Eileen Munro, author of the seminal Munro Review, returns in this fully revised and updated third edition. With new chapters on 'Child Protection Agencies as Complex Adaptive Systems' and 'How organisations can support more effective practice', this new edition shifts its focus from individual workers to look at the critical role that organisations play in child protection, and how individuals are affected by the complex enterprise of people, processes, cultures and agencies. It remains an essential guide to strengthening analytic and intuitive skills to improve children's safety.

'One of the non-fiction books of the year.' Andrew O' Hagan A powerful, evocative and deeply personal journey into the world of missing people When Francisco Garcia was just seven years old, his father, Christobal, left his family. Unemployed, addicted to drink and drugs, and adrift in life, Christobal decided he would rather disappear altogether than carry on dealing with the problems in front of him. So that's what he did, leaving his young wife and child in the dead of night. He has been missing ever since. Twenty years on, Francisco is ready to take up the search for answers. Why did this happen and how could it be possible? Where might his father have gone? And is there any reason to hope for a happy reunion? During his journey, which takes him all across Britain and back to his father's homeland of Spain, Francisco tells the stories of those he meets along the way: the police investigators; the charity employees and volunteers; the once missing and those perilously at risk around us; the families, friends and all those left behind. If You Were There is the moving and affecting story of one man's search for his lost family, an urgent document of where we are now and a powerful, timeless reminder of our responsibility to others.

Exploring specific experiences, circumstances and events that can put children at risk, this book provides practical guidance for early years practitioners working with vulnerable children. It covers supporting children who are abused and neglected, those with special educational needs, children from ethnic minorities, those with emotional or health difficulties, children affected by poverty and children in care. Each chapter draws on current research and theories to set out clear advice and strategies for supporting the wellbeing and development of vulnerable children, including working in partnership with parents, carers and communities.

Nigeria is the most populous nation in Africa, made up of multiple ethnic groups, cultures, and languages. She is a nation with world-acclaimed writers, scientists, and physicians who have created record breaking and award-winning contributions to their fields. Sadly, this great and mighty nation is plagued and attacked almost every week by militants from a deadly, brutal, barbarous, vicious, and dangerous sect called Boko Haram. Boko Haram is the most dangerous terrorist group in Nigeria, the actions of which have led to the injury and/or death of many people. This group evolved from a non-violent nuisance group to a brutal, cruel, and savage one. Boko Haram's activities have had and still have negative, destructive, and devastating effects on different aspects of Nigeria's economy. The impact of Boko Haram's terrorism on security, health, finance, tourism, and education in Nigeria and its people is the topic of focus in this book. Furthermore, the Boko Haram sect is a leading group that breaches the rights of children. It is common knowledge that the children are the future of any nation, and they need to be trained properly for a promising future. Ultimately, the individuals or groups breaching the rights of children need to be punished appropriately, for a better and glorious future for the children of Nigeria.

This practical book looks at the experiences of children in need who live in state care and the social worker's role in working with them. This is a popular guide to this complex and demanding area of practice. There are chapters on communication and children's rights, life story work, attachment and culture, ethnicity and faith. Throughout the book there are sections on supporting legislation and policy for children in residential care, foster care, adoption and leaving care. Key features include: Practical links between theory and practice Includes law and policy relevant to looked-after children Information on understanding statistics Contains lots of practical activities

The Origins of UNICEF traces the history of the founding of the world's most well-known and often controversial relief aid organization for children. UNICEF modeled itself after several national organizations as well as some of the early twentieth-century transnational and international relief aid organizations, catering to a clientele that many observers claimed would be impossible to resist or ignore. In only a few years, UNICEF's programs provided relief aid to millions of children in locations around the globe, but the atmosphere of post-war cooperation, quickly supplanted by Cold War tensions, caused UNICEF's efforts to be scrutinized lest they be too closely aligned with either the United States or the Soviet Bloc. UNICEF remains one of the most highly regarded and effective child relief-aid organizations in the world. The story of its founding and its first years as an aid organization provide insight into how an international, apolitical, philanthropic organization must maneuver through political and cultural tensions in order to achieve its goal of mitigating human suffering.

How do you apply the principles, structures and processes of the law to everyday practice? Drawing on a wealth of contemporary case examples, this handy pocket book demystifies the complex legislation on Looked After Children and demonstrates the practical duties and responsibilities of professionals working with this group.

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.

The focus of this book is on different aspects of leadership and governess for learning in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector, which serves children aged 1-5 years. Internationally, the discourse on the ECEC sector is interwoven with the discourse on early intervention, where ECEC is viewed as laying the foundation for lifelong learning, eliminating child poverty, and fostering social inclusion within an increasingly diverse population.

Among the many religious acts condemned in the Hebrew Bible, child sacrifice stands out as particularly horrifying. The idea that any group of people would willingly sacrifice their own children to their god(s) is so contrary to modern moral sensibilities that it is difficult to imagine that such a practice could have ever existed. Nonetheless, the existence of biblical condemnation of these rites attests to the fact that some ancient Israelites in fact did sacrifice their children. Indeed, a close reading of the evidence-biblical, archaeological, epigraphic, etc.-indicates that there are at least three different types of Israelite child sacrifice, each with its own history, purpose, and function. In addition to examining the historical reality of Israelite child sacrifice, Dewrell's study also explores the biblical rhetoric condemning the practice. While nearly every tradition preserved in the Hebrew Bible rejects child sacrifice as abominable to Yahweh, the rhetorical strategies employed by the biblical writers vary to a surprising degree. Thus, even in arguing against the practice of child sacrifice, the biblical writers themselves often disagreed concerning why Yahweh condemned the rites and why they came to exist in the first place.

International media regularly features horrific stories about Chinese orphanages, especially when debating international adoption and human rights. Much of the popular information is dated and ill-informed about the experiences of most orphans in China today, Chinese government policy, and improvements evident in parts of China. Informal kinship care is the most common support for the orphaned children. The state supports orphans and abandoned children whose parents and relatives cannot be found or contacted. The book explores concrete examples about the changing experiences and future directions of Chinese child welfare policy. It is about the support to disadvantaged children, including abandoned children in the care of the state, most of whom have disabilities; HIV affected children; and orphans in kinship care. It identifies how many orphans are in China, how they are supported, the extent to which their rights are met, and what efforts are made to improve their rights and welfare provision. When our research about Chinese orphans started in 2001, these children were almost entirely voiceless. Since then, the Chinese government has committed to improving child welfare. We argue that a mixed welfare system, in which state provision supplements family and community care, is an effective direction to improve support for orphaned children. Government needs to take responsibility to guarantee orphans' rights as children, and support family networks to provide care so that children can grow up in their own communities. The book contributes to academic and policy understanding of the steps that have been taken and are still required to achieve the goal of a child welfare system in China that meets the rights of orphans to live and thrive with other children in a family.

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.

The need for services that respond to the 'maltreatment' of children and to the struggles of families is at the core of social service systems in all developed nations. While these child and family welfare systems confront similar problems and incorporate common elements, there are substantial differences in philosophy, organization, and operation across international settings and models. In this new collection of essays, Nancy Freymond and Gary Cameron have brought together some of the finest international minds to provide an original and integrated discussion of child protection, family service, and community caring models of child and family welfare. The volume not only examines child protection and family service approaches within Western nations - including Canada, the United States, England, the Netherlands, France, and Sweden - it is also the first comparative study to give equal attention to Aboriginal community caring models in Canada and New Zealand. The comparisons made by the essays in this volume allow for a consideration of constructive and feasible innovations in child and family welfare and contribute to an enriched debate around each system. This book will be of great benefit to the field for many years to come.

From time to time all families face predicaments, and use their own resources to overcome them. However, sometimes these resources are insufficient and they need help. Through the use of richly detailed practice examples and case studies, this comprehensive book clearly and succinctly examines the knowledge, skills and attitude that social workers require in order to engage with and help families experiencing strain in a multitude of different situations. Taking a strongly ecological stance, it outlines the variety of external stressors that can push families into difficulty and provides a thorough examination of the ways in which social workers can understand, help and support them. Concise and accessible, Supporting Families is an essential sourcebook for undergraduate and postgraduate students taking modules related to working with children and families as well as practitioners seeking a fresh source of reference.

Protecting children from abuse and neglect is a serious and complex area of social work practice and understanding the critical skills of communicating with and listening to children's voices, and those of their advocates and survivors, is essential. In this new edition of a highly-regarded book, the authors offer a strengthened children's rights perspective and explore four main categories of child abuse - emotional abuse, sexual abuse, neglect and physical abuse. The book also considers legal safeguards and protective processes to increase the creativity and confidence of those undertaking such work. Locating knowledge and skills within a series of case examples from real life practice and serious case reviews, this book is an indispensable resource for students, professionals and others concerned with protecting children. This second edition has been comprehensively revised and updated to include current research evidence and a focus on the neglected protection needs of sexually exploited young people, children in custody, disabled children, young carers and unaccompanied child migrants.

CHIP is a joint federal-state program that finances health insurance for over 8 million children. Since the program's inception, the percentage of uninsured children nationwide has decreased by half, from 13.9 percent in 1997 to 6.6 percent in the first three months of 2014. This year, Congress will decide whether to extend CHIP funding beyond 2015. In this book, GAO examines what assessments of CHIP suggest about its effect on children's health care coverage and access; and what key issues identified by GAO's work the Congress may wish to consider in determining whether to extend CHIP funding.

Between 1850 and 1970, around three hundred thousand children were sent to new homes through child migration programmes run by churches, charities and religious orders in the United States and the United Kingdom. Intended as humanitarian initiatives to save children from social and moral harm and to build them up as national and imperial citizens, these schemes have in many cases since become the focus of public censure, apology and sometimes financial redress. Remembering Child Migration is the first book to examine both the American 'orphan train' programmes and Britain's child migration schemes to its imperial colonies. Setting their work in historical context, it discusses their assumptions, methods and effects on the lives of those they claimed to help. Rather than seeing them as reflecting conventional child-care practice of their time, the book demonstrates that they were subject to criticism for much of the period in which they operated. Noting similarities between the American 'orphan trains' and early British migration schemes to Canada, it also shows how later British child migration schemes to Australia constituted a reversal of what had been understood to be good practice in the late Victorian period. At its heart, the book considers how welfare interventions motivated by humanitarian piety came to have such harmful effects in the lives of many child migrants. By examining how strong moral motivations can deflect critical reflection, legitimise power and build unwarranted bonds of trust, it explores the promise and risks of humanitarian sentiment.

In 1938, noting that the bulk of the Indian population formed a ""landless proletariat"" and despairing of the ability of the factionalized Indian community to unite in pursuit of common objectives, activist K.A. Neelakanda Ayer forecast that the fate of Indians in Malaya would be to become Tragic orphans of whom India has forgotten and Malaya looks down upon with contempt."" Ayer's words continue to resonate; as a minority group in a nation dominated politically by colonially derived narratives of ""race"" and ethnicity and riven by the imperatives of religion, the general trajectory of the economically and politically impotent Indian community has been one of increasing irrelevance. This book explores the history of the modern Indian presence in Malaysia, and traces the vital role played by the Indian community in the construction of contemporary Malaysia. In this comprehensive new study, Carl Vadivella Belle offers fresh insights on the Indian experience spanning the period from the colonial recruitment of Indian labour to the post-Merdeka political, economic and social marginalization of Indians. While recent Indian challenges to the political status quo -- a regime described as that of ""benign neglect"" -- promoted Indian hopes of reform, change and uplift, the author concludes that the dictates of political discourse permeated by the ideologies of communalism offer limited prospects for meaningful change.

"Somebody's Child" is the extraordinary true story of Lisa Lovatt-Smith, a "Vogue" magazine editor who, at the age of 35, made the astonishing choice to abandon her glamorous lifestyle and dedicate her life to helping Africa's most vulnerable children in rural Ghana.
Born in Spain to a single mother who struggled to make rent, Lisa Lovatt-Smith rose to become the photo editor at British "Vogue" at the age of 19, the youngest in Conde Nast history. At 21, she helped launch Spanish "Vogue," hosting massive, lavish parties in Madrid with celebrities such as the Rolling Stones, Madonna and Andy Warhol. By her mid-thirties, Lisa lived an enviable life filled with designer clothes, a dream career, and a beautiful Parisian home.
But at home, Lisa's life is less than perfect. Her adopted daughter Leila is expelled from school for a series of increasingly disturbing behaviors. Determined to get her daughter back on track, Lisa takes Leila to Ghana to volunteer at an orphanage. The experience is transformational: Lisa, who had feared the hardship of even a short visit to Africa, finds herself stunned out of her luxurious life and compelled to act.
Within 18 months, Lisa moves to Ghana and set up OrphanAid Africa, her own fostering network and activist group, dedicating all her personal resources to bringing up hundreds of Ghanaian children. In her drive to give love and a future to these orphaned children, Lisa first builds a beautiful fostering center in the tropical forest. Next -- in a country with almost no regulations protecting these vulnerable children -- she spearheads a drive to develop nation-wide reform throughout Ghana, advocating a phase-out of orphanages in favor of monitored fostering.
Lisa's quest is a dramatic, unforgettable journey. She confronts snakes, death threats, cruel betrayals, illness, road accidents, arson, an armed attack, and the AIDS epidemic that has killed so many parents with young children, and a corrupt system of for-profit orphanages. Her lonely childhood gives her the keen appreciation for what the orphans are missing, and her apprenticeship within the disciplined structure of "Vogue" has taught her the enormous resourcefulness and persistence she needs to succeed.
"Somebody's Child" is eye-opening and heart-wrenchingly honest, an inspiration to anyone who seeks meaning in helping those who cannot help themselves. It examines the myths surrounding aid to impoverished African children with a critical, yet compassionate, eye. A vivid portrait of West Africa today, it is an unflinching portrayal of the tragedies endured by millions of children, who struggle despite, and sometimes because of, outpourings of often-misplaced Western benevolence. And although to Lisa, it will always be all about the children, it is also a touching celebration of a woman who is talented, generous and brave.

Social work practice with children, young people and families is complex, highly skilled - and fascinating. Writing about social work increasingly acknowledges the complexities and uncertainties of practice but rarely features the voice of the social worker themselves. This book takes a different approach, that of Critical Best Practice: a constructive, realistic and strengths-based approach that takes as its starting point the telling and analysing of in depth stories about 'live' practice. The reader is encouraged to join the social work practitioner or manager as they engage with the everyday dilemmas and uncertainties of 21st century practice. Ten narratives, based round the themes of relationships, risk, and negotiation & problem solving provide varied opportunities for critical reflection and learning about social work in different contexts. Insights are offered into social work with children, from young babies to adolescents, and families with differing needs in different parts of the UK: England, Scotland and Wales.

How do you apply the principles, structures and processes of the law to everyday practice? Drawing on a wealth of contemporary case examples, this handy pocket book demystifies the legislation on children in need and demonstrates the practical duties and responsibilities of professionals within both the statutory and voluntary sectors.

This fully-updated and revised third edition addresses the changes to law and practice in relation to adoption and permanency, the children's hearing system and the implications of the provisions of the Children and Young People (S) Act 2014 and other related matters, including the "National Practice Model" of GIRFEC. This is the only text to provide coverage of the new legal, policy and practice landscape of social work with children and families in Scotland, and as such, it is an indispensable guide for students, newly-qualified social workers, managers and practice teachers and a range of other professionals in health, education, the police and others in cognate disciplines.

Confronting Child and Adolescent Sexual Abuse is the first text to examine the history, theory, treatment, and prevention of this complex phenomenon. With in-depth insights into the psychologies of victims, their families, and the perpetrators, this comprehensive text shows readers how to recognize the symptoms and impact of childhood sexual abuse, critically engage with the unique nature of each case, complete a thorough assessment, develop a treatment plan, and effectively intervene in critical situations. A national expert on child abuse and neglect and the author of numerous books and publications, Cynthia Crosson-Tower addresses a wide range of special topics and helps readers prepare for working in this challenging professional field.

From Every Child Matters and the Munro Review, to changing shifts in thinking from Coalition government; the child protection system has seen dramatic political and policy developments over recent years. This book brings you a critical analysis of these developments from a leading writer and commentator. It begins by exploring the origins of present-day arrangements, locating English policy and practice in both a wider British and international context. It examines tragic cases such as 'Baby P' and Maria Colwell, considering their impact on public and professional attitudes and, in turn, the implications for the child protection system. Looking to the future of child protection, Nigel Parton considers the current state of the system and argues that we need to address wider social and political issues, including poverty, class and inequality. Original, authoritative and up-to-date, The Politics of Child Protection is an important book for all students, practitioners and researchers interested in safeguarding and child protection.

Six Steps to Successful Child Advocacy: Changing the World for Children offers an interdisciplinary approach to child advocacy, nurturing key skills through a proven six-step process that has been used to train child advocates and create social change around the world. The approach is applicable for micro-advocacy for one child, mezzo-advocacy for a community or group of children, and macro-advocacy at a regional, national, or international level. This practical text offers skill-building activities and includes timely topics such as how to use social media for advocacy. Case studies of advocacy campaigns highlight applied approaches to advocacy across a range of issues, including child welfare, disability, early childhood, and education. Words of wisdom from noted child advocates from the U.S. and around the world, including a foreword from Dr. Jane Goodall, illustrate key concepts. Readers are guided through the process of developing a plan and tools for a real-life child advocacy campaign.