Self-harm and suicidal behaviours are increasingly common in young people, but are often hidden. It can be hard to know what might be causing a young person to self-harm, and how to help and support them. Practical and easy to read, A Short Introduction to Understanding and Supporting Children and Young People Who Self-Harm guides the reader through what self-harm is, how to recognise it, and how best to respond. It combines case studies with professional and practical advice, covering all aspects from warning signs and treatment to communication and how the family is affected. The book also emphasizes the importance of parents and carers seeking support for themselves. This book is an invaluable source of information and guidance for parents, teachers, youth workers, and others who care for a young person showing signs of self-harm or suicidal behaviour.

This book addresses the essential topic of child survival in Tanzania, especially focusing on the role of mutual assistance, which has received little attention to date. Further, it identifies a range of key factors for child survival by combining a literature review, regional data analysis, and case studies. These studies center on rural villages in high Under-5 mortality rate (U5MR) regions and assess their strengths and weaknesses regarding child survival. By focusing on deprived rural areas as of 2002 and evaluating the improvements in the 2012 census data, the book also highlights the potential held by rural semi -subsistence economies. An analysis of the focus villages indicates that children in food-sharing circles had better chances of survival. However, food sharing is not necessarily inclusive; a significant number of children have fallen out of such circles, especially in mainland villages. Furthermore, monetary support for children's medicine has often failed to arrive in time. Lastly, the book argues that, in addition to direct factors such as access to health services, water and sanitation, food intake, and education, it is essential that children receive inclusive support at various levels: family, community, village, national, and international.

The book covers the period from 1812, when the Tron Riot in Edinburgh dramatically drew attention to the 'lamentable extent of juvenile depravity', up to 1872, when the Education Act (Scotland) inaugurated a system of universal schooling. During the 1840s and 1850s in particular there was a move away from a punitive approach to young offenders to one based on reformation and prevention. Scotland played a key role in developing reformatory institutions - notably the Glasgow House of Refuge, the largest of its type in the UK - and industrial schools which provided meals and education for children in danger of falling into crime. These schools were pioneered in Aberdeen by Sheriff William Watson and in Edinburgh by the Reverend Thomas Guthrie and exerted considerable influence throughout the United Kingdom. The experience of the Scottish schools was crucial in the development of legislation for a national, UK-wide system between 1854 and 1866.

Drawing on unique access to prominent policy makers including ministers, senior civil servants, local authority directors, and the leaders of children's sector NGOs, Purcell re-examines two decades of children's services reform under both Labour and Conservative-led governments. He closely examines the origins of Labour's Every Child Matters programme, the Munro review and more recent Conservative reforms affecting child and family social workers to reassess the impact of high profile child abuse cases, including Victoria Climbie and Baby P, and reveal the party political drivers of successive reform.

Child abuse and neglect are intractable problems exacting a terrible toll on children and rending the very fabric of our society. What can be done to reduce the suffering? If there were simple solutions to abuse and neglect they would have been discovered long ago. There are no easy answers, but in this vivid history of child protection in America, John E.B. Myers introduces realistic policies that will reduce maltreatment and strengthen the system that protects our children.
Before it is possible to design viable improvements in today's system, it is necessary to understand how it evolved. The sweeping, beautifully written account of child protection in America traces its growth from colonial days to the present--from the rise and gradual disappearance of orphanages, the growth of foster care, the birth of organized child protection in 1874, and the rise of private societies to prevent cruelty, to the twentieth-century transition to government-operated child protection.
Myers goes on to describe the principal causes of child maltreatment, including intergenerational transmission of violence, poverty, substance abuse, cultural violence, excessive corporal punishment, sexual deviance, evolution, mental illness, and domestic violence. Once the causes of maltreatment are clear, it is possible to create solutions. Some of the proposals outlined have been in play for more than a century, while others are new. Policies to combat poverty, expand nurse home visiting programs, increase access to day care, strengthen a sense of community, outlaw corporal punishment, rethink our attitude toward alcohol, and lower the toxicity in popular culture are rooted in a deep understanding of thecycle of violence and challenge traditional ways of thinking.
Since it will never be possible to prevent all maltreatment, it is critical to strengthen the existing child protection system. Attainable reforms such as dealing with the lingering effects of racism in the child welfare, reworking funding mechanisms, refocusing leadership, creating a less adversarial system, strengthening foster care, and reinventing the juvenile court point to flaws in our system but demonstrate that progress is possible.
This provocative book will challenge all those concerned with children's welfare to move toward real solutions that will make life better for America's most vulnerable children.

Approximately one third of child sexual abuse is carried out by children and young people themselves. There is growing public awareness of this issue as well as recognition among professionals that this is a key concern in the safeguarding of children. Working with children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour raises challenging dilemmas around balancing risk management with the need to provide opportunities for social and emotional development. Strong feelings of anxiety may be present among professionals and considerable levels of shame and stigmatisation are often experienced by these children and their families.Allardyce and Yates focus on the importance of recognising that young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour are children first and foremost. They outline an individualised, trauma informed and systemic approach to working with these children and their families. In particular they suggest an approach that moves away from an exclusive focus on the psychology of the individual child towards a wider contextual understanding of the child and the meanings of their behaviour within their family and environment. The authors thus provide an overview of up-to-date empirical and theoretical knowledge about children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour to produce a practical text that is suitable for students and professionals working in child care settings.

This is a detailed and scholarly study of social policy in Weimar Germany. The Weimar Republic gave German youth new social rights and a pledge of generous educational and welfare provision. Public social and welfare policies would, it was hoped, banish the spectre of delinquent and rebellious youth, and ensure that the future citizens, workers, and mothers of Germany's new democracy would be well-adjusted, efficient, and healthy. But how far could the would-be architects of modern technocratic welfare realize their vision in the midst of the economic and political instability of the Great Depression? How did young people respond to policies supposedly in their best interests, but which contained an unmistakable dimension of supervision and control? Elizabeth Harvey examines a wide range of policies implemented by central and local government, including vocational training, labour market policies, reformatory schooling, and the juvenile justice system. Her lucid and scholarly analysis provides new insights into the troubled development of the Weimar welfare state and the crisis into which it was plunged by the Depression. Her book also adds important evidence to the debate over continuities in social policy between Weimar Germany and the Third Reich.

This book examines how pathologising ideas of failing, chaotic and dysfunctional families create a powerful consensus that Britain is in the grip of a `parent crisis' and are used to justify increasingly punitive state policies.

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. Out of Harm's Way explores the following four critical aspects of the system and presents a specific change in each that would lead to lasting improvements. rk, The Book of David, which helped raise awareness of - Deciding who is the client. 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. - Decisions. 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. - The Perverse Incentive. 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. - Aging out. More than 20,000 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. e number of adoptions increased, while the length of time 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.

Concern about gang culture is on the increase, but remains surrounded by myths. While gangs may lead young people into dangerous situations and breed community division, distrust and fear, the friendship, support, security and sense of belonging they offer are often overlooked by those working with young people involved in gangs. Working with Gangs and Young People demonstrates how young people can be engaged in a creative and challenging process that explores the costs, gains and consequences of the choices they make around their gang membership. It provides a tried-and-tested training programme for anyone involved in conflict resolution with young people in groups or gangs, and offers effective interventions that work. Based on a five-year action research project developed by Leap Confronting Conflict, this practical, fully photocopiable toolkit gives practitioners the materials, support and inspiration needed to engage young people who are involved in gangs. It presents flexible activities and strategies to run either two-hour or one-day workshops, and will be indispensable to anyone involved in working with this under-supported group.

In this groundbreaking look at the history and politics of the US child welfare system, When the Welfare People Come exposes the system in its totality, from child protective investigation to foster care and mandated services, arguing that it constitutes a mechanism of control exerted over poor and working class parents and children. Applying the Marxist framework of social reproduction theory to the child welfare system, the author reveals the system's role in the regulation of family life under capitalism.

This book provides new insights on the lives of children in street situations by providing analyses from a qualitative perspective on the sociology of childhood. It proposes some insightful perspectives on the current discussion about the rights of children in street situations. It includes a unique selection of texts, which were initially published in French, written by the authors of this volume, on the lives of children in street situations in Latin America and China, that are now available to an English readership. It challenges obstacles, linked to macrosocial issues such as inequalities, images of the child, the separation of public/private spheres, urban dynamics and structural adjustments, as well as to microsocial dimensions such as identity, motivation, and activities that are constitutive of street situations. The book discusses the situations experienced by children, highlighting children's reflexivity and strategies as social factors, and shedding new light on the debate "agency within structure".

Assessment of the impact of parental illness has gathered significant momentum over recent years. This book provides an up-to-date guide, for a variety of professionals, on how a range of conditions might impact upon children and young people. Each chapter provides an overview of current literature, an evaluation of relevant interventions, an 'in practice' section that provides guidance for readers in terms of best practice, and future research directions. Although the primary focus of the book is directed at children's and young people's response to their parent's condition, the challenges of parenting are also frequently highlighted. Additionally, the text provides an overview of measurement issues when investigating children's and young people's response to parental illness.

This book explores how physical education (PE) can be best enacted in primary schools in order to optimise children's wellbeing. Drawing together extensive data from school communities around the globe, the author examines multiple dimensions of child health in practice. Ultimately, the findings suggest that PE is imperative within the wider landscape of children's holistic learning, offering a powerful platform for meaningful connections across learning areas. While quantitative research has long evidenced the benefits of physical activity, this book contributes to the complex and global issue of what effective health and wellbeing approaches look like in practice. It is natural for children to enjoy movement for the purposes of play, exploration, learning and development: this book is essential reading for educators looking to enhance children's wellbeing and general health.

Human beings have the most immature newborn and longest maturational schedule of any animal. Only 25% of the adult brain size is developed at full-term birth, and most of the brain's size and volume is co-constructed by caregivers in the first years of life. As a result, early life experience has long-term effects on physiological and psychological wellbeing. Contexts for Young Child Flourishing uses an evolutionary systems framing to address the conditions and contexts for child development and thriving. Contributors focus on flourishing-optimizing individual (physiological, psychological, emotional) and communal (social, community) functioning. Converging events make this a key time to reconsider the needs of children and their optimal development in light of increasing understanding of human evolution, the early dynamism of development, and how these influence developmental trajectories. There is a great deal of misunderstanding both among researchers and the general public about what human beings need for optimal development. As a result, human nature unnecessarily can be misshaped by policies, practices, and beliefs that don't take into account evolved needs. Empirical studies today are better able to document and map the long-term effects of early deficits or early assets, mostly in animal models but also through longitudinal studies. An interdisciplinary set of scholars considers child flourishing in regards to issues of development, childhood experience, and wellbeing. Scholars from neuroscience, anthropology, and clinical and developmental studies examine the buffering effects of optimal caregiving practices and shed light on the need for new databases, new policies, and altered childcare practices.

This book provides an interdisciplinary framework for school intervention into child and adolescent maltreatment, highlighting the unique potential for schools to identify and mitigate the long-term impacts of childhood trauma on children's educational well-being. Contributors evaluate recent efforts to incorporate trauma-informed approaches into schools, including strategic planning by administrators, staff training, prevention programming, liaising with local youth service agencies, and trauma-sensitive intervention with affected students. Among the topics discussed:* The developmental impact of trauma* The role of schools and teachers in supporting student mental health* Prevention programming to prevent child and adolescent sexual abuse* Education policies to support students with traumatic histories* Responding to childhood trauma at both macro and microsystem levels Trauma-Informed Schools: Integrating Child Maltreatment Prevention, Detection, and Intervention is a valuable resource for child maltreatment researchers, educational and school psychologists, school social workers, students in early childhood and K-12 education, and education policy makers at all levels of government. It offers the necessary guidelines and insights to facilitate better learning for students who have experienced trauma, aiming to improve student well-being both inside and outside the classroom.

A unique companion to professional play practice

All play professionals are united in their belief that play is important for children s development and there are inherent characteristics of play that underpin professional play practice across contexts. Providing an overarching concept of play, drawing together the evidence base across disciplines and linking theory to practice, "The Essence of" "Play "is the ideal handbook for all those working with children.

Play acts as a natural resource for children to meet physical, intellectual and emotional challenges and this book, unusually, considers play from the perspectives of children rather than adults. It provides a baseline of shared knowledge for all play professionals, exploring the fundamental value of play rather than a how to approach to practice. It considers:

• the therapeutic potential inherent in play;
• how play reflects and promotes physical, emotional, intellectual, linguistic and social abilities;
• the emergence of different types of play skills and why these are important;
• cross-cultural patterns in play, gender, atypicality and adversity, highlighting the relevance of these issues to professional play practice;
• the benefits of utilising play for assessment and other professional practice issues such as ethical play practice, balancing risk with health and safety and the creation and management of boundaries.

This text is designed for students and practitioners working with children across the helping professions, including early years education, play therapy, playwork, childcare, social care, nursing and allied health. Each chapter provides directed reading and small reflective tasks to encourage readers to digest key issues.

Child welfare supervisors need and deserve a book oriented to the reality of their work.Supervision in Child Welfare connects the theoretical and practical to provide readers with the most relevant and sound approaches to supervision. While the availability of professional training programs in the states for supervisors has grown exponentially over the past years, publications that can support this work specific to supervision in a child welfare context are few. Supervision in Child Welfare translates generic supervision principles to the specifics and reality of the child welfare practice environment.
Supervisors operate in a bureaucratic system and respond to a community context of multiple stakeholders. Supervisors support and offer guidance to a stressed workforce while attending to competing demands in an environment where children's lives are at stake. Research has shown that supervisors stand in a pivotal position in the child welfare workforce in terms of recruiting and retaining the best employees, moving agencies to best practice frameworks and creating an sustaining positive organizational climates.
Supervision in Child Welfare bridges the gap between research and supervisory practice, between management and organizational theory and supervisory practice. It provides a comprehensive, integrated resource for child welfare supervisors to give them tools and information to succeed in the fast-paced and intense world of child welfare. The book covers a wide range of must-have skills and knowledge for supervisors including leadership, developing worker performance, managing the Child Welfare unit, working beyond the agency, managing performance, providing clinicalsupervision, and respecting diversity. Plentiful examples and case studies illustrate key concepts.

This Element first reviews the limitations of the concepts of problems in childhood. It proposes a universal, comprehensive, and longitudinal conceptual framework of problems in childhood, their differential context, and their cyclical effects. Based on the linkages identified in the children's problems, they are divided into three levels, primary, secondary, and tertiary. The Element then reviews the concepts and the limitations of the prevalent service delivery approaches of child welfare, protection, and justice, because of which these services have not helped to break the cycle of problems in childhood. The Element identifies the rights-based comprehensive, preventive, and systemic approach for child welfare, at primary, secondary and tertiary prevention levels, in order to break this cycle of problems. Finally, the Element goes into details of the tertiary prevention level integrated service delivery for children facing socio-legal problems.

Levels of violence, abuse and neglect in early childhood are reported internationally as having reached epidemic proportions. The prevalence of all forms of violence to children has been difficult to establish, particularly in low and middle income countries. However, even in countries with a high GDP, the sexual abuse of children and young people by predatory adults may continue undetected for decades. In parts of Africa young children are mutilated and killed for religious reasons. Physical beatings that injure and break bones are still common in the Western world. Pornography and sexual abuse involving young children is propagated worldwide through the internet. The prevention of this violence will require substantial shifts in parental and public attitudes to children and the development and support of national systems of preventive legislation. The last 20 years has seen the emergence of a body of material which interrogates early childhood violence and neglect in a wider range of global settings, particularly those countries with a low GDP. This book aims to highlight important features of national and international initiatives which are rooted in findings from systematic research. The continued abuse and neglect of children has been attributed to social acceptance, not understanding the importance of reporting abuse, and the limitations of child welfare systems. This book will be of interest to practitioners in health care, education, and social work services, as well as field workers implementing programmes to address all forms of abuse at family, community and national level. This book was originally published as a special issue of Early Child Development and Care.

So many children and young people in our society are hurting. Research indicates that more children are depressed, anxious or locked in anger than ever before, with all the problems that creates at home, school and in society at large when emotional pain gets expressed through behaviour or physical symptoms. Many well-intentioned adults really want to help when children suffer because of parental conflict, divorce, family financial worries, loss and bereavement, trauma, bullying, isolation, general growing up issues, and worse. But we often lack the confidence and key skills to know how to help in ways that will genuinely support the child or teenager to properly process what is troubling them, and so reach a more positive place of genuine hope and optimism. Conversations that Matter, the latest book by Margot Sunderland, offers a wealth of tools and techniques to empower parents and practitioners to connect to children and young people through conversation, in life changing ways.Dr Sunderland is widely acknowledged as one of the UK's leading experts in child counselling and therapy, as well as being a best-selling author of books for parents and professionals and co-founder of both the Institute of Arts in Therapy and Education and The Centre for Child Mental Health, London. Her life's work has been to find the most effective ways of helping children and young people in distress, underpinning her practice with cutting-edge findings from the fields of affective neuroscience, developmental psychology and the study of trauma. She is also a passionate advocate for the healing power of the creative arts as a means to reach troubled children, when words are not enough. This long-awaited book will give readers a thorough, evidence-based and inspiring grounding in every aspect of talking with children who are hurting, from how to build a trusting relationship with the child, how to deepen the dialogue between you and make it meaningful, when to work directly or indirectly, how to handle the various inevitable challenges that will arise when talking to children about the difficult stuff, and more.Packed with creative possibilities, and illustrated with numerous 'conversations', this book can be re-turned to again and again whilst helping children and young people work through any life issue, past or present. The book also contains photocopiable worksheets, and introduces a completely new therapeutic story specifically written to help children who are struggling with trauma and shock. Dr Sunderland's book will be of benefit to professionals as well as parents, carers and other adults who want the conversations they have with children and teenagers to genuinely help, and to matter.

Despite a proliferation of legislative action in response to differential outcomes, the relative educational, employment and lifecourse disadvantages of individuals who have experienced the care system remains a pressing issue of widespread international concern. In Wales, a significant body of work has been produced on and with care-experienced children and young people. This edited collection attempts to highlight these valuable insights in a single volume, with contributions from well-established and early career scholars working in different traditions - including education, psychology, policy studies, sociology and social work - to provide a unique opportunity for reflection across disciplinary boundaries and shed new light on common problems and opportunities stimulated by research in the field of social care. The volume introduces a range of contexts and sites - including the home, the school, alternative educational institutions, contact centres, and the natural environment - and reflexively explores changes and continuities within the political and geographical landscape that constitutes Wales. Each chapter introduces insights, reflections and recommendations about the care system and its impacts, which will be useful for readers across geographical contexts who are concerned with improving the lives of children, young people and wider family networks.

An adaptation of the documentary film, Operation Toussaint reveals how an Ex-Special Agent and Operation Underground Railroad are saving children from sex trafficking around the world through Operation Toussaint, a covert mission to Haiti. Tim Ballard left his post as a special agent for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to found Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.). Through this organization, Tim and his team plan undercover operations to rescue child sex trafficking victims around the world. To date, they have saved hundreds of children from horrific conditions, which Tim wasn't able to do when bound by government restrictions. Take an inside look at O.U.R., and their mission to end modern day slavery, as you join Tim and his Special Forces team on a covert mission to Haiti where they bring a ring of sex traffickers who bribed their way out of jail to justice in Operation Toussaint.

This study examines the organization of social responsibility in the USA, in particular of critically ill newborn children. Drawing on medical records and interviews with parents and medical staff, the book investigates two neonatal intensive care units, showing the traumas of extreme medical measures, and the sufferings of infants. The accounts are by turns disturbing and heroic, as parents and staff attempt to take charge of the infants' care, redefining their roles as adults and parents, and coping with sometimes awful contingencies. Rather than treating responsibility as an ethical issue, the book focuses on how responsibility is socially produced and sustained. It questions how staff members encourage parents to take responsibility, but keep them from interfering in medical matters, and how parents encourage staff vigilance when they are novices attempting to supervise the experts. The authors conclude that it is not sufficient simply to be responsible individuals. Instead, people must learn to be responsible in an organizational world, and organizations must learn how to support responsible individuals.

AIDS has ravaged Africa. South of the Sahara, the epidemic is catastrophic. Every day seventeen hundred South Africans contract HIV, and in Botswana over a third of adults are infected. With the death toll ever increasing, this book explores how governments, charities and families are responding to the next wave of the crisis: millions of orphaned children.Told through moving first-hand testimonies and lucid commentaries, Children of Aids gives an unparalleled insight into the reality of day to day life for the street orphans, care-takers, volunteers, doctors and family members living through the crisis across South Africa, Zambia and Uganda. The extended family is the traditional safety net for orphans, but under this kind of strain other ways of coping with the crisis are emerging. In addition to family case studies, Emma Guest looks at childcare projects, fostering schemes and orphanages; the benefits and difficulties of international involvement; and the prospects for children living on the streets or in child-headed families.These accounts of personal courage and resilience in the face of unimaginable poverty and bereavement are both disturbing and awe-inspiring. Emma Guest questions what will happen to the minds of a generation that grows up alone, poor and ashamed by the stigma of the disease that killed their parents. By revealing the way that individuals are affected by AIDS, and how they cope with such an epidemic, Guest also shows what others can do to help, and a list of aid agencies and contact addresses is included.