Week 5: Child Protective Services and Risk Factors

This week we were to read about the field of work dealing with the issues of Child Maltreatment.
In this section I want to focus on what i learned about Child Protective Services (CPS) and also about risk factors and what they really mean.

So as I mentioned in my last post, I want to be a social worker. I've always thought of CPS as the area I wanted to go into. I want to be an advocate for children and teens that don't have the voice or power to help themselves or their situations. CPS helps children in 4 ways.

1)By investigating reports of maltreatment
2)By providing treatment services
3) By Coordinating services offered by other agencies in the community to child victims and their families,
4) By implementing preventive services.

These roles are broken into two different categories as well: Preventative and Post-investigation services.
Preventative services are supposed to increase parents knowledge of proper childhood development and give them them (and in my opinion children too) the tools they need to identify an abusive situation and how to prevent and stop theses situations. This is an area that I really feel is super important. Preventative actions for anything is not only cost-effective for those of you who are money oriented, but also help more people over a longer amount of time because you are stomping on a problem before it even gets started! If I had the choice to decide a budget for these services (like I did in a project for my Juvenile Delinquency class a few years ago) I would put most into preventive services. These services include day care, parent education, counseling and other many other volunteer programs. This is definitely the area of CPS I would like to work in.

The second role CPS has is Post-investigation services. These are where we help increase a child's safety through assessing family strengths, weaknesses, and needs. Post-investigation services include individual and family counseling as well as foster care and other legal services. However I don't think that these two forms of CPS are necessarily separate. If I were to advocate for a child who has been in an abuse environment, I would also be out there in the community providing information wherever I go about these issues to help prevent these kinds of abusive environments.

CPS is not however, without problems. Due to funding issues as well as the lack of properly trained social workers there are problems with investigating within' the proper about of time (anywhere from 24-48 hours). A worker can be given more caseloads that would stretch their ability to help individuals with the time and quality they need. While CPS still have these problems today, these services still do good in our society. Though I hope someday we can see it work to the capacity I know it can and should. Maybe I'll be working and making that difference while I'm in the field of Social Work.

Now for a little bit of a jump.

In discussions, Dr. B brought up the important topic of risk factors. Risk factors surrounding the different forms abuse increase the chances that abuse can happen. HOWEVER, just because a family has risk factors and other extra hurdles to jump does not mean that they are abusive. For example, it is more common for a family of young parents to become abusive as well as families in a low SES (socioeconomic status) bracket. That does not mean that young low SES parents are going to be abusive. Yes, it increases their risk, but these parents can often times be resilient in others ways. They might have help they are seeking, or have different cultural or community support to move past these obstacles. It's really hard to keep this in mind with the language we use when we talk about perpetrators and victims of abuse in the media and in everyday life. We definitely do need to be aware of risk factors, however, we must make sure we are not labeling or condemning families or individuals with these risk factors. Labeling can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, and then what? Instead we should be acknowledge these risk factors, and if we know someone with them, we should talk to them about it. Just keep this in mind when you're reading my posts and even when watching tv, the news, reading a paper, anything. You'll be doing our society a bit of good. :)

Anyways, I think that covers what I wanted to talk to y'all about today.

-Alex