Social Work's Important Work: Keeping Families Safe

Although public safety may long have been a national priority, it is now front-page news. Federal agencies, including a new Cabinet-level office, work to monitor and heighten public awareness of a host of risks. Among the most visible and pressing risks today are terrorism, including biological, workplace injury, and medical error. These risks were scarcely on our radar screens a decade ago. Unfortunately, the "old" risks to our society persist as new ones emerge. Articles in this issue highlight the kinds of risks that social work has historically worked to understand and reduce: threats to and within families. Although new risks grab our headlines, families continue to be threatened by economic hardship, interpersonal violence, and injury to children so severe as to result in out-of-home placement. Social workers have long worked to document the prevalence of such threats, understand their etiology, shape programs to prevent them, and intervene to overcome them. That work continues, as reflected in this issue of our journal. Nearly half a million cases of elder abuse are reported each year (National Center on Elder Abuse, n.d.). Yet, we know very little about it. The little that is known comes from small studies or anecdotal information (National Center on Elder Abuse). Thus, research on the correlates and causes of elder abuse are badly needed. Litwin and Zoabi sought to understand the rise of elder abuse among a rarely researched population: elderly Arab Israelis. More than half of the world's older people live in Asia, and Europe has the next largest share, with 24 percent (Kinsella & Velkoff, 2001). Arab Israelis are among the world's population groups undergoing rapid social change, shifting from traditional agrarian to modern urban societies. While confirming the view that abuse is a complex phenomenon, the findings advance our knowledge of risk factors. Findings highlighted the risk of abuse among low-income families and elderly people with greater functional dependency. Yet, the impact of modernization was marked, accounting for twice as much variance in abuse as the sociodemographic and dependency variables. This finding highlights the vulnerability of elderly individuals in varied ethnic groups and countries experiencing rapid social change. On the positive front, the findings also revealed some protective factors: social support, especially social support from a diverse network of family and friends. Like dependent elderly people, children are often at great risk of violence in their homes. Federal policies, such as the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (P.L. 105-89), have been implemented to help move children into permanent homes as quickly as possible. Social work agencies and researchers have worked to pioneer new treatment models to prevent and to remedy out-of-home placement. Lewandowski and Pierce offer new evidence about the effectiveness of one such model, Missouri's Family-Centered Out of Home Care (FCOHC), a program that incorporates many features of family preservation services. Researchers assessed the effectiveness of FCOHC in reunifying children with their families by comparing differential exit rates of children whose families received family-centered services with children whose families received routine child welfare services. Findings indicated that the pilot FCOHC program differed from routine care in significant ways, including more contact with children and parents, worker identification of family strengths, and frequency of written assessments. Most important, the FCOHC pilot programs were more successful than comparison programs in reunifying children with longer-term placements--those whose chances of reunification were lowest. This study's favorable findings about the effectiveness of family-focused reunification treatment are consistent with those of Kirk and Griffith (2004), who reported in the March 2004 issue of Social Work Research that family preservation services outperformed traditional child welfare services in reducing or delaying out-of-home placement of the highest risk children. …