A course in intervention strategies in child abuse and neglect

A COURSE IN INTERVENTION STRATEGIES IN CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT Kathleen Coulborn Failer, M.S.W. and M. Leora Bowden, A.C.S.W. University of Michigan, School of Social Work, Ann Arbor, Michigan GENERAL INTRODUCTION During recent years in the United States, and also in Western European countries,considerable emphasis has been placed upon the identification and reporting of families where child abuse or neglect is suspected. As a consequence, we have had, in the United States, an astronomi- cal increase in the number of substantiated cases of child maltreatment. Unfortunately, we have not seen a comparable increase in treatment services and personnel. By and large prac- titioners in Child Protective Services have all they can do, and sometimes more, to investi- gate reports and provide emergency intervention to protect the child. Practitioners in treat- ment agencies, outside the Child Protection System, who could and should be providing ongoing treatment to families where abuse and neglect have been identified, have been slow to respond to the problem. Further they feel their skills are inadequate to meet the needs of these families. As a response to this dilemma, we have developed a course called Intervention Strategies in Child Abuse and Neglect designed to be useful both for Protective Services workers and for other mental health practitioners. We have taught it to second year masters level students in social work and have opened it up free of charge to practitioners already in the field of child abuse and neglect. Most of the students were concurrently doing field placements with families and/or children, but not necessarily with maltreating families. Therefore, we felt that our bringing in practitioners would enhance our capacity to relate directly to the prob- lems of child abuse and neglect. In addition, of course, it provided an opportunity to im- part new skills to practitioners. To further anchor the course in the real world of treat- ment, we had as guest lecturers four persons involved in practice with abusive and neglectful families. An essential characteristic of the course was that it was experiential. Because it was a "how to" course, it required that the participants try out what they were learning. Thus class sessions included role play of the strategies being taught, and course assignments were to employ the methods with clients and bring in tapes or written material demonstrating these efforts. We chose to expose our students to five different approaches. The first uses linguistics as a therapy base and demonstrates how language can be a tool for therapy. The Structure of Magic, Vol. 1 and 2, 1975 by Richard Bandler and John Grinder served as the text. Our goal was to have their approach form an overarching framework because it can be utilized regard- less of the therapist's theoretical proclivity. As for the remaining four approaches, we took what we regarded as some major hypotheses about the kinds of family malfunction which lead to child abuse and neglect, and addressed these with currently practiced therapies. An important criterion for the therapies chosen was that they be useful in short-term intervention. In the United States, delivery of services to families suspected of abuse and neglect generally mandates time-limited involvement, ranging from three months in some states to a maximum of about two years in others, While in actual practice, cases are often open longer than the Child Protection Program specifies, clearly we are in a situation where there is no support for such long-term methods as psychotherapy. Moreover, the bulk of population presently being identified in our country does not have the verbal skills nor the motivation to commit themselves to long-term psychotherapy. 227