SOCIAL WORK: EXAM #2 STUDY GUIDE

Chapter 12: Child Welfare Current Issues and Trends

1. Current Issues and Trends The rediscovery of child abuse and neglect by first the medical profession and then the general public led to an explosive growth in the size of the child protective services system and in the number of children in foster care. In recent years, social workers and the courts, alarmed at the immense number of children in out-of-home placements, have been taking a careful look at our approach to the problem of children in need of protection and have been making some fundamental changes in the way we respond to the problem. A consensus has developed that the child welfare system has one primary and two secondary goals. The primary goal is to protect children from harm. The secondary goals are to preserve family units, which include birth and extended family networks, and to promote children's development into adults who can live independently and contribute to their communities.65 In pursuit of these goals, there have been four significant developments: an emphasis on permanency planning, an emphasis on family-based services, a tendency by the courts to order states to upgrade services to children in need of protection, and a concern with the rights and needs of American Indian communities, families, and children. 2. Emphasis on Permanency Planning The roots of child protective services are in the societies for the prevention of cruelty to children, which engaged in "child rescue" work. They viewed their role as removing the child from a bad environment, going to court to gain custody and prosecute the parent, finding a new living situation for the child, and then moving on to another child in need of rescue. They did not view their role as working with either the child's family of origin or the child after placement. In the 1920s, as child protective services became a part of the profession of social work, people in the field began to question the wisdom of this approach, which wrote off a child's family and consigned the child to a life in limbo. De Francis notes that "they began to question this approach in terms of asking, 'Is it truly beneficial to the child to rescue the child from a bad home? Would it not make better sense if we provided services so that we made responsible parents out of irresponsible people?'"66 This approach of keeping the family together, if possible, and working to return the child quickly, if not, has become the guiding philosophical principle of child protective services. The current emphasis on permanency planning began in 1959 with a study by Henry Maas and Richard Engler entitled Children in Need of Parents. This study, still considered a landmark in the field, looked at foster care in nine representative communities. The authors found that there were about 260,000 children in foster care in the United States at the time of the study. They estimated that in no more than 25 percent of the cases was it probable that the child would return to his or her own home. Further, the researchers found regular parent-child contact in fewer than half the cases. They concluded that "there are roughly 168,000 children today who are in danger of staying in foster care throughout their childhood years."67 Thus, far from being a temporary haven for children while their family problems were being corrected, foster care was turning into a permanent arrangement for a huge number of children. Even worse, because the placement was considered temporary, no long-term plans were made to (1) return the children to their own homes, (2) legally free them for adoption, or (3) define their foster home as permanent so that they could develop a permanent bond with their foster families. Because of this lack of planning, many of these children would grow up, not in one foster home, but in a series of homes. Concern about children "adrift" in foster care, stimulated by Maas and Engler's study and by other works—notably Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, by Goldstein, Freud, and Solnit—has led to the development of one of the guiding principles of child protective services: permanency planning.68 Permanency planning emerged in the 1970s as an antidote to long-standing abuses in the child welfare system, especially the inappropriate removal of children from their homes and the recurring drift of children in foster care. Its philosophical and programmatic emphasis was on the primacy of the family as the preferred environment for child rearing. The concept of permanency planning now encompasses a systematic, goal directed and timely approach to case planning for all children subject to child protection intervention aimed at promoting stability and continuity. The underlying rationale is that when children cannot be protected within their family and are removed from home, often the best outcome is effective intervention that improves their parents' skills or capacity to care for them and enables the children to return home. Permanency options include preventing unnecessary placements through family preservation, reunification (returning children to their family home), permanent foster care, permanent relative care, and adoption.69 Meezan enunciates seven principles that must be followed for permanency planning to fulfill its promise: There must be early identification of cases in which family dysfunction can lead to the placement of the child. There must, whenever possible, be work with parents and children in their own homes to prevent entry into the placement system. Removal of a child from home must be based on specific guidelines and should occur only after it has been determined that the parents, with agency supports, cannot remediate the situation with the child in the home. Before or shortly after the removal of the child from a home, there must be an examination of the various placement alternatives, and the child must be placed in the least detrimental alternative available. There must be established for children and their families a time-limited casework plan designed to achieve, as soon as possible, an appropriate permanent placement. Appropriate services must be provided to establish and carry out this plan. There must be established a consistent set of guidelines regarding the termination of parental rights that can be implemented if children cannot return to their homes. There must be sufficient resources available for the child who cannot return home to ensure that a permanent substitute home can be arranged.70 A series of federally funded demonstration projects in the 1970s experimented with methods of implementing permanency planning. The cumulative effect was to reduce the number of children in foster care dramatically—from 520,000 in 1977 to 275,000 in 1984.71 After 1984, however, numerous factors in the social environment caused this trend to reverse. Among these factors were the crack cocaine epidemic, economic problems leading to increased poverty and unemployment, AIDS, and a sharp rise in births to single mothers, particularly teenagers. By 2000, the number of children in out-of-home care had increased to 547,415. Increased knowledge regarding problems in the foster care system and the development of the principles of permanency planning led to the passage of Public Law 96-272, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, amended as the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. This act directs federal fiscal incentives toward permanency planning objectives—namely, the development of preventive and reunification services and adoption subsidies. In order for states to be eligible for increased federal funds, they must implement a service program designed either to reunite children with their families or to provide a permanent substitute home. They are required to take steps, such as the establishment of foster placement review committees and procedures for regular case review, to ensure that children enter foster care only when necessary, that they are placed appropriately, and that they are returned home or else are moved on to permanent families in a timely fashion. The act also creates fiscal incentives for states to seek adoptive homes for hard-to-place children, including children who are disabled, older, or minority group members.72 Meezan has analyzed the child protective services system in the United States in relation to the principles of permanency planning. He concludes that the system falls short in a number of ways but that, because permanency planning is relatively new, the system should be viewed as being in transition. He finds that the system performs well for most children and that "it is this record of achievement that gives us confidence that current deficiencies can be corrected." 3. Emphasis on Family Preservation The massive increase in the number of children in foster care that began to accelerate in the early 1980s led policymakers to look for ways of reversing the trend. One of the major methods social workers have adopted is what is generally referred to as family preservation services. This approach is based on the belief that in many cases where out-of-home placement appears to be imminent, it is possible to prevent placement by the provision of intense services delivered in the child's home over a brief, time-limited period. This approach became a part of federal child welfare policy in 1993 with the passage of the Family Preservation and Support Act that was part of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. Family preservation programs are based on formal theories including crisis intervention theory, family systems theory, social learning theory, ecological theory, and attachment theory. They are also based on an explicit value base that includes: The idea of the family as the ideal developmental context for the child The notion of services as first and foremost family supportive and family strengthening A primary focus on meeting basic developmental needs of children in culturally acceptable ways, as opposed to identifying and treating child/family psychopathology More focus on what might be termed an ecological perspective—looking at the effects of both proximate and distal environments on child outcomes—and moving from changing children and families from the "inside out" to the "outside in" (e.g., by working to create more supportive environments as well as by improving individual coping skills)74 Family preservation services begin, as do most child welfare interventions, when a child is referred to an agency as being in danger of serious harm. A social worker investigates the complaint and, if the complaint is confirmed, decides if the family is a good candidate for family preservation services. For the family to be considered an appropriate case for family preservation services, the child must be at risk of placement, but the social worker must be convinced that the child can remain safely in his or her own home if intensive services are provided. Depending on the model of family preservation being applied, the family is given services for periods ranging from four to six weeks in the most intensive models to three to six months in the less intensive models. The social workers providing services have small caseloads and work with each family for many hours each week, sometimes twenty or more. After provision of the brief, intensive services, the agency withdraws to a supervisory role and leaves the family to function—presumably with a greatly improved level of child care and problem-solving capacity. Family preservation has grown in popularity to the degree that it can now be said to be the policy of choice for dealing with child abuse and neglect. Some form of family preservation service is now in place in every state in the union. The services are provided by both public and private agencies, generally in some form of partnership. The approach is specified in laws at both the federal and state levels and in the policies of public and private agencies. Initial evaluations of family preservation services were glowing in their praise and led to near universal acclaim of this method as the key to dealing with child welfare. More recent (and better designed) studies have not been so positive; these, combined with powerful anecdotal accounts of child deaths and injuries during provision of family preservation services, have prompted some serious reevaluation. The most significant study to date was conducted in Illinois by the University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children, under contract with that state's Department of Children and Family Services. This study ran for three years and collected data on several levels. The conclusion of this study was that the family preservation program in Illinois, called Families First, had no effect on either the frequency or the duration of placements.75 Data from studies such as this, combined with his experience on child death review teams, have led influential family violence expert, and former dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice, Richard Gelles to call for a return to a child protection rather than a family preservation approach to child welfare. Gelles writes: Children must come first in social policies, and in allocation of social resources, children must come first in the words and deeds of the agencies that are entrusted with protecting them. It is time to move beyond the lip service paid to children and to develop a social structure, from top to bottom, that guarantees their safety, both by supporting families so that abuse will not occur in the first place and by absolutely guaranteeing the future safety and developmental integrity of children who have been abused and neglected.76 An additional criticism of family preservation programs is that they are, in theory, to provide "concrete" services—financial assistance, food, shelter, child care, respite—as well as counseling. In practice, they do little of this. This is important because, as we have noted, some analysts believe that one of the principal causes of family crisis is not psychopathology but the inability to deal with extreme poverty.77 Traditional foster care has proved to be beneficial in terms of physical and emotional health and academic performance for the majority of children involved. It compares favorably in some studies with family preservation.78 These comparisons are, of course, with other children at risk for out-of-home placement. When compared with all children, those in foster care exhibit significantly greater problems in functioning and development.79 In practice, no single solution can be expected to work for all cases of at-risk children. A range of service options, including family preservation, foster care, and even residential programs, offers the best hope of dealing with this problem. 4. Reaction to Family Preservation In 1997, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which has been viewed by some as representing a shift in federal policy away from family preservation and toward child-centered policy. The main aspect of the act that leads to this belief is the act's clarification of the requirement that agencies must demonstrate that they have made "reasonable efforts" to preserve a family before parental rights are terminated. Under this new law, reasonable efforts are not required when the court has found that: The parent has subjected the child to "aggravated circumstances" as defined in state law (including but not limited to abandonment, torture, chronic abuse, and sexual abuse). The parent has committed murder or voluntary manslaughter or aided or abetted, attempted, conspired, or solicited to commit such a murder or manslaughter of another child of the parent. The parent has committed a felony assault that results in serious bodily injury to the child or another one of the children. The parental rights of the parent to a sibling have been involuntarily terminated. In these specified cases, states are not required to make reasonable efforts to preserve or to reunify the family. They are required to hold a permanency hearing within 30 days and to make reasonable efforts to place the child for adoption with a legal guardian or in another permanent placement. The 1997 act is not as anti-family preservation as family preservation advocates feared initially. Although agencies are relieved of the requirement to make family preservation efforts in these specified instances, they continue to be required to make reasonable efforts to preserve and reunify families in all other cases. More important, the new law specifically continued and expanded the Family Preservation and Support Services Program, renaming it the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program. Funding levels for the program were increased to $275 million in 1999, $295 million in 2000, and $305 million in 2001. In 2002, this act was reauthorized for an additional five years, and the administration's budget proposal for it for 2007 amounts to $545 million. In 2006, the act was again reauthorized, this time under the name The Children and Families Services Improvement Act. The act is funded in the amount of $305 million in mandatory funds, and an additional $200 million which Congress must authorize each year through the annual appropriations process. The law was reauthorized in 2014 as part of the Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act. The act is currently funded at $428 million with allocations to states ranging from a low of $375,000 for Wyoming to a high of $33 million for California. 5. Class Action Lawsuits on Behalf of Children in Foster Care There is an additional reason why many states are embracing the concept of family preservation services, and it is related to another trend in child welfare services. A number of states have faced class action lawsuits on behalf of children in the foster care system: lawsuits demanding that the states fully fund and implement the provisions of Public Law 96-272. Public Law 96-272, discussed earlier, was intended to be a "major restructuring of Social Security Act programs for the care of children who must be removed from their own homes . . . to lessen the emphasis on foster care placement and to encourage greater efforts to find permanent homes for children either by making it possible for them to return to their own families or by placing them in adoptive homes."80 Unfortunately, the experience in the 1980s was characterized by a huge increase in child welfare caseloads, coupled with a decrease in budget and staff in most agencies. As a result, services to children in foster care actually deteriorated during the 1980s. In response to the problem of the foster care system being unable to meet the spirit or letter of the law as written in P.L. 96-272, in the late 1970s the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) began the Children's Rights Project that has now evolved into an independent organization called Children's Rights. In Missouri in 1983, in the case of G.L. v. Zumwalt, the ACLU was able for the first time to get children in foster care recognized as a class and to get the court to order relief for the entire class. Since that time, Children's Rights has successfully pursued cases in Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Washington D.C., and Wisconsin. In each of these states, reform plans have been developed and approved by the federal courts, and Children's Rights staffs are monitoring each system's progress. The judgments in these cases generally mandate government agencies to take affirmative steps to improve the child welfare system by: Keeping foster care temporary and finding permanent families for children and youth who cannot return home Providing children with adequate services, including medical, dental, mental health, and educational services Mandating caseload caps for caseworkers, giving them sufficient time to tend to children in their caseloads Maintaining an adequate array of foster homes so that children have real homes and are not placed in institutions Providing increased and better training for caseworkers to help them adequately assess risks and safety of children at home and in foster care Implementing accountability mechanisms Using data analysis for management purposes so that trends and trouble spots can be identified and reforms implemented when necessary81 The judgments typically order state governments to upgrade the child welfare system to make it able to meet the requirements of P.L. 96-272. Orders typically require the states to greatly increase the number of social workers in the child welfare system, hire more professionally trained (both BSW- and MSW-level) social workers and supervisors, improve in-house staff training, decrease caseloads by as much as two-thirds, increase training of foster parents, provide special therapeutic foster homes for seriously disturbed children, and develop permanent placement plans for children within six months of their entry into the system. The Children's Rights Project, as well as efforts by other interested parties that have filed suit in other states, is drastically altering the child welfare system. These lawsuits demand better protection of children and higher standards for foster care. States and municipalities are no longer able to excuse poor care for foster children with the argument that they cannot afford the staff and other resources necessary to do better. The courts, using the doctrine of "the right to freedom from harm," have recognized foster children as a class with constitutional rights to quality services, and the states will have no choice but to come up with the necessary resources. 6. Separation of Investigation from Service In addition to increases in litigation on behalf of children, child protective workers are also faced with lawsuits by parents who feel wrongly accused. This has led to higher standards of proof of abuse and less worker discretion in decision making. Workers often feel torn between their roles as criminal investigators and their roles as helpers with families. One response to this difficulty is a proposal to divide the investigation function from the caregiving function. Police could be given the former, freeing the social worker to provide a broad range of family supports with no stigma of social control.83 There are several perils in this proposal. One is that this change would further the withdrawal of financial support for services in favor of investigation. It is currently easier to get money for more police officers than for more social workers. The proposal also might result in less of all kinds of services to families in crisis. Social workers, while playing an investigative and even coercive role, are also more likely than police officers to see the need for and help find services families need. Recall that more than 75 percent of abuse reports are not substantiated; this 75 percent would have no contact with a social worker unless referred by the police. These families are most likely in need of services other than family preservation; how likely are they to get access to those services under these circumstances? 7. The American Indian Child Welfare Act At the same time that America was struggling with the general crisis in child welfare caused by the recognition of child maltreatment and the corresponding increase in referrals and foster home placements, a smaller crisis was developing in the American Indian community. This crisis was a direct result of social changes affecting the supply of adoptable infants. In the 1960s and 1970s, birth control technology improved, abortion became legal, and social norms underwent a startling and rapid change that made single motherhood socially acceptable. The result of these changes was that the supply of what were referred to as "blue-ribbon babies" (healthy white infants born to primarily middle-class white unwed mothers) declined to practically nothing. The response of social agencies and couples wishing to form a family through adoption was to begin to define groups of children who had previously been classified as hard-to-place, or even unadoptable, as adoptable. Older and handicapped children came to be considered good candidates for adoption. In addition, the previous practice of attempting to match a child as completely as possible with adoptive parents (i.e., it was considered desirable, although not essential, that a child with red hair be placed with a couple where one spouse had red hair) was ruled out as an important adoption principle. As this principle was ruled out, transracial and transcultural adoption came to be defined as not only acceptable but desirable. As Jacobs notes "Thus out of necessity, due to changing middle-class, white gender dynamics, the adoption of Indian children by non-Indian families became more acceptable in this period."85 In the 1960s, social agencies identified the American Indian community as a rich potential source of adoptable infants to replenish the supply diminished by the factors identified above. Two projects were developed by prestigious professional organizations that sought to increase the adoption of Indian children by non-Indian parents. One was the Indian Adoption Project jointly sponsored by the Child Welfare League of America and the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. This project was later incorporated into a new project, the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA) a more widely focused project dedicated to placing "hard-to-place" or "special needs" children, that continued to place Indian children with non-Indian adoptive families. The result of these efforts was a rapid increase in the number of Indian children placed permanently with non-Indian families and the steady circulation of anecdotal accounts of violation of biological parents rights and disregard of Indian culture and practices (notably the importance of the extended family in the rearing of Indian children) in child removal and placement decisions. In1968, responding to an inordinate number of complaints from tribal members regarding the behavior of child welfare officials, the Devils Lake Sioux Tribe of North Dakota requested that the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA) conduct an investigation of the situation. The AAIA investigation found that, of 1,100 Devils Lake Sioux living on the reservation, 275, 25 percent, had been separated from their families. Suspecting that the practice affected other Indian communities, the AAIA analyzed national data from state and private social service agencies. They found that, in most states with large American Indian populations, 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been separated from their families and placed in foster or adoptive homes or institutions, a rate far greater than that for non-Indian children. Indian families and their advocates charged that the reason for these disproportionate statistics was at least partially due to social workers using ethnocentric and middle-class criteria to unnecessarily remove Indian children from their families. In response to this problem, Indian activists and their allies sought to bring Indian child welfare under the control of Indian nations. In 1976, the AAIA presented its findings to the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs who responded that they found the situation "shocking [and that it] cries out for sweeping reform at all levels of government." The Committee further found that state, local, and federal officials had abused their child removal powers to "strike at the heart of Indian communities by literally stealing Indian children."86 The result of the hearings was the passage, in 1978, of the Indian Child Welfare Act. The first thing the act did was to create a uniform system for standardizing statistics and procedures regarding placement of Indian children because these varied so greatly across the country that keeping tabs on the situation was nearly impossible. The main thrust of the act was to "ensure Indian families will be accorded a full and fair hearing when child placement is at issue, establish a priority for Indian adoptive and foster families to care for Indian children . . . and generally promote the stability and security of Indian family life."87 The act sought to shift the balance of power in child placement decision making to tribal communities so that they could regulate their own child welfare issues by keeping the children in the tribe and protecting the Indian children as Indians. Under this act, all child welfare court proceedings involving Indian children must be heard in tribal courts if possible, and tribes have the right to intervene in state court proceedings. The Indian Child Welfare Act also established the Indian Child Welfare Grant program that allocates approximately $11 million annually to support a broad array of child welfare services.

Chapter 10: The Nature and Causes of Poverty

1. Different Types of Poverty Although the preceding data are useful for giving us a general description of the characteristics of the poor, these data are static. That is, they tell us what the population looks like at various points in time but say little, if anything, about differences other than demographic ones within the population. Sociologists have long known that the poverty population is not homogeneous, and recent studies, notably the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, have added greatly to our understanding of the many differences within the poverty population. 2. Three Levels of Poverty In their classic study of poverty, Segalman and Basu posited the existence of three different segments in the poverty population: the transitional poor, the marginal poor, and the residual poor.5 The transitional poor are those people whose experience of poverty is only temporary and is usually brief. Poverty for this group is generally the result of some life change or misfortune. Examples of situations likely to result in transitional poverty include a person returning to school to finish a degree and living on a bare-bones budget while doing it, a person unemployed because of a plant closing who is unable to find a new job and finally moves to a more economically prosperous area, a person who has an extended illness, a newly divorced homemaker, and a widow for whom it takes a year or so to adjust to the new realities of her situation, including entering or reentering the job market. Segalman and Basu say that new immigrants generally go through a period of transitional poverty before learning the many things they need to know to compete in the job market. The key characteristics of transitional poverty are that it is brief, temporary, and generally related to specific events in the life of the person experiencing it. We don't worry very much about transitional poverty. The reason these people are experiencing poverty is clear—a homemaker going through a divorce is obviously going to experience a bad patch in her life. We have effective programs in place to deal with transitional poverty—the displaced homemaker can access SNAP benefits, a TANF grant, and numerous vocational rehabilitation programs to help her return to the job market. And transitional poverty, as indicated by its very name, is brief—our displaced homemaker will most likely be a public charge for only a limited amount of time. The marginal poor are the group often referred to as the "working poor." They generally have jobs, but because of low educational levels and few skills, or because of discrimination, the jobs they have are low paying and insecure. These people are nearly always at the margin of the poverty line and, depending on luck and the economy, may be on one side or the other of that line. In periods of prosperity such as the economic boom of the 1990s, many of the marginal poor were earning near-middle-class incomes because of the great amount of work and overtime available. When the economy is in recession, such as 2007-2008 many of these folks fall back below the poverty line. The main difference between the transitional poor and the marginal poor is that the transitional poor are experiencing a brief episode of poverty, may never experience another, and may quickly rise well above the poverty line. For the marginal poor, rising out of poverty and sinking back into it constitute a long-term pattern, and it is doubtful for most that they will ever rise much above the poverty level. We also don't worry much about marginal poverty. The reason these people experience poverty is obvious—a person who dropped out of high school is going to have a hard time maintaining steady and well-paid employment. The solution to marginal poverty is also clear—our high school dropout needs to get some kind of education or training to become competitive in the job market. We have effective programs in place to deal with this type of poverty; for example, the extensive network of community colleges that have developed over the past half-century is focused on programs that will lift people out of marginal poverty. Our high school dropout might complete a one-year certificate program in welding, auto body repair, or any number of other programs that will lead to steady, well-paid employment and lift him out of the marginal poverty population. The residual poor are a group who remain in poverty over an extended period of time. They are generally dependent on welfare benefits for their daily living, and their poverty may well be intergenerational. This group has received a good deal of attention in recent years, and they are often referred to as "the underclass."6 Most media discussion of the problem of poverty in the United States, or of the corollary welfare problem, generally refers to the residual poor. This is the group that is hard to reach and that often seems almost immune to help; this is the group that we don't understand; this group is thus frustrating to a society that likes to find rapid solutions to problems. 3. Data on Different Types of Poverty and Poverty Patterns The preceding discussion of different types of poverty is based on Census Bureau data, which are of somewhat limited usefulness because they consist of statistical "snapshots" taken at various points in time. The data do not answer questions related to the proportion of the poor that is residual, the experience of poverty across the life cycle, the extent to which families and individuals move out of, or remain in, poverty, and consequently, the factors that are related to escaping poverty. To make up for this deficiency, several longitudinal (meaning "over time") data sets have been developed. Called panel studies because they follow a panel of respondents for a number of years, these include the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), and the most useful for our purposes, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The PSID was developed in 1968 by a group of social scientists at the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan.7 For this study, the researchers selected a random sample of more than 5,000 families, and repeated annual interviews have been conducted with the families each year since 1968. There are now fifty years of data on these families. In this section, we summarize some of the major findings of the longitudinal studies. In the following section, we use these data to examine some of the major theories on causes of poverty. The official poverty rate in the United States remains fairly steady at between 11 and 15 percent. We now have a good deal of longitudinal date to further delve into the current 12.7 percent to try to understand who is in this group, how long people are in it, patterns of entry and exit from poverty, what the risks are over the life course of entering poverty, and similar questions, collectively referred to as the dynamics of poverty. Cellina, McKernan, and Redcliff conducted a meta-analysis of research about these, and other, poverty dynamics. They divide the research into attempts to answer four questions. The first question asks what are the probabilities associated with entry into, exits from, and reentries into poverty? The research reviewed found that the likelihood of entering poverty is roughly 4 percent per year for the U.S. population and that just over half of the population will experience poverty at some time before age 65. The probability of ending a poverty spell is around 33 percent on average in any given year. The research on recurrent poverty suggests that of all those who exit a poverty spell, about half will return to poverty within five years, a cycle that can add up to a significant number of total years in poverty (persistent poverty). The second question is how persistent is poverty? The research about this suggests that most people who begin a poverty spell end it quickly, with around 50 percent experiencing spells of less than one year and around 75 percent experiencing spells of less than four years. The third question looks at the events associated with entries and exits from poverty. The studies reviewed all agree that changes in the labor supply and earnings are most significant in explaining both poverty entry and exit, but changes in household composition, such as changes to or from female headship are also important events in the dynamics of poverty. The final question involved looking at patterns of poverty among various demographic subgroups. Regarding this question, the research was remarkably consistent: Blacks, young adults, and female-headed families are particularly vulnerable to poverty entry, low rates of exit, and long spell duration. Common threads also emerged suggesting the importance of employment, education, and marriage as mechanisms for avoiding, exiting, and shortening poverty spells.8 In addition to a snapshot approach, and a longitudinal approach, researchers look at poverty as a life-course risk. Sandoval, Rank, and Hirschl, identify the key concepts in life-course analysis as risk, historical context, and stages of the life course, emphasizing the importance of particular characteristics, such as race and gender that influence the trajectory of the life course. They find that between the ages of 20 and 75, nearly 60 percent of Americans will experience at least one year in poverty, 68 percent of Americans will experience poverty or near poverty (125 percent of the poverty line). The odds of experiencing poverty across adulthood are significantly increased for blacks and those with lower levels of education—91 percent of blacks between the ages of 20 and 75 as compared to 53 percent for whites; 75 percent of people with less than a high school education will experience at least a year in poverty compared with 48 percent of those with more than 12 years of education. Poverty is also very high during early life—before the age of 17, 34 percent of Americans will experience poverty for at least one year. At the other end of the life course, 40 percent of the population between ages 60 and 90 will experience at least one year below the poverty line.

Chapter 10: The Nature and Causes of Poverty

1. Structural Explanations of Poverty—Liberal Version Structural explanations argue that poverty is not a result of individual or cultural factors that we can change by working with individuals on a one-to-one basis. Rather, poverty is viewed as the result of social factors that act on individuals, causing them to exhibit the characteristics that the other theories state are the result of individual or cultural shortcomings. To reduce poverty significantly, according to the structural perspective, the basic fabric of society will need to change. Obviously, this is a perspective that appeals to liberals and radicals and one that conservatives traditionally have opposed. In recent years, however, conservatives have developed their own structural theory, albeit one that is quite different from that espoused by liberals and radicals. What are these structural factors purported to have so much influence over the life chances of people? One of the clearest explanations of these factors from the liberal perspective is presented by the sociologist Leonard Beeghley. Beeghley classifies structural factors that contribute to poverty into four main groups: The way in which the correlates of poverty create a vicious circle that often traps the poor and prevents them from changing their situation. The way the class system reproduces itself over time. The organization of the economy. The continuation of institutionalized discrimination against African Americans and women.54 Sociologists and psychologists have recently added structural explanations of poverty from the perspectives of their respective fields. Sociologist William Julius Wilson argues that poverty is a result of the increasing social isolation of inner city neighborhoods. Psychologist Bernice Lott argues that much of poverty is a result of classism, operationally defined as upper social classes distancing themselves from the poor. 2. Poverty as a Vicious Circle After people are caught in poverty, it becomes a trap from which it is very difficult to escape. There are many elements to this poverty trap. The first is the public assistance system, which, although it seeks to make people self-supporting, often perversely contributes to their inability to escape welfare and poverty. One aspect of the welfare system that traps people in poverty is the fact that people must be so destitute before they become eligible for assistance that they no longer have the resources to obtain employment. Before people can get welfare, they have often lost their home, furniture, and car, and their clothes are old and worn. Obviously, if you don't have a nice outfit to wear to a job interview, if you can't afford to take a trip to another town to look for work where the opportunities may be better, if you don't have a phone for prospective employers to call or an email address to which they can write, and if you do not have a dependable car to commute in, your chances of obtaining a good job and escaping poverty are slim. Cross-national research has repeatedly demonstrated the significant impact that a social welfare state exerts on poverty reduction. Countries with a more comprehensive welfare state (such as the Scandinavian countries) are able to cut poverty much more than those with a weak safety net such as the United States.56 Another element of the vicious circle is crime and the criminal justice system. Poor people are much more likely to be the victims of crime than are people in higher income brackets. They must spend much more time and energy defending themselves against crime than other citizens, time and energy that otherwise might be devoted to escaping poverty. One of the authors once worked in a community school in the inner city area of St. Louis. The school provided educational programs to help people develop marketable job skills, but many people did not take advantage of the courses because they were at night and the people were afraid to walk in that neighborhood after dark. In a very real sense, these folks were trapped in their own homes by their poverty. The other side of this element is what happens to poor people when, as defendants, they come in contact with the criminal justice system. When higher-income people are arrested for a crime, they post bail and go about their lives more or less as usual. When tried, they are represented by competent lawyers who often can strike a bargain for them that allows them to stay out of jail. By contrast, poor people often will be unable to afford bail. Thus, when arrested, they will stay in jail, which means they will lose their jobs, be evicted from their homes or apartments, and lose anything they are making payments on. When a poor person goes on trial, he or she probably will not be able to afford the best lawyer, will have no influence with the judge, and probably will be given a prison term with all its predictable economic consequences. The next element in the vicious circle of poverty is ill health and the health care system. By almost any measure available, the health of the poor is significantly worse than that of the population in general.57 Poor health is both a cause and an effect of poverty. If a person has a health problem, particularly a chronic one, it is going to adversely affect that person's ability to make a living. After a person is poor, his or her access to healthy living conditions becomes limited. Poor people cannot afford to eat the most healthy foods, they may live in conditions that are hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and their homes are more prone to infestations by disease-carrying pests such as rats. Illness also has a more immediate economic effect on the poor than on the general population. When poor people become ill for more than a few days, it is very likely that they will lose their jobs, and it is very unlikely that they will have insurance to cover either the cost of medical care or the lost income from missed work. The health care system in the United States, as we discuss in a later chapter, is designed primarily to serve the middle class, and it does not do a good job of serving the health care needs of the poor. Thus, after poor people become sick, they most likely will have a hard time obtaining efficient, high-quality medical care. Reeves observes that health, as well as education and skills, is a form of human capital, contributing to productivity and, therefore, earnings.58 There is an old saying that it takes money to make money. A corollary of this saying, related to the vicious circle of poverty, is that it takes money to save money. It is a hard fact of economic life that the poor pay more. If poor people need to borrow money, they pay much higher interest rates than the non-poor. Stores in ghetto areas charge higher prices than stores in the suburbs. You must have extra money to take full advantage of sales. For example, middle-income parents often refuse to buy disposable diapers at regular price. They wait until diapers go on sale, at discounts of as much as two or three dollars a box, and then they stock up on several weeks' or even months' worth of diapers. Poor parents who do not have the extra cash to take advantage of the sale end up paying more than the higher-income parents for the same diapers.59 We could discuss numerous other elements of the vicious circle of poverty. The poor lack political power, so they rarely get their way when decisions are being made that could benefit them. Low-income people tend to get married earlier and have children earlier; they thereby increase the chance that their children will grow up poor and in turn marry early and have children early. The educational system tends to define poor children as low achievers, to put them into remedial classes, and thereby to increase the probability of this becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The main point is that the very condition of being in poverty decreases a person's chances of getting out of poverty. Over time, these conditions tend to wear a person down and cause many of the characteristics that Lewis identified as the culture of poverty. 3. Does the Class System Reproduce Itself? Beeghley, among others, argues that one of the causes of poverty is that the class system tends to reproduce itself. He discusses the status attainment process in the United States and concludes, "The result is that the class structure reproduces itself over time and a stratum of impoverished persons is continually recreated."60 What he means is that the children of wealthy parents, through various mechanisms such as inheritance and family connections, themselves grow into wealthy adults; children of middle-class parents become middle-class adults; and children of poor parents, as a result of the socially disadvantaged position into which they are born, are almost automatically doomed to lives of poverty. Does this actually happen? The answer is that no, the class system does not totally reproduce itself, but yes, the lowest and highest classes do. Research on stratification and social mobility is one of the most highly developed areas in contemporary sociology.61 This research seeks to understand how people obtain and change their positions in the social structure. We all like to believe that the United States is the land of opportunity, that our class structure is open, and that people often rise out of poverty into wealth, as in the famous Horatio Alger stories. And indeed, research results indicate that the class system in the United States is open for most people; that is, parents' status has relatively little effect on the status of their children.62 Recent research indicates that while the class system may be fluid for most of the population, it is not for lower-income Americans. Nam, using data from the PSID, compared two cohorts of fathers and sons (sons who were eleven to fifteen years old in 1969 compared with sons who were the same age in 1979). He analyzed the economic positions of the two groups of children when they reached adulthood, between 25 and 27 years of age. His data indicated that high-income status increased between the two cohorts, but low-income status stayed the same—it had become easier for high-income sons to maintain their economically advantaged status over time, but low-income sons' fortunes had not improved. Nam concludes that "These findings imply that America is not becoming more equal for its children, at least in terms of the intergenerational transmission of low-income status."63 Thus, the American dream is alive and well for most people in the country; but for poor people, being born into poverty generally means living out life in poverty. For the poor, the class structure does indeed reproduce itself. 4. The Organization of the Economy This element of the structural explanation of poverty asserts that the organization of the economy is such that some people are forced into poverty. There are two versions of this explanation, the radical version and the liberal version. The radical version is derived from the work of Marx and Engels and claims, basically, that the labor market of capitalist economies cannot provide sufficient employment at above-poverty-line wages to prevent poverty. Behind this problem is the assertion that capitalist economies are organized so that the owners of the means of production (the capitalists) get wealthy by exploiting the workers.64 This perspective further asserts that the welfare system is designed to force people into starvation-level jobs when they are available but to provide enough support when jobs are not available to prevent workers from organizing and overthrowing the capitalist system.65 The basic contention is that in capitalist economies, poor people are poor because this is a necessary condition for others to be rich. In other words, poverty is intentional; it is designed into the fabric of the economy. The second version of the assertion that the organization of the economy forces people into poverty is the liberal version. This version claims that there are two labor markets operating in our society, the primary and the secondary labor markets, sometimes called the core and the periphery. The primary, or core, labor market is the one in which most people in the United States work. Jobs in this labor market pay well; they include benefits such as health coverage, sick leave, a retirement plan, and paid vacation; and they are often fairly secure. Research has conclusively demonstrated a mismatch between the number of living wage jobs versus the number of people who need such jobs.66 However, owing to the way the economy is organized, there are not enough jobs in the primary labor market for everyone. Bartik, for example, analyzed the U.S. labor market and estimates that five to nine million more jobs are needed to meet the needs of the poor and disadvantaged.67 Economists discuss what they call the natural level of unemployment, which means that a certain percent of the labor force must be unemployed, or underemployed, so that businesses will have workers available when they need to expand. Rank reports that over the past forty years, the natural unemployment rate has run between 4 and 10 percent.68 These people who cannot find jobs in the primary labor market are forced into the secondary labor market. The secondary, or peripheral, job market is made up of jobs that do not pay well; they generally include few benefits; and they offer little security. Jobs in the primary labor market are found in government and in industries dominated by large, capital-intensive, oligopolistic firms. Jobs in the secondary labor market are found in small, labor-intensive, highly competitive firms. These are businesses that unions have not been able to organize because of their small size, that cannot pay well because they have to keep costs down to remain competitive and do not offer benefits for the same reason, and that do not offer job security because of the basic instability of their position in the market. The job skills and training (human capital) of workers in the secondary labor market are not much different from those of workers in the primary labor market. It is often just a matter of luck and sometimes geographic location that determine whether a person gets well-paid and secure employment or spends life in a series of minimum-wage jobs at fast-food restaurants or discount stores.69 Beeghley says, "Regardless of the skills people have, the nature of the jobs available to them decisively influences the likelihood of their living poorly." 5. Racial, Sexual, and Age Discrimination Prejudice and discrimination appear to be a major structural component of poverty. As the data reviewed earlier clearly indicate, a disproportionate number of minorities, women, and the elderly are found among the ranks of the poor. Beeghley identifies three mechanisms that he believes account for the large proportion of minorities and women among the poor. First, recruitment procedures used by employers work to the advantage of white males and to the disadvantage of other groups. Second, divorce laws usually grant custody of children to the mother but often do not grant enough child support to provide for them, or if adequate child support is ordered, the courts do not strongly enforce its payment. Third, child-rearing patterns tend to guide women into lower-paying careers or to create the expectation that a woman should be dependent on a husband, thus putting a woman in a bad position when her marriage breaks down and she has to support herself. 6. The Increasing Social Isolation of the Ghetto A recent structural explanation of poverty that is gaining a wide following is the social isolation hypothesis of Harvard University sociologist William Julius Wilson. This explanation is especially popular among liberals who are anxious for an alternative to the extreme culture of poverty interpretation of conservatives such as Edward Banfield. Wilson argues that much of poverty in the United States can be explained by the fact that poor people are geographically and, consequently, socially isolated. That is, poor people are largely confined to housing projects and inner-city ghettos where they are denied contact with the wide variety of influences and opportunities the rest of society enjoys. Wilson contends that the rapid increase in poverty, particularly among inner-city blacks, and the growth of what is now referred to as the underclass have been ironic by-products of the success of the civil rights movement. The ghetto, Wilson states, used to be characterized by vertical integration of different segments of the urban African American population. Lower-, middle-, and upper-class African Americans used to live in the same communities largely because neighborhood segregation provided few options for the higher-income groups. The presence of these economically better off segments of the population resulted in a high degree of social organization in the neighborhoods. By social organization, Wilson means "(1) the prevalence, strength, and interdependence of social networks; (2) the extent of collective supervision that the residents exercise and the degree of personal responsibility they assume in addressing neighborhood problems; and (3) the rate of resident participation in voluntary and formal organizations."71 Today, however, because of the success of the civil rights movement, middle- and upper-class African American professionals have moved out of black inner-city neighborhoods, leaving many of these areas almost totally populated by the unemployed, welfare recipients, drug addicts and alcoholics, the mentally disabled, and other problem-ridden segments of the population. The results have been that these communities have lost their stability, crime and violence have increased, unemployment has increased, female-headed families have become the norm, welfare is the standard form of support, leadership has disappeared, children have few role models, and the inner city has become characterized by a tangle of pathology. Social isolation means several things to the residents of inner-city neighborhoods. First, it means that these communities are characterized by a high concentration of poverty and its associated problems, which Wilson refers to as concentration effects. It also means that the residents lack contact or sustained interaction with individuals or institutions that represent mainstream society; Wilson refers to this as a social buffer. Because of this social buffer, the residents of these areas are unlikely to develop good work habits—if you don't know anyone who gets up each morning to go to work, it is unlikely that you will develop this habit yourself. Also, because businesses often leave inner-city areas along with the higher-income residents who were their best customers, very few jobs are left; the only ones available are generally undesirable and likely to alienate the people who do them. According to Wilson, "the combination of unattractive jobs and lack of community norms to reinforce work increases the likelihood that individuals will turn to either underground illegal activity or idleness or both."72 The results of social isolation look very much like the attributes of the poor that culture of poverty theorists attempt to explain—low work ethic, a high degree and favorable evaluation of welfare dependency, female-headed families, and inability to defer gratification. Wilson admits that these cultural traits exist, but he contends, in opposition to culture of poverty theorists, that they do not result from unique, ghetto-specific values. Culture of poverty theory "places strong emphasis on the autonomous character of the cultural traits once they come into existence. In other words, these traits assume a 'life of their own' and continue to influence behavior even if opportunities for social mobility improve." By contrast, "social isolation does not mean that cultural traits are irrelevant in understanding behavior in highly concentrated poverty areas; rather it highlights the fact that culture is a response to social structural constraints and opportunities." Wilson's social isolation hypothesis is similar to the situational adaptation thesis and the choice model discussed earlier. You will recall that these theories contend that the differences in behavior between poor and nonpoor people are not a result of different values but rather are caused by the different situations in which people find themselves. The value of marriage is functional for two people who have reasonable expectations of a secure future; it makes much less sense for people who know that life will be hard enough on their own and who expect that for a married couple it will only be harder. Wilson's hypothesis deals with the rapid rise of inner-city poverty in recent years and contends that the situation to which poor people have to adapt has gotten quite a lot worse for a large number of people because of social isolation, concentration effects, and social buffering. A great deal of research has been done since Wilson first proposed the social isolation hypothesis. Chow, Johnson, and Austin reviewed the literature and report that since the mid-1990s, over a hundred studies of neighborhood effects are being published per year. They report that the main findings of this huge group of studies are: Considerable social inequality exists among U.S. neighborhoods in terms of socioeconomic and racial segregation. Social problems tend to come bundled together at the neighborhood level in geographic "hot spots." Neighborhood predictors common to many social problems and child and adolescent outcomes tend to be related and include the concentration of poverty, racial isolation, single-parent families, low rate of home ownership, and short length of tenure of residents. Place matters, regardless of factors such as social class, race, and family status. The concentration of poverty appears to have increased significantly during recent decades in concert with the concentration of affluence at the opposite end of the income scale. Other social-ecologic factors besides disadvantage may play a role in well-being, including residential stability, home ownership, density, ethnic heterogeneity, and life cycle status.74 Wilson's social isolation hypothesis has great implications for social policy regarding inner-city poverty. Using this approach instead of the currently prevailing cultural explanations would mean shifting the focus of our policies and programs from attempting to change subcultural traits (by means of classes on family life for teenagers in poverty, counseling sessions aimed at developing an appreciation of the benefits of deferring gratification, and work habits classes) to attempting to change the structure of constraints and opportunities in which inner-city dwellers find themselves. In other words, the social isolation approach to inner-city poverty would involve changing social structures rather than changing individuals. What Americans Believe In this chapter we review various theories and data about the causes of poverty that have been presented by policymakers, social scientists, and social theorists. It is the average citizen, however, who gives money to anti-poverty agencies and who votes candidates into office based on the candidate's perceived beliefs and values. It is thus important for social workers, and other anti-poverty activists, to have some idea of what the average citizen believes are the causes of poverty. There are a number of polls that are carried out at intervals and that contain items relevant to the questions above. In 2017, Howard, Freeman, Wilson, and Brown reviewed a number of these polls conducted between 1990 and 2015 to assess Americans' opinions and beliefs about poverty and welfare. The questions we are interested in are the ones about attitudes toward the poor, beliefs about the causes of poverty, and beliefs about the work behavior of the poor. The first poll was conducted by American National Election Studies (ANES) and asked Americans about their feelings toward the poor in general and people on welfare in specific. The poll used a feeling thermometer scale where 0 means cold or unfavorable, 50 is neutral and 100 means very warm or favorable. The results are presented in Table 10.3 below for surveys conducted in 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2013. It appears that Americans have very positive feelings about the poor, the median over all the years being about 70, but feel much less positively about people on welfare, the median being around 50, with substantial numbers giving scores below 40. The second question is answered by polls conducted by several national media outlets (New York Times, CBS News, NBC News) and by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. These polls queried people about their understanding of the causes of poverty. They were asked to choose between an individual explanation (poverty due to lack of effort by the poor themselves) and a structural explanation (poverty due to circumstances beyond the control of the poor). The results from eight administrations of the polls, spanning from 1990 to 2014 are presented in Table 10.4. These results may partially explain the positive feelings toward the poor reported in Table 10.3. People have, over the years, been consistently more likely to attribute poverty to structural forces outside the poor's control than to lack of effort by the poor themselves. The third question is answered by polls conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard University School of Public Health; National Public Radio and the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government; and the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. These polls asked about people's perceptions of the work behavior of the poor. Basically, they looked at whether people actually believe the stereotype of the poor being in their situation because they are lazy and indolent. The results presented in Table 10.5 of polls taken in 1994, 2001, 2005, and 2012 are interesting. These polls show a large shift in public opinion since 1994, just before welfare reform, and the latest poll in 2012. Between these years, the percentage who believed that most poor people "work but can't earn enough money" grew from 49 to 65, while the percentage who believed that the poor simply did not work decreased from 44 to 23. These figures probably partially explain the public support for the TANF welfare reform, which requires people to work, and for the Earned Income Tax Credit which, although a welfare program that one would think would be unpopular, gives money only to people who can demonstrate a fairly steady and productive work history. 7. A Psychological Structural Explanation As reviewed earlier, explanations of poverty advanced by the discipline of psychology have tended to focus on individual deficiencies. This has recently begun to change as psychologists have looked at external factors impacting individuals and contributing to their low economic status. The American Psychological Association furthered this approach in 2000 when they adopted the Resolution on Poverty and Economic Status that argued for the primacy of social environmental causes of poverty and ended with the promise of advocacy for research, education, and training, and public policy in the interest of low-income people. An example of the new psychological structural explanation of poverty is the theory of social distancing advanced by social psychologist Bernice Lott. Lott argues that a major contributor to poverty is classism, operationalized by members of upper classes creating distance between themselves and their poorer fellow citizens. Based on a review of the research evidence, Lott categorized distancing into three types: Cognitive distancing. This refers to better off members of society holding negative stereotypes of characteristics and behaviors of the poor that explain poverty as a result of individual shortcomings and failure. Examples are beliefs that poor people are dishonest, lazy, dependent, not interested in education, and sexually promiscuous. Institutional distancing. This refers to social barriers that exclude the poor from full social participation. Examples include inferior schools for poor children; low quality and inaccessible health care for the poor; and longer prison sentences and a greater chance of capital punishment for the poor. Institutional distancing may be deliberate and obvious or it may be subtle and indirect, but the result is to reduce opportunities for the poor to improve their position in society. Interpersonal distancing. This refers to the face-to-face classist discrimination that poor people often encounter in their daily activities. Examples are a shopkeeper who closely follows a poor customer obviously suspicious that the person might try to steal something; a grocery store clerk who expresses disapproval over what she sees as extravagant purchases by a customer paying with a Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (food stamps) card; and a thrift store volunteer who refers to a customer as "girl."75 The new psychological structural explanation of poverty is not significant for discovering anything new. After reading this chapter you should recognize that these are all factors that social workers and sociologists have been discussing for years. What is significant about this perspective is that the psychological profession, a profession defined by its focus on individual behavior, is now recognizing structural factors as having a primary impact on the social and economic condition of individuals.

Chapter 12: Child Welfare The Development of Child Welfare Services

1. The Development of Child Welfare Services There were a few child welfare facilities in the United States before the 19th century, notably a home for girls established in New Orleans by the Ursuline Sisters in 1729; the Bethesda House for Boys, founded near Savannah, Georgia, in 1740; and the Charleston Orphan House, established in 1790.37 However, services did not develop to any great extent until well into the 1800s. Most children who could not be cared for by their parents (dependent children) during the colonial years and early years of the republic were either placed in private families and put to work or bound out as apprentices. 2. The Development of Children's Homes As the apprenticeship system declined and the number of dependent children increased during the early 19th century, the first response was to treat dependent children in the same manner as other dependent people: to place them in county poorhouses. A report submitted to the Senate and Assembly of New York in 1823 found 2,604 children living in poorhouses in that state.39 There, children grew up in the company of elderly, alcoholic, sick, insane, and feeble-minded people. A visiting committee of the New York State Charities Aid Association described the plight of children in the Westchester County poorhouse in 1873 as follows: The children, about sixty in number, are in the care of an old pauper woman, whose daughter and whose daughter's child, both born in the poorhouse, make her one of three generations of paupers. The daughter assists in the care of the children. She has a contagious disease of the eyes, which is, apparently, communicated to them. The children are neither properly clothed nor fed; but saddest of all is to see the stolid look gradually stealing over the faces of these little ones, as all the joy of their lives is starved out of them.40 With conditions such as these, it is not surprising that a call for reform began. The Charities Aid Association report continues: "to think what these children must grow up to, what they must become, if they are not soon removed from this atmosphere of vice. . . . Alas! We know only too well what becomes of children who live and grow up in the poorhouse."41 The people of New York State felt so strongly about this problem that in 1875 an Act to Provide for the Better Care of Pauper and Destitute Children was passed. This act made it unlawful for any child over three and under 16 years of age to be committed to a county poorhouse "unless such child be an unteachable idiot, an epileptic or paralytic, or . . . otherwise defective, diseased, or deformed, so as to render it unfit for family care."42 The obvious shortcomings of the poorhouse as a solution to the problem of dependent children resulted in the development of specialized children's institutions. In 1800 there were 3 children's institutions, by 1851 there were 77, and by 1860 there were 124.43 Although the children's homes were a great improvement over county poorhouses, they had many shortcomings. They were large, impersonal, rigid, authoritarian, and generally antifamily. One of the leading critics of institutional care, Charles Loring Brace, felt that: The impersonal custodial care of an institution . . . not only stunted children, it destroyed them. . . . The regimentation did little to build self-reliance, to prepare the child for practical living. . . . [I]nstitutional life, like charity handouts, perpetuated pauperism, and both were dismal failures when it came to helping people to learn to stand on their own.44 In addition to the charge that children's institutions were not appropriate places for rearing children, other problems quickly began to seriously erode the unquestioned acceptance they had enjoyed. One problem was that, in spite of the great growth in the number of institutions, the number of dependent children was growing at a much faster pace. The overflow either ended up in county poorhouses or, more likely, became "street arabs" living on their own. Another problem resulted from the fact that institutions were designed to take care of children for a relatively short period of time "during which education and reeducation for orderly living were provided. Having satisfactorily completed this period of rehabilitation, the male child was placed out by the institution as an apprentice in a particular trade or occupation; the female child was indentured as a domestic servant."45 But the spread of compulsory public education and the decline of the apprentice system greatly lengthened the period of time dependent children needed care. This further increased the pressure on already overcrowded institutions because, as children stayed longer, fewer children could be cared for. 3. The Idea of Foster Family Care The problems of children's institutions and their inability to meet the challenge of caring for dependent children led to the notion of placing children with private families to be cared for as a member of the family. Although probably not the originator of the concept, the first person to put it into practice effectively was the Reverend Charles Loring Brace, who founded the New York Children's Aid Society in 1853. Brace's basic idea was to take homeless children from the streets of New York—where they had few options other than begging, crime, and vice and therefore were a serious social problem—and transport them to rural regions of the country to be placed with farm families. There they would be an asset because even small children are useful on a farm. Brace and his associates advertised their plan and found the response to be immediate and astounding. He later recalled: Most touching of all was the crowd of little ones who immediately found their way to the office. Ragged young girls who had nowhere to lay their heads; children driven from drunkards' homes; orphans who slept where they could find a box or a stairway; boys cast out by stepmothers or stepfathers; newsboys whose incessant answer to our question, "Where do you live?" rang in our ears—"Don't live nowhere!" . . . All this motley throng of infantile misery and childish guilt passed through our doors, telling their simple stories of suffering and loneliness and temptation.46 The technique of the Children's Aid Society was to gather together homeless children in shelters in New York City and, when a large enough group was gathered, to send them by train to towns in the West. Agents of the society would precede the train into each town, organize a local placement committee of prominent citizens, and advertise the location and the date the children would be available for placement. When the day arrived, local families would inspect the children, and families who were deemed suitable by both the society's agent and the local committee could select one or more children. The prospective parents promised to take good care of the child and to provide him or her with a "Christian home" and an education. No money was exchanged. Figure 12.2 recreates an article from the Jefferson County Tribune (Missouri) dated January 13, 1911, reporting the arrival of a shipment of children sent by the New York Children's Aid Society. The Jefferson County Tribune, January 13, 1911. Figure 12.2 Full Alternative Text In terms of numbers alone, the Children's Aid Society was a tremendous success. By 1873, the society was placing more than 3,000 children a year. Its peak year was 1875, when a total of 4,026 children were placed. In terms of policies and techniques, however, the society was the object of some well-deserved criticism. A major concern was that if a child had living parents, the society made no attempt to work with them so that the child could return home. The society worked from the assumption that parents who were unable to care for their children were somehow morally inadequate, and it saw its role as rescuing the child from them. Another criticism was raised by Catholics, who felt that the Children's Aid Society, founded and run by Protestants, was snatching Catholic children off the streets and sending them west to be reared as Protestants.47 Also, many of the states receiving children soon lost their enthusiasm for the society's work. Many of the children—one study estimated nearly 60 percent—became sources of trouble and public expenditure when their placements failed to work.48 Finally, the most serious criticism was the lack of study, the generally casual nature of the placement process, and the almost total absence of follow-up supervision after a placement was made. One Catholic organization in New York City, the Sisters of Charity, developed a preplacement procedure to obviate the public selection process. Although the Children's Aid Society's program had many flaws, the basic idea of placing dependent children in a family setting caught on and had a tremendous impact on child welfare practice. Toward the end of the 19th century, members of the newly emerging social work profession, notably John Finley of the New York State Charities Aid Association, Charles Birtwell of the Boston Children's Aid Society, and Homer Folks of the Children's Aid Society of Pennsylvania, began to develop systematic and sound administrative procedures for child placement. These procedures included placement of the child in his or her home community, if possible; thorough study of the child and the prospective foster home; some financial support for the child; and careful supervision of the placement. With these new procedures, foster care for children spread rapidly. By the turn of the century, foster care had replaced institutional placement in a number of cities. In 1909, the report of the first White House Conference on Children gave support to the foster care movement with the recommendation that "it is desirable that [children] should be cared for in families whenever practicable. The carefully selected foster home is for the normal child the best substitute for the natural home."49 The spread of foster care has continued until the present time, when placement in an institution is considered appropriate only for special needs children. 4. The Campaign Against Child Labor One of the concerns about the practice of sending children west to be placed on farms was that they would be exploited as cheap labor. At the same time, social workers and other progressives were becoming increasingly concerned about exploitation of child labor in industries. Prior to the late 19th century, few were concerned about this. The labor of children was considered an economic help for families and was also considered morally valuable, preventing sins like idleness and teaching the virtues of work and responsibility. However, jobs appropriate for children, mainly on family farms, were steadily declining, and children were, in ever increasing numbers, being put to work in industrial jobs, and under conditions that many felt were not appropriate. The percent of the labor force comprised of children increased from 14 in 1870 to over 18 in 1900.50 This worked out to nearly 2 million child employees in the labor force. Contemporary observers and historians today believe that many children were not counted and that the official figures were extremely conservative. Reformers argued that child labor should be curtailed because working conditions had become much too dangerous for children; that children working interfered with schooling and thus perpetuated poverty; that children were being exploited, sickened, and maimed by the unrestrained greed of industrialists; and, finally, child labor robbed children of the happy and healthy childhoods that the emerging conception of childhood argued that they were entitled to. Several industries were of special concern. One was coal mining where young boys worked in dark and dangerous mines, often for 12 or more hours at a shift. Some worked above ground as breakers, a job that involved sitting for hours at a time over swiftly moving, dusty belts of coal to pick out debris, mainly pieces of slate or shale. Another industry was glassmaking where boys worked at various tasks in furnace rooms, exposed to long hours of intense heat, often in excess of 100 degrees, and glaring light, combined with the dangers of fumes, dust, and broken glass. Many children worked the night shift. A third industry of special concern was textiles, especially cotton mills in the south. In 1900, one in four cotton mill workers were under 15, and children as young as 6 or 7 were often employed. Most children employed in cotton mills worked as spinners, tending bobbins to repair breaks in the thread or to change a full bobbin for an empty one. In canneries on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts children as young as 6 shucked oysters, picked shrimp, and processed fruits and vegetables, sometimes 7 days a week, 16 hours a day. Finally, there was concern with urban areas where children roamed the streets, peddling newspapers, working as delivery boys and girls, and as night messengers, a job that was suspected, and later confirmed, as usually a front for prostitution.51 Social workers Jane Addams, Florence Kelly, Lillian Wald, and New York School of Philanthropy director Samuel McCune Lindsey, provided leadership for the anti-child labor movement. Addams stated that it was "inevitable that efforts to secure a child labor law should be our first venture into the field of state legislation."52 In 1899, Kelly became General Secretary of the National Consumers League, an organization focused on regulating child labor. The main tactic of the League was to band consumers together to boycott the products manufactured by companies that exploited child labor. Lillian Wald lobbied for the federal government to establish a bureau to monitor the welfare of children, referencing the huge programs of the Agriculture Department when she argued, " . . . if the government can have a department to look after the nation's farm crops, why can't it have a bureau to look after the nation's child crop?"53 Her efforts contributed to the establishment of the Children's Bureau in 1912. In 1904, Lindsey became the first director of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), a group focused on obtaining government regulation of child labor. The NCLC, working in concert with the National Consumers League, was quickly successful in getting bills passed on the state level, but in most cases the protection provided child workers was weak. Child labor in home sweatshops, agriculture, canneries, and street trades other than night messenger services remained for the most part completely unregulated. A major goal of the group quickly became to get federal legislation passed that would provide more effective regulation of industry. Buoyed by its success in getting state level child labor laws passed, the NCLC was confident that federal legislation was possible. After intense lobbying, in 1916 the Keating-Owen bill was passed with the support of President Wilson and by wide margins in both the house and the senate. The bill was based on the right of the federal government to regulate industries involved in interstate commerce. The bill was in effect for only about a year before being challenged in North Carolina by a father of two children who would lose their textile mill jobs if the bill were to stay in effect. The judge declared that the law was unconstitutional based on his belief that Congress did not have the right to regulate local labor conditions and that the law denied parents their legal right to their children's earnings. On June 3, 1918 the Supreme Court, by a 5 to 4 margin, upheld the North Carolina ruling, the majority concluding that the law overstepped the legitimate use of the interstate commerce clause. Even though the Keating-Owens bill was overturned, public support for child labor legislation had become very strong. In 1918, when the United States entered the World War I, the War Policies Board added the standards specified in the act to all federal war contracts. After the Supreme Court decision, the NCLC immediately began work on constitutionally acceptable alternatives. Based on NCLC work, Senator Atlee Pomeroy introduced a bill that would add a 10 percent tax on the profits of companies that violated the standards specified in the Keating-Owens Act. With little debate, the bill passed both houses and was signed into law by President Wilson on February 14, 1919. The Pomeroy Act was declared unconstitutional by an 8 to 1 Supreme Court decision in 1922. However, by this time most states had strengthened their child labor laws and passed compulsory school attendance laws that met the standards of the overturned federal legislation, and so no further federal laws were pursued. By 1930, less than 5 percent of children between ages 10 and 15 were employed, down from over 18 percent in 1900. 5. The Development of Protective Services At the same time 19th-century America was wrestling with the problem of what to do with the children left homeless in the wake of industrialization, and children exploited by the labor market, another child welfare problem was emerging—the abuse and neglect of children. Interestingly, the awareness and concern regarding this problem were slightly preceded by concern with the abuse and neglect of animals. In 1866, Henry Bergh founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). He quickly succeeded in getting laws passed prohibiting neglect and abuse of animals and empowering the society's agents to actually make arrests and issue subpoenas. It was to Bergh and his society that a charity worker turned with her concern about the treatment of Mary Ellen Wilson, an eight-year-old girl who was being abused and neglected by her stepparents.54 Bergh directed his attorney, Elbridge T. Gerry, to seek custody of the child and prosecution of the stepparents. Gerry did this and, amidst much publicity, was successful. Media coverage of the Mary Ellen Wilson case caused a flood of public opinion resulting in the passage in New York in 1875 of "an Act of the incorporation of societies for the prevention of the cruelty to children."55 Like agents of the SPCA, agents of these new societies were empowered to "prefer a complaint before any court or magistrate having jurisdiction for the violation of any law relating to or affecting children" In 1877, the American Humane Association was incorporated. By 1900, its membership was composed of 150 anticruelty or humane societies throughout the country, most dealing with both child and animal protection, but about 20 restricting their activities to protection of children only.56 The societies for the prevention of cruelty to children viewed themselves as child rescue agencies. Like law enforcement agencies, which for all practical purposes they were, the societies investigated cases of abuse, neglect, and exploitation. If a complaint were substantiated, they would initiate criminal charges against the perpetrators and file for custody of the child. The 31st Annual Report (1907) of the American Humane Association stated that the societies were never intended to reform children or families; they were: a hand affixed to the arm of the law by which the body politic reaches out and enforces the law. The arm of the law seizes the child when it is in an atmosphere of impurity, or in the care of those who are not fit to be entrusted with it, wrenches the child out of these surroundings, brings it to the court, and submits it to the decision of the court.57 After they had gained custody of the child, agents would place the child in a home or institution and close the case. Only in cases of lost or kidnapped children did the society ever consider returning them to their parents. Thus, by the turn of the century, the seeds of our current child welfare system had been planted. The beginning of our current foster home system was in place in the form of state children's aid associations, and the current protective service system was beginning in the local societies for the prevention of cruelty to children. The final step in putting the current system in place was to merge the two elements and put the programs under public auspices. In 1914, the secretary of the Pennsylvania SPCC, addressing a conference of the American Humane Association, said: This thing we are doing is, after all, the job of the public authorities. The public ought to protect all citizens, including the children, from cruelty and improper care. As speedily as conditions admit, we should turn over to the public the things we are at present doing.58 C. C. Carstens, director of the Child Welfare League of America, found both developments well under way when he addressed the National Conference on Social Work in 1924. He observed that, in many areas of the country, "the children's protective and children aid functions are being combined under one society" and that in some areas "public departments have been given the power and to some extent the equipment to take over the whole of the children's protective service."59 The government on all levels was showing an increasing willingness to become involved in providing social welfare services, particularly those involving children. The 1909 White House Conference resulted in the establishment in 1912 of the U.S. Children's Bureau located in the Department of Commerce and Labor. The bureau was charged with investigating and reporting on "all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and child life among all classes of our people."60 In 1918, the Infancy and Maternity Bill was passed, setting up infant and maternal health centers administered by state health departments. In 1935, child welfare services became a predominantly public function with passage of the Social Security Act, which, under Title V (later under Title IV), authorized the Children's Bureau to fund and assist states in providing child welfare services for dependent and neglected children. 6. The Rediscovery of Child Abuse and Neglect The basic structure of the child protective services system was in place with the passage and implementation of Title V of the Social Security Act of 1935. Following this landmark legislation, however, there was a period of nearly three decades of apathy regarding child welfare. Although child protective services were officially a responsibility of government, the services were spotty and poorly funded. Three states had no child protective services at all. In the states that did have services, an American Humane Association survey found that "much of what was reported as child protective services was in reality nonspecific child welfare services or nonspecific family services in the context of a financial assistance setting."61 In addition, the survey found that services provided by private agencies had undergone a long-term decline. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, the problem of child maltreatment was rediscovered, and greatly increased resources were directed toward its resolution. Perhaps the major reason for the rediscovery of child maltreatment was the belated recognition of the problem by the medical profession. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, radiologists began to recognize injuries that we now know generally to result from abuse and neglect but that they tended to view as accidental. In 1960, a social worker at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh published an article regarding the resistance of physicians to diagnosing child abuse; the article attributed this resistance to both repugnance at the problem and difficulty in assuming an objective attitude with abusive parents.62 C. Henry Kempe, the physician instrumental in overcoming this resistance, recalls, "When I saw child abuse between 1956 and 1958 in Denver, our housestaff was unwilling to make this diagnosis [child abuse]. Initially I felt intellectual dismay at diagnoses such as 'obscure bruising,' 'osteogenesis imperfecta tarda,' 'spontaneous subdural hematoma.'"63 In 1960, Kempe used his prerogative as program committee chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics to plan a plenary session on child abuse. The rest of the committee agreed, provided that he could come up with a catchy title for the session. The title Kempe coined was "The Battered Child Syndrome." Shortly after the meeting, Kempe, with the assistance of a psychiatrist and a radiologist, published an article with the same title in the Journal of the American Medical Association. As Williams notes, "The speed of public and professional response, enhanced by media coverage, was incredible."64 In 1962, the U.S. Children's Bureau held a conference to draft model child welfare legislation. That same year the Social Security Act was amended to require all states to develop a plan to provide child protective services in every political subdivision. In 1963, eighteen bills were introduced in Congress dealing with child abuse, and eleven of them passed. By 1967, all states had passed laws requiring professionals to report child abuse. Also in 1967, Title XX of the Social Security Act was passed. Part of this act made protective services mandatory for all states and provided a large amount of federal money to pay for these services. In 1972, the National Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect was established with the help of federal funds. This center publishes a newsletter, engages in research on child protection, and provides training for professionals concerned with child maltreatment. In 1974, the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act was passed. This act provides direct assistance to the states to help them develop child neglect and abuse programs; it also provides support for research, mainly through the establishment of the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect within the Children's Bureau. The center supports research and acts as a clearinghouse for information on public and private programs in the area of child protection. Congress authorized $15 million to finance implementation of the act, and this was later increased to $22 million. Finally, in 1980, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act was passed. This act is discussed later in the section on permanency planning.

Chapter 8: Conclusion

Conclusion Religion and social work have a long and closely intertwined history. They are natural allies and collaborators, both being concerned with the well-being of people, justice, and problems of the oppressed, as well as many other mutual interests. But as social work has become more secularized and more tolerant of "atypical" behavior, and as conservative religion has become a more powerful force in society, and more closely aligned with conservative politics, the potential for problems between these old allies has increased. How great have these problems actually proved to be? Because it has been only in the past few years that many people have even perceived the potential for conflict, we really do not have much data on which to base a firm conclusion. However, the data that are beginning to come in indicate that the relationship between religion and social work is not presenting as great a problem as feared. A study by Eckardt compared the practice of graduates of the social work program at Temple University, who identified themselves as secular in orientation, with graduates of the social work program at the Philadelphia College of the Bible, who identified themselves as evangelical Christians. Eckardt concluded that: The overwhelming difference in religious beliefs was matched by an equally overwhelming similarity in practice. There was not always a positive affirmation of the values of the profession through the practice decisions, but the nature of the responses was similar. A generalization which can be made from this study is that although the groups tested were diverse in religious beliefs, they were similar in professional practice.90 A similar finding was reported by Epstein and Buckner, who surveyed practicing social workers in Georgia, in the heart of the Bible Belt. Of the 214 social workers surveyed, only 4.4 percent identified themselves as fundamentalist Christians, but 35.5 percent identified their religion as "central to my life and philosophy." Epstein and Buckner found that "those social work professionals participating in the study have not experienced significant conflicts or pressures related to Fundamentalism or to differences in religious beliefs."91 There is evidence that in recent years the concern of the social work profession has begun to move away from a fear of the negative implications of religion for social work and move toward a fear that social workers are not receiving training adequate to prepare them to deal with the spiritual dimensions of clients' lives. A survey by DeCoster and Burcham of graduate social work students found that students recognize the importance of religion but are not sure of how to operationalize this concern in their practice.92 Speaking from the perspective of a practitioner with over 20 years' experience, Moshe ben Asher has come to the conclusion that "any model of generalist practice that does not incorporate a conception of the social worker's role, responsibility, and resources relative to a beneficiary's spiritual and religious interests does not address the whole beneficiary. Inevitably, it will fail to help the beneficiary reach full potential."93 By way of conclusion, the authors agree with Cnaan who, in his study of the relation of social work and religion, states: The separation of social work from its religious roots not only jeopardizes its moral foundation and public support but also makes it difficult for the profession to chart its future course—one that will undoubtedly find strong connections between secular and religious-based social services at many levels. Post-1980 social policy is focusing on service development at the local level, where agencies, both public and private, sectarian and secular, are using the resources of religious organizations. This, in turn, is forcing social work to reconnect with its religious roots.

Chapter 8: The Religious Roots of Social Welfare

1. The Religious Roots of Social Welfare The desire to help someone is not, as far as we know, instinctive. The very desire to help others, and, therefore, the beginning of social welfare, seems to have developed as a part of religion. Almost all religions have obligated their followers to engage in acts of charity, sometimes only to members of their sect and sometimes to anyone in need.5 All major religions have, to some extent, stressed responsibility for one's fellows, kindness or justice to the needy, and self-fulfillment through service. 2. Early Egyptian Roots Egyptian civilization is the oldest culture to have left a substantial written record. It is, therefore, used here to illustrate the early development of religious injunctions regarding social welfare. Morris points out that a similar evolution was taking place in Assyrian, Mesopotamian, and Chinese societies.6 The early Egyptian holy book, called the Book of the Dead, was a group of writings collected around 3500 bc. In the book is a list of seven acts of mercy, including relief of hunger, thirst, and nakedness; care of prisoners; help for the stranger; and care for the sick and the dead.7 The book also contains an early version of what we now call the Golden Rule, "Do to the doer in order to cause him to do [for thee]."8 The Book of the Dead contains mainly negative injunctions; that is, it focuses more on not doing harm than on actively doing good. It suggests behaviors that should be avoided because such avoidance will ensure a good life after death. Writings buried with the dead for the apparent purpose of providing evidence that the person had lived a correct life contain statements such as "I have not done violence to a poor man," "I have not made anyone sick or weak," and "I have not taken milk from the mouths of children." There is also some evidence of positive injunctions, such as "I gave bread to the hungry, I clothed the naked, I ferried him who had no boat." 3. Jewish Roots In Jewish thought, there is no concept of salvation or damnation, so thoughts of a good afterlife did not provide any motive for charitable behavior. However, it was believed that once a year there should be a Day of Atonement in which people would be afflicted with earthly torments—flood, fire, plague, death, and the like—in punishment for their misdeeds. Repentance, prayer, and charity were ways a person could avoid these sufferings. Thus, although charitable behavior was not believed to ensure a good afterlife, as the Egyptians thought, it could at least help one escape some earthly torments. Probably the most significant advance of Jewish charitable thought over Egyptian thought was the assertion that individuals have a positive obligation to perform acts of helping and doing good for others. For example: If there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren, in any of your towns within your land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him, and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be. Take heed lest there be a base thought in your heart, and you say, "The seventh year, the year of release is near," and your eye be hostile to your poor brother, and you give him nothing, and he cry to the Lord against you, and it be sin in you. You shall give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging when you give to him because for this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. [Deuteronomy 15:7-10] The Egyptian concept of charity mainly meant the avoidance of doing harm to others. The Jewish concept added the obligation to do positive acts of good. Interestingly, the Hebrew word tsedakah, which generally has been translated as "charity," actually could be translated more accurately as "justice."10 From this it can be inferred that not only did people have an obligation to help those in need, but also the needy had a right to help. Charitable acts were to be done simply because they were the right thing to do, and the giver should expect no repayment from the recipient. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides outlined eight degrees of charity, from lowest to highest: Give, but with reluctance and regret. This is the gift of the hand but not of the heart. The second is to give cheerfully, but not proportionately to the distress of the sufferer. The third is to give cheerfully and proportionately, but not until we are solicited. The fourth is to give cheerfully and proportionately, and even unsolicited; but to put it in the poor man's hand, thereby exciting in him the painful emotion of shame. The fifth is to give charity in such a way that the distressed may receive the bounty and know their benefactor, without being known to him. The sixth, which rises still higher, is to know the objects of our bounty, but remain unknown to them. The seventh is still more meritorious, namely, to bestow charity in such a way that the benefactor may not know the relieved person's, nor they the name of their benefactor. Lastly, the eighth and most meritorious of all, is to anticipate charity by preventing poverty; i.e., to assist a reduced person so that he may earn an honest livelihood and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding up his hand for charity.11 From these ideas, along with the Ten Commandments, prophetic exhortations, the Proverbs, and general moral teachings, the Jews developed a number of social welfare practices. Among them were hospitable reception of strangers, education of orphans, redemption of lawbreakers, endowment of marriages, visitation of the ill and infirm, burial of the dead, consolation of the bereaved, and care of widows, slaves, divorcees, and the aged. Provision for the poor was mainly through various agricultural practices such as "corners," whereby farmers were commanded to leave a small portion of every field unharvested; "gleanings," the practice of leaving grain dropped during harvest to be picked up by the poor; "forgotten sheaves," leaving any corn missed by harvesters for the poor; and "grape droppings," leaving dropped grapes and small clusters so that they may be picked by the poor. 4. Christian Roots To the moral teachings and concept of justice from the Old Testament, the early Christians added an emphasis on love and compassion. The "theological virtues" were set forth as faith, hope, and charity, the greatest of these being charity.13 The basis of the Christian approach to social welfare is generally considered to be in Jesus' depiction of the welcome to the righteous as blessed inheritors of the Kingdom: "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me." Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?" And the King will answer them, "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me." [Matthew 25:35-40] In Christian doctrine, Jesus is seen as the revelation of God and as the model that believers are to follow and emulate. The teachings of Jesus centered on the law of obedient love, which takes its cue from the nature of God rather than from the worthiness of any other object. Miller contends that the Good Samaritan parable, which emphasizes this love response, has probably done more to encourage humanitarian social welfare than any other single influence in all of history.14 A somewhat different, although not conflicting, rationale for charity is found in the writings of St. Paul. As discussed by Douglas: St. Paul, in his famous description of the virtue of charity, implies an almost total merging of the interests of the individual with those of the collectivity of which he or she is a member. In the Church of Corinth, he was faced with the fairly typical problem of a collectivity riven by doubts, jealousies, and schisms. His principal response was to elaborate the analogy between a collectivity, the church, and a human body. "A man's body is all one although it has a number of different organs and all this multitude of organs goes to make up one body. . . . The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of thee." [I Corinthians 12:15-21] The diversity is to be prized. After all, "if the whole were one single organ, what would become of the body?" Charity is the unifying force: "God has established a harmony in the body. . . all the different parts of it were to make each other's welfare their common care" [I Corinthians 12:19, 24-25]. He follows the analogy immediately with the famous description and praise of charity of Chapter Thirteen. The same point, also in relation to the analogy of the body, is made more succinctly in the Letter to the Ephesians: "Thus each limb receiving the active power it needs; it [the body] achieves its natural growth building itself up through charity." [Ephesians 4:16]15 Thus charity was viewed not only as a theological virtue but also as a practical necessity to maintain the organic unity of the church and community. The early Christian church, and the generations that followed, took seriously the command of Jesus to carry out the expression of love that occurs so frequently in the New Testament. Since its earliest days, the church has engaged in at least twelve areas of social ministry: the care of widows, orphans, the sick, the poor, the disabled, prisoners, captives, slaves, and victims of calamity; burial of the poor; provision of employment services; and meals for the needy.16 Because Christianity and traditional Judaism both sprang from the same source, the lists of charitable activities of the two groups are very similar. 5. Muslim Roots Of the major religions in the United States, Islam is the youngest, beginning in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in the 7th century. There are currently about 1.3 billion Muslims, making this the second largest religion in the world, surpassed only by Christianity. It is estimated that 22 percent of the world's population are Muslim and 33 percent are Christian, with the growth rate of Islam exceeding that of Christianity. In the United States, there are currently 3.45 million Muslims, up from 2.35 million in 2007. This number constitutes only about 1.1 percent of the population, although it is estimated that the population of Muslims in the public school system probably exceeds 5 percent. Like the worldwide situation, the growth rate of the Muslim population in the United States exceeds that of the general population. It is projected that by 2040 Muslims will replace Jews as the second largest religious group in the United States. By 2050, the U.S. Muslim population is projected to reach 8.1 million, or 2.1 percent of the population.17 For these reasons, understanding the Islamic roots of, and traditions regarding, social welfare will become increasingly important.18 Muslims in the United States, as in the world, are divided into two significant streams, Sunni and Shiite. Sunnis are by far the largest group, comprising about 90 percent of Muslims worldwide and 80 percent in the United States. A useful, if not entirely accurate, comparison is that between Protestantism and Sunni Islam and Roman Catholicism and Shiite Islam. Sunni Islam shares with Protestantism the emphasis on a direct relationship between the believer and God unmediated by any religious authority figure. Like the Roman Catholic Church, Shiite Islam has a hierarchical structure of legal scholars who have responsibility for interpreting the word of God for the faithful.19 Islamic thought differentiates between social justice and charity. The faith, based on the Prophet Muhammad's advocacy on behalf of women, children, and the disadvantaged, has a strong tradition of social reform. This tradition is operationalized through the requirement that every Muslim who is financially able contribute 2.5 percent of his or her net wealth each year for support of the needy, a practice called zakah. This is not considered to be charity but rather an act of social justice through the redistribution of wealth.20 Contributions over and above the zakah, called sadaqa, a word borrowed from Hebrew, are considered to be charity. The importance of charity in the Muslim faith is illustrated by the fact that of the five pillars of Islam, the third pillar is charity.21 The Koran specifies eight categories of uses for which the sadaqa (charitable contributions) may be spent: The alms are for the poor, the needy, those who collect them, and those whose hearts must be reconciled, to redeem the captives, the debtors, for God's cause, and the wayfarer. It is a duty imposed by God. God is all-knowing and all-wise. The aim of this charity is not social reform but individual perfection of the giver, with the expectation of eternal reward from God.22 English social workers Patel, Humphries, and Naik point out that there is a close correspondence between social work values and Islamic values. The following is their list of basic Islamic values: Emphasizes the well-being and welfare of the community All people (men and women) are regarded as equal There is a relationship between individual freedom and the community's obligations to the individual Conscience and conformity dictate the individual's sense of responsibility and obligation Consultation between people is important in relationship building23 It can be seen that Islamic belief, through the combination of the zakah, the annual contribution toward achieving a more just society, and the sadaqa, which emphasizes charity in addition to the zakah, and the basic value system, provides a strong foundation for social welfare among members of this community.

Chapter 10: The Nature and Causes of Poverty

1. Why Are the Poor Poor? Imagine that a social scientist randomly sampled 1,000 people from across the United States and lined them all up along a long, straight road. The people would be lined up according to income, with the poorest people on the left, progressing toward the richest on the right. The social scientist would then actually paint a line to represent where the poverty level began, with people to the left of the line being those in poverty and people to the right being those out of poverty. Assuming that the poverty rate was 12.7 percent, 126 people would be to the left of the line and 874 to the right of it. The social scientist would then stand back and ask, "What is different about the 126 people to the left of the line? Why are they there and not the other 874?" Some differences would be obvious to the social scientist or to anyone else observing the line. A much greater percentage of the people to the left of the line would be members of minority groups, many more would be women, and more would be old and young. To the right of the line, a disproportionate percentage would be white, male, and in the early and middle adult years. This simple visual inspection of the people would give us a hint as to the causes of poverty—they have something to do with race, sex, and age—but it would not give us a complete answer because of two broad questions. The first question has to do with what statisticians call between-group variance. We can see that more members of the female group than of the male group are poor. However, we do not know the source of this variance. Are more women poor because there is something in our society that systematically discriminates against them and bars them from an equal chance at well-paying jobs? This is known as a structural explanation; in other words, the source of the problem is in the social structure. Or are more women poor because there are genetic or cultural factors that make women less competitive in the job market, factors such as desire to stay home and have children or fear of competition? This is known as an individual explanation. The second broad question has to do with what statisticians call within-group variance. This question addresses the fact that although a disproportionate number of women and African Americans are in poverty, not all are, and although most whites are not in poverty, some are. What are the differences among the members within these groups? The question of the causes of poverty is complex and controversial, and answers are incomplete. And yet the question is extremely important. Proposed solutions to poverty based on different explanations often will be diametrically opposed. If you propose a program based on a structural explanation, the focus of the program will be on changing society. If you propose a program based on individual explanations, the focus will be on changing individuals. If we implement an anti-poverty program that seeks to change individuals, and the causes of poverty are more structural, we have wasted our time and money. Conversely, if we implement an anti-poverty strategy that seeks to change the social structure, and the causes of poverty are within the individual, we have also wasted our time and money. In this section, we take a close look at three different broad explanations of poverty. The first explanation views poverty as being the result of individual characteristics. The second views poverty as the result of poor people holding values fundamentally different from those of the rest of society, values that prevent them from escaping poverty and make it likely that their children will follow them into lives of poverty—an explanation known as the culture of poverty thesis. The third explanation sees the poor as victims of society and attributes their poverty to impersonal economic forces or to discrimination and oppression, which are mainly institutional; these are the structural explanations referred to earlier. 2. Poverty as the Result of Individual Characteristics In previous chapters we discussed the belief among people in the United States, especially among conservatives, in individualism. The aspect of this belief most important for an understanding of social welfare is that it tends to attribute the cause of problems to the individuals affected by the problems. Thus, it is natural in our society to assume that the primary cause of poverty is to be found in some defect in the individuals affected. Holman notes that "the analyses do not necessarily allocate blame to individuals who are poor, but they do regard poverty as stemming from the limitations, maladjustments or deficiencies of individuals."10 Individualistic explanations of poverty can be divided into three main types, which have emerged in rough chronological order. The explanation with the longest history is that people are poor because of inferior genetic quality, especially, but not limited to, intellectual ability. By the mid-20th century, this explanation had been largely discredited but has still been expounded occasionally. For example, in 1994, the genetic inferiority explanation reappeared with a bang in the best-selling book The Bell Curve, by psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray. Another popular explanation of poverty as being due to individual characteristics is one that argues that the poor are not necessarily genetically inferior but that they suffer from psychological problems that inhibit their ability to compete for good jobs. This view continues to have some influence; in its most recent form it is known as the expectancy model. Finally, the current influential theory of those who insist on individual explanations of poverty is known as human capital theory. This is the notion that poor people do not have the knowledge, skills, and attributes (human capital) that make them valuable to employers. These three individualistic explanations are discussed in detail next. 3. Genetic Inferiority People in the United States at one time attributed poverty almost entirely to genetics. Behavior often was described as being "in the blood." So, it was thought, for instance, that Irish immigrants were poor because they drank heavily and had bad tempers; the Italians were hot-blooded Mediterraneans; African Americans were fun-loving and childlike. All were suspected of having low intelligence. As various groups have entered the mainstream of American life and competed successfully for jobs and income, these theories of innate genetic inferiority generally have been dropped. They have been replaced by a much more sophisticated theory based on the science of psychological measurement, specifically the development of the IQ test. This theory argues that intelligence is inherited (that is, it is genetically determined) and that economic success is closely related to intelligence. The originator of the IQ test and of the idea that intelligence was a measurable quality was French psychologist Alfred Binet. Binet developed a test in the early 1900s for the use of Paris public school administrators who desired a way to identify children in need of special education. Binet's test served this purpose, and he was quite specific about its limitations. He insisted that the test should be used only to identify children in need of special help and should not be used to classify normal children. Binet strongly asserted that the test did not measure anything innate or permanent, writing in 1909 that: some recent philosophers appear to have given their moral support to the deplorable verdict that the intelligence of an individual is a fixed quantity. We must protest and act against this brutal pessimism. A child's mind is like a field, for which an expert farmer has advised a change in the method of cultivation, with the result that, in place of desert land, we now have a harvest.11 Binet's ideas of testing intelligence were quickly snapped up by H. H. Goddard and Lewis M. Terman in the United States and by Sir Cyril Burt in England. These psychologists chose to ignore Binet's statements about the limitations of intelligence tests; in fact, they advanced quite the opposite idea. They insisted that intelligence was heritable (passed down from generation to generation) and immutable (unable to be changed). Therefore, a person who is born to parents with low intelligence is doomed to a life of failure and probably misery. The result of the work of these men and a number of similar thinkers was what has come to be called the eugenics movement. This movement, which we discuss in greater detail in Chapter 15, was based on the idea that not only is intelligence genetic but also that those with low intelligence (at that time called the feeble-minded) reproduce at rates far greater than the more intelligent segments of the population. Thus, the human race was seen as being in danger of becoming overrun by people of low intelligence.12 Although eugenics fell into disrepute following World War II, the notion that intelligence is hereditary and that poverty can be explained largely by inherited low intelligence has persisted. The most influential modern advocate of the notion that intelligence is an innate quality and is inherited is the Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen.13 Jensen argues that modern genetic research has firmly established that about 49 percent of the variance in IQ scores can be explained by heritability. After reviewing the work of 17 geneticists and behavioral geneticists, Jensen concludes, "With such general agreement among scientists, it is all the more amazing how the popular media have so often promoted the notion that the genetic inheritance of intelligence is a highly controversial issue."14 The most influential modern exponents of the idea that socioeconomic class, and by extension, poverty, is related to inherited intelligence are Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein. Although Herrnstein reported his ideas in many publications in the past, they became popularized through The Bell Curve, coauthored with Murray, a well-known conservative critic of social programs.15 In this book, Herrnstein and Murray argue that: 1. Differences in mental ability are largely inherited. 2. Success requires high mental ability. 3. Earnings and prestige depend on success. 4. Thus social standing (which reflects earnings and prestige) will be based to a large degree on inherited differences among people. Herrnstein and Murray argue that the differences in intellectual ability between social classes are becoming greater as barriers to the upward mobility of gifted people are removed, thus removing them from the gene pool of the lower classes. The trend for an increasing proportion of people to marry within their social class has been confirmed by recent research. Schwartz and Mare found that the odds of a high school graduate marrying someone with a college degree declined by 43 percent between 1940 and the late 1970s. Sweeney and Cancian found an increasingly strong association between women's wages before marriage and the occupational status and future earnings prospects of the men they married.16 Based on his belief in the heritability of intelligence, Herrnstein concludes, "The biological stratification of society looms."17 The idea that intelligence is an inherited trait and that success is the result of high intelligence and lack of success the result of low intelligence has been the subject of severe, and often emotional, criticism. The arguments are technical and complex, and we do not have room to go into them in detail. However, basically the critics of Jensen, and of Herrnstein and Murray, argue that we do not really know what intelligence is and that whatever it is, it is doubtful that intelligence tests measure it. Critics argue that the tests are culturally biased. That is, items selected for the tests are based on what is familiar to white and middle-class people, so minorities and lower-class people are less likely to be familiar with them. Fischer and his colleagues, in a lengthy and reasoned refutation of Herrnstein and Murray, argue that "scholars long ago established that scores on IQ and IQ-like tests were only of modest importance compared with social context in explaining individual attainment." They demonstrate that the test Herrnstein and Murray used as an indication of intelligence, the Armed Forces Qualification Test, is really a measure of education, not of native intelligence. Of the major argument of Herrnstein and Murray, Fischer and colleagues assert: At its base it is a philosophy ages old: human misery is natural and beyond human redemption; inequality is fated; and people deserve, by virtue of their native talents, the positions they have in society. . . . The political implications [are] clear: If inequality is natural, then governmental intervention to moderate it is at best wrongheaded and at worst destructive. 4. Poverty as a Result of Psychological Problems The idea that a large proportion of the poor are that way because they are suffering from some psychological problem gained popularity throughout the 1950s, peaked and even gained legislative support during the 1960s, and then rapidly lost influence. Especially popular was the idea that the poor live in "multi-problem families" that have an almost insatiable appetite for social services. Buell, for example, in a study of social services in St. Paul, Minnesota, found that 6 percent of families receiving services consumed more than half the total services provided.19 The basic idea of this theory is that poor people do not have their developmental needs met as children; as a result, they are immature, and consequently, they are unable to meet the needs of their own children—who then grow up immature, and the cycle goes on and on. Curran has studied the social work profession's contribution to this theory of poverty, saying: In line with the profession's psychiatricoutlook, many postwar social work scholars claimed that psychopathology plagued ADC recipients. A 1954 Social Service Review article expressed popular social work sentiment in describing ADC recipients as frequently "ill in body and mind." Social work research suggested that a significant portion of ADC clients had mental health problems. For instance, Kermit Wiltse, a leading proponent of the psychological model and a faculty member of the University of California's School of Social Work, "found a kind of pseudo or subclinical depression in many of our [ADC] clients, particularly in the early phase of contact." The widely circulated 1960 study of the ADC program in Cook County, Illinois, Facts, Fallacies, and Future, also found that approximately one-third of the families suffered from a diagnosed or suspected mental disorder. Psychiatric disorders topped the list of psychosocial issues faced by "multi-problem" families, the term postwar social workers coined to describe long-term ADC users. One author working with multi-problem families noted, "The psychiatric diagnosis of the parent or parents have [sic] ranged from psychosis to borderline character disorders."20 The theory that poverty is largely caused by psychological problems among the poor hit its high point in 1962, when it was incorporated into the amendments to the Social Security Act popularly known as the "social service amendments." These amendments were based on the idea that the poor required not just financial assistance but also psychological and life skills counseling. The amendments provided a large sum of money to enable states to hire social workers trained in psychological techniques to help people solve psychological problems that were preventing them from being self-supporting. The social service amendments proved to be the undoing of the theory that psychological maladjustment was a major dynamic in poverty. Social workers went out armed with new therapeutic skills and quickly discovered that these had little relevance for dealing with the harsh realities of impoverished families. Congress also quickly lost its enthusiasm for this approach when the welfare rolls did not go down. In fact, just the opposite happened; following passage of the social service amendments, the welfare caseloads skyrocketed. The fact that social workers for a time embraced an individual, psychological explanation of poverty generally has been attributed to the professions' desire to achieve status in the years following World War II as a psychotherapeutic profession. Curran offers another explanation, one more in keeping with the social change and advocacy tradition of the profession. She says: Faced with a popular and legislative backlash against Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), the public assistance program for single mothers and their children, postwar social work researchers, educators, and clinical theorists increasingly turned to fashionable psychological and psychoanalytic paradigms to explain and justify welfare use. The profession's portrayal of welfare recipients as victims of psychologically abusive pasts stood in contrast to a hostile popular and legislative discourse that cast ADC recipients as unscrupulous chiselers and immoral cheats.21 The idea that psychopathology provides at least part of the explanation for long-term poverty has resurfaced recently in conservative thinking on the subject. Lawrence Mead recognizes that this explanation was discredited previously because of a lack of empirical verification—that is, that research failed to find more psychological problems among the poor than among the nonpoor. However, he argues that there is evidence that the poor have become significantly more dysfunctional since the mid-1970s: Signs include the drug epidemic, the explosion of foster care in major cities, and the growth in the homeless population, two-thirds of which has been in prison or institutionalized for mental illness or substance abuse. Significant portions of the long-term poor may suffer from depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, or antisocial personality. Such impairments may be immediate causes of poverty, even if the ultimate causes lie in society.22 A newer version of the psychological explanation of poverty has emerged that does not assume pathology but rather explains the problem of poverty in social psychological terms. This theory is called the expectancy model. This model is based on the theory that there is a relationship between confidence, sense of control, and success. Those who are successful gain confidence, and this leads to a sense of control over their lives, which in turn results in more success. On the other hand, those who fail lose confidence and begin to feel out of control of their lives, and this leads to further failure. Poverty results when people lose a sense of control over their lives, when they begin to expect failure, and when they cease to believe that they can ever escape poverty. Ellwood observes that "people who are frustrated by their lack of control may be observed to exhibit two almost opposite kinds of responses: either an aggressive and potentially antagonistic response or a very passive and sedate one. People become overwhelmed by their situation and lose the capacity to seek out and use the opportunities available."23 Psychological explanations of poverty have been almost totally abandoned by the social work profession. Although social workers will readily admit that some individuals are poor due to psychological problems, just like some people commit crimes or get divorced due to psychological problems, psychological factors as explanations of the macro problem of poverty (i.e., if everyone was mentally healthy poverty would end) are no longer considered valid. An illustration of this is the review article on poverty in the most recent edition of the Encyclopedia of Social Work that does not even mention psychological theories in the section on explanations of poverty. 5. The Human Capital Approach This is an economist's approach to explaining the individual's contribution to his or her own poverty. Human capital is defined by Thurow as "an individual's productive skills, talents, and knowledge. It is measured in terms of the value (price multiplied by quantity) of goods and services produced."25 In other words, the human capital approach looks at how much an individual's labor is worth. People who have a large amount of skill obtained by experience, education, and training are going to be worth more on the labor market than those who have not invested in these things. Some aspects of the value of human capital are, of course, natural abilities that cannot be acquired. Most aspects, however, are acquired or enhanced by human actions. The human capital approach views poverty as the result of individuals having low amounts of human capital. Rank explains: . . . evidence often overwhelmingly confirms the importance of human capital in affecting earnings (and consequently risk of poverty). Human capital refers to the skills, education, and credentials that individuals bring with them into the labor market. The importance of human capital has been studied extensively within the economic and social stratification literatures. Individuals acquiring greater human capital tend to be in greater demand in the market place. As a result, they are able to pursue more lucrative careers resulting in higher paying and more stable jobs. Those lacking in human capital are unable to compete in the labor market, and therefore must often settle for unstable, low-wage work. The effect of human capital upon the risk of poverty has been shown to be substantial. In particular, greater levels of education, skills, and training are strongly associated with higher levels of earnings. Conversely, those lacking in marketable job skills and education are at much greater risk of experiencing poverty.26 Recently, the human capital approach has been expanded to include the concept of social capital. Social capital has been defined by Putnam as "the connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them." In other words, social capital is the network of friends and colleagues that a person has that provides support for the person, as well as providing ties that act as social bridges that help the person get ahead.27 The human capital approach is a straightforward approach to poverty. It says, in essence, that people are poor because they lack the knowledge and skills necessary to get good jobs that will provide above-poverty-level incomes. There is no doubt that this lack is one factor in poverty. However, the human capital approach does not account for several other factors, including discrimination. Traditionally, female jobs requiring a college degree (in other words, a large amount of human capital), such as elementary school teaching, often will pay much less than jobs traditionally held by men and requiring much less human capital—for example, the job of electrician. Be that as it may, for our purposes, the human capital approach merely substitutes one definition of poverty for another. Thurow says, "One of the advantages of thinking in terms of human capital is that it immediately focuses attention on the production problem. What factors create human capital? What is the most efficient method of combining these factors?"28 The human capital approach merely substitutes the question, "Why do some people possess low amounts of human capital?" for the question, "Why are some people poor?" 6. Cultural Explanations of Poverty The preceding individual explanations of poverty tend to appeal to conservatives because of the conservative focus on the individual's responsibility for his or her own situation. Structural explanations, which are discussed in the next section, locate major responsibility for personal problems within the social structure in which the individual finds himself or herself. Liberals and radicals tend to favor these explanations because of their belief in the strength of the environment in shaping individuals' lives. Between these two types of explanations are the cultural explanations. These have been, and continue to be, influential because they mix individual and structural factors in such a way that both conservatives and liberals feel comfortable subscribing to them. Cultural explanations, like individualistic explanations, locate the proximate cause of poverty as being individual characteristics. Individuals who are poor are seen as being in this situation because they are not motivated to succeed, they do not value work, they demand immediate gratification of their needs, and they do not value marriage or education. Unlike individualistic explanations, however, cultural explanations do not view these individual characteristics as being caused by any innate quality of the individual affected, such as low intelligence or some form of psychopathology. Instead, individuals are viewed as possessing these characteristics because of the social situations they were born into and in which they were reared and educated. Thus, cultural explanations are more hopeful than individual explanations because these factors are more easily "corrected" than low intelligence or psychological disorders. There are two slightly different versions of cultural explanations: the culture of poverty theory and the cultural deprivation theory. 7. Culture of Poverty The concept of a culture of poverty was first suggested by anthropologist Oscar Lewis in his 1959 book Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty.29 The concept won almost immediate acceptance by social scientists, journalists, and policymakers who were struggling with ways to deal with poverty in the 1960s. Michael Harrington made extensive use of the concept in his 1962 book The Other America, Frank Riessman related the concept to education in his 1962 book The Culturally Deprived Child, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan used the concept in his controversial but influential Department of Labor report The Negro Family.30 The massive anti-poverty programs of the Kennedy administration and Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty programs were greatly influenced by the culture of poverty idea. Lewis set out to apply basic ideas of anthropology to the study of poverty. He looked at poverty as a "subculture with its own structure and rationale, as a way of life which is passed down from generation to generation along family lines." He proposed that poverty was not only something negative—want and deprivation—but that it also included positive aspects, some rewards without which the poor could not carry on. The culture of poverty develops, according to Lewis, as a reaction by the poor to their marginal position in society; and it "represents an effort to cope with feelings of hopelessness and despair which develop from the realization of the improbability of achieving success."31 The culture of poverty, according to this theory, consists of a set of values, behavior patterns, and beliefs among the poor that are different from those of the larger society. Lewis identified seventy separate elements of the culture of poverty, which he lumped into four groups. The first group includes characteristics related to the fact that the poor are not effectively integrated into the major institutions of the larger society. For example, they do not participate in unions, political parties, or voluntary groups. In fact, they show a fundamental distrust of many of the basic institutions of society—the police, government offices, and even the church. They are poorly integrated into the job market, and this is a main reason that they control very little wealth. Banfield, a popularizer of the culture of poverty theory whose version is much more conservative than that of its originator, comments that the poor person "feels no attachment to community, neighbors, or friends, . . . resents all authority (for example, that of policemen, social workers, teachers, landlords, employers), and is apt to think that he has been 'railroaded' and to want to 'get even.'"32 The second group of elements of the culture of poverty is related to the communities in which poor people live. In these communities, there is little organization beyond the level of the extended family. Occasionally, temporary groupings and voluntary organizations emerge, and sometimes even a sense of community, but this does not last long. The third group of elements of the culture of poverty related to the family. According to Lewis, major traits of family life are: absence of childhood as a specially prolonged and protected stage in the life cycle, early initiation into sex, free unions or consensual marriages, a relatively high incidence of the abandonment of wives and children, a trend toward female- or mother-centered families and consequently a much greater knowledge of maternal relatives, a strong predisposition to authoritarianism, lack of privacy, verbal emphasis upon family solidarity which is only rarely achieved because of sibling rivalry, and competition for limited goods and maternal affection. Banfield asserts that the child-rearing style of the mother is impulsive, and once children have passed infancy, they are likely to be neglected or abused.34 Finally, there are those elements related to the individual. People in the culture of poverty supposedly have strong feelings of marginality; that is, they do not feel they really belong to anything in society. They are also characterized as having strong feelings of helplessness, dependence, and inferiority. There is a high incidence of maternal deprivation, weak ego structure, and confused sexual identity. Poor people are viewed as having poor impulse control, a strong present-time orientation with little ability to defer gratification and to plan for the future, and a corresponding sense of resignation and fatalism. Banfield says, "At the present-oriented end of the scale, the lower-class individual lives from moment to moment. If he has any awareness of a future, it is of something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen to him, he does not make them happen. . . . [W]hatever he cannot use immediately he considers valueless."35 Lewis argues that these elements represent characteristics of a culture or, more accurately, of a subculture. They are social, psychological, and economic traits that are passed on from one generation to another. They represent beliefs, attitudes, and values that are fundamentally different from those of the larger society. Lewis says: People with a culture of poverty are aware of middle-class values, talk about them and even claim some of them as their own, but on the whole they do not live by them. Thus it is important to distinguish between what they say and what they do. For example, many will tell you that marriage by law, by the church, or by both, is the ideal form of marriage, but few will marry. A key argument is that these cultural elements survive and are passed down from generation to generation because they are functional for people living within a poverty situation. Lewis continues the example on marriage: "To men who have no steady jobs or other sources of income . . . free unions and consensual marriage makes a lot of sense. Women will often turn down offers of marriage because they feel it ties them down to men who are immature, punishing and generally unreliable."36 According to culture of poverty theorists, these characteristics of the poor make it unlikely that they will be able to escape their poverty. To get out of poverty, one has to participate in social institutions, especially school; one has to form stable relationships, mainly two-parent families; and perhaps most important of all, one must be willing to defer gratification of immediate wants in order to gain greater rewards at a future date. For example, we all realize that going to college requires that a young person delay a large number of desires. It generally involves putting off buying a nice car, getting married, and traveling for at least four years. Going to college costs a lot in terms of deferred pleasures. However, most people realize that if they put these things off for four years, there is a higher likelihood that they will reap larger rewards over the remainder of their lifetime. Culture of poverty theorists assert that poor people are unable to see this far ahead and so do not defer gratification in order to get an education, among other things; thus they hurt or destroy their chances to escape poverty. Three additional points need to be made about the culture of poverty theory. The first is that this theory is not meant to apply to all poor people. The group being discussed is the group we identified earlier as the residual poor—the persistently poor or the welfare poor. People in this group represent only a small percentage of the poor, but they receive much attention because of the seemingly intractable nature of their poverty. The second point is that culture of poverty theory views the lives of the residual poor as containing a kind of irony. That is, the beliefs, attitudes, and behavior patterns that help make life in poverty bearable are the same patterns that prevent people from escaping poverty. For example, for a teenage boy in the ghetto, belonging to a gang and selling drugs are going to provide much more pleasure and status among his peers than being on the honor roll and working afternoons at McDonald's for minimum wage. Yet going to school and working at a straight job are likely to be a route out of poverty, whereas belonging to a gang and selling drugs are probably going to eventually result in disaster. The third point is that because poverty constitutes a subculture, it involves more than money. According to this theory, even if members of the poverty culture were given enough money to meet all their needs, they would not change their lives. They would most likely "squander the money" to gratify immediate needs and wants, and they would end up just as miserable as before. 8. Cultural Deprivation Whereas culture of poverty theory is based on research in anthropology and focuses on the concept of culture, cultural deprivation theory is based on research in education and focuses on the concept of socialization. Cultural deprivation theory does not assert that the poor have different values, beliefs, and knowledge from the nonpoor; it posits that they are deprived of the opportunity to develop the knowledge, beliefs, and values of the larger society. Cultural deprivation theory has focused mainly on low educational achievement among poor children, which in turn results in low human capital. The theory argues that differences in educational achievement between poor and nonpoor children are explained by differences in home background. The homes of culturally deprived children are depicted as lacking privacy due to overcrowding, lacking books or other reading material, little verbal interaction beyond barked orders and frequent criticism, few, if any, conversations about the value of education, and little emphasis on sitting still and concentrating on a task. Although cultural deprivation theory was developed before the advanced digital age, it is a safe bet that in the 21 century the lack of access to computers, iPads, and iPhones would be added to the list of significant missing items/experiences. According to cultural deprivation theory, poor children do not disvalue education; they simply have never been taught (or, more accurately, socialized) to value it. According to Holman, "If the child-rearing practices are deficient, then the children will not develop into adults who can fit into the prevailing culture with all its opportunities for education and advancement. (Again, a contrast can be made with the culture of poverty thesis in which the children are adequately socialized but into a culture that accepts poverty.)"37 In the years since the original cultural deprivation studies, research has been conducted that presents additional explanations for poor school performance by poor children. Psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley compared the development of 42 children for three years. They found a marked difference in vocabulary development between middle-class and poor children. By age three, the children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, whereas the children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of only about 525 words. The children's IQs correlated closely with their vocabularies, with the average IQ among the middle class children being 117, and the welfare children's average being 79. Hart and Risley's explanation of this difference was explained by the verbal behavior of the parents. They found that, in professional homes, the parents directed an average of 487 "utterances" toward the child per hour, whereas in the welfare homes the number was only 178. In addition, they found that among the professional parents, the communications tended to be mainly positive, words of praise and approval, whereas in the poor homes, communications tended to be more commonly words of disapproval. Anthropologist Annette Lareau also has looked at the achievement gap between middle-class children and poor children and found that parental resources can explain much of the difference. Middle-class parents tend to schedule countless activities for their children—music lessons, clubs, soccer games, trips to the museum or the zoo—things that poor parents have neither the time nor the money to provide for their children. These "cultural differences translate into a distinct advantage for middle-class children in school, on standardized achievement tests, and later in life, in the workplace."

Chapter 10: The Nature and Causes of Poverty

1. Structural Explanations of Poverty—Conservative Version In recent years, a new conservative explanation of structurally caused poverty has emerged. This theory is referred to as new structural poverty. Basically this explanation contends that "overly generous" government welfare programs encourage able-bodied, working-age persons to sink into a lifestyle of welfare dependency and consequently permanent poverty. Basically, according to this theory, poor people make a rational choice that a combination of welfare program benefits will produce higher income than they can get from employment earnings. Advocates of this perspective argue additionally that welfare payments to poor female-headed families undermine the traditional role of the male breadwinner, for whom the state unintentionally becomes a surrogate.80 To the chagrin of liberals, conservatives have some empirical data with which to back up this theory. From 1967 until 1977, the government financed a series of studies that looked at increased benefits and liberalized policies for public assistance recipients. The studies were the New Jersey Guaranteed Income Experiment, which began in 1967; the Rural (1968) and Gary (1969) Guaranteed Income Experiments; and finally, the largest, the Seattle-Denver Income Maintenance Experiments (Sime/Dime), which began in 1970. In these studies, more than five thousand families were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The experimental groups were placed on what is known as a "negative income tax," or "guaranteed annual income"; in addition, some received labor market counseling and training. The control groups received traditional welfare support. After various periods of time, the families were evaluated to see whether there were any differences in the amount of labor force participation (Were participants in the more generous guaranteed annual income program less motivated to work?), whether labor market counseling affected labor market participation, and what the effects of the experimental program were on marital stability. The study found that the program did have some (although there is debate as to just how much) negative effect on labor market participation. It also found that the more generous benefits and liberalized policies did not have the anticipated effect of reducing marital breakup among recipients. Conservatives point to these studies as evidence that more generous welfare programs will have a result just the opposite of that intended; that is, they will increase poverty and dependency rather than reduce it.

Chapter 12: Child Welfare Conclusion

1. Conclusion For many reasons it can be said that child protective service is the most central area of the social work profession. It is among the largest fields of practice, it is the one area in which social work is the host profession, it has grown the most rapidly, and it enjoys the highest level of public support. Child protective service is also one of the most professionally and personally satisfying areas of social work practice. As Kadushin has written: The Talmud, emphasizing the importance of each individual life, says, "If during the course of your own life, you have saved one life, it is as if you have saved all mankind." Few occupations give us the opportunity of participating in the saving of a life. The everyday work of the child welfare worker is concerned with just that—reclaiming a child for life. It is to be expected that such a task would be very difficult. It is also to be expected that there are few, if any, tasks that offer the same degree of satisfaction and the same sense of accomplishment.

Chapter 10: The Nature and Causes of Poverty

1. Critique of Conservative Explanations Although liberals will admit that the guaranteed income experiments demonstrated that generous welfare programs provide some work disincentives, they consider these effects to be minor when compared with the poverty-reducing results of the increased benefits. They argue that generous welfare benefits help families maintain basic financial and health care standards they would not otherwise enjoy. These benefits, besides making the lives of the poor more tolerable, also function to prevent temporary hardships from escalating into such sustained and severe difficulties that the family is never able to recover. Liberals argue that the conservative structural explanation of poverty is really an old idea that has been brought out and dusted off not in response to any new data but rather because the political atmosphere is once again receptive. When the Elizabethan Poor Law was passed in England in 1601, one of the major fears of its critics was that the law would result in "pauperization" of the poor. By this, the critics meant that once people learned they could survive without working, they would be forevermore rendered useless for socially beneficial work. Liberals argue that the new structural poverty theory is simply a restatement of this idea, and as Sanders notes, "the attraction of [conservative] arguments may derive more from the 'hands-off' governmental approach and the potential for lower taxes it implies."

Chapter 10: The Nature and Causes of Poverty

1. Critique of Cultural Explanations Cultural explanations of poverty are extremely popular for two major reasons. The first is that they appeal to both liberals and conservatives. The second reason is that to the average person on the street, as well as to academics and professionals, these theories just seem to make so much sense. When subjected to close scrutiny, however, cultural explanations do not make nearly as much sense. There are several criticisms of cultural theories, mainly directed at the more influential culture of poverty theory and its intellectual heir, underclass theory. The first criticism is directed at the research on which the theory is based, and the second stems from other research that has failed to support major aspects of the theory. The third, aimed at the recent popular interest in the underclass, asserts that cultural explanations of poverty are really a modern attempt to define a portion of the poor as "undeserving." In this section, we briefly address these critiques, discuss a major and influential theory called blaming the victim that rejects cultural explanations, and look at alternative explanations of the characteristics of the poor that have been attributed to cultural differences. 2. Culture of Poverty Theory Is Based on Methodologically Flawed Research Although culture of poverty theory has been expounded by an enormous number of authors, few have conducted original research to test whether the theory is correct. Nearly all applications of the theory are based on the anthropological studies of Oscar Lewis, notably Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty, The Children of Sanchez, and La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York The method Lewis used in writing these books is simple and straightforward. He begins with a description of the attributes of the culture of poverty, as discussed previously. He then records an immense quantity of biographic data about people whom he believes characterize the culture of poverty. According to one of his critics, Charles Valentine, "The principal purpose of this design is evidently to convey the impression that the biographical evidence supports and validates the theoretical abstraction which is labeled the 'culture of poverty.'" Valentine argues that Lewis's research does not validate the culture of poverty concept because of the following flaws: Lewis met with the subjects of his research in his office rather than in their own environment. Lewis employed a "directive" approach, guiding the respondents to material he wanted them to cover. Lewis edited the material and, according to Valentine, "often reorganized the material, selected some portions of the testimony, and eliminated others." The most serious flaw, according to Valentine, is that the subjects selected may not have been representative of the group being studied. For example, in the Rios family, the subjects of La Vida, prostitution is very important in the lives of the women. This is not typical of poor Puerto Rican families and indicates that the family is an unreliable basis for generalization.39 Valentine concludes that "the scientific status of the 'culture of poverty' remains essentially a series of undemonstrated hypotheses. With respect to many or most of these hypotheses, alternative propositions are theoretically more convincing and are supported by more available evidence."40 These alternative propositions are discussed later in this section. 3. Cultural Definitions Really Refer to the "Undeserving Poor" The well-known sociologist and urban planner Herbert Gans points out that the original use of the term underclass was as a purely economic concept to describe people who were chronically unemployed or underemployed as a result of the emerging postindustrial economy. These people were poor for purely structural reasons. In recent years, however, there has been a gradual change in the use of the term. Underclass has come to refer more and more to people who are viewed as attitudinally and behaviorally deviant. Gans believes that it is not coincidental that those defined as members of the underclass are almost entirely African American and Latino. Thus, according to Gans, the term has become a code word for the old concept of the undeserving poor. It has become the most recent in a long line of concepts that permit us to maintain harsh attitudes and hard hearts toward the poor by defining their poverty as their own fault. Gans says: The first danger of the term is its unusual power as a buzzword. It is a handy euphemism; while it seems inoffensively technical on the surface, it hides within it all the moral opprobrium Americans have long felt toward those poor people who have been judged to be undeserving. Even when it is being used by journalists, scholars, and others as a technical term, it carries with it this judgmental baggage. . . . A second and related danger of the term is its use as a racial codeword that subtly hides anti-black and anti-Hispanic feelings. 4. Research Fails to Support Elements of Cultural Explanations Criticisms of weakness in Lewis's research design are supported by the fact that studies looking at various characteristics of people who are supposedly members of the culture of poverty have almost uniformly failed to verify the existence of these characteristics. Culture of poverty theory asserts, for example, that one of the reasons poor people do badly in the job market is that they do not value work. Two studies by Goodwin, based on a sample of more than 4,000 adults, found just the opposite to be true. These studies found that work was just as essential to the self-esteem of poor people as it was to the nonpoor.42 Ethnographic studies by anthropologists have arrived at the same conclusion—the poor want to work, just like the middle class; that is, there is no cultural difference on this variable.43 A 2001 study by Barnes found not only that members of the underclass want to work but also that the majority are in fact working. Their jobs, however, are often not counted in employment statistics because the poor often "earn money by performing informal jobs such as lawn care, home child care, selling products, and day labor."44 A recent ethnographic study by Edin and Kefalas of 162 women with incomes below $16,000 found a similarity in values and attitudes about marriage and parenthood between poor and middle-class women.45 A cornerstone of cultural theories, particularly cultural deprivation theory, is that the poor do not value education and so are not motivated to strive for an education. The research evidence also casts doubt on this proposition. A study by Sears, Maccoby, and Levin found that the poor were even more concerned that their children do well in school than were middle-class parents.46 Similarly, Riessman found that lower-class parents regretted their own lack of education and were strongly motivated to see that their children did better.47 Similarly, Barnes's data revealed education to be "very important to [underclass] respondents."48 We could go on and on discussing research that casts doubt on cultural explanations of poverty. However, there is still one problem: Even though research has demonstrated that the poor do not really hold values significantly different from those of the rest of the population—that is, they do not have a separate culture—there are still some differences in their lifeways that must be explained if cultural explanations are to be rejected. For example, it has been demonstrated that the poor are less likely to defer gratification than the middle class, poor kids are less likely to continue their educations, and poor women are more likely than nonpoor women to have children outside of marriage. How do we explain these things? 5. Alternative Explanation for the Lifeways of the Poor At the risk of seeming repetitive, we need to emphasize that the main idea of the cultural explanations of poverty is that the lifeways, or behaviors, of the poor are caused by a set of values existing among poor people that are fundamentally different from those of the larger society. Poor people often have children out of wedlock because, supposedly, they do not value marriage; poor people do not work, the theory contends, because they do not value work and do not feel any stigma from being supported by welfare; poor children do not do well in school, it is argued, because they have not been taught to value education and its related components, such as paying attention and reading books. But there is a different explanation for these lifeways of poor people. That is, poor people have the same values as the rest of society (this has been supported by the research cited earlier), but they behave differently because within the limited range of choices available to them, those behaviors are the ones that make the most sense. Sociologists refer to this as the situational adaptation interpretation, and economists call it the choice model.49 Let's illustrate this interpretation with an example of two young couples: James and Vivian and Cindy and Dave. Each couple has been in a relationship for about one year. Vivian and Cindy each become pregnant, and both are strongly opposed to abortion as a solution. Here the similarity ends. James and Vivian have grown up in the ghetto, and they are the children of welfare mothers. Vivian finished the eleventh grade and then dropped out of high school. She has worked fairly steadily in a series of minimum-wage jobs, mainly in fast-food restaurants. James dropped out of school in his senior year when the high school graduation exam revealed that he could barely read or write, and school personnel said that he would be required to take remedial work before he could earn his diploma. Since leaving school, he has worked only sporadically, usually in temporary manual labor jobs. In contrast, Cindy and Dave are both juniors at a large state university. They grew up in the suburbs, and they are the children of middle-class professional parents. Dave is majoring in engineering and is an officer candidate in army ROTC. Cindy is majoring in accounting. On learning of their respective pregnancies, what do the two couples do? James and Vivian do not even consider marriage. Vivian applies for welfare and food stamps shortly after the baby is born; she has quit her job because she could not afford day care on the salary she was earning. James hangs around for a few months and contributes whatever money he can for the baby's support, but eventually he drifts away. Vivian basically reproduces her own childhood for her baby. Dave and Cindy approach the situation differently. When they learn that Cindy is pregnant, they immediately decide to get married. They both take part-time jobs, and this income, combined with Dave's ROTC stipend plus some help from their families, provides enough income for them to survive until Dave graduates and is commissioned a second lieutenant in the army. Cindy takes a year off to be with the baby and then goes back to school, earns her degree, and begins a career with a large accounting firm. How do we explain the different behaviors of these two couples? Cultural theorists would say that their behaviors reflect the fundamentally different values the two couples have learned in their respective social environments. James and Vivian come from environments that have taught them that single parenthood is acceptable, perhaps even preferable, to marriage. They do not really value work and achievement and so view welfare as an acceptable way to rear their child. Fathers are not considered to be important to the well-being of children, so no one is too concerned when James drifts away. Cindy and Dave hold different values. For them, it is of paramount importance that a child have parents who are married; the concepts of work and self-support are also extremely important to them. The situational adaptation interpretation provides a different explanation. This perspective argues that the two couples probably have similar values but exist in very different situations that make their choices different. Both couples value marriage and work, but these are realistic choices only for Cindy and Dave. James and Vivian realize that there is no bright future for them as a couple. There is no commission in the army followed by a good engineering job for James, and there is no period of full-time motherhood followed by a professional career with good day care for Vivian. Instead, what lies in their future is a series of low-paying jobs interspersed by long periods of unemployment. To make matters worse, by getting married, Vivian would lose eligibility for some types of aid. Thus, both couples are making rational choices based on the opportunities available to them. The difference is that the opportunities available to Cindy and Dave are in line with traditional American values—marriage, job, and a two-parent family. For James and Vivian, violating these norms makes far more sense: As a single mother, at least Vivian will not be tied to an unemployed man, and James will not be constantly frustrated by obligations he has no way of fulfilling. If poor people like James and Vivian hold basically the same values as the rest of society but are forced to violate these values in order to make rational decisions, how do they cope with the frustration that must result? Rodman argues that they do this through a process he calls the "lower class value stretch." This is a process through which poor people "come to tolerate and eventually evaluate favorably certain deviations from middle class values."50 This process is closely related to what psychologists call rationalization or the "sweet lemon effect." For example, when Vivian and James do not get married, one might very well hear Vivian saying something like, "I don't want to be tied down to one man anyway. This way I can be a mother and still be able to party and have fun." When James can secure only manual labor jobs, he may say something like, "I'd really hate to be cooped up in an office all day and be forced to wear a tie. Only suckers do that. I want to be working outside with the real men. Sure, the boss can fire me anytime he likes because my job is only temporary, but the other side of that coin is that anytime I want I can tell him to take this job and shove it. I don't have to take grief from anyone!" The point Rodman emphasizes is that poor people share the same basic values as the rest of society but that because of their limited opportunity to make these values work for them, they "stretch" the values to fit the opportunities they do have. With all the criticisms of the cultural theories, why do they continue to exert so much influence? These theories were first formulated and exerted tremendous influence in the 1950s and 1960s. They largely went out of vogue in the 1970s with the landslide of contradictory data. Like the mythological phoenix, they have risen from the ashes and once again have a grip on our collective imagination, this time under the new and catchy label "the underclass." The reemergence of cultural theories is in no way related to any new data, but this appears to bother only a few people. One of these is economist David Ellwood, who sees value in cultural theories but recognizes that they remain largely untested. Even Ellwood, a hard-nosed, empirically oriented (and incidentally liberal) economist, is willing to give some credence to cultural theories; he argues that the fact "that [cultural] theories are hard to test and interpret is not a legitimate basis for ignoring them in empirical work or policy discussion. The way welfare recipients are treated, the way they perceive the world, and the way the world interacts with them must have profound influences."51 Why do cultural theories continue to exert so much influence in the face of so little solid empirical support? And why have people shown so little inclination to seek empirical support, instead relying on the assumption that these theories are valid? The answer, perhaps, lies in a tendency in U.S. society that psychologist William Ryan calls blaming the victim. 6. Blaming the Victim Because of our strong belief in individualism, we tend to place responsibility for problems, as well as credit for successes, squarely on the shoulders of the individual affected. This approach sometimes makes perfectly good sense, but we often carry it to ridiculous extremes. A woman is raped, and some people will ask, "Why was she wearing such suggestive clothes? Had she been drinking? What was she doing unescorted in a bar? Had she been flirting with her attacker?" The implication of these questions is that she somehow was responsible for the attack on her. This tendency is so deeply ingrained that we even do it to ourselves. When a person's car is stolen, you will often hear him or her saying things like, "I should have known better than to park it in that lot" or "I knew I should have ridden the bus to work; this neighborhood is no place to leave a car." The point is that the woman did not rape herself and the person did not steal his or her own car. These things were done to them, yet we still tend to place much of the blame on the person who was victimized. Ryan asserts that because of our tendency to blame people for their own problems, we naturally look for reasons why the poor are responsible for their own poverty. The earliest explanations were that the poor were in some way morally or genetically inferior. He believed that society falsely held three myths to be true about those living in poverty: Minority children do poorly in school because they are "culturally deprived" African-American family structure is typically unstable and matriarchal People living in poverty have poor health due to ignorance about proper care and/or apathy about their health However, these explanations always seemed harsh, at least to liberals, and they did not last long against the weight of experience with the poor. So, according to Ryan, we developed new theories that still placed the responsibility for poverty on the poor themselves but that seemed to be more scientific and more humanitarian. Ryan argues that cultural explanations of poverty are so powerful and have lasted so long precisely because they allow us to continue to explain problems as being the fault of the individuals affected, but to do so under the cloak of liberal humanitarianism and concern. The old conservative notion of intrinsic or hereditary defect is replaced by an emphasis on environmental causation. Ryan's belief is that the individual is not responsible for his or her own poverty and that cultural explanations are just sophisticated attempts to cover up the real reasons for poverty. These reasons are not defects in the individual but defects in the structure of society. It is to this explanation of poverty that we now turn.

Chapter 12: Child Welfare Dynamics

1. Dynamics In the face of the staggering statistics on child abuse and neglect, the question that demands an answer is, "Why do people do such things?" The most obvious answer, and the one that dominated thinking until recently, is that parents who abuse and neglect their children are psychologically sick or perhaps even evil. Steele and Pollock refer to abusive parents as a "gold mine of psychopathology"; Kempe and his associates describe the abuser as the "psychopathological member of the family"; Young says that "neglecting parents tend to wear blinders imposed by their own unsatisfied needs" and refers to abusive parents as "parents who hate"; Eisenberg refers to abusive parents as having "cancer of the soul."18 A great deal of research has been done on this question of "Why?" The general consensus that has emerged is that the dynamics of abuse and neglect are much too complex to be explained adequately by a simple psychopathological model. It is now thought that abuse and neglect result from the interaction of four types of factors: individual parent factors, family factors, child factors, and environmental factors. 2. Individual Parent Factors Although the majority of parents who maltreat their children have no diagnosable psychopathologic condition, researchers and practitioners have identified a cluster of personality traits and social attributes that are frequently found among the parents. Among the more common are: Feelings of low self-esteem. These parents often feel they are worthless, incompetent, and bad. Neglectful parents often neglect themselves as well as their children. External locus of control. These parents often have the belief that events are determined by chance or outside forces beyond one's personal control. Excessive dependency. Neglectful and abusive parents look to others to fulfill needs; mature adults take care of themselves. Impulsivity. Everyone has impulses to do things that are improper. These range from mild things like going to the beach instead of going to work on a nice day to more serious things like striking someone when he or she frustrates or irritates us. Part of maturing is learning to control these impulses—or, in Freudian terms, developing a superego. Maltreating parents often have not done this. Negative attitudes based on deficient knowledge. Parents who maltreat their children often lack knowledge about normal child development, and this leads to unrealistic expectations about appropriate child behavior. For example, a parent may punish a one-year-old for not being toilet trained, not knowing that this is not an appropriate expectation for a child of this age. Deficient consciences. These parents often demonstrate an inability to empathize with their children and a great ability to rationalize their own behavior. Therefore, they feel little remorse when they maltreat their children. Childhood deprivation. Often, maltreating parents are repeating child-rearing patterns they experienced as children. While not all maltreated children grow up to be maltreating parents, a review of the research found that about one-third of all individuals who were maltreated will subject their own children to maltreatment.20 Social isolation. Maltreating families are often cut off from their social environment. They avoid, and in turn are avoided by, neighbors. They rarely participate in church or community activities, and they are often alienated from their extended families. A small proportion of parents who maltreat their children do have diagnosable psychological disorders or mental problems. Among these are the following: Psychopathy. A true psychopath is a person who, because of severe deficiencies in his or her own nurturing, has developed a grossly distorted superego. These people do not have deficient consciences; they have no consciences. Thus, when they harm a child, they feel no remorse at all. This is a rare condition and accounts for less than 5 percent of abusive parents. 3. A Closer Look: Major Types of Child Abuse and Neglect Each state sets its own definition of child abuse and neglect, but the definition must be within minimum standards set by the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). Most states recognize four major types of maltreatment: physical abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse. Although any of the forms of child maltreatment may be found separately, they often occur in combination. In many states, abandonment and parental substance abuse are also defined as forms of child abuse or neglect. The examples provided below are for general informational purposes only. Not all states' definitions will include all of the examples listed below, and individual states' definitions may cover additional situations not mentioned here. Physical abuse is nonaccidental physical injury (ranging from minor bruises to severe fractures or death) as a result of punching, beating, kicking, biting, shaking, throwing, stabbing, choking, hitting (with a hand, stick, strap, or other object), burning, or otherwise harming a child, that is inflicted by a parent, caregiver, or other person who has responsibility for the child. Such injury is considered abuse regardless of whether the caregiver intended to hurt the child. Physical discipline, such as spanking or paddling, is not considered abuse as long as it is reasonable and causes no bodily injury to the child. Neglect is the failure of a parent, guardian, or other caregiver to provide for a child's basic needs. Neglect may be: Physical (e.g., failure to provide necessary food or shelter, or lack of appropriate supervision) Medical (e.g., failure to provide necessary medical or mental health treatment) Education (e.g., failure to educate a child or attend to special education needs) Emotional (e.g., inattention to a child's emotional needs, failure to provide psychological care, or permitting the child to use alcohol or other drugs) These situations do not always mean a child is neglected. Sometimes cultural values, the standards of care in the community, and poverty may be contributing factors, indicating the family is in need of information or assistance. When a family fails to use information and resources, and the child's health or safety is at risk, then child welfare intervention may be required. In addition, many states provide an exception to the definition of neglect for parents who choose not to seek medical care for their children due to religious beliefs that may prohibit medical intervention. Sexual abuse includes activities by a parent or caregiver such as fondling a child's genitals, penetration, incest, rape, sodomy, indecent exposure, and exploitation through prostitution or the production of pornographic materials. Sexual abuse is defined by CAPTA as "the employment, use, persuasion, inducement, enticement, or coercion of any child to engage in, or assist any other person to engage in, any sexually explicit conduct or simulation of such conduct for the purpose of producing a visual depiction of such conduct; or the rape, and in cases of caretaker or interfamilial relationships, statutory rape, molestation, prostitution, or other form of sexual exploitation of children, or incest with children." Emotional abuse (or psychological abuse) is a pattern of behavior that impairs a child's emotional development or sense of self-worth. This may include constant criticism, threats, or rejection, as well as withholding love, support, or guidance. Emotional abuse is often difficult to prove and, therefore, child protective services may not be able to intervene without evidence of harm or mental injury to the child. Emotional abuse is almost always present when other forms are identified. Abandonment is now defined in many states as a form of neglect. In general, a child is considered to be abandoned when the parent's identity or whereabouts are unknown, the child has been left alone in circumstances where the child suffers serious harm, or the parent has failed to maintain contact with the child or provide reasonable support for a specified period of time. Substance abuse is an element of the definition of child abuse or neglect in many states. Circumstances that are considered abuse or neglect in some states include: Prenatal exposure of a child to harm due to the mother's use of an illegal drug or other substance Manufacture of methamphetamine in the presence of a child Selling, distributing, or giving illegal drugs or alcohol to a child Use of a controlled substance by a caregiver that impairs the caregiver's ability to adequately care for the child. 4. Depression. This is probably the most common psychological disorder among maltreating parents, particularly neglectful parents. These people feel so bad that they find it impossible to get up the energy to care for their children. Psychosis. Psychotic parents suffer from a distorted sense of reality. They may think that strangers are trying to kill them, they may hear the voice of God, or they may think that their child is possessed by the devil. Although only about 5 percent of parents who mistreat their children are psychotic, these children are in great danger. Developmental delay. Developmentally delayed parents can be caring and nurturing. However, they often lack the knowledge and skill to rear children without help and thus may have difficulty adequately protecting their children. Substance abuse. In the past 30 years, substance abuse has gone from a fairly insignificant factor in child maltreatment to being the major individual/parent factor. A study published by the Child Welfare League of America in 2001 reported that 67 percent of the parents involved in the child welfare system were in need of substance abuse treatment. Commonly available substances that can substantially impair a person's ability to parent include alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, crack, PCP, and heroin, as well as new "designer drugs" that are constantly emerging. Substance abuse contributes to child maltreatment in two ways. First, the alcohol or drugs can lower a parent's impulse control, and he or she may express underlying anger by injuring the child. Second, children are often neglected because the parent is unable to perform everyday tasks while under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Recently, prenatal exposure of children to drugs and alcohol during their mother's pregnancy has been an issue of particular concern. The number of children born each year exposed to drugs or alcohol is estimated to be between 550,000 and 750,000.21 While this issue has received much attention, children who are exposed prenatally represent only a small proportion of children negatively affected by parental substance abuse. 5. Family Factors When a case of child maltreatment comes to light, there are many questions to be answered. The most disturbing questions relate to the role of family members other than the victim and the perpetrator. If a child is abused by one parent, we ask, "Where was the other parent during all this? Why didn't he or she protect the child? Where were the brothers and sisters? If they were older, why didn't they intervene? If they were younger, why didn't they tell someone?" In neglect situations, we ask questions such as "How could the whole family have ignored the need for medical treatment? How could both parents have been so careless?" The answers to questions such as these lie in the realm of family dynamics. Although we do not yet fully understand these answers, some of the important dynamics we are learning about are: Parental collusion. Although one parent may be the active perpetrator in abuse cases or may be the parent most obviously failing in his or her role responsibilities in neglect cases, it is rare that the other parent does not play some part in the maltreatment. The passive parent generally is aware of what is happening and gives tacit permission and support to the active parent. Scapegoating. Often one child becomes the focus for anger and aggression present in family relations. Other family members "take out" their rage and aggression on the designated child. Single-parent status. Single parents are heavily over-represented among protective service cases. The rate of child abuse in single-parent households is 27.3 children per 1,000, which is nearly twice the rate in two-parent households. Single parents often lack adequate resources, including financial resources, for raising children, and our society is not particularly generous in its assistance to them. Adolescent parents. Young parents are over-represented in child welfare caseloads. Late adolescence and early adulthood are stressful times without the added burden of parenthood—often single parenthood. The extended family. The extended family is a primary source of support during times of stress. Parents who maltreat their children frequently lack this source of support. Family management problems. Many persons are not well prepared for parenthood at the time they have children. These people may have difficulty finding and keeping appropriate housing, organizing and completing basic household tasks such as cleaning the house and paying bills, getting children to school on time and other obligations properly completed and on time, and protecting children from health and safety hazards. Family management problems contribute to neglect because the pervasive disorganization virtually ensures that all of a child's needs are not met. They also contribute to abuse through increasing the parent's frustration level. 6. Child Factors While children are not responsible for being victims of maltreatment, there are a number of factors related to the child that have been found to be correlated with maltreatment. A very active child places more stress on caretakers and, therefore, is more likely to be a target for abuse. A passive child places fewer demands on parents and, therefore, is at greater risk for neglect. Other factors that have been found to be significant are: Age. The younger a child is, the greater is his or her risk of maltreatment. When children reach adolescence, they, particularly girls, are at increased risk of sexual abuse. Disabilities. Children with physical, cognitive, and emotional disabilities experience higher rates of maltreatment than other children. A national study found that children with disabilities were three times more likely to be maltreated than children without disabilities.22 Child behavioral problems. Child factors such as aggression, attention deficit disorder, and difficult temperaments have been associated with increased risk for child maltreatment. 7. Environmental Factors A time-honored bit of practice wisdom among social workers is that child maltreatment results from "internal stress combined with external press." Internal stress refers to the individual parent and the family factors discussed previously. External press refers to factors in the environment that overload the abilities of individuals and families to cope with difficulties in healthy ways. Major types of environmental factors that relate to child maltreatment are: Chronic stressors. These are long-term problematic conditions with which a family must cope. Simply being a parent is a chronic stressor, especially for parents who are too young, too ignorant, or not ready for the responsibilities of having children. Having a family member who is chronically ill, either physically or mentally, is another great stress on a family. Probably the most persistent chronic stressor is poverty. Some believe that this in itself is the greatest cause of abuse and neglect.23 Rearing children is much easier for parents who can afford babysitters, summer camps, music lessons, nice houses, and innumerable other things. When you can never financially afford a break from your kids, and when you can never say yes to their desires, parenthood can be a hard road indeed. Situational stressors. These are changes in a family's social situation, generally, though not always, for the worse. Situational stressors to which the family may be unable to accommodate include unemployment, moving, divorce, homelessness, death, birth of a new baby, a promotion, and both parents working. These stressors produce tension and often a role overload, which may be instrumental in abuse or neglect. Precipitating stressors. These are incidents that immediately trigger an incident of maltreatment. They are, in Faller and Ziefert's words, "the straws which break the camel's back."24 Precipitating stressors are identified most commonly in cases of abuse, but they sometimes lead to neglect in the form of abandonment or withdrawal from parenting responsibilities. The most common form of precipitating stressor is actual or perceived child misbehavior. 8. Additional Factors Two additional factors need to be considered in relation to the dynamics of child maltreatment. These are our culture's general ambivalence about violence and subcultures that approve of violence to a greater degree than the rest of society. Although we in the United States consider ourselves to be a peace-loving people, we are fascinated with physical violence. The success of movies such as martial arts and super hero films of all types demonstrates this. Further, we sanction a level of violence directed toward children that is considerably higher than we permit for adults. Imagine what would happen if a supervisor rapped an assistant on the knuckles with a ruler because his work was late or if an executive struck his secretary with his belt because her work was sloppy. Everyone would be horrified, and the perpetrators likely would end up in court on criminal or civil charges. However, if a parent or other relative were to do these things to a child, he or she generally would be considered to be acting in a perfectly acceptable manner. Gil asserts that the culturally sanctioned approval of physical violence toward children is the "basic dimension upon which all other factors [contributing] to child abuse are imposed."25 The final dynamic related to child maltreatment is the existence of subcultures within society that sanction the use of a greater degree of violence toward children than does society in general or that hold greatly different standards regarding appropriate care. Although the relationship between social class and use of violence is complex and not fully understood, there is evidence that lower-class parents are more likely to condone the use of violence than middle-class parents.26 There also have been highly publicized cases of religious groups that practice what most of us would consider to be child abuse in the name of a proper, biblically supported lifestyle. This type of situation garnered much publicity in the case in which police and child protective service workers raided the Yearning for Zion ranch in Eldorado, Texas. The ranch is populated by a sect of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who practice polygamy and, it was alleged, were forcing girls as young as fourteen to marry much older men. And there are subgroups within our society that, for religious or other reasons, do not believe in modern medical care. When a child in one of these groups becomes critically ill, intervention becomes necessary to protect the child. With our tradition of religious freedom, this is a touchy area.

Chapter 12: Child Welfare Historical Perspective

1. Historical Perspective The earliest known provision for the protection of children in this country was a statute passed in Massachusetts in 1735, which provided that when parents: were unable, or neglected to, provide necessaries for the substance and support of their children . . . and where persons bring up their children in such gross ignorance that they do not know, or are not able to distinguish the alphabet, or twenty-four letters, at the age of six years, the overseers might bind out such children to good families for a decent Christian education.27 This law, however, was an anomaly. We do not find evidence of widespread, serious concern for child protection until well into the 19th century. -The Emergence of Concern for Children Why is it that our society did not exhibit much concern about the welfare of children until 150 years ago? There are three general, interrelated reasons: the lengthening of childhood, the breakdown of the ability of the family and the church to manage child dependency, and a gradually changing conception of childhood. -The Lengthening of Childhood Before the Industrial Revolution, childhood was relatively short because, in a rural agricultural setting, children became economically useful and began to fulfill adult roles at young ages. On a farm, where most children grew up, a five- or six-year-old would be a productive part of the family, gathering eggs, weeding the garden, and bringing lunch to the workers in the fields. Children's economic value quickly exceeded their cost. Higgeson wrote in his 1629 New England's Plantation that "little children here by setting of corne may earne much more than their own maintenance."28 Bossard and Boll note that "children, little children, worked hard. But adults worked hard too. Hard work was a colonial necessity for both. The struggle for existence in the New World was a stern reality."29 Children who did not grow up on farms were often apprenticed at an early age, and thus they became productive and assumed adult functions. Childhood as a lengthy period of immaturity and dependence before the assumption of adult responsibilities, which is how we think of it today, did not exist until well into the 19th century. -The Breakdown of the Ability of the Extended Family and the Church to Manage Child Dependency Before the Industrial Revolution, which in the United States really took hold during the mid-19th century, family and child problems were more or less adequately dealt with by the basic social institutions of the extended family and the church. If a child were orphaned, he or she generally would be taken in either by a member of the extended family or by a church family. If a child were being neglected or treated cruelly by his or her family, informal social pressure would be exerted on the family. If parents were mentally or physically ill, the extended family, church, or community would step in to ensure that the child's care did not sink too far below an adequate level. But with the onset of heavy industrialization, the family, the church, and the community no longer were able to handle child dependency. An ever-increasing number of people lived in cities far from their extended families; they were marginally involved in church, and many had little knowledge of, or concern for, their neighbors. The first visible symptom of the breakdown in the ability of the family and the church to handle child dependency was a vast and rapid increase in the number of homeless children. Fry notes that: the numbers were immense. At a time when New York City's population was around five hundred thousand, the police estimated that there were ten thousand homeless children wandering about. Later, after close observation [social workers] came to the conclusion that the number ran as high as thirty thousand. This large number of homeless children was, of course, cause for concern. Fry continues: Ragged, verminous, barefoot, the vagrant children slept where they could: in doorways, under stairways, in privies, on hay barges, in discarded packing boxes, and on piles of rubbish in alleys and littered back yards. The older boys often became members of street gangs who terrified respectable citizens when they weren't bashing one another's heads in; many of the girls were accomplished streetwalkers by the time they were twelve or thirteen years old.30 In the latter half of the 19th century, social services rapidly evolved to deal with the massive problem of homeless children. Part of the reason for the development of services was, of course, humanitarian concern for the well-being of the children. Probably a greater reason was fear that these children represented a threat to social stability. One of the leading child welfare figures of the time, Charles Loring Brace, referred to homeless children as the "dangerous classes" and described his efforts to remove the children from the city and place them in rural foster homes as a "moral and physical disinfectant." -The Development of a Changed Conception of Children and Childhood Before the 19th century, children were viewed, at best, as miniature adults; more likely, they were thought of as products of original sin, possessed of evil impulses, who would run wild if not strictly controlled.32 Adults saw childhood as an inconvenient period that people had to get through before they began the real business of living as adults. Children were not thought to have special needs or to require any special care. As a result of this perception, children generally were treated poorly. DeMause found in his research on the history of childhood that: A child's life prior to modern times was uniformly bleak. Virtually every childrearing tract from antiquity to the modern century recommended the beating of children. We found no examples from this period in which a child wasn't beaten, and hundreds of instances of not only beating, but battering, beginning in infancy.33 Williams notes: Since time immemorial children have been treated with incredible cruelty. . . . Children have been tortured, burned, worked to death, terrorized, and flogged daily in order to "discipline" them, dipped in ice water and rolled in the snow in order to "harden" them, and buried alive with their dead parents.34 Few people felt that children needed protection or that they had any right to protection. Children were considered to be the property of their fathers. In Roman law, the power of a father over his children was absolute—he could kill them, sell them, or offer them as sacrifices if he so chose. English common law progressed a little from this, setting forth the duties of parents to support and educate their children. However, common law recognized these duties as "imperfect," which means they were considered to be unenforceable. In 19th-century America, a marked change in attitude toward children began, which evolved into a conception of children as beings who had unique needs and the right to have those needs fulfilled to a reasonable extent. Viviana Zelizer documents in her book Pricing the Priceless Child how, during the 19th century, the concept of the "useful" child who made a valuable contribution to the family economy gradually evolved into the "useless" child of the 20th century: the child who is economically worthless, in fact, very costly, to the family but is considered to be emotionally priceless. The reasons for this transformation were many, including the decline in useful tasks that could be performed by children in a maturing industrial economy, the decline of the birth and death rates, and the rise of the compassionate family.35 The changing view of children, combined with the enlightened view of jurists that parental rights result from the carrying out of parents' duties to their children, created an atmosphere in which laws and programs to protect children were possible.36 These factors converged and interacted during the 19th century to create a need and demand for child welfare services. Industrialization contributed to a lengthening of childhood by greatly postponing the age at which a person became economically useful, the combination of industrialization and urbanization led to such a number of homeless children that they were perceived as threats to social stability, and people began to view children as beings with innate value and unique needs and with certain rights to have these needs fulfilled. 2. The Emergence of Concern for Children Why is it that our society did not exhibit much concern about the welfare of children until 150 years ago? There are three general, interrelated reasons: the lengthening of childhood, the breakdown of the ability of the family and the church to manage child dependency, and a gradually changing conception of childhood. -The Lengthening of Childhood Before the Industrial Revolution, childhood was relatively short because, in a rural agricultural setting, children became economically useful and began to fulfill adult roles at young ages. On a farm, where most children grew up, a five- or six-year-old would be a productive part of the family, gathering eggs, weeding the garden, and bringing lunch to the workers in the fields. Children's economic value quickly exceeded their cost. Higgeson wrote in his 1629 New England's Plantation that "little children here by setting of corne may earne much more than their own maintenance."28 Bossard and Boll note that "children, little children, worked hard. But adults worked hard too. Hard work was a colonial necessity for both. The struggle for existence in the New World was a stern reality."29 Children who did not grow up on farms were often apprenticed at an early age, and thus they became productive and assumed adult functions. Childhood as a lengthy period of immaturity and dependence before the assumption of adult responsibilities, which is how we think of it today, did not exist until well into the 19th century. -The Breakdown of the Ability of the Extended Family and the Church to Manage Child Dependency Before the Industrial Revolution, which in the United States really took hold during the mid-19th century, family and child problems were more or less adequately dealt with by the basic social institutions of the extended family and the church. If a child were orphaned, he or she generally would be taken in either by a member of the extended family or by a church family. If a child were being neglected or treated cruelly by his or her family, informal social pressure would be exerted on the family. If parents were mentally or physically ill, the extended family, church, or community would step in to ensure that the child's care did not sink too far below an adequate level. But with the onset of heavy industrialization, the family, the church, and the community no longer were able to handle child dependency. An ever-increasing number of people lived in cities far from their extended families; they were marginally involved in church, and many had little knowledge of, or concern for, their neighbors. The first visible symptom of the breakdown in the ability of the family and the church to handle child dependency was a vast and rapid increase in the number of homeless children. Fry notes that: the numbers were immense. At a time when New York City's population was around five hundred thousand, the police estimated that there were ten thousand homeless children wandering about. Later, after close observation [social workers] came to the conclusion that the number ran as high as thirty thousand. This large number of homeless children was, of course, cause for concern. Fry continues: Ragged, verminous, barefoot, the vagrant children slept where they could: in doorways, under stairways, in privies, on hay barges, in discarded packing boxes, and on piles of rubbish in alleys and littered back yards. The older boys often became members of street gangs who terrified respectable citizens when they weren't bashing one another's heads in; many of the girls were accomplished streetwalkers by the time they were twelve or thirteen years old.30 In the latter half of the 19th century, social services rapidly evolved to deal with the massive problem of homeless children. Part of the reason for the development of services was, of course, humanitarian concern for the well-being of the children. Probably a greater reason was fear that these children represented a threat to social stability. One of the leading child welfare figures of the time, Charles Loring Brace, referred to homeless children as the "dangerous classes" and described his efforts to remove the children from the city and place them in rural foster homes as a "moral and physical disinfectant." -The Development of a Changed Conception of Children and Childhood Before the 19th century, children were viewed, at best, as miniature adults; more likely, they were thought of as products of original sin, possessed of evil impulses, who would run wild if not strictly controlled.32 Adults saw childhood as an inconvenient period that people had to get through before they began the real business of living as adults. Children were not thought to have special needs or to require any special care. As a result of this perception, children generally were treated poorly. DeMause found in his research on the history of childhood that: A child's life prior to modern times was uniformly bleak. Virtually every childrearing tract from antiquity to the modern century recommended the beating of children. We found no examples from this period in which a child wasn't beaten, and hundreds of instances of not only beating, but battering, beginning in infancy.33 Williams notes: Since time immemorial children have been treated with incredible cruelty. . . . Children have been tortured, burned, worked to death, terrorized, and flogged daily in order to "discipline" them, dipped in ice water and rolled in the snow in order to "harden" them, and buried alive with their dead parents.34 Few people felt that children needed protection or that they had any right to protection. Children were considered to be the property of their fathers. In Roman law, the power of a father over his children was absolute—he could kill them, sell them, or offer them as sacrifices if he so chose. English common law progressed a little from this, setting forth the duties of parents to support and educate their children. However, common law recognized these duties as "imperfect," which means they were considered to be unenforceable. In 19th-century America, a marked change in attitude toward children began, which evolved into a conception of children as beings who had unique needs and the right to have those needs fulfilled to a reasonable extent. Viviana Zelizer documents in her book Pricing the Priceless Child how, during the 19th century, the concept of the "useful" child who made a valuable contribution to the family economy gradually evolved into the "useless" child of the 20th century: the child who is economically worthless, in fact, very costly, to the family but is considered to be emotionally priceless. The reasons for this transformation were many, including the decline in useful tasks that could be performed by children in a maturing industrial economy, the decline of the birth and death rates, and the rise of the compassionate family.35 The changing view of children, combined with the enlightened view of jurists that parental rights result from the carrying out of parents' duties to their children, created an atmosphere in which laws and programs to protect children were possible.36 These factors converged and interacted during the 19th century to create a need and demand for child welfare services. Industrialization contributed to a lengthening of childhood by greatly postponing the age at which a person became economically useful, the combination of industrialization and urbanization led to such a number of homeless children that they were perceived as threats to social stability, and people began to view children as beings with innate value and unique needs and with certain rights to have these needs fulfilled.

Chapter 12: Child Welfare Perspectives

1. Perspectives At first look, it is hard to imagine that there could be liberal and conservative perspectives on child maltreatment. It is true that no sane and decent person, liberal or conservative, advocates the maltreatment of children or ignores children in need of protection or assistance. However, there are still some substantial areas of disagreement. The main areas of disagreement are conceptions of which behaviors constitute appropriate discipline and which are inappropriate, theories of the causation of maltreatment, and beliefs concerning the rights and responsibilities of parents, children, and the state. 2. Conceptions of Appropriate Discipline -Conservative Perspective Although conservative philosophy does not advocate abusing children, it accepts a certain level of physical discipline.88 This acceptance is rooted in the conservative's generally pessimistic view of human nature. People are innately bad, and thus early, firm discipline is necessary for them to become productive members of society. The conservative belief in individual responsibility for behavior and in the importance of respect for authority also contributes to the belief that physical punishment is appropriate for effective child rearing. One of the most influential experts currently involved in parent training is the conservative psychologist and political activist James Dobson. Dobson has this to say about discipline: The issue of respect can be a useful tool in knowing when to punish and how excited one should get about a given behavior. . . . In my opinion, spankings should be reserved for the moment a child (age ten or less) expresses a defiant "I will not!" or "You shut up!" When a youngster tries this kind of stiff-necked rebellion, you had better take it out of him, and pain is a marvelous purifier.89 Dobson provides a number of biblical citations to support his belief in corporal punishment. -Liberal Perspective Although liberals do not always condemn spanking, they are much less enthusiastic about it than conservatives. They tend to believe that human nature is innately good and that it is acceptable, and sometimes even desirable, to question authority. They also tend to believe that violence teaches violence and that physical punishment does more to make the child feel angry and resentful toward the parent than it does to make him or her a responsible citizen. Psychologist Elizabeth Gershoff conducted a meta-analysis of 88 studies of corporal punishment of children. She found a strong association between corporal punishment and eleven child behaviors and experiences. Ten of the associations were negative such as with increased child aggression and antisocial behavior. The only desirable association was between corporal punishment and increased immediate compliance on the part of the child.90 Those who take a radical view believe that the social sanction of physical violence toward children, in the form of approval of spanking, is the basic underlying cause of all child abuse. Gil, for example, argues: Whenever corporal punishment in child-rearing is sanctioned, and even subtly encouraged by a society, incidents of serious physical abuse and injury are bound to happen, either as a result of deliberate, systematic, and conscious action on the part of perpetrators, or under conditions of loss of self-control. In either case, but especially in the latter, physical attacks on children tend to relieve tensions and frustrations experienced by the perpetrators. Clearly, then, these attacks are carried out to meet the emotional needs of the perpetrators rather than the educational needs of the victims, as is often claimed by advocates of corporal punishment. -Analysis and Synthesis In many ways the differences between the conservative and liberal perspectives on corporal punishment are not as great as they appear initially. The conservative psychologist Dobson states, "One of my greatest concerns in recommending corporal punishment (spanking) is that some parents might apply the thrashings too frequently or too severely."92 He is adamant that teenagers should never be spanked because "teenagers desperately want to be thought of as adults, and they deeply resent being treated like children. Spanking is the ultimate insult."93 On the other hand, the liberal pediatrician Spock wrote that there had been an overreaction against spanking, saying, "I'm not particularly advocating spanking, but I think it is less poisonous than lengthy disapproval, because it clears the air, for parent and child."94 Even so, the main difference is clear—generally, conservatives feel corporal punishment is acceptable and even desirable ("spare the rod and spoil the child") for teaching respect and maintaining discipline. Liberals, most of whom would agree with Spock and hesitate to condemn a parent for spanking, nonetheless think that corporal punishment is not the most desirable way to discipline children, even though it occasionally may be justified. Liberals feel that respect does not always mean absolute obedience and that when corporal punishment is necessary, discipline already has broken down. They advocate withdrawal of privileges, time-outs, and extra chores as more effective forms of punishment. Two areas in which conceptions of whether corporal punishment is acceptable directly affect child protective services. The first is the definition of child abuse. If our society were to take a stand, as Sweden has, that any and all corporal punishment is wrong, the definition of abuse would be much easier. Marks of any kind on a child would constitute evidence of abuse, and the case would be "open and shut." But using the conservative idea that spanking is acceptable, as our society does, we have no clear basis for definition. Is it spanking to hit a child with your hand but abuse to use a belt? Is it spanking to hit a child with a belt but abuse to leave bruises? Is it spanking to leave bruises below a child's waist but abuse to bruise above? If corporal punishment is acceptable in any form, these become questions of individual opinion. For example, one of the authors began his career as a child welfare worker in a large city that had two juvenile court judges, one liberal and one conservative. All the child welfare workers knew that unless an abuse case was severe, they should work to get it placed on the docket of the liberal judge. The conservative judge was likely to dismiss a case with the admonition that "you can't blame a man for whipping his boy." The second area in which conceptions of the appropriateness of corporal punishment affect child protective services is the causation of child abuse. A frequent cause of abuse is a spanking "gone wrong." A parent begins with the intention of administering a mild spanking and loses control and carries it to excess or attempts to hit the child on the bottom and misses, hitting the child's eye or ear, resulting in far more pain and injury than was intended. 3. The Causation of Maltreatment In the section on the dynamics of maltreatment, we discussed the four types, or levels, of causative factors: individual parent, child, family, and environmental. Conservatives and liberals differ in the amount of emphasis they place on each level. -Conservative Perspective Conservatives, with their belief in autonomy as governing behavior, place almost total blame for child maltreatment on individual parent factors. If parents abuse or neglect their child, it is because they choose to do so. They may choose to do so because they are lazy, ill tempered, or perhaps even evil. If this is the case, then the proper societal response is to see that they are arrested, prosecuted, and punished for their unacceptable behavior. On the other hand, they may choose to maltreat (or choose not to care adequately for) their children because they are mentally ill. If this is the case, the proper societal response is to provide appropriate psychological services in an attempt to "cure" them. This perspective, which defines a social problem in terms of individual illness, is called the medical model. This is the model that was developed by the pediatricians and psychiatrists who formed the team at the University of Colorado School of Medicine that publicized the battered child syndrome which, as previously discussed, resulted in child abuse becoming a major social issue. This model attributes child abuse to parent factors, with some contribution by child factors, and they assert that individual psychiatric treatment is the appropriate response because "it deals in the most humanitarian and constructive way we know with a tragic facet of people's lives."95 Underlying this explanation is the conservative assumption that society is functional and that everyone has the opportunity to adequately fulfill all roles, in this case that of parent, if they work at it and, if necessary, receive help. -Liberal Perspective Liberals as well as radicals place much greater stress on the role of environmental factors in child maltreatment. They point out that research has failed to demonstrate conclusively that psychopathology exists in a greater proportion of child protective services clients than in the general population.96 They assert that the really important causative factors are the environmental conditions that lead to stress and frustration, such as poverty, overcrowded and dilapidated neighborhoods, large numbers of children, single-parent households, and alienating work. Also, liberals argue that regardless of how adequate individual parents are, the entire society is guilty of child maltreatment—because it does not provide adequate schools, safe neighborhoods, high-quality affordable child care, or adequate welfare support and because it fails to condemn corporal punishment. According to this perspective, programs to help individual parents, although necessary, treat only the symptoms, not the disease. Gil, coming from a radical perspective, says, "There simply is no way of escaping the conclusion that the complete elimination of child abuse on all levels of manifestation requires a radical transformation of the prevailing unjust, inegalitarian, irrational, competitive, alienating, and hierarchical social order into a just, egalitarian, rational, humane, and truly democratic, decentralized one."97 Underlying the liberal view of the cause of child maltreatment is the belief that individuals are not autonomous and that society, as it is presently structured, is not functional for large numbers of people. -Analysis and Synthesis The liberal, radical, and conservative perspectives on the causation of child maltreatment are truly a case of the blind person examining different parts of the elephant. As discussed earlier, child maltreatment is a phenomenon with several levels of causation. It is undoubtedly true, as the liberal and radical perspectives assert, that the only way to significantly reduce child maltreatment is to change the many social and economic factors that oppress and frustrate people. We know, for example, that when the unemployment rate declines, child abuse declines. As Gil notes, "If one's priority is to prevent all child abuse, one must be ready to part with its many causes, even when he is attached to some of them, such as the apparent blessings, advantages, and privileges of inequality."98 The conservative emphasis on the individual level of causation also has several strong points. We have generally used our criterion of pragmatism to argue for the liberal perspective, but in this case the conservative view is, perhaps, more pragmatic. When dealing with a specific case of child maltreatment, it does little good to point out that the family is the victim of environmental pressures beyond its control. What must be focused on is how the family members respond to those pressures and how they can improve their ability to cope. Although conservatives are most comfortable emphasizing the individual causes of child maltreatment and liberals and radicals like to emphasize the environmental causes, nearly everyone will admit that the problem needs to be addressed on all levels. As social workers, many of us are expected to work on the individual level, but it is our professional responsibility also to make time to combat the environmental factors. For example, social workers responding to referrals of young children being left at home alone in a community without adequate day care are failing in their professional duties if they only help parents, on a case-by-case basis, find child care. In addition to helping individual families, they should work to have adequate, affordable, accessible day care established so that parents won't have to leave their children alone in the first place. 4.Rights of Children, Parents, and the Government Child rearing in our society is based on beliefs and assumptions regarding the rights and responsibilities of a triad—children, parents, and the government. These beliefs and assumptions are not the same for liberals and for conservatives. Downs and colleagues state that "an essential question in any formulation of family social policy is the extent to which children have their own rights and interests independent of parents, with a claim to their recognition and enforcement."99 There have been numerous formulations of children's rights over the years, such as the "Children's Charter" adopted by the 1930 White House Conference on Children, the "Children's Charter for the Seventies" presented at the White House Conference on Children in December 1970, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. These documents give as children's rights such things as the parents' understanding and guarding his or her personality; prenatal care for the mother; a safe, sanitary, and wholesome place to live; recognition of, and help for, disabling conditions; when "in conflict with society the right to be dealt with intelligently as society's charge, not society's outcast"; and an adequate standard of living. The 1970 document added as rights freedom from pollution, freedom from racism, and freedom from fear. As Downs and colleagues point out, these statements are really statements of children's "needs" as defined by current knowledge about the physical, psychological, and social development of the child rather than "rights," which are based on a legal definition and carry a claim or an "entitlement" and are enforceable. Public education is a right because if it is denied a child, that child can force the community to provide it by court action. An adequate standard of living is a need, but it is not a right. Millions of children in our society live well below what the government defines as an adequate level (the poverty line), but they are not entitled by right to a better living standard under current law. Parents in our society are given almost total responsibility for the care and upbringing of their children. As long as the level of child care does not sink below a minimal standard demanded by the community, parents are given a large number of rights. Among these rights are the rights of guardianship, the right to determine the "living pattern" and standards of everyday conduct, the right to select the religion (or lack of religion) of the child, the right to determine the kind and extent of the child's education, the quality and type of health care given to the child, and the place where the child will live. If a boy's parents move him to a new city during his last year of high school, if they select an academic curriculum when both their son and the school prefer a vocational one, if they take him to the Unitarian church every Sunday when he would like to attend the Church of Christ and if they buy him slacks and oxford cloth dress shirts when he would like to wear blue jeans and T-shirts, the child and the community might object, but they would have little power to oppose the parents because these decisions are theirs by right. The government has the general responsibility to promote the welfare of children, and it has certain rights necessary to enable it to carry out this responsibility. The legal term for this is parens patria, which means that ultimately the state is the parent to all children. The state exercises its rights and responsibilities in three broad ways: Regulatory powers. For the general protection of children, the state formulates regulations that govern all persons dealing with children. Examples are compulsory school attendance laws, which require communities to provide free public education and require parents to send their children to school, and employment laws, which forbid employers to hire children below a certain age or for jobs considered harmful or dangerous. "The intent of the state's use of its regulatory authority is to represent society's interest in all children through the application of broad powers to set standards that apply to children generally, or all parents generally, or other adults acting in relation to children."100 Power to intervene in the relationship between parent and child. When the level of care provided a child falls below a certain level, or when a child's behavior violates the law, the state has the right to intervene to either protect or correct the child. This may, in serious cases, involve the removal of the child from the home and his or her placement in a foster home or institution. Power to legislate for the development of child welfare services. The state has the right to collect revenue by means of taxation and to spend it on any of a number of services to benefit children. Costin and Rapp comment that the importance of this power cannot be overemphasized. "How successfully children are helped often depends upon the extent to which the statutes of a state reflect modern knowledge about children and their changing world, respect for their rights, and readiness to tax and appropriate money for professional services and facilities to meet the needs of children." -Conservative Perspective Conservatives, with their fear and disapproval of government and their belief in tradition and authority, emphasize the rights of parents and the responsibilities of parents and children, and they deemphasize the rights and responsibilities of government. They feel that government should intervene in the relationship between parents and children only in serious cases and that then the intervention should be subject to stringent controls. They believe that parents have a God-given right to rear their children in the manner that they see fit, and the Child Protective Services, as a government entity, seeks to tear down the natural parent-child bond, and has as an end to remove children from their parents. Conservatives argue that excessive government power inevitably will lead to abuses. Wald has analyzed state statutes regarding neglect and concludes that the language is so broad and vague that the statutes give almost unlimited power to state officials. He recommends greater protection of parent rights through laws that focus less on vague standards of parental behavior and more on evidence of specific harm to the child.102 Conservatives feel as strongly as anyone that children should be well cared for. However, they feel that the philosophical basis for this care is not the right of children to demand it or the right of government to enforce it but the moral duty of parents to provide it. -Liberal Perspective Liberals are much more sympathetic to the notion of rights of children, less sympathetic to the rights of parents, and more willing to support governmental intervention. They feel that there should be no difference between needs and rights of children. They are comfortable with government's intervening in the relationship between parents and children to enforce children's rights. What Americans Believe The General Social Survey includes two questions, one with seven parts, which are of relevance to child welfare. The first question, relating to our discussion of corporal punishment, is "Do you strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree that it is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking?" The second question relates to our discussion of the right and desirability of government to intervene in family life. This question is worded: "Sometimes public authorities intervene with parents in raising their children. Please indicate in each of the following cases how far you think authorities should go in dealing with a 10-year-old child and his or her parents." Respondents were asked to indicate in each situation if the authorities should take no action, give warning or counseling, or take the child from its parents. The cases were The child uses drugs and the parents don't do anything about it. The child frequently skips school and the parents don't do anything about it. The parents regularly let the child stay out late at night without knowing where the child is. The parents fail to provide the child with proper food and clothing. The parents regularly beat the child. The parents refuse essential medical treatment for the child because of their religious beliefs. The parents allow the child to watch violent or pornographic films. The responses to the question relating to the desirability of corporal punishment as a child-rearing technique are not surprising. They are cross-tabulated with political orientation in Table 12.2. As can be seen by inspecting this table, liberals are less accepting of corporal punishment than are moderates and conservatives. However, these differences, although statistically significant, are not huge. About 67 percent of liberals strongly agree or agree that spanking is sometimes necessary, compared to a little over 80 percent of conservatives making these choices. The responses to the questions regarding the appropriateness and desirability of government intervention into family life are summarized and cross-tabulated with political orientation in Table 12.3. These data are surprising in two respects. The first surprise is that there are virtually no differences in opinion between people with different political orientations. Chi-square analyses were run on all seven case situations, and the only significant difference was in the case in which the parents let the child stay out late without knowing where he or she was. This difference was barely significant at the .05 level of probability, and it was the responses of the moderates, not of the liberals and conservatives, that were significantly different. It is the authors' opinion that this is probably one of those five chances out of one hundred in which the difference was, indeed, a result of chance. The other surprising aspect of the responses to these seven questions is the overwhelming endorsement of government intervention, and forceful intervention at that, into family life. Almost 94 percent of responses to these items felt that at least warning or counseling was justified in the case situations described. Almost 36 percent felt that actually removing the child from the parents' custody was warranted. These responses indicate that we social workers may feel that we have a good deal less public support and approval for intervention on behalf of children than is actually the case. Downs and colleagues summarize the current position of the courts regarding the balance of rights of government, parents, and children: The current balance says that the state has the right and responsibility to regulate the behavior of parents regarding their children where that parental behavior causes harm or potential harm, interferes with the privacy rights of mature minors as related to medical treatments including abortion and to promote the general welfare of its citizens. Although great deference in the responsibility of raising children remains with the parents and although children have not been granted the full, absolute protection of the Constitution granted to adults, the Court clearly acknowledges that children are citizens entitled to the protections of the Constitution in their own right, but those protections need to be tempered on the basis of developmental capacities and childhood status within the family context. -Radical Perspective Radicals are inclined to point out that "the American family is one of this country's most violent institutions."104 The family has undergone considerable strain and distortion in recent decades. Preserving it in traditional form may perpetuate oppression of women and harm to children. -Analysis and Synthesis Conservatives and liberals agree that children should be adequately cared for. Conservatives argue that this care is the moral duty of parents, and liberals argue that it is the right of children. The main difference between conservatives and liberals is their opinion about the right, or wisdom, of government intervention in parent-child relations when child care falls below a certain level. Conservatives fear that when government is given power to intervene, it will use this power to the maximum to snatch children from their homes and place them in foster care when there is no compelling need. The research evidence gathered on this matter indicates that this fear is unfounded. The authors' analysis of data reported on the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System found that, in 2015, the foster home placement rate was less than one-quarter of children who received post-response services, a number that itself was only about one-quarter of total reports to child welfare agencies, and less than 5 percent of all referrals. Even this percentage is probably high because the data do not indicate how many children were placed for only a brief time owing to a family crisis. Therefore, there appears to be little justification for the fear that government will frequently overstep its bounds and remove children from their homes when removal is not justified.

Chapter 8: Should the Church Be Involved in Social Work and Social Welfare?

1. Should the Church Be Involved in Social Work and Social Welfare? There are those both in the church and in the social work profession who do not feel that the church should be involved in social welfare. From the perspective of the church, this is an issue that assumed more importance in the past than it does now. The major argument is that the church should be concerned with saving souls, not with redeeming society. The colorful 19th-century evangelist Billy Sunday is quoted by Marty as having said, "The road to the kingdom of God is not by the bathtub or the gymnasium [two common services provided by social welfare agencies of the time], nor the university, but by the blood red hand of the cross of Christ." Sunday criticized Christian social welfare agencies of the time, such as the YMCA, because "they have taken up sociology and settlement work but are not winning souls to Christ." He was overheard by a reporter to say, "We've had enough of this godless social service nonsense. I'll go with you in eugenics, in social service, oyster soup, and institutional churches, but when you leave Jesus Christ out of it, good night."57 Very few people in the church are concerned with this today, but it does still occasionally pop up. For example, an essay in Evangelical Missions Quarterly suggested that social service directed toward community development "probably is the greatest foe of Christianity." Sanzanbach speculates that "it is probable that a fundamentalist review of leading social work textbooks, journals, or proceedings of national conferences and meetings would conclude that, despite the profession's good intentions, social work is hopelessly infused with the atheistic doctrines of secular humanism."58 Pellebon found empirical support for this hypothesis when he surveyed the members of conservative, nondenominational churches to measure their perceptions of social workers and the social work profession. He reports that "Statistically significant findings indicate that this sample both perceives a high degree of conflict with social work and disagrees with humanistic interpretations of social work values."59 Loewenberg observes that "some ministers view social workers as competitors. They are especially concerned that nonreligious social workers provide help that they believe to be incompatible with the teachings of their church."60 Few people on the social work side of the relationship feel that, as a general principle, social work and religion are not compatible. The only general concern is that many persons, probably a majority of the profession, feel that the mission of social work is to become an empirically-based, scientific profession, and they fear that religion, which they often associate with dogma, will retard this development. Imre observes: The tendency to equate dogmatism with religion . . . can be seen to be rooted in the history of science. The development of logical positivism is intertwined with this history. Academic social work, where much of the current literature originates, is still very much committed to the positivistic definition of science. [The social work profession's] hidden assumptions, such as that all religion is dogmatic and ideological, continue to operate, even while recognition is given to the roots of [social work] values in religious and moral tradition. 2. Conservative Religion and Social Change Many within social work are uncomfortable with what we discussed earlier as the reversal of secularization. This discomfort is a result not of disapproval of religion but of disapproval of a particular kind of religion. Social workers are generally very comfortable with mainline liberal Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish faith. However, many people now entering social work out of religious motivation are coming from somewhere else. They are generally perceived as being "conservative," "fundamentalist," or "evangelical." Mike Elliott, a social worker on the staff of a Baptist church in Kentucky, relates the following: [C]hurch related social workers are often considered "unclean" by secular social workers. It seems as if I was regarded as an evangelist who had the ulterior motive of conversion in mind for my clients. I was pegged a social work evangelist who, with or without hair spray or wing-tipped shoes, only used social work to rack up conversions.62 However, the concern of secular social workers goes deeper than a fear that social workers with conservative religious orientations will use their profession to evangelize. The major concern is that conservative religion goes hand in hand with conservative politics and will tend to blunt, or even thwart, the social change mission of social work. Social workers are not the only people who fear that conservative religion will hamper efforts at achieving a just society. Magnuson writes: When Ernest Fremont Tittle, the noted liberal preacher, wrote more than three decades ago that "Evangelical religion" could never hope to produce a humane social order, he gave voice to what has been the opinion of many throughout the present century. Tittle thought that evangelicals had since the reformation era habitually sanctioned the social order and refused "to cry out against social injustice," thus clearly demonstrating the social impotence of a gospel of individual salvation.63 This concern was heightened by the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president and the rather puzzling support of conservative Christians in spite of his very public behavior that is counter to strongly held conservative Christian values.64 Is this the case? Is conservative Christianity incompatible with the social change aspect of social work? The answer, found mainly in the writings of Christian social workers, is interesting. It is that yes, this is often the case, but no, it should not and need not be. The criticism of conservative Christianity as being opposed to social change has some justification, and Christian social workers are the first to admit this. Keith-Lucas says that the Christian is "looked on with suspicion by social work educators, and most rightly, too." The reason for this suspicion is "the noninvolvement in human problems that can all too easily accompany a religion that has metaphysical or otherworldly interests."65 Speaking of the renewed interest in social change that emerged in social work in the 1960s, Kuhlmann observes, "Christians, particularly those holding an evangelical viewpoint, have tended to resist these trends, both in social work as well as in the larger society."66 Van Hook observes that "despite biblical mandates to support a social justice agenda, the church and Christian community have frequently supported and legitimized a status quo that created and supported inequalities."67 Belcher, Fandetti, and Cole acknowledge that "conservative Christians have some important things in common with the welfare state" but argue that they have some characteristics, mainly a narrow definition of the family and belief that social concern regarding poverty, classicism, and racism are overblown, that are not compatible with social work values. They conclude that "the profession of social work is correct in its wariness of faith-based initiatives."68 Why have conservative Christians tended to resist social change? Eckardt traces the problem to the development of "higher criticism" of the Bible, which developed in Europe during the first half of the 19th century, and to the growth of the ideologies of communism and socialism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Basically, higher criticism refers to the intellectual analysis of the Scriptures, which includes interpreting them in relation to the social and historical context in which they were written, as well as to the motivations of their authors. The bottom line is that the Scriptures are viewed as God-inspired but written by humans and, therefore, fallible. The hallmark of conservative, or evangelical, Christians is their belief that the Scriptures represent the actual word of God and are thus infallible and therefore not open to interpretation by mere humans. A popular bumper sticker reflecting this attitude reads: "God said it; I believe it; That settles it!" As a result of higher criticism, fundamentalist Christians became preoccupied with defending their faith, and this has tended to cause them to withdraw from worldly concerns such as social justice and equality. The great theological debates among conservative Christians during the late 19th and early 20th centuries centered on the "fundamentals" of faith rather than on any social issues. Social issues became the territory of the liberal sects; this made them even less attractive to the fundamentalists, who rejected "anything associated with liberal theology [because they] feared that if part of it was bad all the rest would soon be contaminated."69 The second reason for the rejection of social change by conservative Christians is the development of the ideologies of communism and socialism. These ideologies, particularly communism, are often militant in their rejection of religion in general and Christianity in particular. This led to "an alignment of evangelical Christianity with conservative politics and economics. There developed an unquestioned acceptance of capitalism as the Christian's economy and of democracy as God's political preference."70 This acceptance of the political status quo as being ordained by God has resulted in evangelical Christians viewing any effort to change the social system as being, by definition, against the will of God. Numerous writers have pointed out that the identification of conservative Christians with a reactionary position on social change is strange because, historically, evangelicals have been heavily involved in social change, with their activities often exceeding those of their liberal counterparts. Magnuson did an in-depth study of evangelical social work from 1865 to 1920. He found that, although liberals talked about social change and conservative Christians tended to avoid such rhetoric, when actual behaviors were studied, it was the evangelicals who had the greater record of social change activities. He observes: No matter how troublesome the persons they helped—former prisoners, prostitutes, unwed mothers, vagrants, or the unemployed—revivalists accepted them with openness and warmth. Placing the blame largely on environmental pressures, rescue workers argued that given a proper chance even the most difficult persons would perform creditably. Frederick Booth-Tucker, commander of the Salvation Army in the United States from 1896 to 1903, estimated that 90 percent or more of the unemployed would gladly work if they had the opportunity. That kind of optimistic acceptance generally characterized these organizations.71 Magnuson contrasts this attitude with that of many liberal religious reformers, such as Washington Gladden, whose attitude was often somewhat harsh, advocating that applicants for assistance should be treated with "prison-like restraint."72 The attitude of Christian social workers writing today is clearly that the identification of conservative Christianity with conservative politics, although often a fact, has been a sort of historical accident and is really based on a misinterpretation of faith. Keith-Lucas says, "these are not actually beliefs in the Judeo-Christian or Biblical tradition. They are perversions of these beliefs in the capitalist-puritan set of assumptions."73 Kuhlmann says, "such a view [that social action is not good], although it is quite prevalent in the contemporary evangelical community, and also reflects much that is consistent with Biblical Christianity, is not fully Christian, in the sense that it does not reflect the whole of Biblical truth on the subject."74 Moberg asserts that concern among Christians for individual salvation at the expense of social change "leaves out significant aspects of the teaching of the Bible. It easily results in loving only 'our own brethren,' avoiding needy neighbors in our own community and other parts of the world, . . . and it reflects paying greater attention to cultural values than to biblical norms." Theologian Richard F. Lovelace argues that revival movements have historically begun with concentration on individual salvation and have then moved into a period of emphasis on social change. He argues that the United States is in the early stages of a great religious awakening and predicts that it will eventually move into an era of social change based on this awakening.76 The foundation for this has been identified as a 1973 meeting that took place among evangelical leaders during which they wrote "A Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern."77 The survey of philanthropic activities by organized religion conducted by the Council on Foundations found that groups who identified themselves as conservative were funding social justice activities "just like [their] non-conservative brethren."78 To sum up this section, we refer to Ralph Eckardt, a well-known figure among Christian social workers. Eckardt makes two general points regarding Christianity and social action. The first is that political involvement is a legitimate activity for Christian social workers. The second is that conservative Christianity is not synonymous with conservative politics. Eckardt says: I am a patriotic American and support the democratic way of life, but it is not God breathed. I also assert my allegiance to Jesus Christ. The two are very important to me but they are not synonymous. In this regard my allegiance to Jesus Christ stands above any other and I must serve Him primarily and I assert my obligation to criticize this or any government, when what it does is not in consonance with the revealed will of God.79 In a similar vein, the British social worker Robert Holman says: So I argue that Christians in general and Christian social workers in particular should have a collective voice to address society. Its support for the poor might seem to lean towards the left, its views on the sanctity of life and marriage towards the right. It belongs to no political party. It should be an attempt to show that a distinct Christian opinion can be expressed about those social issues which confront social workers every day of the week.80 What Americans Believe In the 2002 and 2004 General Social Surveys (GSS), the researchers included a module that asked questions that were then converted into scales measuring altruism and empathy. (These modules have not been repeated in more recent surveys.) The altruism scale was based on questions in the module asking respondents about fifteen different acts of altruism they may have performed, such as talking with someone who is depressed, helping with housework, giving up a seat to a stranger, giving money to charity, volunteering, helping someone find a job, or helping in other ways such as lending money. Empathy was measured with the Davis Empathy Scale that asks respondents seven self-assessment questions such as "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me," and "When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel kind of protective toward them." This module revealed that the most significant relationship of both the empathy and the altruism scale was with religion. Those who reported themselves to be religious tended to have higher scores on both the altruism and the empathy scales. There was also a strong relationship between these variables and the frequency of church attendance, with scores on the scales increasing with increased attendance. Interestingly, those with fundamentalist religious beliefs scored higher on both the altruism and the empathy scales than did moderates and liberals. Before he began the study, Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey, said that he expected to find that people who are more socially involved, and people who support spending on social welfare programs, would be found to be the most empathic and altruistic groups. He found that these attitudes, however, were only weakly associated with altruism and empathy, of much less importance than religiousness and church attendance. "The connection between good deeds and religion probably indicates that people are reflecting the religious teachings of charity that are central beliefs of most major religions," Smith said. "For most religions, an important part of the belief system is an admonition to love other people and to do good deeds. The people who attend weekly services hear that quite a lot. . . . Also, people in a religious congregation are nested in a community that provides them with opportunities to do good deeds and reach out to others." 3. Social Work Values and Christian Values—Conflict or Consensus? There is little doubt that there is perceived conflict between the secular, humanistic values of the social work profession and the religious values of many practitioners. Eckardt describes: the preconceived notion on behalf of many in the profession that social work and religion do not mix. More specifically, this attitude suggests that if a person is a committed evangelical Christian his values are so different from those of the social work profession as to render him an unacceptable, or at least second rate, practitioner in the field. Most professionals would deny this discrimination and bias; but as an evangelical I have felt it when I have applied for positions in the profession, sought further education, or attended gatherings of professionals discussing professional issues.81 In a study of social work in church-related agencies, Netting found that church representatives feared that "spiritual values will be sacrificed on the altar of professional know-how," whereas social workers felt that religion interfered with maintaining a nonjudgmental attitude.82 Buckner observes concerns in the profession that emerging issues such as abortion, gay and lesbian rights, and increasing numbers of non-Christian immigrants "may threaten the beginning social worker's ability to recognize the professional values of self-determination and unconditional positive regard in their dealings with clients whose religious beliefs differ from their own."83 This conflict of values has grown out of the process of secularization of the profession. Siporin, in an article that is sharply critical of the profession, asserts that social work was once based on a normative philosophy. That is, social work was seen as being a moral agent of society, charged with enforcing religiously based social norms. As such, social workers actively sought to prevent, in their clients, behavior that was generally considered by society at that time to be undesirable or immoral, such as divorce, premarital sex, homosexuality, and the use of alcohol or drugs. Siporin asserts that "in recent years, however, this social work value system and its moral vision have been fragmented and weakened. Many social workers now believe that people should be free to choose their own life-styles, values, and moral norms." He calls this the libertarian philosophy and observes that it rejects the labeling of behaviors such as those listed earlier as deviant and that it instead labels them as "variant" or "normal." "It is further argued that the social work profession should advocate and support the social redefinition of such conduct as 'normal,' and should actively support or approve these behavior patterns as rightful, viable options for people in our society." Siporin believes that this trend has been harmful to the profession and that it has led to the perception by much of the public of social work as an immoral, or at least amoral, profession. He thinks that "social work as a profession needs to regain its moral vision and idealism and even the moral passion that the old-time social workers had. Social work also needs to be able to present itself again as a representative moral agent of society."84 Keith-Lucas takes a much less extreme view than Siporin with regard to both social work's current moral state and what its position should be. Rather than viewing social work as having abandoned a normative position and adopted a libertarian position, Keith-Lucas believes that social work has simply abandoned the concept of sin, and with good reason. The concept of sin often has been used to justify harshness toward people with problems, and it has been interpreted legalistically and simplistically. This often led to punitive attitudes toward clients, attitudes that Keith-Lucas believes are both "bad social work and questionable Christianity."85 Keith-Lucas also believes that Christian values have sometimes been perverted by our society: To the extent that Christian doctrine has been identified with capitalism, to the extent that it ensures, even implicitly, that worldly success and grace have anything to do with each other, to the extent that there is any room in it for judgmentalism, or distinction between people on the basis of their supposed goodness or badness, to the extent that it rejects the sinner rather than his sin, the church . . . deserves all that the humanists have said about it.86 Whatever the reasons, it is clear that there is the potential for conflict between the values of the social work profession and those of religion, particularly conservative Christianity. The basis for the conflict lies in the principles considered almost sacred by social work and referred to earlier in the case of Penny: principles of the client's right to self-determination, the worker's obligation to provide information on all options, and the worker's need to maintain a nonjudgmental attitude. In practice terms, this means that a social worker, at least when working in a secular agency, is obligated to consider all legal options for clients. These options sometimes involve practices that certain religions consider to be sinful. Common examples are homosexuality, abortion, premarital sex, and contraceptives and sexual information for teenagers, among many others. We should note that the problem of helping clients find solutions that are at variance with the personal values of the social worker is by no means confined to social workers with strong religious convictions. For example, many social workers with strong feminist convictions find themselves in the position of helping women strengthen traditional marriages in which the husband is the "boss," the wife is the "helpmate," and the wedding vows include a promise that she obey her husband. The social worker may find this type of relationship personally distasteful, but if it is the kind of marriage the client desires, the social worker has no right to impose their own values of equalitarian relationships on the client. Problems stemming from the relationship of social work and religion have two sides; they present difficulties for both the agency and the individual social worker. From the standpoint of the agency, religion presents several problems. The first has to do with a problem noted by Keith-Lucas that social workers with strong religious beliefs tend to be less concerned than social workers in general about the material needs of clients "and more concerned that their clients should behave in a generally acceptable way."87 The policy of most social work agencies is that the client's material needs should be taken care of before the social worker deals with behavioral change. The second problem has to do with agency administrators' concern that agency policies regarding client self-determination and worker nonjudgmentalism be followed. They are generally concerned, and rightly so, that social workers with strong religious beliefs may have difficulty following these policies. The third problem for agencies has to do with witnessing. It is not uncommon for social workers with strong Christian beliefs to feel that the root of many clients' problems is that they are out of alignment with God and that finding and accepting Jesus Christ is the only solution to their problems. Be that as it may, in secular agencies the practice of witnessing is almost always against policy. Whether a social worker agrees with a non-religious approach to client problems is not a concern of the agency; however, ensuring that workers follow policy and refrain from using their positions to witness to clients is very much a concern. From the standpoint of the social worker with strong religious beliefs, the issue is one of balancing the sometimes conflicting values of profession and religion without unacceptably compromising either. Social workers writing in this area have developed guidelines that may be of help. The following list is based on writings of Sherwood and Keith-Lucas:88 Integrating faith and practice involves difficult judgments and compromise because every choice will advance certain values at the expense of other values. Religion will provide a fundamental value base from which to practice but will not give prescriptive, mechanical guidance. It is possible to work with clients whose values and goals are at variance with your own. Sherwood recalls: "In doing marriage counseling in a secular setting this author often found clients choosing goals counter to his own. One consequence was that he often found himself doing divorce counseling. It was neither his right nor in his power to prevent such a choice on the part of his clients. And once the choice was made, he believes he served them better by helping to minimize the damage of the divorce." It is acceptable to express one's own values, when appropriate, as long as they are clearly labeled and with emphasis on the client's right to and responsibility for his or her own choices and their consequences. The agency setting and the social worker's position should never be used in a manipulative or coercive way, even "for the client's own good." This means, among other things, that a social agency, particularly a secular one, is not an appropriate setting for witnessing. When working in a social agency, the social worker has an obligation to carry out the policy of the agency. A social worker in a public health clinic must discuss abortion as an alternative to a problem pregnancy, must discuss the use of condoms with homosexuals and unmarried clients as a means of AIDS prevention, must furnish birth-control information to teenagers, and must discuss with drug addicts ways to get clean needles. About this, Keith-Lucas says, "One has no right to ignore policies or give them subtly some other meaning than that which the agency intends. Clients have a right to rely on an agency's consistency and Government or a Board of Trustees that its money be spent as it directs."89 What if a social worker is asked to do something that he or she cannot in good conscience do? Keith-Lucas says the worker has two choices. One is to resign, and the other is to refuse openly to carry out the policy, in which case the worker probably will be fired. A Closer Look: Guidelines from the North American Association of Christians in Social Work As a member of NACSW, I practice, learn, and teach social work within the following philosophical frame: Human beings are of infinite worth, irrespective of gender, race, age, or behavior. At the same time human beings, including myself, are fallible, limited creatures. They are not capable, and never will be, of solving all their problems or of creating the perfect society. Nevertheless they are sometimes capable, with appropriate help, of transcending their nature in acts of courage and compassion. As a fallible being myself I have no right to pass moral judgments on others, to assume authority over them except as mandated by law, or to imagine that I know everything about them. Human beings have been endowed with the faculty of choice, which must not be denied them except by due process of law, or where their actions or threatened actions are demonstrably gravely harmful to others or self-destructive, or where they voluntarily surrender this right for a prescribed purpose. They are, however, responsible for the consequences of their choices, and may need help in perceiving what these are likely to be. No person is beyond help, although at this time we may not have the knowledge or skill to help. All programs and policies that depreciate people, treat them as objects rather than as subjects, seek to impose on them behavior not mandated by law, manipulate them without their knowledge and consent, or deny them choices permitted others in our society, are to be avoided or resisted. Our society is far from perfect, and it is not my business to act as a representative, but rather to help people determine their relationship to it. Love, understanding, and compassion are the source of well-being and acceptable behavior, rather than the reward for them. While force is sometimes the quickest way of obtaining an immediate result, in the long run it is self-defeating. Compassion, understanding, and concern are the eventual victors. The social sciences provide much useful knowledge for practice, but they cannot explain all phenomena and their pronouncements need constantly to be evaluated in terms of the values they subsume. There are outcomes to human helping that cannot be measured statistically as well as those which can. All human institutions, ideals, and commitments are liable to subtle perversion of their values, unless these are constantly examined. The new is not necessarily the best, nor does new knowledge always invalidate the old. Professional education and training in self-discipline are indispensable to good social work. As a Christian committed to the dissemination of what I believe to be the truth, my task as a social worker is not so much to convince others of this truth, as to provide them with the experience of being loved, forgiven, and cared for so that the Good News I believe in may be a credible option for them. Source: Alan Keith-Lucas, So You Want to Be a Social Worker: A Primer for the Christian Student (St. Davids, PA: North American Association of Christians in Social Work, 1985), 34-35. Used with permission. Incidentally, these guidelines can be turned around. Many religiously affiliated agencies employ social workers who are themselves not particularly religious. It is entirely possible for a social worker who believes in abortion as a viable alternative to pregnancy to be employed by a Catholic agency that has a strict policy against offering abortion to clients as an option. The worker in such a setting is also under an obligation to follow agency policy and not to discuss abortion. Incidentally, it is perfectly ethical for an agency to have such a policy as long as clients know about it ahead of time. It is not ethical, however, for an agency to call itself something like "Pregnancy Counseling Center" and imply that it offers all options when in fact preventing abortions is its major goal. The North American Association of Christians in Social Work has developed a useful set of guidelines for Christians in social work. These are presented in "A Closer Look." The Association has more recently developed a Statement of Faith and Practice that is divided into three parts: Tenets Emphasizing Christian Beliefs, Tenets Empathizing Human Relationships and Responsibilities, and Tenets Empathizing Vocation. The authors consider the Guidelines developed by Alan Keith-Lucas in the 1980s to be the most useful document for social work practitioners struggling to reconcile their Christian faith with their chosen profession.

Chapter 12: Child Welfare Social Work Roles

1. Social Work Roles Child protective service is one of the most challenging and important areas of social work practice. It is also one of the largest. Data reported by 40 states to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System indicates that approximately 32,710 social workers are employed by these state's protective service agencies, an average of 818 child protective service workers per state. With the trend toward courts' ordering states to upgrade the number and qualifications of child welfare staff, it seems probable that the number of social work positions in child welfare agencies will increase steadily. The major reason for the importance of child protective service as an area of social work practice is that child welfare is the only institution in which social work is considered the principal profession responsible for its operation. In most other areas of practice, social workers are located in host institutions, where some other profession is central to the institution, and social workers provide an ancillary service. Even financial assistance, which many people associate with social work, is actually dominated by public administration, with proportionately few social workers employed. But child welfare is clearly social work's field, and this perception is shared by the general public. Another important attribute of child protective service is that this is the field of social work practice that enjoys the most public support. As Kadushin observes: Public attitudes toward a profession are shaped in part by the attitudes toward the client groups with which the profession is associated. . . . To what extent can one expect that the situation will change and the client will become a productive citizen? On both these counts, children are regarded as "acceptable" clients.106 A study by Carter, Fifield, and Shields found that 80 percent of 9,346 respondents would spend "however much is necessary" to help children in welfare dependent families become productive adults. The respondents also were asked to rank their willingness to support seventeen different social services. Four of the top six ranked services were child welfare services: foster home care, protective services, adoption, and day care.107 In a study of the New York State legislature's reaction to social service bills, Howe found that child welfare bills were given the highest priority. Bills concerned with child abuse, neglect, foster care, and adoption were more likely to be approved than bills concerned with the disabled, the indigent, or the aged.108 The majority of opportunities in child welfare are with state social service agencies. These used to be called departments of public welfare, but in recent years most states have changed the name to something that sounds more modern. Common names are department of social services, department of family and children's services, and department of protective and family services. These departments will have a division called either the child welfare or the child protective services division. A smaller, but still significant, number of child welfare social workers are employed by private agencies. 2. Direct Services in Public Child Welfare Child protection agencies organize their direct service staff in many different configurations depending on the size and philosophy of the agency. Regardless of organization, workers in all agencies will fill the following general roles: intake and assessment, supervision of families with children at home, family preservation services, recruitment and supervision of foster homes, and adoption services. In a small office in a rural area, one worker often will fill all these roles. In a large urban office, there may be an entire unit of six or seven social workers who perform only one role, for example, foster home recruitment. -Intake, Screening, and Assessment The intake worker, sometimes referred to as the investigation worker, is responsible for responding to reports of child maltreatment received by the protective service agency. The worker must first screen the report to determine if it involves child maltreatment as defined by state law and agency policy. If a report is "screened in," the worker makes contact with the family involved and with all parties who are involved and/or have pertinent information. The agency then decides to accept or not accept the case for services. If the case is accepted for services, the assessment process begins. The purpose of the assessment process is to enable the agency to make an accurate estimate of the client's problems. The worker gathers pertinent data through interviews, previous reports, and piecing together facts to determine if the maltreatment has in fact occurred and how serious the risk is for the child for additional maltreatment.109 This is the most important stage in the history of a case. At the end of the intake/assessment process, the case is either closed (unsubstantiated) or opened for ongoing services (substantiated) with the child either in his or her own home or in a foster home. In many agencies, at this point the case is transferred to another social worker for long-term services. -Supervision of Families with the Child at Home In many cases, the assessment process will find a family in which standards of child care and discipline are below those demanded by the community but in which the children are not in great danger of serious harm. In these situations, the case is opened for agency supervision for purposes of assisting the parents to improve the level of child care. If the parents realize that there is a problem and are willing to work with the agency to try to solve it, no court action is necessary. If the parents are unwilling to deal with the problem voluntarily, sometimes the court will assign legal custody of the children to the agency but leave physical custody with the parents on the condition that they accept services. Social workers in this supervisory role must monitor the home carefully to be sure that child care does not deteriorate further, they must find supplemental services (such as tutoring or recreation) to compensate for deficits in the home, and they must work with the parents, often with the assistance of other professionals, such as psychologists and vocational rehabilitation counselors, to help them resolve problems and learn skills necessary for successful parenting. These services are often referred to as family support services. -Family Preservation Services The growth of family preservation services, described earlier in this chapter, has resulted in the development of a special category of social worker providing services to families with children at home. Family preservation services cases are cases in which the family situation is defined as severe and the potential risk to the children is judged to be great. Generally, these are defined as cases in which placement of the children in out-of-home care is imminent without the provision of immediate and intensive services. The family preservation social worker has a much smaller caseload than is typical of child welfare workers and provides much more intensive services. The worker will spend anywhere from five to twenty hours a week with a family over a period from four weeks to six months. The worker concentrates on strengthening the family's problem-solving capacity and also on teaching the family how to deal successfully with everyday tasks of family living and child rearing such as cleaning, shopping, paying bills, managing credit, and using effective nonviolent means of discipline and limit setting. The theory is that the intensive time-limited services will quickly strengthen the family's child-rearing capacity, increase the level of safety of the children at home, and allow the agency to withdraw to a much more limited and short-term supervisory role. -Recruitment and Supervision of Foster Homes As the number of children requiring foster home care has increased, the number of families willing to assume the responsibilities of foster parenthood has decreased.111 The combination of these two trends has made effective recruitment and assessment of new foster parents, as well as support for existing ones, among the most critical roles in child protective services. It also has contributed to an emphasis on kinship care, that is, seeking out family members as foster parents before considering strangers. Agencies usually begin the recruitment process of nonkinship foster homes by working with the media to obtain publicity (feature stories in print and electronic media) as well as radio and television announcements, making presentations to community groups, and working with community leaders to encourage persons from groups they represent to apply. When a pool of interested persons is formed, a social worker will schedule a meeting to present information and answer questions about foster parenting. Studies of foster home recruitment show a high rate of attrition among people who express initial interest. Usually less than 10 percent of a pool of applicants actually become licensed and rarely more than 20 percent. If a couple, or sometimes a single individual, still expresses interest after the initial meeting, a social worker does a detailed assessment of the individual or family. The assessment is based on objective criteria outlined in state licensing standards (e.g., age and health of applicants and size of home) and on socioemotional factors that are considered desirable in a foster home (e.g., motivation for becoming foster parents, potential effect on natural children, and the history of the marriage and current marital interaction). The agency then decides whether to license an applicant as a foster parent. The critical shortage of foster parents has caused agencies to be flexible, often waiving requirements regarding mother's employment, age of foster parents, and need for religious affiliation. However, as Martin observes, "agencies still prefer what is considered a 'traditional' family—a nuclear, heterosexual couple living in fairly comfortable economic circumstances and espousing middle-class values. The greater the extent to which families deviate from this model (by being homosexual or single, for example), the more reluctant and anxious agencies are about selecting them as homes for children." Following recruitment, selection, and approval, an agreement is signed and the family is licensed. -Adoption When parents do not wish to have responsibility for their children, as in the case of some single mothers and in instances of desertion or in situations so severe that there is little hope the parents will ever be able to adequately care for their children, the agency and the courts terminate parental rights and seek to create a new family for the child through adoption. This is considered to be among the most serious tasks social workers perform, largely because of the lifelong implications. Therefore, the social workers assigned to the adoption function are usually the best trained and most experienced in the agency. Important parts of the role of the adoption worker include counseling biological parents, terminating biological parents' rights, making the decision to place for adoption, preparing the child for adoption, selecting adoptive parents, handling "failed placements," and working with the courts and other agencies. In recent years, the number of prospective parents wishing to adopt healthy infants has far exceeded the number of infants available. Because of this, agencies, particularly in the public sector, have begun to concentrate on placing "special needs" children, that is, those who are not easily adoptable because of age, race, disability, or medical problems. 3. Private Agencies Although by far the largest numbers of child welfare social workers are employed in public agencies, many also work in private settings. Among the private agencies employing child welfare social workers are often church-affiliated adoption agencies, child guidance clinics, children's homes, foster care agencies, therapeutic foster care agencies, children's hospitals, and day-care centers. Social workers in these settings usually have graduate training and occupy therapeutic roles.

Chapter 10: The Nature and Causes of Poverty

1. Statistical Description of the Poverty Population The Bureau of the Census maintains an Internet web site and periodically publishes a book that presents nearly one hundred pages of statistics on the poverty population.2 A few of the most interesting of these cross-sectional statistics for 2016 are summarized in Table 10.1. As can be seen, more than 40 million Americans, 12.7 percent of the population, had incomes that were below the poverty level in 2016. The misery of poverty, however, was not evenly divided among the many groups of the population. The burden fell much more heavily on some than on others. 2. Race The image of the poor in most people's minds is that of a minority group member, generally African American. As can be seen from the data in Table 10.1, that image is both right and wrong. It is wrong in the sense that the largest number of the poor, nearly 44 percent, is non-Hispanic white. However, the image is correct in that a much greater proportion of minority group members fall below the poverty line. Fewer than one of every 12 non-Hispanic white people in this country is poor, compared with nearly one of four persons of African or Hispanic origin. Whites constitute the largest number of the poor only because such a great majority of the population is white. 3. Age The popular image of a poor person is of an able-bodied young adult. The Census Bureau data show this image to be wrong. The largest single age group among the poor is, in fact, children who are too young to work and who thus cannot improve their own status. As people move into the productive adult years, the percentage in poverty declines rapidly. The percentage decreases once again as people move into the older segment of the population. This last fact reflects one of the successes of American social policy. Fifty years ago the elderly were the group with the highest poverty rate. Due to improvements in Social Security, Medicare, Supplementary Security Income, and the Older Americans Act (see Chapter 17), the poverty rate of the elderly has steadily declined until it is now the lowest of any age cohort. 4. Age The popular image of a poor person is of an able-bodied young adult. The Census Bureau data show this image to be wrong. The largest single age group among the poor is, in fact, children who are too young to work and who thus cannot improve their own status. As people move into the productive adult years, the percentage in poverty declines rapidly. The percentage decreases once again as people move into the older segment of the population. This last fact reflects one of the successes of American social policy. Fifty years ago the elderly were the group with the highest poverty rate. Due to improvements in Social Security, Medicare, Supplementary Security Income, and the Older Americans Act (see Chapter 17), the poverty rate of the elderly has steadily declined until it is now the lowest of any age cohort. 5. Nativity With the high level of concern being placed on immigration policy, the Census Bureau has added the category of nativity to the income, poverty, and health insurance statistics. It is not surprising that a high proportion of noncitizens in the United States, 23.3 percent, fall below the poverty line. Because illegal residents tend to be below the government statistics radar screen, it is a pretty certain bet that the actual percentage is probably much higher than this. What is surprising, and somewhat encouraging, is that the poverty rate among naturalized citizens is more than 2 percentage points below the national rate. These statistics lend credence to the traditional American dream narrative, where immigrants enter the country (legally), are poor and struggling for several years, and after being acculturated, go on to bright and prosperous futures. 6. Family Type As is discussed later in this chapter, researchers are finding a great deal of evidence that points to family type as the most important determinant of economic status. The basis for this line of thinking can be found in Table 10.1. Families that are headed by a couple have a poverty rate of only 5.1 percent. For families with a female head and no partner present, the rate is 26.6 percent, nearly six times that of married-couple families. Interestingly, single-person households appear to do rather poorly in economic life. The overall rate of poverty for single individuals is 20.8 percent; for single males, the rate is 18.1 percent, and for single females, it is 22.6 percent. 7. The Feminization of Poverty You have probably noticed in all the data being reviewed that women appear to be doing poorly as compared to men. This is an accurate observation and one that has not gone unnoticed by researchers and policymakers in recent years. In fact, a term was coined in 1978 to describe this problem—the feminization of poverty.3 This problem has become even more severe in recent years because of the rapid and steady increase in the number of families headed by women. The percentage of families headed by women increased from 10.1 percent in 1950 to 14 percent in 1976, an increase of almost 40 percent in only one generation. The number of households headed by women is currently 18.8 percent, and the number of families with children under 18 headed by women is 27 percent.4 In our society, because the woman is generally the parent who provides the bulk of child care, this trend contributes to the great number of children living below the poverty line.

Chapter 12: Child Welfare Statistical Profile

1. Statistical Profile The preceding discussion of definitions of child welfare is well and good, but it does not differentiate child maltreatment from acceptable child-rearing behavior. Just what types of acts toward children are considered to represent a role breakdown serious enough to warrant intervention? After reviewing varied definitions of child maltreatment from the perspectives of the medical, legal, and social work professions, Faller and Russo identified four requirements for a situation to be defined as child maltreatment: 1. There must be some definable parental behavior directed toward the child. This may be an act of commission (abuse) or omission (neglect), and it can be either physical or mental. 2. There must be some demonstrable harm to the child. This may be a physical injury or condition, or it may be evidence of psychological damage, or both. 3. A causal link needs to be established between parental behavior and the harm to the child. 4. The social worker needs to feel that the maltreatment is sufficiently serious to warrant intervention.5 In this section, we concentrate on child maltreatment, the area of child welfare in which most social workers are involved. Unfortunately, we do not have precise statistics regarding child maltreatment. Because of the lack of a uniform definition, what one source reports as abuse or neglect another does not. Also, maltreatment, like crime, is private; people attempt to cover it up and thus avoid becoming part of the statistics. For these reasons, plus the historic lack of attention to the problem, only recently has much effort been expended to discover the dimensions of the problem of child maltreatment. Several good sources of data regarding child maltreatment have become available. Under congressional mandate, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) collects and publishes a national incidence study every ten years. The most recent is The Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4), published in 2010. The National Incidence Studies attempt to compensate for underreporting owing to the secret nature of child maltreatment mentioned earlier. They do this by measuring child maltreatment in a nationally representative sample of 122 counties and using reports to child protective agencies as only one part of the measurement. In addition to these reports, the NIS asks a wide range of professionals in the sample communities, called sentinels, to remain on the lookout for maltreated children during the study period. Children identified by sentinels and those whose alleged maltreatment is investigated by child protective services during the same period are evaluated against standardized definitions of abuse and neglect. This is done in a way to prevent duplication of reports; that is, each child and each incidence are reported only once. After the data have been collected, national estimates of incidence rates are computed based on the sample 122 counties.6 In addition to the once-a-decade NIS, the Department of Health and Human Services has developed the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), which compiles state-level data on actual reports of child maltreatment that are published on an annual basis in the Child Maltreatment series.7 Although both the quantity and quality of the data have been improving, researchers still have difficulty finding clear patterns. Pelton notes I was often warned by experienced social workers that abuse and neglect problems are so varied that they defy generalizations. As a social scientist, I expect to discover generalizations. Unfortunately, I found that the cases conformed more closely to their advice than to my optimism.8 Therefore, the following data should be regarded as rough estimates. 2. Number of Children Involved The NCANDS states that, in 2016, approximately 4.1 million reports were received by state protective services agencies of suspected victims of maltreatment, a 14.7 percent increase since 2012. These figures work out to a rate of approximately 55.1 reports per 1,000 U.S. children. About 58 percent of these referrals (about 2.3 million) were "screened in," meaning that they met agency criteria for investigation and assessment. After investigation, approximately 17.2 percent of the referrals (about 376,000) found that at least one child was a victim of maltreatment. Because these cases involved an average of 1.8 children, the total number of child victims of maltreatment in 2016 was found to be approximately 772,000.9 Because the NCANDS reports studies that consist only of cases actually reported to child protective agencies, it is an underrepresentation of the actual incidence. Several studies based on statistical samples have attempted to ascertain the actual incidence. Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz, who limited their study to abuse and to children between the ages of three and seventeen, estimated that between 1.4 and 1.9 million were subjected to abuse during a one-year period.10 The NIS-4 estimated that 1,256,600 children in the United States were abused or neglected, a number nearly twice that reported to and substantiated by protective agencies.11 Thus, although figures are inadequate to reach many solid conclusions, it is clear that the problem is immense. 3. Type of Maltreatment The NCANDS data on "Type of Maltreatment" indicate that neglect is by far the most frequently reported type of maltreatment. In 2016, three quarters of victims (74.8%) were neglected, 18.2 percent were physically abused, and 8.5 percent were sexually abused. In addition, 6.9 percent experienced what the NCANDS report classified as "other" types of maltreatment such as threats, drug or alcohol addiction, and lack of supervision. An interesting study by Drake and Jonson-Reid found that regardless of the reason for an original referral (sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect), subsequent referrals were most likely to be for neglect. This leads to the conclusion that neglect is probably present as a secondary problem in nearly all child maltreatment referrals. 4. Gender and Age The NCANDS finds that reports of maltreatment were fairly evenly divided between boys and girls. In 2016, 48.6 percent of substantiated reports involved boys and 51 percent involved girls. As to age, the report found that the youngest children are the most vulnerable to maltreatment. More than one quarter (28.5%) were younger than three years. The highest rate was for children under one year of age (28.8 per 1,000 children in the population of the same age). 5. Social Class Although it is true that child maltreatment occurs in all social classes, the data indicate that it is most common among families in lower socioeconomic levels. More than half the children removed from their homes because of abuse or neglect come from families receiving public assistance.13 Lindsey, looking at data from the most recent NIS, observes that the likelihood of fatalities and severe injury to a child is highly correlated with poverty. The rate of severe injuries for families with annual income below $15,000 was twenty-two times greater than for families with income above $30,000. The rate for fatalities was sixty times greater for poor families.14 Pelton surveyed child protective service records in New Jersey and found that 79 percent of the families had incomes below the poverty line. Berger and Brookes-Gunn found evidence that socioeconomic status of parents contributes substantially to child maltreatment, as measured by the perceptions of pediatric nurse-practitioners. These figures often have been rejected based on the theory that poor people are more susceptible to being reported to public agencies than middle-class people and thus that the figures reflect reporting bias rather than an actual relationship between socioeconomic class and child maltreatment. However, social scientists now conclude that although poor people may be slightly over reported, it is probable that a greater proportion of poor children are maltreated. 6. Race All studies of child maltreatment have found that minority groups are over-represented. NIS-4 data for 2010 indicate that the rate of maltreatment per 1,000 children is 24 for African Americans, 12.6 for whites, and 14.2 for Hispanics.16 However, it is generally thought that these figures represent differences in social class rather than race. One study conducted by the American Humane Association found that when income was controlled for, maltreatment rates for nonwhite children actually were slightly lower than for white children. 7. Trend The reporting rate has been climbing steadily, from 36.1 per 1,000 children in 1990 to 55.1 per 1,000 children in 2016. However, the rate of substantiated cases has been declining, from 13.4 per 1,000 children in 1990 to 10.3 per 1,000 children in 2008, to 9.1 per 1,000 children in 2016. The increase in the rate of referrals is fairly easy to explain, mostly reflecting factors that increase the likelihood that incidents will be reported. These factors include the allocation of more federal money for reporting, the strengthening of state reporting laws (physicians, teachers, social workers, and other professionals who work with children are now required to report in all states), the redesign of state social service department intake systems, the implementation of twenty-four-hour hotlines, and the general increase in public awareness of the problem of child abuse and neglect and increased knowledge of how to make a report. The reasons for the decreased rate of actual victims of child maltreatment are not so clear. Hopefully, they reflect a positive outcome for our efforts to improve the level of care of all children in our society.

Chapter 8: The Religious Roots of Organized Social Work

1. The Religious Roots of Organized Social Work The philosophical basis for social welfare is largely found in religious teachings, so it is not surprising that the earliest forms of organized social work all had religious progenitors. Even before the rise of modern European states, the church was providing social services of a primitive sort. The earliest organized social welfare activity of the Christian church was the formation of burial societies, followed closely by provision of alms to the poor, shelter for the homeless, and care and comfort for the sick; monasteries often served as all-purpose social service agencies, acting as hospitals, homes for the aged, orphanages, and travelers' aid stations.24 As discussed in Chapter 3, however, it was not until the onset of industrialization and urbanization, when the informal helping systems of the church and family began to break down, that organized social welfare services began to emerge. The natural first step was for the church to begin to formalize what it had previously done on an informal basis. The profession of social work is generally considered to have emerged from three general movements: the charity organization society (COS) movement, the settlement house movement, and a third, less clearly defined movement, the development of institutions to deal with an entire range of social problems. All these had their period of most rapid growth during the 19th century, and all grew out of the church. 2. Churches and the Charity Organization Society Movement The earliest development of the COS has been traced to Thomas Chalmers, a minister of the Church of Scotland. Chalmers was called to Glasgow in 1814 to be the minister of one of its most important churches. Appalled by the poverty he witnessed in the parish of St. John's, and detesting the Poor Law, he set out to do something about the situation. What he did was to divide the parish into 25 units and to assign the direction of each unit to a deacon of his church. Each unit was composed of approximately 50 families who had requested aid from the church. The deacon in charge was to get to know each of the families, thoroughly investigate their situations, and help them solve the problems that had led to their state of dependency.25 Chalmers is credited with conceiving the individualized approach and the person-centered philosophy that have become the central tenets of social work practice. In 1819, five years after Chalmers began his work in Glasgow, a Unitarian clergyman, Joseph Tuckerman, was beginning similar work in Boston. Until failing health caused his retirement in 1833, Tuckerman pursued many projects in his efforts to better the condition of the poor. Bremner wrote that "housing, wages, education, delinquency, and relief all occupied his attention. From his 'Poor's Purse,' derived from contributions from wealthy supporters of his ministry, he gave charitable assistance to the needy."26 In 1834, one year after his official retirement, Tuckerman began an association of more than twenty benevolent societies operating in Boston for the purpose of cooperation and coordination of services to the poor. The COS movement, widely recognized as the parent of organized social work, began in England in 1869 and in the United States in 1877, building on the work of Chalmers and Tuckerman. In the United States, a cleric was once again credited with the development of the COS—this time an Episcopalian, the Reverend S. Humphries Gurteen of Buffalo, New York. Gurteen was alarmed by what he perceived as the chaotic and indiscriminate approach to poor relief in Buffalo. Supported by his parish, he traveled to London and observed the work of the Charity Organization Society there; then he returned to the United States to implement a similar system. His basic goal was to set up a rational, objective system of poor relief, emphasizing the investigation of each individual case and the coordination of the activities of all charitable agencies to avoid duplication of services. In 1882, Gurteen stated the basic philosophy of the charity organization societies: If left to themselves . . . [the poor] will inevitably sink lower and lower, till perchance they end their course in suicide or felony. If . . . our charity is not tempered by judgment, they will inevitably learn to be dependent. . . . To avoid these two extremes, both of which are fatal, is the grand object of the Charity Organization Society. It views man as God has made him, with capabilities of manliness and self-respect and holy ambition. . . . Its axiom, accordingly, is, "help the poor to help themselves."27 Unlike the work of Chalmers and Tuckerman, the COS movement was an immediate success. Within twenty years, virtually every city of any size in the United States had a Charity Organization Society or an Associated Charities, as they were sometimes called. Interestingly, although begun by a minister and often directed and staffed by clergy, the charity organization societies always viewed themselves as secular and put their faith in science and professionalism, rather than in religion, as the solution to social problems. 3. Churches and the Settlement House Movement The settlement house movement began in Victorian England as part of a broad attempt to preserve human and spiritual values in an age of urbanization and industrialization. The first settlement was Toynbee Hall, founded in 1884 by Canon Samuel A. Barnett. Barnett's idea was to have university graduates move into the worst area of London and get to know the people living there. He felt that university men were cut off from the real work of the world and that they were restless and needed to do something useful. On the other hand, he felt that working men were cut off from culture and civilization. Toynbee Hall was strongly Protestant in nature, and Barnett hoped that it would result in a spiritual reawakening in both the laborer and the university man. Although it was founded in England by a clergyman and was strongly religious in nature, the settlement movement was imported to the United States by laypeople who had little interest in its religious aspects. Stanton Coit, a young American who had just finished a Ph.D. at the University of Berlin, visited Toynbee Hall in 1886, was greatly impressed with the concept, and returned to New York to found the Neighborhood Guild, the first settlement in the United States. Jane Addams visited Toynbee Hall in 1888 and returned to Chicago to found Hull House, the most famous settlement in the world. The Neighborhood Guild and Hull House, like many settlements in the United States, were secular from the very beginning, and their focus was on social change rather than on spiritual goals. Many other settlements, however, grew from religious roots. Probably the best known is Chicago Commons, founded by the Reverend Graham Taylor, who was the first professor of Christian sociology at Chicago Theological Seminary. He founded the settlement in 1894, partially as a social laboratory for his students. Although historians almost always characterize Taylor's work in the most positive light, the religious roots of the settlements are not always regarded so kindly. Mohl and Betten, for example, have written that: most settlements were religious missions that reflected, acted upon, and transmitted the values and attitudes of the larger society; beyond their proselytizing activities, they adopted a derogatory view of ethnic traditions and assumed that their proper role was that of Americanizing the immigrant with all possible speed. 4. The Church and the Institutional Roots of Social Work Probably the most popular way of dealing with dependency during the early years of social welfare was the establishment of institutions such as orphanages, poorhouses, and asylums. The church had a leading role in fostering this approach to social problems; it also had a leading role in seeking alternatives once the shortcomings of institutions became known. Residential institutions for children and the aged in America were established initially by Catholic orders; the first was an orphanage opened by the Ursuline Sisters in New Orleans in 1727. Reid writes "These early Catholic institutions were American transplants from established institutional networks maintained by Catholic sisterhoods in Europe. The European sisterhoods continued to be a source of the development of specialized residential institutions in this country, including such innovations as institutions providing protective care for girls."29 Many institutions were established by Lutherans, a group not often associated with early developments in social welfare. The person associated with the beginning of these activities was a German pastor, Johann Hinrich Wichern. Wichern worked in Hamburg's poorest area and became concerned about the great problems he was seeing that were related to industrialization and immigration. His first project was the opening of a home for delinquent boys, Das Rauhe Haus (The Rescue Home). Within a short time, people trained by Wichern had established "rescue homes" for alcoholics, the poor, seamen, and inner-city dwellers. Wichern's work, which came to be known as the "inner mission" of the church, was carried over into American Lutheranism by William Alfred Passavant, a pastor called to Pittsburgh in 1844. Shortly after coming to Pittsburgh, he visited Europe and observed the work of Wichern's followers. He returned to the United States and established a large number of orphanages, hospitals, homes for the aged, and other "rescue home" type services.30 But it was not long before the shortcomings of institutions, especially those for children, were recognized. These institutions tended to be overcrowded, understaffed, impersonal, and generally ineffective in meeting the developmental needs of the residents. Thus, people began to look for alternatives almost as soon as the institutions were built. One of the earliest and best-known alternatives came from a churchman, the Reverend Charles Loring Brace, who established the Children's Aid Society in New York City in 1853. Brace's main idea was to remove orphan children from the streets of the city and, instead of sending them to an institution, to send them to the Midwest to be cared for by families. As discussed in greater detail in Chapter 12, Brace's program was subjected to harsh criticism both from his contemporaries and from historians. However, he should at least be credited with an idea that led to some real advances in child welfare. As the preceding brief review indicates, the interest of social workers in religion, and the interest of religious people in social work, is hardly a new one. F. Ernest Johnson has gone so far as to say that the church is the "mother of social work." Reid argues that virtually all social work in the voluntary sector originated from religion. He states that today's voluntary social services either operate under religious auspices (sectarian services) or began under religious auspices and over time have become secularized.31 It is to this secularization of social work that we now turn. 5. The Secularization of Society When we discuss the secularization of social work, we have to look at it within the context of a more general secularization of society. Scholars working in the area of the sociology of religion identify two general understandings of this phenomenon. The first is the assertion that beginning in the 19th century and continuing until the present time: there has been a displacement of religious interpretations of reality and religious orientations toward life by an orientation that seeks explanations for and justifications of human behavior and other phenomena in scientific and rational terms. One has undergone a secularization process if, for example, instead of asserting that marriages are made in heaven and for eternity, he or she says that marriages are made by human beings, in time, on the basis of propinquity, and in response to biological and psychological needs.35 Because of the trend of secularization, people see fewer things as being explained in terms of "God's will," and they seek scientific, rational explanations for more of life's events. The secularization process can be seen clearly in the history of social work. In the early years, the causes of many types of dependency were believed to be related to moral factors. The charity organization societies, for example, felt that poverty was a result of a lack of abstinence, diligence, and thrift among the poor—all moral failings. After thousands of contacts with families of "exemplary piety" and diligence who were overwhelmed by circumstances beyond their control—abominable housing, illness, low wages, and unemployment—the COS people were forced to conclude that in many, and perhaps most, cases of dependency, morals had little to do with the problem. The failure of the moral explanation of problems made the problems, and hence social work, less religious and more secular. COS workers, as well as other social workers, quickly began to search for scientific explanations to replace the moral explanations of problems. The second general understanding of secularization is that "it is a process of increasing differentiation between the religious and the secular (nonreligious) spheres of life—a process, moreover, coinciding with and perhaps in part resulting from increasing specialization within society as it grows and becomes more urbanized and industrialized."36 This trend relates to the process of professionalization discussed in Chapter 4. During the 20th century, the ministry, like many other professions, has come to be considered a specialized profession. The specialty of ministers is now considered to be limited to worship and spiritual matters. Ministers who wish to engage in counseling, for example, are no longer considered to be qualified for this role simply by virtue of being ordained. They are expected to have training beyond the seminary level in either pastoral counseling or social work. At one time, a person wanting to enter social work could do so by attending a seminary. This is no longer true. If a person wants to enter social work, he or she must now attend a specialized social work school or program, which is generally located in a secular college or university. 6. The Growth of Government Services When social work first began during the 19th century, many services were privately funded, and the source of the great majority of funds was religious groups. Thus, most of social work occurred under religious auspices. During the 20th century, government rapidly assumed responsibility for more and more social services. The biggest development in this process was the Social Security Act of 1935, which firmly established the federal government as the major source of social welfare funding. Currently, more than 90 percent of social welfare funding in the United States comes from governmental sources. With the long-standing tradition of separation of church and state in the United States, the fact that most social workers work for government-funded programs virtually mandates the secularization of social work. 7. The New Left and the Student Movement of the 1960s and 1970s The final reason for the secularization of social work is, admittedly, more speculative on the part of the authors, but we think it is valid. Although social work was considered to be a secular profession, for most of the 20th century a large number of people who entered social work continued to do so because of religious motives. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, the social work profession grew at a tremendous rate, more than doubling in size. And among the reasons for this rapid growth was the fact that many young people of that generation viewed it as a "relevant" profession. That is, they saw it as related to the liberal, social change-oriented ethos that was characteristic of college-age people at that time. Thus, a large, perhaps dominant, proportion of the huge cohort of new social workers was entering the profession out of political or ideological rather than religious motives. We speculate that this cohort brought fundamental changes to the nature of the social work profession. Among these changes was completion of the process of secularization that had been evolving for most of the profession's history. 8. The Reversal of Secularization? Although it is a difficult speculation to prove, there are indicators that the trend toward secularization in society in general, and in social welfare and social work in particular, is slowing and perhaps even reversing. In society in general, the clearest indicator seems to be the large amount of growth that conservative churches have been experiencing, with the number of people describing themselves as "born again" or Evangelical Christians increasing from 36 percent of the population in 1992 to 42 percent in 2017.37 At the same time that conservative churches have been growing, mainline churches have experienced a decline in membership. The exact reasons for the growth of conservative churches and decline of mainstream congregations are unclear. The standard explanation has been that the decline of the mainstream churches is related to these churches' growing attention to secular social issues and decreasing concern with basic questions of faith and evangelism.38 However, a very interesting alternative explanation has been offered that presents data to show that the changes in relative size of the two types of churches is really related to fertility rates—women in conservative churches were slower to adopt birth control techniques and thus had more children for most of the 20th century. Researchers Hout, Greeley, and Wilde state that the change in relative size of mainstream churches as compared with conservative churches is simply that "there are more conservatives today because their parents had larger families than did Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, and Congregationalist."39 Thus, this church membership pattern may not reflect a reversal of secularization after all. Another bit of evidence is found in data collected on a regular basis by the Gallup organization for the Princeton Religious Research Center. The responses to two questions that Gallup polls have asked periodically since the early 1950s are summarized in Figure 8.1 and Table 8.1. Figure 8.1 shows the percentages of respondents who believe that religious influence is increasing or decreasing in American life. The number who felt that the influence was increasing declined from 69 percent in 1958 to a low of 14 percent in 1970. Correspondingly, the percent who felt that religious influence was decreasing went from a low of 14 percent in 1958 to a high of 75 percent in 1970. Table 8.1 shows the second Gallup poll item that asked people to assess the importance of religion in their own lives. In 1952, 75 percent of respondents believed that religion was very important, 20 percent felt that it was fairly important, and only 5 percent indicated that it was of little importance. By 2017, these numbers have changed to the point that only 51 percent said very important, 23 percent fairly important, and 25 percent said not very important. The responses of Americans to both these items indicate that in spite of the growth of fundamentalist churches, America is a significantly more secular society than was the case in the 1950s. In social welfare in general, the reversal of secularization has been forced by the trend in government in recent years to abdicate responsibility for social welfare. The argument that social welfare is "the historic mission of the churches" has been used as the justification for cutting government programs. Since early in the Reagan administration, the stance of government has been that it should do less and the churches should do more because social welfare is really the proper role of the church rather than of government.40 Unfortunately, although churches are aware of the challenge, it is plain that they are not up to meeting it. A survey by the Council on Foundations reported that churches felt "inundated since the federal budget cuts, in 1983 receiving the largest volume of requests for aid in their history. Several warned that no methods could come close to replacing government funds and that religious organizations would never be able to take over the role of government in meeting human needs." A recent Gallup poll included the interesting finding that the majority of Americans do not agree that social welfare is the responsibility of the churches; most consider it to be the responsibility of government.41 The government moved from rhetoric to action in 1996 with the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Section 104 of this act, known as "Charitable Choice," makes it possible for religion-based organizations and congregations to receive public funds for the provision of social services.42 It has always been possible for religious organizations to receive public funds, but in the past they were required to strictly separate their religious activities from the publicly funded program. Under Section 104, a religious organization can receive public funding for a program even if that program has explicitly religious content. For example, a church can now receive public funding for a job placement program that requires prayer and Scripture reading as part of the job search strategy, or a church can provide pregnancy services that include instruction on biblical injunctions against abortion. Since the passage of this law, very few congregations or religious organizations have taken advantage of it. It appears that many religious leaders fear that if congregations become government-funded service providers, this may have the unintended effect of stamping out the voluntary spirit that distinguishes American congregations and will result in rigid bureaucratic programs replacing flexible voluntary ones. There also seems to be a fear on the part of many leaders that in spite of the spirit of Section 104, there is a high risk of arbitrary, unfair treatment by the government. Although the greatest fears of social workers about Charitable Choice have not materialized, it is true that government bureaucrats have faced challenges in maintaining the separation of church and state while performing necessary functions such as contracting procedures, contract administration, and performance evaluation.43 In the social work profession, there is also evidence of a reversal of the trend toward secularization. One indicator is the establishment and growth of a professional organization specifically devoted to the interests of Christians in social work, the North American Association of Christians in Social Work. This organization currently has more than a thousand members, holds a well-attended annual convention, and publishes a journal, Social Work and Christianity. There is also a journal devoted to the interests of Catholics in social work, Social Thought, and one devoted to the interests of Jews, the Journal of Jewish Communal Service. Another indicator of the renewed interest of social workers in religion is the topics chosen for journal articles and doctoral dissertations. In the 1960s and early 1970s, one rarely encountered an article or dissertation dealing with a topic related to religion. In recent years, this too has changed, and we find, often in mainline journals, articles dealing with topics such as integrating clients' religion into social work practice, the relationship of clients' spirituality to various practice issues, and liberation theology, as well as many others.44 Social work educators have begun to demonstrate a renewed interest in the subject of religion, with articles being published on religion in social work education, religion as a component of both micro- and macro practice courses, spirituality as an important component in human behavior courses, overcoming fear of religion in social work education and practice, religion in child protection work, and methods of teaching spirituality.45 Several recently published books are apparently designed as supplementary texts for the purpose of introducing religion and spirituality content into social work practice courses.46 We are also witnessing doctoral degrees being granted by major graduate schools of social work for dissertations on topics such as the development of social responsibility among Lutherans, evangelical Christianity and social work, a Christian interpretation of humanity for social work, a conceptualization of spirituality for social work, the relationship of social work to religion and the church, a quantitative analysis of social workers' clinical decisions regarding religious and spiritual issues in direct practice, and legislative advocacy activities of faith-based organizations.47 Another indicator has been the development of social work education programs with a religious focus. There is a long history of social work programs affiliated with Catholic institutions, notably Catholic University and Loyola University, but these programs have always defined themselves as professional social work programs and make little effort to differentiate themselves from the programs at secular colleges. Shortly after the turn of the 21st century, a few colleges began to develop programs with a distinctly Christian focus. On the undergraduate level, programs in "Bible social work" were developed and accredited by the Council on Social Work Education at schools such as Eastern College and the Philadelphia College of the Bible. The College of St. Catherine/University of St. Thomas began a dual degree in social work and theology. On the graduate level, at least one conservative religious university, Andrews University, which is affiliated with the Seventh Day Adventist Church, developed an accredited MSW program. Baylor University, affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas but independent of denominational control, has accredited BSW and MSW programs that "infuse content on church social work and the ethical integration of faith and practice throughout all coursework at the undergraduate and graduate level."48 Since 2005, the floodgates have opened with well over a dozen BSW programs with an unapologetic Christian focus having been developed and fully accredited by the Council on Social Work Education, including Abilene Christian University, Belmont College, and Campbellsville University. Likewise, on the MSW level, there are now at least an additional ten accredited Christian-focused MSW programs including Abilene Christian University, Northwest Nazarene University, Southern Adventist University, and Union University. Finally, data now indicate an awareness of the importance of religion/spirituality in social work practice. Practicing social workers, surveyed by Furman and Chandy in 1994 and by Benson and Chandy in 1997 and 2008, reported that they were encountering religious and spiritual issues in over one-third of their caseloads. Of licensed practicing social workers, 52 percent felt that it was important to deal with the religious/spiritual issues of their clients, and 50 percent felt that religious and spiritual issues should be part of the social work curriculum. Fewer than 10 percent of the social workers surveyed believed that integrating religion and spirituality in social work practice conflicts with the NASW Code of Ethics.49 It would be a mistake to interpret these developments as an indication that social welfare and social work will return to being primarily religious endeavors. If for no reason other than their immense size, social welfare and social work in the United States will continue to be largely secular enterprises. However, there is a natural alliance between the church and social work/social welfare. These trends seem to indicate that, after some years of neglect, the importance of this alliance is once again being recognized, and the alliance probably will continue to develop in a productive manner. In the next section, we turn to a brief examination of services provided by agencies with a connection to organized religion, generally called sectarian agencies. 9. Current Sectarian Services If you do a web search of any large city under the descriptor "Social Service Agencies," the enduring religious connection of social welfare is clearly illustrated. Take, for example, Fort Worth, Texas. Of the 240 agencies listed, 48 have names that clearly indicate some formal religious ties. Listed are the Presbyterian Children's Home and Services, Catholic Charities, Christian Community Service, Salvation Army, All Church Child and Family Service, and 43 other sectarian agencies. Or look at agencies funded by the United Way, a clearly secular organization. A report by that body states: The secular United Way funds the following sectarian services in local communities nationwide: 717 religious Family Service Agencies such as Catholic Family Services, Lutheran Family Services and Jewish Family Services in communities around the country receive United Way allocations for "non-religious" service provision; 1,273 Salvation Army agencies with community-based secular programs are allocated funds and the funds comprise 14% of their budgets. It should be pointed out that the Salvation Army is a church. A combined 1,902 YMCAs and YWCAs receive United Way funding, and the funds comprise 6 percent and 14 percent of their budgets, respectively.50 It is not possible to give accurate figures on the number of sectarian agencies in the United States. One thing that is clear, however, is that sectarian agencies provide an immense amount of services. An example of the size and scope of these organizations is Catholic Charities, a network of services comprising more than 1,400 organizations, using nearly 283,000 staff and volunteers, serving more than 12 million people annually, and with a budget of $2.1 billion. These agencies provide nearly every type of social work service.51 The best figures currently available on the number of sectarian agencies come from a now somewhat dated study conducted by Netting, who surveyed the national headquarters of religious groups in the United States to obtain the number of social service agencies affiliated with each group. Approximately 14,000 agencies were reported to be affiliated with national religious groups. Netting explains that this is an underestimate of the total number of sectarian agencies because it does not include those that are not affiliated with a national body.52 We also should note that sectarian agencies have differing degrees of relatedness to the religious groups with which they are affiliated. Reid posits a sectarian-secular continuum,53 varying on criteria such as degree of control exercised by the parent religious body, the amount of financial support derived from sectarian sources, the proportion of board members who are of the faith, the extent to which decisions of the board and administration are guided by religious considerations, the amount of religious content in agency programs, and the religious identification of the agency's clientele. At the sectarian end of the continuum might be a Catholic adoption program that is funded entirely by Catholic sources; has a board consisting only of church members; provides services mainly to pregnant, unmarried, church-affiliated women; and will place children only in Catholic homes. At the secular end of the continuum might be a United Methodist community center that began as a settlement house with strong church ties but over the years has evolved to the point at which the board is only nominally United Methodist, the staff is hired on the basis of professional credentials with no consideration of church affiliation, funding comes mainly from the United Way and government sources with only a very small percentage coming from the Methodist church, and the clients reflect the changing character of the neighborhood in which the center is located, which is currently not very Methodist. For the reasons discussed earlier, the data on the services provided by churches are sketchy and fragmentary at best. Boddie reviewed a number of surveys that estimated somewhere between 57 and 92 percent of congregations provide some type of social service. The services ranged from short-term episodic aid such as meals programs, to social services such as youth development and senior services, to community and economic development. A large number of congregations also provided informal services such as member and clergy support, or hosting social service programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, scouts, or Habitat for Humanity. A survey of social services provided by religious congregations give some indication of the size and scope of these activities. Table 8.2 summarizes the results of a survey, conducted by Cnaan and Boddie, of social services provided by religious congregations in Philadelphia. In contrast to an earlier Council on Foundations survey, which concluded that congregations prefer "hard" services such as soup kitchens and clothing closets to "soft" services such as mental health counseling and support groups, the survey by Cnaan and Boddie found both types of services to be fairly equally represented. Regardless of the type of services provided, one thing is made abundantly clear by these studies: Religious congregations are major players in the provision of social services. Cnaan and Boddie's estimation of the cash value of the services provided by congregations in Philadelphia, summarized in Table 8.3, is that the annual replacement value of these services would be $246,901,440.

Chapter 10: The Nature and Causes of Poverty

1. Conclusion If you find the preceding discussion a little confusing, do not be surprised, because it is. Obviously, there is no consensus on what causes poverty, and so, as we discuss in the next chapter, there is no agreement on what to do about it. Your view of what causes poverty is heavily influenced by your political perspective. If you are conservative, you are likely to believe either in individual factors or in the individual components of cultural factors. If you are liberal, you most likely will believe in structural explanations and/or in the social components of the cultural explanations. If you are radical, you will concentrate on structural factors. How do we make sense out of all this uncertainty? The first thing we need to do is to recognize the complexity of poverty. Anyone searching for a simple, single-variable explanation of poverty is going to be frustrated. To say poverty is a multivariate problem is to understate the situation. Each individual case of poverty involves hundreds of variables, including age, gender, race, health, geographic location, family background, friends, and luck—the list goes on and on. When you multiply these variables by millions of individuals, you see the complexity of the situation. There are some commonalities among individuals, however, and so it is possible to discover some generalizations, even though they are imperfect. If you recall, at the beginning of this chapter we spoke of within-group variance and between-group variance. We think that it is probably safe to say that different types of explanations probably better explain the different types of variation. For example, if you take a sample of people who are carefully matched on as many characteristics as possible—they are all of the same race, gender, and social class background and from the same geographic location—and then compare the members of that group on the variable of economic status, it would be a good hypothesis that economic differences were caused largely by individual characteristics. Those who were more intelligent, energetic, focused, and motivated probably would be found to be doing better. However, the statistics reviewed earlier reveal that a large part of poverty falls into the between-group variance. Being a minority, old or young, female, a member of a single-parent family, rural, or an inner-city dweller all greatly increase the likelihood of being in poverty. It is very difficult to explain poverty related to these between-group variations using anything but a structural explanation.

Chapter 10: The Nature and Causes of Poverty

1. Critique of Liberal Structural Explanations As you might imagine, structural explanations of poverty are not well received by conservatives. These explanations are diametrically opposed to nearly all the major components of the conservative worldview discussed in Chapter 2. Conservatives believe in individual responsibility; the structural perspective downplays this and says the social and economic environment is largely responsible for poverty. Conservatives believe in minimum government; the structural perspective logically leads to the conclusion that government intervention is necessary to correct the structural flaws that are causing poverty. Conservatives believe in the free market; the structural perspective argues that the market is not really free. Thus, it is obvious that conservatives will be critical of this perspective. Probably the most influential critique of the structural perspective is that presented in Losing Ground by Charles Murray. Murray argues that the huge growth of social programs that occurred during the 1960s was based on a structural explanation of poverty. He says that, according to the designers of the anti-poverty programs, "Poverty was not a consequence of indolence or vice. It was not the just deserts of people who didn't try hard enough. It was produced by conditions that had nothing to do with individual virtue or effort. Poverty was not the fault of the individual but of the system."76 But Murray believes that poverty is indeed caused by all the individual failings structural explanations reject. He reviews what he believes to be the catastrophic failure of the social programs that have been implemented since the 1960s and lays the blame for this failure squarely at the feet of structural explanations of poverty. Murray argues that the result of structural explanations has been to remove responsibility for self-support from individuals and to make it more profitable to be on welfare than to work; this in general has made it "profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in the long term."77 Murray's critique of structural explanations of poverty can itself be criticized on several points. There have been responses that criticize Murray's use and interpretation of data, as well as the logic of his arguments.78 Murray cites a great deal of research that he claims demonstrates that programs were failures, but he fails even to mention research that did not reach these conclusions.79 The most serious shortcoming of Murray's argument, however, is that very few people have ever believed that the social programs developed during the 1960s were based on a structural explanation of poverty. Most, even Murray's fellow conservatives such as Butler and Kondratas, have interpreted the programs as being based on the culture of poverty theory. This theory, as reviewed previously, gives lip service to structural factors but still lays responsibility for poverty at the feet of the poor person. Thus, as a critique of structural explanations of poverty, Murray's argument is really of the straw man variety.

Chapter 12: Child Welfare Definition

1. Definition In a broad sense, child welfare refers to all the aspects of society essential for the well-being of children. Included are day care, education, medical care, parks and recreation, and public safety. Child welfare as an area of social welfare and a field of social work has a somewhat more limited focus. In this more limited context, child welfare generally has been concerned with the special needs of children and their families when parental functioning is impaired, when the family lives in such poverty that effective parenting is impossible, or when the child, because of developmental, emotional, or behavioral problems, may not be able to function within his or her own family. Thus, in keeping with our Chapter 3 definition of social welfare as the management of dependency in society, child welfare is defined as those services provided when dependency is created by problems in functioning in the parent-child-community role network. The child may be considered dependent because he or she lacks parental care, and the parent may be considered dependent on society for help in fulfilling his or her expected roles. Dependency also can result from a lack of service and support available in the community. Child welfare services are nearly always provided on a residual basis; that is, they come into play only after the institution considered to be primary, the family, has broken down. This is unfortunate because there is no area in which institutional services are more needed. In today's fragmented, fast-moving society, in which more and more families are finding it essential for both parents to work, and the number of families headed by a single parent continues to grow, even the most capable people are finding it difficult to adequately fulfill all parental roles. The conception of child welfare as a residual service, operating only after the family has broken down sufficiently to endanger its members, seriously limits the field of social work intervention. Duncan Lindsey argues that this conception has, in fact, crippled social work's ability to solve family problems. He argues for a return to a broader approach to family support and a renewed recognition that much of child abuse and neglect has its origins in extreme poverty. Lindsey goes so far as to refer to child abuse as a "red herring," that is, as an emotionally charged issue that diverts attention away from the real issue—which is, in this case, child poverty. In addition, structural forces outside of social work's control are assaulting the family. Waiting until things have already fallen apart is a recipe for failure.

Chapter 10: The Nature and Causes of Poverty

1. Who Are the Poor? In this section we present a statistical picture of the population in the United States who live below the poverty line. Two types of pictures are presented. The first is the traditional means of describing this population based on statistical data gathered mainly by the Census Bureau as part of its series of Current Population Reports. This is the source of most of the figures you see on the evening news and that are referred to in statements by lawmakers and interest groups. This type of information has been referred to as cross-section or snapshot data: It provides a series of statistical pictures at certain points in time, but it does not tell us much beyond a general description of the situation at that time. Poverty statistics show, for example, that the level of poverty in this country is fairly stable, running between 11 and 15 percent each year, that single parent families are more likely to be poor than are two parent families, that poverty rates are higher for minority groups than for the majority, and so forth. However, these statistics do not tell us anything about the individual makeup of those figures at each point in time. Is the 11 to 15 percent of the population falling below the poverty line composed of the same people this year as last year, or are different people poor each year? If the statistics describe a different population each year, how different is it? Are some people more likely to be part of the statistics for a short time, whereas others are part of them for many years? To answer questions such as these, a different type of data collection is needed. This type of information comes from longitudinal data—data collected from the same persons at many successive points in time, which can begin to answer some of these questions. Longitudinal data is used to perform life course risk analysis that identifies the incidence, chronicity, and age pattern of American poverty and how these dimensions change over various time periods.1 Since the 1970s, researchers have been collecting longitudinal data, the best source currently being the Panel Study of Income Dynamics conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. The first topic in this section, the statistical description of poverty, relies mostly on snapshot data collected by the Census Bureau. The next section, types of poverty, relies more on longitudinal data, mainly from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.