Out of Harm's Way

Despite many well-intentioned efforts to create revise reform and establish an effective child welfare system in the United States the system continues to fail to ensure the safety and well-being of maltreated children. <em>Out of Harm's Way </em>explores the following four critical aspects of the system and presents a specific change in each that would lead to lasting improvements. <p/>- <strong>Deciding who is the clien</strong>t. Child welfare systems attempt to balance the needs of the child and those of the parents often failing both. Clearly answering this question is the most important yet unaddressed issue facing the child welfare system.<br>- <strong>Decisions</strong>. The key task for a caseworker is not to provide services but to make decisions regarding child abuse and neglect case goals and placement; however practitioners have only the crudest tools at their disposal when making what are literally life and death decisions.<br>- <strong>The Perverse Incentive</strong>. Billions of dollars are spent each year to place and maintain children in out-of-home care. Foster care is meant to be short-term yet the existing federal funding serves as a perverse incentive to keep children in out-of-home placements.<br>- <strong>Aging out</strong>. More than 20000 youth age out of the foster care system each year and yet what the system calls emancipation could more accurately be viewed as child neglect. After having spent months years or longer moving from placement to placement aging-out youth are suddenly thrust into homelessness unemployment welfare and oppressive disadvantage. <p/>The chapters in this book offer a blueprint for reform that eschews the tired cycle of a tragedy followed by outrage and calls for more money staff training and lawsuits that provide at best fleeting relief as a new complacency slowly sets in until the cycle repeats. If we want instead to try something else the changes that Gelles outlines in this book are affordable scalable and proven.<br>