Have Social Workers Abandoned Child Welfare?
From the President
By Yvonne Chase, PHD, MSW, LCSW, ACSW
Child welfare, and more specifically child protection, has been my focus for most of my career, and it has been an integral focus of the social work profession from our very beginning. Social work has evolved over the decades, and social workers are essential in many specialty areas. In all honesty, these specialties often are in areas that are less likely to contribute to burnout and compassion fatigue, and offer better working hours and higher salaries.
In the mid-1990’s, I served on the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse & Neglect, a body that was formed to report directly to Congress on the systems that were in place to protect children. The board visited several programs across the country, and while we found several “pockets of excellence,” our overall findings were dismal. We found a system that was overburdened with reports and lacked the staffing to investigate complaints in a timely manner. Children were being abused in their own homes as well as in out-of-home placements. The board produced four reports between 1990 and 1993, in which we included what we declared a national emergency and called for an effective federal policy to protect children in this country. Congress listened and did nothing.
Shortly after the board’s four reports were published, Harry Specht and Mark Courtney published “Unfaithful Angels: How the Social Work Profession Has Abandoned Its Mission.” One of the chapters describes what the authors called a movement of social work into private practice and away from the poor. I view the movement into private practice as a necessary step in the profession’s evolution, and I do not agree that we have turned away from the poor. However, I have witnessed many MSW graduates leave child welfare and enter private practice or other specialty areas. Is there an obvious reason?
If we take a serious look at the child welfare system, the answer becomes more obvious. The child welfare system is broken. Staff retention rates are at an all-time low; complaints are assessed and responded to in order of importance; supervisors are overburdened; and foster parents are not receiving the support they need to address the trauma the children placed in their homes have experienced. Many states, unable to fill social worker positions, have reduced the requirements for child welfare workers to a high school diploma.
While a child welfare worker certainly has tasks that are difficult—like removing children from their homes—there is an essential task of developing a “workable” plan for the child to be reunified with the family. Without social workers, this task is falling to individuals who are not trained to work with families to create a safe environment for children rather than a long-term placement in foster care. How do we prepare students to address the barriers in a broken system? Unfortunately, restructuring the system cannot be accomplished in a couple of years.
A colleague of mine told me many years ago that to achieve any lasting change, we need advocates both inside and outside of a system. We need social workers who are willing to advocate for change from inside and from outside of the child welfare system, and continuously until it becomes the system it was intended to be: one that protects children and supports families who need help. We know what the system lacks and what is needed. By 2030, we could see an article titled “A New Child Welfare System—A Legacy for Social Work!” This will not happen without a serious commitment on our part.
“History will judge us by the difference we make in the everyday lives of children.”
― Nelson Mandela
Contact Yvonne Chase at president@socialworkers.org