Social Workers and Abused Children

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at how differential attitudes towards different social groups leads to differential treatment and thereby outcomes, for the families of abused children. The paper provides scholarly material supporting the above contention and also looks at what the social work profession can do to discourage such sentiments while simultaneously making itself more responsive to victims. The writer explores a selected client system and looks at how families existing within different socioeconomic or racial contexts can experience variable treatment at the hands of social workers. Specifically, the paper explores the seriousness with which child abuse is addressed by social workers when that abuse occurs in non-white homes or is perpetrated by a woman and not by a man. The paper also looks at cultural factors which social workers overlook at their peril and what can be done by social workers to mitigate the effects of child mistreatment. In the end, the writer maintains that there are flaws in the system but also hope for the future.

Outline:
Abstract
Family Unit in Different Contexts

From the Paper:

"At the same time, social workers face a number of challenges that professionals even a generation or so ago simply did not encounter. For one thing, our society - by which it is meant Anglo-American society predominantly - is changing rapidly and becoming more diverse than in the past. As a result, social workers working with troubled families must deal with cultural and religious assumptions and cosmologies that were scarcely present before the 1970s - or even 1980s. The end result of all this is that people from different cultures must be communicated with in different ways and allowances must be made for the fact that certain procedures - such as physical examinations of an abused child - may cause pain for the non-offending parent (assuming he or she has been reared in a "traditional" faith such as Hinduism) in a way that they would not for someone reared in a more secular manner. Similarly, religious families already wracked by grief or by pangs of guilt do not need social workers to inject their own cynicism about religion into any discussions occurring between the parties."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Corcoran, Jacqueline. (1999). Solution-focused interviewing with child protective services clients. Child Welfare, 78(4): 461-479.
• DeVries, Rheta. (2000). Vygotsky, Piaget and education: A reciprocal assimilation of theories and educational practices. New Ideas in Psychology, 18(2/3): 187-213.
• Davis, Liane V. (1991). Violence and families. Social Work, 36(5): 371-373.
• Fischer, Kurt W., and Hencke, Rebecca W. (1996). Infants' construction of actions in context: Piaget's contribution to research on early development. Psychological Science, 7(4): 204-210.
• Garbarine, J., Garbarino, James, and Stocking, S. Holly. (1980). Protecting children from abuse & neglect: Developing and maintaining effective support systems for families. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, Inc.

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