Child Protection and Practice最新文献

This study examined the mediating role of job satisfaction in the associations among workplace support, job autonomy, and turnover intention among child welfare workers in China. The differential effects of several sources of workplace support (coworkers, supervisors, and organization leaders) on worker turnover intention were also examined. Using data drawn from the Chinese Social Work Longitudinal survey 2019, a series of path analyses were conducted. The results indicated that job satisfaction partially mediated the effects of workplace support and job autonomy on turnover intention. When the effects of workplace support from different sources were examined, the mediating effect of job satisfaction was significant only for the association between support from organization leaders and turnover intention. Greater workplace support from organization leaders and supervisors directly predicted lower turnover intention, while workplace support from coworkers was not significantly associated with turnover intention. The findings suggest that policies and programs that promote workplace support from organization leaders and supervisors and enhance job autonomy and satisfaction may be critical to address high turnover rates among child welfare workers.

UNICEF policies, plans, and strategies increasingly demonstrate that gender equality and the empowerment of girls are central to the organization's mandate to advance child rights. In its newest frameworks, UNICEF has pledged to practice gender transformative approaches to achieve progress toward advancing adolescent girls' wellbeing and agency, as well as a more gender equal world. Employing such approaches requires shifting power and resources to adolescent girls and girl-led organizations and networks. This means deliberate support for girls' capacities as leaders and changemakers; understanding and confronting the gendered and age-related power dynamics and norms that impede gender equality at all levels of society and stages of life; and working with girls and their communities to create more gender equitable environments for girls' rights (Rumble et al., 2022).

UNICEF has seen some early successes, but also encountered challenges in applying these approaches. Gaps in expertise, restricted funding, and political sensitivities are just a few impediments to ensuring transformative action at scale. Yet, the potential impacts are enormous.

In this Practice Perspective Article, we share our reflections on principles UNICEF is applying, implementation challenges it is encountering, early outcomes it is capturing, and lessons it is learning in its work to employ gender-transformative approaches to further adolescent girls’ rights.

Background

Homelessness during pregnancy and early childhood is associated with poorer social welfare outcomes for birth parents and their children. For these clients, contact with the child protection system is common. In some cases, children are removed.

Objective

To systematically review published literature investigating the impact of housing support during pregnancy and early childhood on child protection outcomes.

Participants

and setting: Provision of housing support for clients experiencing homelessness while pregnant or parenting young children (0–7 years) in high-income countries.

Methods

A systematic search of databases CINAHL and SocIndex for peer reviewed studies, with independent double-screening of retrieved studies and full-text review of eligible studies.

Findings

Of 793 screens and 37 studies with full-text review, two were eligible. Both were small, without a control group, and one was qualitative. There was no convincing evidence for impacts, and meta-analysis was not possible. In post-hoc reviews, five additional studies met all criteria except child protection outcomes. These studies’ findings suggested that, compared with controls, housing interventions led to faster initial improvements in housing status and decreased alcohol use, as well as decreases in child internalising and externalising behaviours.

Conclusions

There are promising indications that housing interventions generate benefits for clients experiencing homelessness while pregnant or parenting young children. However, high-quality longitudinal studies with robust intervention designs are lacking, likely due to the challenges inherent in embedding research to evaluate such programs. Given the importance of pregnancy and early childhood on children's development, existing housing support and policy implementation evaluations should be prioritised.

Background

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was hypothesized that stay-at-home policies would impact cases of violence, abuse, and neglect among children and youth due to increased familial stressors.

Objective

We examined the effect of the implementation of pandemic policies on violence-related emergency department (ED) visits and hospitalizations among youth.

Participants

Violence-related ED visits and hospitalizations among children and youth ages 0–19 in Ontario, Canada were obtained from April 2015 until the most recent available date, March 31, 2022.

Methods

We used an interrupted time series design to model the change in monthly violence-related ED visits and hospitalizations before and during the pandemic. We used negative binomial models to estimate the immediate effect of the policy and the change in the number of injuries during the pandemic.

Results

After adjusting for seasonality and population changes over our study period, we observed a 56% decrease in violence-related ED visits (RR: 0.44, 95%CI: 0.38, 0.50) and a 35% decrease in hospitalizations (RR: 0.65, 95%CI: 0.52, 0.82) immediately after the implementation of the pandemic policy, followed by moderate increasing trends. We observed no difference in the effect of the pandemic policies on the rate of violence-related ED visits and hospitalizations by sex, age or material deprivation; however, males aged 10–19 years and those in higher quintiles of material deprivation had higher average rates of injuries compared to females, those in younger age groups and lower quintiles of deprivation over the study period.

Conclusions

We observed an abrupt decrease in the rate of violence-related ED visits and hospitalizations immediately after the onset of pandemic policies in Ontario. Following this, violence-related injuries increased, approaching pre-pandemic levels.

Background

Child welfare-involved families have diverse and multi-faceted needs. Families who experience poverty and are investigated by the child protection system may represent a particularly vulnerable group.

Objective

This study aims to understand the unique profiles of need that exist for families who experience poverty and are investigated by the Ontario child protection system.

Participants and setting

Data from the Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect 2018 (OIS-2018) was used. The OIS-2018 is a cross-sectional study which collected information on investigations conducted in Ontario, Canada in 2018.

Methods

A latent class analysis was conducted to identify and describe distinct classes of adversity among a representative sample of child protection investigations. Indicators of child, caregiver and economic adversity were used.

Results

This study found evidence for eight distinct classes of adversity. With the exception of a low adversity class which emerged, the identified classes were characterized by distinct profiles of cooccurring adversities and there were several classes where indicators of poverty were probable. Investigation dispositions varied greatly by class.

Conclusions

The findings highlight the importance of ensuring an optimal fit between the distinct needs of investigated families and the child welfare interventions provided. Services and supports that are tailored to the specific constellations of cooccurring adversities that families face may be more effective in reducing the need for future child welfare involvement and/or more intrusive child protection responses. It is likely that investigated families who experience poverty would benefit from a range of economic and concrete supports.

Background

The association of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) with young adult social outcomes is poorly understood.

Objective

To examine the relationship between ACEs and young adult household income, education, and partnered status.

Participants

13,767 respondents (population-weighted estimate N = 13,191,291) aged 30–39 completed the optional ACES module in the 2019 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) from 17 states.

Methods

The 2019 BRFSS was used to analyze the significance of ACE scores for the likelihood of reporting household income greater than $75,000, a college or postgraduate degree, and living with a partner among respondents aged 30–39. Poisson regression analyses controlled for sociodemographic, health status, and behavioral risk characteristics.

Results

As compared to those with zero ACEs, respondents reporting four or more ACE exposures (20.2% of respondents) were marginally less likely to report high income (IRR: 0.87, 95% CI: 0.79–0.97) and one-third less likely to report a college degree (IRR: 0.68, 95% CI: 0.61–0.76), with no significant difference in partnered status.

Conclusions

Young adult social status may be shaped by social-emotional effects of ACEs that go beyond demographic and health status differences. Enhancing resilience to childhood adversity can benefit from a trauma-informed approach in health care, education, and employment.

Over the last 50 years, the global community has forged consensus on child rights and, thereby, laid the basis for defining child protection in terms of three cornerstones: (1) the protection from all forms of violence in all settings and contexts and for all children, without discrimination; (2) the provision of supports within governments, to families, and children for the promotion of child health when failures to child protection occurs; (3) and the participation of child and youth voices to value their lived experience and developmentally-based understanding of adult decisions impacting their rights. As such, child protection has historically been internationally focused, broad-based, with accountability structures within countries and internationally. When we survey some current contexts, the implementation of child rights seems to have been met with a blockage in realizing child protection, within child welfare system settings, but more graphically within conflict settings. This discussion serves as an introduction to the needed discourse on standards in responding to child rights violations, and the urgent need to formulate preventive, protective strategies to uphold the law-based consensus of global child rights and global child health goals. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and its Optional Protocols, continues to be the leading guidepost for country-level and international efforts to protect children and promote their well-being, and informs the Sustainable Development Goals integrating the protection from violence with child health, as benefiting the public health and global health targets. With seemingly shifting alliances among countries, the central focus on child rights as foundational and the driving force to child protection needs to remain as a cross-cutting, sustained commitment. Duty of care precedes the standards of care, and such standards are uppermost in need in our current socio-economic-political landscape.

Background

The Canadian child protection system is a network of provincial, territorial, and federal systems. Each province and territory has unique child protection legislation and service delivery practices. There is significant variation between the legislations and processes which inevitably determines which children and families are investigated.

Objective

This study examines the clinical case characteristics to understand the drivers related to the significant difference in child protection investigation rates occurring in Ontario and Quebec, Canada. Relevant legislations and policies are also examined.

Participant and setting

The study uses data from four provincial Incidences Studies: 1) the Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect-2013 (OIS-2013), 2) the Quebec Incidence Study on Investigations of Child Protection-2014 (EIQ-2014); 3) OIS-2018); and 4) EIQ-2019. These studies are cross-sectional and collect de-identified information on child protection investigations which occurred in the relative province and year.

Methods

Descriptive tests were conducted to examine differences between clinical case characteristics of the four Incidence Studies. Incidence rates were calculated using Statistics Canada Census data. Confidence intervals were conducted to test for significant differences.

Results

There is a statistically significant difference in the investigation rates between OIS-2013 and EIQ-2014, and OIS-2018 and EIQ-2019. There is no statistically significant difference in the substantiation rates between OIS-2013 and EIQ-2014, and no clinical difference in the substantiation rates between OIS-2018 and EIQ-2019.

Conclusions

It is a critical time to examine screening procedures and tools to ensure resources are used effectively and reduce negative impacts on children and families unnecessarily investigated. Keywords: child welfare, policy, provincial comparisons, incidence rates.

The adoption and implementation of the UNCRC across the globe has taken many forms in various countries, as some develop legislations, national policies, and amend current provisions to work towards eliminating all forms of child violence by 2030, as outlined by SDG 16. Systemic disparities pertaining to international conflicts, power dynamics, and resource limitations hinder the progress of achieving SDG 16. This frequently restrains reporting standards, organization development, and just aid to maltreated children. In terms of the Canadian landscape, Canada acts as a pathfinder country in the adoption of the UNCRC, as it has implemented numerous studies and initiatives in an attempt to end child maltreatment. However, systemic racism, overrepresentation of marginalized communities, and a lack of support for youth as they age-out of care persists in the Canadian child welfare system. While the Ontario child welfare system shares similar struggles, they have made strides in the fields of child maltreatment reporting and data collection, as well as trends and problem identification through the Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect. First, we present considerations related to the global mandate for child protection, and the challenges that persist amongst marginalized communities. Subsequently, we focus on Canada and, in particular, the Ontario example: the trends from the Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (OIS). This child welfare epidemiological project has highlighted the need for greater intersectional adjustments to best protect children, where the iterative research-policy cycle has most effectively been seen with a formal system for the inclusion of lived experience, as in the case of Indigenous peoples. This introduction to the OIS research papers emphasizes that adaptive models for cost-sharing and collaboration are needed to increase the relevance, efficiency and effectiveness of the child welfare system. Continued evaluation to respond to and challenge policy is a critical function of sustained surveillance systems.