Richard Gelles – författare

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.

Child Abuse and Neglect is the third volume sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. The goals of these volumes include the development of a biosocial perspective and its application to the interface between biological and social phenomena in order to advance the understanding of human behavior.Child Abuse and Neglect applies the biosocial perspective to child maltreatment and maladaptation in parent-child relations. The biosocial perspective is particularly appropriate for investigating parent behavior since the family is the universal social institution in which children are born and reared, in which cultural traditions and values are transmitted, and in which individuals fulfill their biological potential for reproduction, growth, and development. The volume examines biological substrates and social and environmental contexts as determinants of parent behavior. By identifying areas in which contemporary human parent behaviors conform with and depart from evolutionary and historical patterns and assessing the overall costs and benefits, it permits their objective assessment in terms of modern circumstances. In analyzing evolutionary and historical variations in parent behavior and assessing their costs and benefits, the book makes possible an objective assessment of contemporary variations. Its analysis of the occurrence of child abuse in past history and in other cultures and species advances our ability to predict the probability of child abuse and neglect in various social and ecological contexts.

Child Abuse and Neglect is the third volume sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. The goals of these volumes include the development of a biosocial perspective and its application to the interface between biological and social phenomena in order to advance the understanding of human behavior.Child Abuse and Neglect applies the biosocial perspective to child maltreatment and maladaptation in parent-child relations. The biosocial perspective is particularly appropriate for investigating parent behavior since the family is the universal social institution in which children are born and reared, in which cultural traditions and values are transmitted, and in which individuals fulfill their biological potential for reproduction, growth, and development. The volume examines biological substrates and social and environmental contexts as determinants of parent behavior. By identifying areas in which contemporary human parent behaviors conform with and depart from evolutionary and historical patterns and assessing the overall costs and benefits, it permits their objective assessment in terms of modern circumstances. In analyzing evolutionary and historical variations in parent behavior and assessing their costs and benefits, the book makes possible an objective assessment of contemporary variations. Its analysis of the occurrence of child abuse in past history and in other cultures and species advances our ability to predict the probability of child abuse and neglect in various social and ecological contexts.