1994 is the International Year of the Family, and debates about the rights of the child are once again at the top of the national and international legal and political agenda. Yet in places of armed conflict all over the world tens of thousands of children are recruited to fight in bloody conflicts, and their rights are systematically ignored and abused. In this path-breaking study, Professor Goodwin-Gill and Dr Cohn assess the status of the Child Soldier in international law and highlight the ways in which international humanitarian law fails to provide effective protection, particularly in the internal conflicts which are the most common battlefields today. Based upon empirical data gathered from places of conflict all over the world, the authors examine the consequences for child soldiers, their families and community of their participation in armed conflict. They conclude their study with practical suggestions for preventing recruitment, and call for a more coherent policy of treatment for those children who have participated in acts of violence.

Child Development for Child Care and Protection Workers is a classic text for students and practitioners in the child care and protection field which summarises important current thinking on child development and applies it directly to practice. The book covers key issues such as resilience and vulnerability and the impact of protective or adverse environments. Different stages of development (infancy, school age and adolescence) are discussed, and attachment theory is used to offer insights into the impact of abuse and neglect on development. A key feature is the inclusion of case studies and activities to allow the reader to improve their understanding and reflect on good practice. This second edition is fully updated to reflect the new policy context and multi-disciplinary practice, and contains updated practice examples to take into account contemporary issues affecting children and young people. This book encourages practitioners to consider each child as an individual with unique circumstances, and links theory and practice in an imaginative and sympathetic way. It will be essential reading for all child care and protection workers.

Hello, Nancy. You're at your usual locker at Fitness Plus. The time is 09:15. Your cell phone is dead, your home phone won't answer and your daughter, Beth, is home with the nanny. It will take you 18 minutes to get home. If you drive fast. Shame. You're already 18 minutes late... The kidnappers' only stipulation is that Nancy must tell her husband, Michael. The problem is, she doesn't know where he is, or how to contact him. But she recalls him mentioning a number she should call if anything unusual happens. This triggers a Code Red at specialist security company Cruxys Solutions, who send investigators Ruth Gonzales and Andy Vaslik to track him down. But they can't find a single trace of him. What do you do when a child's life depends on finding a man who doesn't seem to exist? A white-knuckle suspense thriller that just won't let go, perfect for fans of Harlan Coben, Daniel Silva and Michael Connelly. Praise for The Locker 'Readers who enjoy Harlan Coben and Joseph Finder will happily get lost in the nightmare presented here' Booklist '[An] intriguing and inventive plot' Mystery Scene 'Magson is arguably one of the most entertaining writers of British spy fiction currently operating. His novels are sharp and exciting, with intelligent plots and interesting characters' Deadly Pleasures 'Gonzalez and Vaslik make an appealingly mismatched investigative unit' Kirkus Reviews

Group Counselling and Psychotherapy with Adolescents offers an overview of group dynamic theory and the essentials for adolescent group work in a variety of locations, including schools, clinics, and family violence and substance abuse programmes - and in criminal justice counselling and youth employment and recreational settings.

The South African Constitution declares, in the Bill of Rights, that every child has the right to basic nutrition, shelter, basic health services and social services. The Bill of Rights also gives everyone, including children, rights to social security and basic education. Parents and the state, led by government, are the main players in translating children's rights into reality. But when parents are too poor or disadvantaged to do so, the state is legally obliged to step in. Over the first decade of democracy, the South African government made progress in rolling out services to poor people, including poor children, but poverty remains extensive. Monitoring Child Socio-Economic Rights in South Africa: Achievements and Challenges links the government's efforts to realise children's basic socio-economic rights to its legal obligations to do so, thereby aiming to contribute to eradicating child poverty in South Africa and ensuring that children live the quality of life they are entitled to.

Based on extensive research over many years, with a broad range of participants in Canada and internationally, this collection of essays is an important contribution to the child welfare agenda. It deals with the promotion of emotional well-being in families, and the prevention of child maltreatment. Values, policies and resources are examined as both facilitators of, and barriers to, effective action.

The authors interviewed nearly 150 people, including researchers, policy makers, social workers and clients of the child welfare system. Both theoretical and practical issues emerge, as the authors discuss the social context of abuse and the scientific context wherein policy is made. They conclude that the following social conditions are essential in effectively reducing abuse: upheld values of self-determination and the health of children; sufficient material and psychological resources for children and families; family-friendly parental leave and child support policies, and empirically grounded and tested prevention programs.

Contained within the work is extensive examination of current issues in Aboriginal child welfare. The authors advocate certain collective approaches to child-raising, inspired by current and historical Aboriginal practices.

Promoting Family Wellness is of relevance to all those involved in child welfare, and to researchers and students too. It is readable and clear enough to be of interest to the general reader who is interested in this intellectually complex and emotionally fraught topic.

We use the word all the time, but what exactly is self-esteem, and how do young people develop it? Feeling Like Crap explores how a young person's self is constructed, and what might really help that self to feel more valued and confident. Through accounts of his individual and group work with young people, Nick Luxmoore demonstrates how listening to, engaging with and being respectful of young people can provide the support they need to help them repair their sense of self and offer them new possibilities and directions in life. When Grace was three, her parents split up and she went to live with her father while her sister stayed with their mother. Allie has slipped behind with her school work since falling out with her best friend, and any positive feelings about himself that Conor may have dared to develop have been beaten out of him by his father. This compassionate and thought-provoking book will be an invaluable resource for counsellors, teachers, youth workers, and anyone else working to help young people with self-esteem issues.

Social service agencies are facing the same expectations in quality management and outcomes as private companies, compelling staff members and researchers to provide and interpret valid and useful research to stakeholders at all levels in the field. Child welfare agencies are particularly scrutinized. In this textbook, two highly experienced researchers offer the best techniques for conducting sound research in the field. Covering not only the methodological challenges but also the real-life constraints of research in child welfare settings, Amy J. L. Baker and Benjamin J. Charvat present a volume that can be used both for general research methods and as a practical guide for conducting research in the field of child welfare. Baker and Charvat devote an entire chapter to ethical issues involved in researching children and their families and the limits of confidentiality within this population. They weave a discussion of ethics throughout the book, and each chapter begins with a scenario that presents a question or problem to work through, enabling readers to fully grasp the methods in the context of a specific setting or area of concern. Special sections concentrate on the value of continuous quality-improvement activities, which enable the collection and analysis of data outside of the strictures of publishable research, and the implementation of program evaluations, which can be helpful in obtaining further research and programmatic funding.

Residential care and treatment for children and youth remain ubiquitous across Canada in spite of frequent critiques and an ideology of constructing group care as a last resort. In the first book of its kind, Dr. Kiaras Gharabaghi argues that the absence of a unifying theory or conceptual idea(s) pursuant to residential care and treatment perpetuate dynamics of mediocrity and complacency toward inadequate standards and practices. Drawing on organizational examples from across Canada, Gharabaghi re-constructs the possibilities for this form of care as a space for healing, growth, and the promotion of autonomy for young people. This well-timed resource offers the child and youth services community a positive, constructive, and revolutionary framework for residential care and treatment that is fundamentally based on a partnership between caregivers and young people, their families, neighbourhoods, and communities. Dr. Gharabaghi's sophisticated and provocative analysis of the system's key issues is essential reading for students, practitioners, and educators in the field of child and youth care and in the human services more broadly. Features: explores residential care and treatment with a focus on the needs of unique populations, such as black youth, Indigenous youth, and young people impacted by developmental disability or neurodevelopmental challenges emphasizes the voices and participation of young people with lived experience in residential care and treatment written in a uniquely Canadian context, but its theoretical elements draw on residential care in the United States, Germany, South Africa, and elsewhere

The need for adoption work to be based upon the best available evidence is plain; but it is particularly important in the light of the radical changes that adoption has undergone in recent times. It now covers a wide range of social arrangements for children, adopters and birth parents, and presents new and often perplexing challenges. Adoption Now brings together up-to-date and authoritative research on adoption. It provides an overview of studies commissioned by the Department of Health to identify the principal messages about adoption policy and practice to emerge from its programme of research over the last few years. Roy Parker, Professor Emeritus, University of Bristol, details the most important and reliable ‘messages’ obtained from the research. These conclusions are made readily available in an accessible form, with the main points highlighted throughout the text. The studies are extensive and comprehensive, ranging across: the processes which adoption entails; children joining new families; single-parent adoption; transracial adoption; children talking about their adoption; and the support provided and needed during and after placement. This unique volume includes:

• children’s views of their experiences of being adopted
• neglected issues such as the relations between children and other members of the family
• the different stages of the adoption process
• implications of the research for both policy and practice

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.

This, the first book in the Wiley Series in Culture and Professional Practice, is designed as a practical guide for professionals who work with children from differing cultural backgrounds. It relates cultural differences in development to the problems and practice of child care with a special contribution from cross-cultural psychology. The book includes the main issues which professionals are likely to encounter, for example:

• how individual differences in temperament and behaviour interact with cultural traditions
• how a sense of mixed identity develops and how this conflict affects many young people in different cultural settings
• how the anxieties and motivations of children are influenced by their cultural backgrounds

A child at loose ends needs help, and someone steps in--a Big Brother, a Big Sister, a mentor from the growing ranks of volunteers offering their time and guidance to more than two million American adolescents. Does it help? How effective are mentoring programs, and how do they work? Are there pitfalls, and if so, what are they? Such questions, ever more pressing as youth mentoring initiatives expand their reach at a breakneck pace, have occupied Jean Rhodes for more than a decade. In this provocative, thoroughly researched, and lucidly written book, Rhodes offers readers the benefit of the latest findings in this burgeoning field, including those from her own extensive, groundbreaking studies.

Outlining a model of youth mentoring that will prove invaluable to the many administrators, caseworkers, volunteers, and researchers who seek reliable information and practical guidance, "Stand by Me" describes the extraordinary potential that exists in such relationships, and discloses the ways in which nonparent adults are uniquely positioned to encourage adolescent development. Yet the book also exposes a rarely acknowledged risk: unsuccessful mentoring relationships--always a danger when, in a rush to form matches, mentors are dispatched with more enthusiasm than understanding and preparation--can actually harm at-risk youth. Vulnerable children, Rhodes demonstrates, are better left alone than paired with mentors who cannot hold up their end of the relationships.

Drawing on work in the fields of psychology and personal relations, Rhodes provides concrete suggestions for improving mentoring programs and creating effective, enduring mentoring relationships with youth.

Providing an authoritative overview of the growing phenomena of child to parent violence - a feature in the daily life of increasing numbers of families - this book outlines what we know about it, what is effective in addressing it, and outlines a proven model for intervention. Based on non-violent resistance (NVR), the model is founded on a number of key elements: parental commitment to non-violence, de-escalation skills, increased parental presence, engaging the support network and acts of reconciliation. The book outlines the theory and principles, and provides pragmatic guidance for implementing these elements, accompanied by case studies to bring the theory to life.

Many of the babies born at the Ideal Maternity Home in East Chester, Nova Scotia, were not adopted. Instead they mysteriously disappeared, becoming known as butterbox babies--named after the grocery delivery boxes that they were buried in. Since Bette Cahill first wrote about this shocking truth in 1992, she continued to research the story and corresponded with many of the home's survivors. In this expanded edition, she shares her ongoing examination, revealing the sometimes happy, often heartbreaking endings of survivors searching for their birth parents.

'Primarily aimed at adoptive parents, but of considerable use to foster carers of young children, this publication approaches attachment and developmental issues arising when even the smallest child is in your care. Extremely well researched, it offers practical, sensitive guidance through the dark areas of separation, loss and trauma in early childhood. It reassures that no problem faced as a result of your child's early experiences is insignificant or undeserving of a solution. Neither is the reader patronized by assumptions that some matters should already be common knowledge. Archer sets out purposefully to encourage confidence and thereby to enable enjoyment of the young life in your care, confessing this to be the book she herself would have welcomed 20 years ago.'

'A 'must have' book for both adoptive parents and for those professionals who help adoptive families forge new family ties. The author, herself an adoptive parent, addresses a wide variety of very complex topics with a marked sensitivity to the varying needs of children who may have had a wide range of early life experiences. Although in general the text is easy to read and understand, there is a glossary for those who might be unfamiliar with some of the terminology. References are made to well established issues as well as to some of the newer research on the impact of early abuse and neglect on brain development. I particularly appreciated the special focus on identifying abnormal arousal patterns and helping the child with these. Parents and professionals alike will value the specific ideas provided for coping with problem behaviors and for building closer family ties.'

Leading researchers examine child poverty in industrialized countries--the United States, UK, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Hungary, and Russia--in this major new study. Issues addressed are: definition and measurement in the dynamic analysis of child poverty; cross-national comparisons of child poverty rates and trends; cross-national comparisons of children's movements into and out of poverty; country-specific studies of child poverty dynamics; and the policy implications of taking a dynamic perspective. This unique study, with its cross-national and dynamic analysis of child poverty, will interest academics, international organizations, governments and their advisors.

Combining contemporary research with practice findings, this book shows how we can improve the mental health of children in care. Expert contributors highlight the challenges that children face and propose innovative models of practice which have been proven to improve outcomes. The book describes the difficulties children in care commonly encounter, such as vulnerability to self-harm, substance misuse or inappropriate sexual behaviour. It goes on to explore therapeutic interventions, such as art therapy or integrative therapy, which can be used to address the root of these behaviours. With a range of clinical and practical perspectives, it also makes recommendations for further training for foster carers, for reinforcing professional support networks and for all agencies to have a developed understanding of cultural considerations when working with children in care. Those committed to improving the mental health of children and young people in care, such as psychologists, psychiatrists, CAMHS professionals and social workers, will find this book an invaluable source of evidence and inspiration.

The situation of children abandoned by adults, in foundling homes, sleeping rough in the streets, in refugee camps, and in other circumstances, attracts much political and journalistic attention, but surprisingly little from social scientists. As the editors of this volume point out, there is therefore not enough said about the varieties of experiences summarized as "abandonment." Nor has enough effort been put into studying the perspectives of children themselves on their situation. Situating the discourse on child abandonment in the more general field of debate on children, both historical and ethnographic, this book attempts to show that the presentations of "abandoned" children tend to take for granted ethnocentric ideas about what children can and should do, and about what their relationship should be with adults.

The situation of children abandoned by adults, in foundling homes, sleeping rough in the streets, in refugee camps, and in other circumstances, attracts much political and journalistic attention, but surprisingly little from social scientists. As the editors of this volume point out, there is therefore not enough said about the varieties of experiences summarized as "abandonment." Nor has enough effort been put into studying the perspectives of children themselves on their situation. Situating the discourse on child abandonment in the more general field of debate on children, both historical and ethnographic, this book attempts to show that the presentations of "abandoned" children tend to take for granted ethnocentric ideas about what children can and should do, and about what their relationship should be with adults.

Helping vulnerable children and young people to build protective behaviours is the key to keeping them safe. Full of creative ideas and activities, this guide provides the tools to help children develop these key skills. Topics include work around: building resilience and problem solving skills; identifying a 'safety network'; developing emotional literacy; awareness of grooming strategies and safe/unsafe touch; and cyber safety. The range of tried and tested techniques will be sure to engage any child in thinking about their personal safety, allowing adult carers to have confidence that their child will be empowered to better identify and avoid harmful situations and behaviours. Practical and easy to use, this is a valuable resource for professionals working with vulnerable children and young people, such as adopted or fostered children and those in residential care, as well as the parents and carers of these children.

Child Protection and Parents with a Learning Disability provides the practical knowledge that professionals need in order to understand common intellectual disabilities and how they might affect parenting capability. It presents clear guidance on how to carry out effective assessments and explains how interventions might differ when working with parents who have a learning disability. It covers a broad spectrum of disabilities, including borderline conditions and Autism Spectrum Disorder. The book also explores a number of emotional and mental health issues that can occur alongside learning disabilities, such as ADHD, anxiety, depression, and attachment disorders, to show how they should be understood in the context of cognitive abilities and the parenting role. Empowering practitioners to make informed decisions about children's welfare, this is a must-have guide for all professionals working with families where a parent is affected by a learning disability.

With contributions from internationally recognized experts, this edited volume presents original thinking on the theory, research and practice surrounding child neglect. Comprehensive and current, the book takes an expansive look at how we can better address this prevalent issue. It explores the effects of neglect on the developing child and makes recommendations on how to identify neglect at the earliest opportunity. It considers common causal and contributing factors in neglect cases and the impact of these on children. The book details effective intervention techniques alongside case vignettes and shows how change can be achieved. It highlights the importance of supporting parental care and developing parental responsibility in families where children are neglected. Chapters provide in-depth descriptive examples and include a summary of learning points. Including practical suggestions for combating child neglect, this is an essential guide to best practice for students and practitioners working with children and families. The book also contains useful insights relevant to researchers and policy makers.

The figure of the lost child has haunted the Australian imagination. Peter Pierce's original and sometimes shocking study The Country of Lost Children traces this ambivalent and disturbing history. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from poetry, fiction and newspaper reports to paintings and films, The Country of Lost Children analyzes the cultural and moral implications of the lost child in Australian history and illuminates a crucial aspect of our present condition. At its core are confronting, often troubling, questions about childhood itself.

Domestic violence has a serious impact on children and families but some of the harm can be minimised by providing parents with effective guidance on developing safe, protective and positive ways of caring for their children in the aftermath of a violent relationship. This practical guide provides techniques and exercises to help practitioners work in a structured and focused way with parents after domestic violence has occurred. It sets out a framework for assessing risks and needs, and covers how to build strengths, set goals, and plan an intervention pathway. Advice, exercises and handouts that are easily photocopied will help parents understand the impact of domestic violence and develop their relationship with their child. The resource also covers how to use discipline, talking to children, understanding child development, and how to build resilience and empathy. Guidance on working with both the perpetrator and the victim of domestic violence is included. This invaluable resource will benefit child and family social workers, children's centre workers, therapists, counsellors and anyone supporting a family recovering from the trauma of domestic violence.