Interpersonal Violence Against Children and Youth uses empirical research to provide an overview of the risk factors, different types of violence against children and youth, their victimizations (online and offline), as well as prevention practices and strategies. Pulling together researchers, practitioners, and educators from around the world, this book addresses the various practices and efforts different countries use to protect children and prevent interpersonal violence. These forms of violence include parental or caregiver initiated, actions of peers, intimate partner-related, or that among strangers and are not limited to maltreatment, bullying, emotional strife, sexual assault, or homicidal violence. This book would be of interest to those studying criminology, criminal justice, sociology, social work, law, forensic pathology and others.

In the light of the complex demographic shifts associated with late modernity and the impetus of neo-liberal politics, childhood continues all the more to operate as a repository for the articulation of diverse social and cultural anxieties. Since the Thatcher years, juvenile delinquency, child poverty, and protection have been persistent issues in public discourse. Simultaneously, childhood has advanced as a popular subject in the arts, as the wealth of current films and novels in this field indicates. Focusing on the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, this collection assembles contributions concerned with current political, social, and cultural dimensions of childhood in the United Kingdom. The individual chapters, written by internationally renowned experts from the social sciences and the humanities, address a broad spectrum of contemporary childhood issues, including debates on child protection, school dress codes, the media, the representation and construction of children in audiovisual media, and literary awards for children's fiction. Appealing to a wide scholarly audience by joining perspectives from various disciplines, including art history, education, law, film and TV studies, sociology, and literary studies, this volume endorses a transdisciplinary and meta-theoretical approach to the study of childhood. It seeks to both illustrate and dismantle the various ways in which childhood has been implicitly and explicitly conceived in different disciplines in the wake of the constructivist paradigm shift in childhood studies.

Drawing on interviews and focus groups with young mothers and fathers, their parents and other relatives, this book provides a rich exploration of the experience of being a teenage parent now, and for earlier generations, closely examining teenage pregnancy and parenting in families where two or more generations have been teenage mothers. Brown also explores the cultural and social contexts of teenage parenting by including the views of people who have many years' experience of working with young parents in health, social and welfare settings. The book challenges policy contexts which focus on negative aspects of teenage parenting, and shows that for many young people, parenting can be a positive experience. It will appeal to academics, policymakers and professionals with an interest in teenage pregnancy and parenting.

Clinical psychologist Daniel J. Flannery reveals the impact of violence and victimization in the lives of children and adolescents from a developmental perspective. He explores how young people experience violence in their everyday lives and how this impacts their mental health and ability to cope with challenges and crises. His case studies show the significance of these mental health issues for the individual, family, neighborhood, and community. He offers lists of professional resources, including web sites and readings related to violence and mental health. This book will be a valuable resource for parents, teachers, social workers, childcare workers, public health officials, police officers and others who interact every day with young people, to help them understand more about child development and how experiences with violence can affect development and daily life.

This book presents the results of researches conducted with children and youth at risk for over 20 years in Brazil. It addresses a series of topics related to children and youth living in poverty or in situations of social vulnerability, such as family, sexual and dating violence; adolescent mothers and mothers who put their children for adoption; children and youth living in foster and institutional care; and adolescents involved in drug trafficking or incarcerated in juvenile detention centers. Building upon the Bioecological Theory of Human Development, this volume emphasizes the innovative knowledge about psychosocial development of vulnerable children and youth produced in Brazil and aims to present theoretical and methodological approaches developed especially for the countries of the Global South, in an attempt to overcome the scientific divide between the North and South. Northern research agenda defines as global the theories, methodologies, and application of knowledge on social policies and interventions. However, the contexts, histories, and cultural processes are essential for producing and applying research knowledge according to specific regional characteristics, organizations, and conditions. Human development is related to contextual features and cannot be directly imported from one place to another. Departing from these original theoretical and methodological approaches, the book also presents the results of evidence-based interventions, showing its effectiveness in specific contexts. All of this makes Vulnerable Children and Youth in Brazil - Innovative Approaches from the Psychology of Social Development a valuable tool for psychologists, educators, social scientists and public health professionals studying or working with children and youth at risk in different parts of the world, contributing to the understanding of human development in cultural context.

Drawing together international research from the fields of geography, alcohol studies, sociology, psychology and childhood studies, Jayne and Valentine explore children's understandings and experiences of alcohol consumption and the role of alcohol in family life. Chapters address both extra-familialnorms about parenting and drinking cultures which are generated in wider society (through law/regulation, media/advertising and social networks etc.) and intra-familialnorms including the modelling behaviour of family members attitudes to alcohol, drinking habits and practices, rules and guidance, and initiating children to drinking. Based on empirical research undertaken in the UK, and drawing on studies from around the world, Childhood, Family, Alcohol advances theoretical debates and offers insights relevant to policy and practice by: * adopting a cross-generational perspective on drinking cultures * exploring pre-teen children's understandings of alcohol * focusing on the significance of the spaces of everyday family life * considering adult alcohol consumption, drinking practices and drunken performativities * reflecting on social/individualized consumption, social reproduction, adult-children interaction and materialities * showing the importance of non-(and more-than) representational understanding of the complexities of childhood, family life and alcohol consumption.

The impact of sibling relationships on how people develop has been dramatically under-emphasised in the literature on child development. Drawing together new and established research, this accessible text shows that these relationships are crucial to professionals' under-standing of the children and the families they work with. Sibling Relationships offers a theoretically grounded and culturally sensitive account of the many complexities of sibling relationships, emphasising the significance of these for practice and the ways in which the effectiveness of work with children and families can be enhanced by promoting positive connections between brothers and sisters. It examines a range of adverse circumstances for children and families - substance abuse, domestic violence, loss, disability and mental illness - considering how sibling relationships are affected by these circumstances, and how relationships with siblings might help to promote resilience in children. Practice notes provide examples of how sibling relationships can become an important focus in the work of professionals. This is the first book to link knowledge of sibling relationships to the practice of working with families. It will be important reading for anyone interested in children and families, including students and professionals in the areas of social work, counselling, applied social studies and childhood studies.

This collection of articles, first published in 1991, attempts to describe life in the suburbs from diverse vantage points, to evoke a feeling of what life is like for some of the children and their families living in these communities and to demonstrate the practice and value of group work within this context. This title will be of interest to students of social work, sociology and urban studies.

Researchers, practitioners, journalists and politicians increasingly recognise that foster care throughout the world is in a state of crisis. There are more and more children needing care and, as residential alternatives dry up, more of these children are being assigned to foster families. This book reports the major findings of a two-year longitudinal study of 235 such children who entered the foster care system in Southern Australia between 1998 and 1999. As well as examining the changing policy context of children's services, the book documents the psychosocial outcomes for these children, their feedback on their experiences of care, and the views of their social workers and carers. In the process, the book examines some cherished beliefs about foster care policy and sheds new light on them. The research reveals that while most children do quite well in foster care up to the two-year point, there is a worrying amount of placement instability at a time when the concentration of emotionally troubled children in care is increasing throughout the western world. Although, surprisingly, placement instability does not appear to produce psychosocial impairment for a period of up to eight months in care, it has an extreme effect on children who are moved from placement to placement because no carer will tolerate their behaviour. These children are consigned to a life of distribution and emotional upheaval because of the lack of alternative forms of care. Another unexpected finding of the research is that increasing the rate of parental contact achieves little or nothing in relation to the likelihood of family reunification. As child welfare increasingly enters a world of research-based practice, Children in Foster Care provides some much needed hard evidence of how foster care policy and practice can be improved.

A comprehensive guide to empirically supported approaches for child protection cases The Wiley Handbook of What Works in Child Maltreatment offers clinicians, psychologists, psychiatrists and other professionals an evidence-based approach to best professional practice when working in the area of child protection proceedings and the provision of assessment and intervention services in order to maximize the well-being of young people. It brings together a wealth of knowledge from expert researchers and practitioners, who provide a comprehensive overview of contemporary work informing theory, assessment, service provision, rehabilitation and therapeutic interventions for children and families undergoing care proceedings. Coverage includes theoretical perspectives, insights on the prevalence and effects of child neglect and abuse, assessment, children s services, and interventions with children, victims and families.

This topical book, now available in paperback, comprehensively draws together diverse perspectives from key leaders in the field to address critical issues for children in relation to their rights, welfare and protection at a critical time in Ireland. The broad array of chapters addresses the changing and complex landscape of policy, practice and law. It discusses the politics of children's rights, the impact of child abuse within the Catholic Church, diverse approaches to service delivery and professional practice, the media and representations of child protection practice and the relationship between research evidence and practice. It offers a critique of governance in children's services and identifies key barriers to fundamental progress in the area of children's rights and the protection of children. This original book fills a gap in publications in this area in Ireland. It is vital reading for academics, practitioners, managers, students and policy-makers, as well as being accessible to individuals with a broad interest in child welfare and protection. -- .

This fascinating book provides a detailed account of the history of maternity and child welfare in Dublin between 1922 and 1960. In so doing it places maternity and child welfare in the context of twentieth-century Irish history, offering one of the only accounts of how women and children were viewed, treated and used by key lobby groups in Irish society and by the Irish state. Mother and Child is of critical importance to understanding the political and social history of modern Ireland as it examines the responses of the State, the church, voluntary groups and women to the emergence of the welfare State in Ireland. As such it makes a welcome contribution to Irish political, social, medical and gender history.

The very notions of childhood and youth are intimately connected to contemporary norms, practices and spaces of care, caring and care-giving. The provision of care is widely figured as both the primary responsibility of parents, carers and practitioners who work with children and young people, and the primary factor in shaping children and young people's development, education, socialisation, wellbeing and contentment. However, children and young people themselves are rarely figured as key actors in the provision of care. An overwhelming presumption that children and young people are to be cared for has effectively marginalised their agency and responsibilities as carers, or in relation to practices and spaces of care. Bringing together a significant array of multidisciplinary work on children, young people and families, this collection draws together new research on the diverse lives and experiences of children and young people as carers, as cared for, and in relation to spaces and institutions of care. It is the first collection specifically devoted to the subject of care in relation to childhood and youth. As such, the book will be a key resource for academics, practitioners and students seeking leading-edge empirical and conceptual material on this topic.

The true measure of any society is how it treats its children, who are in turn that society's future. Making use of data from the longitudinal Chinese Family Panel Studies survey, the authors of this timely study provide a multi-faceted description and analysis of China's younger generations. They assess the economic, physical, and social-emotional well-being as well as the cognitive performance and educational attainment of China's children and youth. They pay special attention to the significance of family and community contexts, including the impact of parental absence on millions of left-behind children. Throughout the volume, the authors delineate various forms of disparities, especially the structural inequalities maintained by the Chinese Party-state and the vulnerabilities of children and youth in fragile families and communities. They also analyze the social attitudes and values of Chinese youth. Having grown up in a period of sustained prosperity and greater individual choice, the younger Chinese cohorts are more independent in spirit, more open-minded socially, and significantly less deferential to authority than older cohorts. There is growing recognition in China of the importance of investing in children's future and of helping the less advantaged. Substantial improvements in child and youth well-being have been achieved in a time of growing economic prosperity. Strong political commitment is needed to sustain existing efforts and to overcome the many obstacles that remain. This book will be of considerable interest to researchers of Chinese society and development.

This volume focuses on very young children's (aged 0-8) rights in a digital world. It gathers current research from around the globe that focuses on young children's rights as agental citizens to the provision of and participation in digital devices and content-as well as their right to protection from harm. The UN Digital Rights Framework of 2014 addresses children's needs, agency and vulnerability to harm in today's digital world and implies roles and responsibilities for a variety of social actors including the state, families, schools, commercial entities, researchers and children themselves. This volume presents a broad range of research, including chapters on parental supervision and control, the changing forms of play, early childhood education, media and cultural studies, law, design, health, special-needs education, and engineering. Implicit within this book is the acknowledgement that children of various ages, abilities, socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds should have equal access to, and positive / non-harmful experiences with, new digital technologies and content-as well as adult support and expertise that enhances these experiences. This passionate book celebrates the diversity of young children's activities in the digital world. It interrogates these through four intersecting lenses: their rights, play experiences, contextualised design, and best practice. Balancing children's eager engagement with digital content alongside adult responsibilities for education, privacy and protection, the volume provides a fitting showcase for work of global relevance. Professor Lelia Green Professor of Communications Edith Cowan University Perth, Western Australia This compelling text provides a critical resource to inform our understanding of the intersection of the digital world and children's rights. Ilene R. Berson, Ph.D. Professor of Early Childhood Education Affiliate Faculty, Learning Design & Technology Area Coordinator, Early Childhood Coordinator, Early Childhood Ph.D. Program University of South Florida College of Education A truly international collection that investigates young children's engagement with digital technologies. Identifying issues of public interest around digital practices, this highly readable book is a valuable resource for researchers, parents and policy makers. Professor Susan Danby Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child and, Faculty of Education School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education QUT Kelvin Grove, Queensland

In India, in the second half of the twentieth century, there was a vastly increased concern for the welfare of children. Various developmental programs were undertaken for the improvement of children's status, especially in rural families. This book, first published in 1979, examines these programs and considers the enormous challenge of child care under the wide variety of conditions in this vast country.

This book conceptualizes the 'lived spaces' of infant and toddler early education and care settings by bringing together international authors researching within diverse theoretical frameworks. It highlights diverse ways of understanding the experiences of very young children by exposing the ways that the authors are grappling with the unknown. The work explores broadly the construct and meanings of 'lived spaces' as relational spaces, interactional spaces, transitional spaces, curriculum spaces or pedagogical spaces operating within the social, physical and temporal environment of infant-toddler education settings. The book invites interchange between and among diverse theories and approaches and through this build new understanding of infants' and toddlers' experiences and interactions in early education and care settings. It also considers the implications of this work for policy and practice in infant and toddler education and care.

This book explores how humanitarian interventions for children in difficult circumstances engage in affective commodification of disadvantaged childhoods. The chapters consider how transnational charitable industries are created and mobilized around childhood need-highlighting children in situations of war and poverty, and with indeterminate access to health and education-to redirect global resource flows and sentiments in order to address concerns of child suffering. The authors discuss examples from around the world to show how, as much as these processes can help achieve the goals of aid organizations, such practices can also perpetuate the conditions that organizations seek to alleviate and thereby endanger the very children they intend to help.

Due to the demand for flexible working hours and employees who are available around the clock, the time patterns of childcare and schooling have increasingly become a political issue. Comparing the development of different "time policies" of half-day and all-day provisions in a variety of Eastern and Western European countries since the end of World War II, this innovative volume brings together internationally known experts from the fields of comparative education, history, and the social and political sciences, and makes a significant contribution to this new interdisciplinary field of comparative study.

The 20th century, declared at its start to be the Century of the ChildA by Swedish author Ellen Key, saw an unprecedented expansion of state activity in and expert knowledge on child-rearing on both sides of the Atlantic. Children were seen as a crucial national resource whose care could not be left to families alone. However, the exact scope and degree of state intervention and expert influence as well as the rights and roles of mothers and fathers remained subjects of heated debates throughout the century. While there is a growing scholarly interest in the history of childhood, research in the field remains focused on national narratives. This unique volume compares the impact of state intervention and expert influence on theories and practices of raising children in the U.S. and German Central Europe. In particular, the contributors focus on institutions such as kindergartens and schools where the private and the public spheres intersected, on notions of raceA and ethnicity, A normalityA and deviance, A and on the impact of wars and changes in political regime

There have long been doubts within social work about the viability of reconciling participatory practice with the statutory power that comes hand-in-hand with child protection work. This book explores this issue by proposing an original theory of children's participation within statutory child protection interventions. It prioritises children's voices through presentation of a wide collection of children's experiences of the child protection system including three unique in-depth accounts. Identifying the different ways in which children engage with professionals in the child protection process, Duncan explores why they act in the ways that they do. The book reveals why some children are sceptical participants or become disaffected with the system whilst others participate more positively within it. Participation in Child Protection will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including social work, sociology, psychology, counselling, law and education, as well as child protection professionals such as social workers, child protection police officers, health visitors and teachers.

After years of research and reflection on the work of the interdisciplinary family justice system Mervyn Murch offers a fresh approach to supporting the thousands of children every year who experience a complex form of bereavement following parental separation and divorce. This stressful family change, combined with the loss of support due to austerity cuts, can damage their education, well-being, mental health and long-term life chances. Murch argues for early preventative intervention which responds to children's worries when they first present them, without waiting until things have gone badly wrong. His radical proposals for reform involve a much more coordinated and joined up approach by schools, the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. This book encourages practitioners and academics to look outside their professional silos and to see the world through the eyes of children in crisis to enable services to offer direct support in a manner and at a time when it is most needed.

In the light of the complex demographic shifts associated with late modernity and the impetus of neo-liberal politics, childhood continues all the more to operate as a repository for the articulation of diverse social and cultural anxieties. Since the Thatcher years, juvenile delinquency, child poverty, and protection have been persistent issues in public discourse. Simultaneously, childhood has advanced as a popular subject in the arts, as the wealth of current films and novels in this field indicates. Focusing on the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, this collection assembles contributions concerned with current political, social, and cultural dimensions of childhood in the United Kingdom. The individual chapters, written by internationally renowned experts from the social sciences and the humanities, address a broad spectrum of contemporary childhood issues, including debates on child protection, school dress codes, the media, the representation and construction of children in audiovisual media, and literary awards for children's fiction. Appealing to a wide scholarly audience by joining perspectives from various disciplines, including art history, education, law, film and TV studies, sociology, and literary studies, this volume endorses a transdisciplinary and meta-theoretical approach to the study of childhood. It seeks to both illustrate and dismantle the various ways in which childhood has been implicitly and explicitly conceived in different disciplines in the wake of the constructivist paradigm shift in childhood studies.

Child sexual abuse is a major public policy challenge. Many child protection measures were beginning to reduce its occurrence. However, that progress was impeded by online grooming, the downloading of indecent images of children and even their abuse online in real time. This now places major demands on national and international policing. The book brings together groundbreaking case studies from a wide range of settings. As well as family members and those near the home, offenders can also be found in religious, sporting and childcare settings. This extensive picture is drawn deliberately in order to highlight a split in the academic analysis of child sexual abuse. The mainstream or orthodox view, defended by the author, is that child sexual abuse is an under-reported crime. However, a minority view, presented but criticised, is that it is a moral panic created by public hysteria, child protection experts and campaigning politicians. By the end of the book, this division of academic opinion and its implications for public policy are explored in detail. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in preventing child sexual abuse and the dilemmas of responding to both victims and perpetrators. It will be of particular use to practitioners in social work, the police and in the mental health professions.

In the thirty-five years since China instituted its One-Child Policy, 120,000 children mostly girls have left China through international adoption, including 85,000 to the United States. It's generally assumed that this diaspora is the result of China's approach to population control, but there is also the underlying belief that the majority of adoptees are daughters because the One-Child Policy often collides with the traditional preference for a son. While there is some truth to this, it does not tell the full story a story with deep personal resonance to Kay Ann Johnson, a China scholar and mother to an adopted Chinese daughter. Johnson spent years talking with the Chinese parents driven to relinquish their daughters during the brutal birth-planning campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s, and, with China's Hidden Children, she paints a startlingly different picture. The decision to give up a daughter, she shows, is not a facile one, but one almost always fraught with grief and dictated by fear. Were it not for the constant threat of punishment for breaching the country's stringent birth-planning policies, most Chinese parents would have raised their daughters despite the cultural preference for sons. With clear understanding and compassion for the families, Johnson describes their desperate efforts to conceal the birth of second or third daughters from the authorities. As the Chinese government cracked down on those caught concealing an out-of-plan child, strategies for surrendering children changed from arranging adoptions or sending them to live with rural family to secret placement at carefully chosen doorsteps and, finally, abandonment in public places. In the twenty-first century, China's so-called abandoned children have increasingly become "stolen" children, as declining fertility rates have left the dwindling number of children available for adoption more vulnerable to child trafficking. In addition, government seizures of locally but illegally adopted children and children hidden within their birth families mean that even legal adopters have unknowingly adopted children taken from parents and sent to orphanages. The image of the "unwanted daughter" remains commonplace in Western conceptions of China. With China's Hidden Children, Johnson reveals the complex web of love, secrecy, and pain woven in the coerced decision to give one's child up for adoption and the profound negative impact China's birth-planning campaigns have on Chinese families.