived abduction by the Lord's Resistance Army return to civilian communities in Northern Uganda as stigmatized outsiders. They are child-mothers with children who are not accepted by the community. Years after they have returned to civilian communities they are struggling for themselves and their children. This failure to access security on a social, economic and personal level is found to garner further insecurities including neglect and abuse, which prevail and are passed on to their children. The need to provide reintegration and reconciliation assistance is recognized by both the international community and the Government of Uganda; however, it is found that assistance is failing to help this group of formerly abducted people to reintegrate in communities. This article analyses the multi-faceted perceptions and experiences of reintegration, identifying root causes and gaps where assistance can provide security and integration to these returnees.     

When is a child not a child? Child soldiers in international law

International humanitarian law and international human rights law both prohibit the use of child soldiers in armed conflict. The protection afforded to children is problematic because the age a child may become a soldier and what constitutes child “soldiering” fluctuates between States and cultures. Differing levels of children soldiers’ protection leave them vulnerable to particular abuses. This paper examines some different attitudes and approaches towards the use of child soldiers and concludes that international human rights law and international humanitarian law does not adequately protect children.     

Technologies of Displacement and Children’s Right to Asylum in Sweden

Through an analysis of 100 asylum decisions and 10 interviews with 20 asylum officers at the Swedish Migration Agency this article reveals two intricate processes through which children’s rights are displaced in the Swedish asylum process; by overlooking children’s individual claims for asylum through a circle of neglect, and negating children’s best interests. The article demonstrates how the balancing act between migration control on one hand and children’s rights on the other hand plays out in the asylum process, which results in a double displacement; the children are not adult enough to be addressed as asylum seekers and not children enough to deserve qualification as bearer of children’s rights. An in-depth analysis of everyday practices at institutions applying children’s rights is essential both to understand the reproduction of discrepancies between rights on paper and rights in practice, and to explore the potential of rights to disrupt oppressive vehicles of power.     

Institutional racism in child welfare

Three reasons are most often provided to explain the persistent overrepresentation of black children in the child welfare system. One, since black families have more risk factors (unemployment, single-parent families, poverty, etc) that cause them to abuse and neglect their children more than white families, the higher representation of blacks is appropriate. Two, since blacks are more highly concentrated among the poor than whites, blacks are expected to be overrepresented in child welfare due to their lower class status—not because of their race. But this article focuses on a third explanation—institutional racism. This thesis holds that systemic discrimination, which emanates from decision-making processes in child welfare, is a major contributor to the disparate representation of black children.This analysis examines how institutional racism influences the operation of the child welfare system to result in disparate adverse effects on black children and their families. The evolution of blacks in child welfare is viewed from an historical perspective. It assesses the impact of other systems (notably mental health, special education and juvenile justice) on the child welfare system. It examines the extent to which decision-making processes at various stages of child welfare screen in black children and screen out white children. It describes how systemic racism denies vital social and economic supports to kin caregivers who are responsible for their related children. This assessment ends with practice, policy and research recommendations to reduce the overrepresentation of black children in child welfare.     

Managing anxiety: neoliberal modes of citizen subjectivity,fantasy and child abuse in New Zealand

The neoliberal direction of social policy under New Zealand’s fifth National government (2008–) is demonstrated in its 2012 White Paper for Vulnerable Children. This document advocates increased monitoring and policing of welfare populations and the downgrading of child protection policy to a technical administrative system for managing ‘risky’ families. The White Paper’s release came soon after the coroner’s report into the deaths of the ‘Kahui twins’, which were treated by the media as a shocking case of child abuse, and exemplified the media’s use of a fantasy of a ‘savage’ Maori welfare underclass in reporting cases of child abuse. Drawing on Isin’s analysis of ‘governing through neurosis’, this article explores how these media and policy discourses reinforce normative patterns of neoliberal citizen subjectivity by offering compelling pathways out of anxiety that re-route citizens’ anxiety over child abuse in support of neoliberal modes of citizen subjectivity.     

Where Has Child Protection Gone?

The government introduced its ambitious plans to transform children's services as its response to the tragic death of Victoria Climbie, the victim of child abuse. However their scope is far more than improving child protection services. The aim is to develop preventive services, responding to low level concerns, so that all children are helped to achieve their potential. This article asks what the impact of this shift in emphasis will be for child protection work. It argues that the refocusing carries the risk of taking resources and professional time away from investigating serious cases of abuse and fails to address the problems in professional practice identified in the Climbie report.     

Do public sector organizations ensure labor ethics? Perspectives from ethics and workplace spirituality in Bangladesh's garment sector

The suppression of labor rights is a matter of serious concern in developing countries. Yet little is known about the role of public agencies in protecting the rights of underprivileged employees. Hence, this study aims to examine the reasons behind the persisting labor exploitation in private enterprises despite the presence of public governance and labor codes. Data was collected through in-depth interviews as well as archives from different external and internal agencies of privately owned garment enterprises in Bangladesh including public administrators and multinational retailers. Kantian ethics and Islamic moral principles were used as theoretical lens to evaluate the labor practices of enterprises. This study contributes to the existing literature by introducing a process model of labor exploitation that depicts multinational power and poor governance to be the main drivers for the abuse of labor ethics. Specifically, political influence and institutional corruption drive poor governance. Public power is exercised to suppress marginalized labor institutions rather than enact labor codes. We found that ethical and spiritual values are not reflected in labor practices and practical suggestions on enacting labor ethics through which the fair enforcement of public power is offered.     

From disguised protectionism to rewarding regulation: The impact of trade‐related labor standards in the Dominican Republic

Policymakers in the Dominican Republic have responded to foreign pressure by rewriting their labor laws and revitalizing their labor ministry. What are the likely consequences? Is aggressive labor law enforcement more likely to protect vulnerable workers from abuse and exploitation or to undermine their ability to compete for labor‐intensive employment in an unforgiving world economy? And what are the broader implications of the answer? I address these questions by analyzing qualitative as well as quantitative data on workplace regulators empowered by the Dominican Republic in response to trade‐related labor standards imposed by the United States and find that they reconcile social protection with economic adjustment by simultaneously discouraging “low road” employment practices like informality, union‐busting, and the exploitation of child labor, and encouraging “high road” alternatives that link firms, farms, and families, on the one hand, to public educational, training, and financial institutions, on the other. The result is a potentially inclusive alternative to the repressive industrial relations regime that fueled export‐led development – and the East Asian “miracle” in particular – in the late twentieth century.     

Making Child Protection Policy: The Crime and Misconduct Commission Inquiry into Abuse of Children in Foster Care in Queensland

Internationally as well as in Australia, public inquiries have become one of the dominant means of scrutinising child protection services. As such, inquiries have become a policy mechanism for defining the problem of child abuse, and developing possible solutions. This article examines the 2004 Crime and Misconduct Commission Inquiry into the Abuse of Children in Foster Care in Queensland. It discusses both the problems and potential of public inquiries in promoting positive change in a contested policy field like child protection.     

Women’s Rights to Property in Marriage,Divorce, and Widowhood in Uganda: The Problematic Aspects

This article examines women’s rights to property in marriage, upon divorce, and upon the death of a spouse in Uganda, highlighting the problematic aspects in both the state-made (statutory) and non-state-made (customary and religious) laws. It argues that, with the exception of the 1995 Constitution, the subordinate laws that regulate the distribution, management, and ownership of property during marriage, upon divorce, and death of a spouse are discriminatory of women. It is shown that even where the relevant statutory laws are protective of women’s rights to property, their implementation is hindered by customary law practices, socialization, and the generally weak economic capacity of many women in the country. The article delves into the even weaker position of women’s rights to matrimonial property at customary and religious laws. In many homes, wives provide labor to support their husbands without having a stake in the use or monetary benefit from it. Under Islamic law regulating intestate succession to property, the entitlements for widows fall short of the constitutional standards on equality and non-discrimination. Polygyny is widely practiced by Muslims implying that the widows share the one eighth whenever there are children or one fourth in cases when there are no children. Radical reforms such as adopting an immediate community property regime instead of the present separate property regime are inevitable if women’s rights to property are to advance.     

Modifying children's court care plans to acknowledge poverty and disadvantage

This think piece suggests that Children's Court Care Plans should include a new section that documents poverty and social disadvantage, especially of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, when they are under investigation for child abuse and neglect. New South Wales in Australia is used as the exemplar state, but this suggestion may find an echo elsewhere.

Points for practitioners

• As a general proposition social and economic circumstances should be considered in addition to parental dysfunction in child protection proceedings in Children's court.
• Care Plans prepared for hearings in the NSW Children's Court, often developed in response to serious harm report investigations, currently do not contain information about parents' poverty and social disadvantage and hence decontextualise family living circumstances.
• Consistent with international evidence, Care Plans should require information about parents' socioeconomic situation, including social disadvantage of residential neighbourhood, status and cost of household tenancy, and household income.
• Taking account of social and economic circumstances has the potential to generate savings in out-of-home care that can be re-allocated to support services to reduce poverty and social disadvantage and thereby reduce the need for removal of children from parental care.

     

The Active Child Citizen: Lessons from Canadian Policy and the Children's Movement

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has advanced a model of active citizenry for children, which is difficult to reconcile with the still dominant Western notions of childhood that fetishize innocence and attribute passivity and incompetence to children. This article explores the manner in which state policy, Canadian courts, and children's politics in Canada have responded to the imaginary of the active child citizen. The Canadian government has provided limited political space to young people and has narrowly construed children's participation rights as limited to family law and juvenile justice. The reluctance of adult decision-makers to open up policy-making to the contributions of children has been further hindered by the current anti-democratic cast of neo-liberal governance. This article examines how quasi-judicial tribunals and the Canadian courts have invoked the Convention in their dealings with child asylum seekers, only to construct childhood participation and childhood protection as mutually exclusive. The article concludes with a brief exploration of the alternative model of children's citizenship revealed by the children's movement organization, Free the Children. In contrast to the relative failure of adult decision-makers to implement the participation rights of children, the contemporary children's movement advances a view of children as empowered, knowledgeable, compassionate and global citizens, who are nonetheless, like other marginalized groups, in need of special, group-differentiated protections.     

Implementing children’s right to be heard: Local attenuations of a global commitment

A critical challenge for human rights and human security alike turns on diminution of subject audibility and voice and the reduction of rights-bearing subjects to mere referent objects of security. Owing in part to inadequate theorization of child/youth subjecthood, this problem is especially acute where the rights and security of young people are at issue. Though the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child makes specific provision for recovery of the voices of children and youth, this may be frustrated at implementation in local settings. Moving beyond the Global South, where this problem has been more readily acknowledged, this article inquires into practices that undermine child/youth rights by reinforcing the subject/object positions of protector/protected in ways that disallow young people’s articulations of their best interests and security needs. Spurious presumptions about young people’s (in)capacity for independent subjecthood as well as emergent rhetorical technologies of silencing and voice-denial are identified.     

PROMISES, PROMISES: CHILD ABUSE PREVENTION IN THE 1980s

The article reviews the history of the evolution of the definition of child abuse as a social problem, then analyzes the related legislative efforts to respond to the problem, giving special emphasis to child abuse prevention. Program outcomes of relevant primary prevention programs are discussed, as well as studies attempting to predict risk of child abuse. Specific conclusions related to the viability of primary prevention of violence to children are presented.     

Welfare reforms,family resources,and child maltreatment

This paper examines the impact of welfare reforms on several measures of child maltreatment. The authors use state‐level data from 1990 to 1998 to examine whether recent welfare reforms have increased or reduced the incidence of reported and substantiated cases of maltreatment, the incidence of specific types of substantiated maltreatment—physical abuse and neglect—and the number of children living in out‐of‐home care. The welfare reforms considered are the imposition of: family caps, lifetime limits, work requirements, sanctions for non‐compliance, and the restriction of welfare benefits to immigrants. How welfare benefit levels and changes in state Earned Income Tax Credit programs affect reports and substantiated cases of maltreatment are also considered. Evidence strongly indicates that reductions in states' welfare benefit levels increase the number of children in out‐of‐home care, and some evidence indicates that strict lifetime welfare limits and tougher sanctions for noncompliance are related to higher levels of substantiated maltreatment. The evidence on family caps is mixed: family caps appear to be associated with fewer instances of substantiated maltreatment, but more children in out‐of‐home care. Because most of the welfare reforms examined have been in effect for only a short time, these results should be considered preliminary. Overall, however, they provide some evidence that the recent welfare reforms in the United States may have increased child maltreatment. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy and Analysis and Management.     

Constructions of migrant rights in Canada: is subnational citizenship possible?

Devolutionary trends in immigration and social welfare policy have enabled different levels of government to define membership and confer rights to people residing within the political boundary of a province or municipality in ways that may contradict federal legal status. Drawing upon theories of postnational and deterritorialized citizenship, we examined the legal construction of social rights within federal, provincial, and municipal law in Toronto, Ontario. The study of these different policy arenas focuses on rights related to education, access to safety and police protection, and income assistance. Our analysis suggests that the interplay of intra-governmental laws produces an uneven terrain of social rights for people with precarious status. We argue that while provincial and municipal governments may rhetorically seek to advance the social rights of all people living within their territorial boundaries, program and funding guidelines ensure that national practices of market citizenship and the policing of non-citizen subjects are reproduced at local levels.     

‘The Cooling of Hearts’: Community Truth-Telling in Northern Uganda

Recent national and international debates on truth and reconciliation in Uganda have emphasized the importance of incorporating local-level mechanisms into a national transitional justice strategy. The Juba Peace Talks represented an opportunity to develop and articulate sufficient and just alternatives and complementary mechanisms to the international criminal model. The most commonly debated mechanism is the Acholi process known as mato oput (drinking the bitter root), a restorative justice approach to murder. Drawing on 2 months of research in nine internally displaced persons’ camps in 2007, we examine local justice practices in the region of northern Uganda to consider their potential, promise and pitfalls to realizing a successful truth-telling process. We find that although local mechanisms could help facilitate reconciliation in the region, truth-telling is but one part of a conciliatory process complicated by a national context of fear and the complexity of the victim–perpetrator identity at the community level. These locally informed insights help move forward the debate on such mechanisms in Uganda and add useful insights into community processes in the field of transitional justice more generally.