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Withholding of Services
When foster children are moved around among various placements, adequate service necessities can hardly be provided. One example is that abused and neglected children often need therapeutic and mental health services to deal with the pain in their lives. Unfortunately, and again due to instability in placement, services such as psychotherapy are not always provided (Schroeder, 1993, p. 15). Even as psychotherapy is highly effective, and has been noted to have "…spectacular results…" children in care do not get that service until after a long-term placement is found (Schroeder, 1993, p.16). Often times abused children "may need immediate help to cope with the trauma and the resulting disruption of…[the]…family" (Shulman, 1999, p. 218).
Bureaucracy
At a much broader level, problems can be found in child welfare by looking at the larger system as a whole. Sociologists have identified limiting factors in large scale organizations whereby the colossal structures needed to care for so many youth actually serves to limit a worker's ability to perform at peak levels, and to come up with new ideas for improving the quality of care. In an effort then to give explanation to some of the damning extremes in various patterns within the child welfare system, a consideration should be made via the principles of bureaucratization. As the system of child welfare expands and evolves it becomes increasingly important to develop guidelines and structures that ensure efficiency. Bureaucracy is vital in the effort to facilitate the practical provision of services and promote consistency in day-to-day operations. Efficiency and consistency are plausible, but, as sociologists Richard Schaefer and Robert Lamm (1998) make clear, bureaucratization does not occur without consequence; it can lead to poor training, narrow perspectives, concealment of mistakes, stifling of initiative and can discourage ambitions for improvement (p. 161). David Devine, Assistant Director of the Social Work Training Council in London, himself once a youth housed within the European child welfare system, indicates the problems of systemic practice: "we are focusing on protocols of various kinds…any deviations from those open up workers to potential sanctions…Policies and procedures are necessary but they have to be helpful and enabling, not constrictive, punitive and unnecessarily directive, and should not be created without the involvement of those who have to carry them out" (Schroeder, 1993, p. 15).
Unclear Terminology
The ambiguity of the definition of what constitutes abuse should not be overlooked in the review of what is and is not successful in relationship to the system of child welfare. One state may call a behavior of a parent abuse, whereas another state may not. Andrew Cherlin (1999) in his text, Public and Private Families, attributes many child protection inconsistencies to the fact that " there is no single definition of exactly what constitutes child abuse [and]…the greatest [italics added] consensus among child welfare professionals is serious physical harm…with intent to injure" (p. 346).
Changing Educational Requirements
More complex is the fact that as many as fully fifty percent of the professionals in the field of child welfare are under or uneducated (DiNitto & McNeece, 1997, p. 140). Comparatively, front-line child welfare workers were once required, under the regulations of the Children's Bureau, to have graduate degrees; and in fact, the Children's Bureau was created in 1912 to, among other things, monitor the educational requirements of those who worked with children (Schorr, 2000). In time, the educational requirements of child welfare workers decreased from graduate level to bachelors level for some workers and many were no longer required to have a degree at all.
In addition to the problem of lack of education, there exists the possibility that agencies "are still using intervention techniques…established in the sixties and seventies rather than from any new development. And those services do not seem to have changed much in their approach" (Gilmore, 1993, p. 23).
Summary
The literature review concerning existing service delivery structures highlights both case-by-case problems and systemic problems; from the micro and macro levels the child welfare system is not only busting at the seams, but it is unable to provide adequate and effective treatment for today's distressed youth. Contemporary programs such as shared family care and family drug courts are still too new to establish large-scale success or failure rates. In order for treatment efforts to be successful it is likely that they will need to be evenly applied to both the abused children and their parents. Furthermore, supplementary policy changes will be necessary and current treatment modalities will need to be continually adjusted. Some of the changes will seem radical in nature, in particular to a system that customarily tells itself it is a successful direct care provider.
What are the consequences of putting a child into "a strange house with strange people, beds, smells foods, schools, rules, neighbors" (Forsythe, 1992, p. 38)? Moving an abused child from home, to shelter, to temporary placement, to foster home, to yet another foster home and maybe on to adoption certainly costs the child a great deal (Blome, 1997, p. 51). Imagine instead what it might look like to tell an abusive father that it is he who will need to go get professional help for his problems and that his sons and daughters will remain in the family home where they will be supervised by family members or social workers. It seems that it would be better to keep abused children in the schools they are accustomed to and in the homes that that they know. Why are children leaving abusive homes, while their parents often remain? It really is not the children who should be leaving, but rather it should be the abusive parents who are leaving. And parents will be gone for as long as it takes for them to get better, at which time they can come home to take on their parental obligations, supervised at first, and then gradually the family can move toward independence.
Literature Review Conclusion
Agencies often measure success by whether or not a youth completes "treatment." While much speculation exists about the success/failure rates of foster care youth, and perhaps for all children within the child welfare system, actual outcomes are unsupported through valid research practices. In fact, the research that does exist, even the extensive sort that is evident in the Reddy and Bearup studies, hardly provides favorable results concerning the children who live within the system and the children who grow up to leave the system.
The ability of a system child to successfully adapt to society when he/she reaches adulthood must be a factor in determining whether or not treatment strategies are successful. Stability in placement, schooling, and safety, are key components of what normally defines success in placements. It is not enough however to provide safety from an abusive environment, if that safety cannot comparatively prepare the child for the normative expectations of adulthood.
In review of the current child welfare system, much of it appears to be in dire need of adjustment. Yes, there are success stories, hopefully as many as there are horror stories, but the "question is, 'is there not another way to look at the issue?' We see that question as one that we ourselves must tackle anew, rather than something that has to be done the way it has always been done…The existence of children, the importance of health…whatever we turn to demands a shifting of our perceptions" (Duhl, 1990, p. 57).
Methods
Supporting Rationale
Child welfare, in and of itself, has many flaws. The child welfare system should be converted into a more appropriately named, and conceptually different adult welfare system. The call for transformation is not new (as suggested by Pelton, 1992) nor has the call for change subsided in recent years (see Whittaker & Maluccio, 2002 and also see Schorr, 2000). That is not to suggest that children will no longer need to be removed from homes, because they will. As long as parents are unable, or unwilling to change abusive patterns, foster care will be a vital safety mechanism for children.
Building upon the notion that children are being hurt, not only by abusive parents, but also within the structures of the present day child welfare system, lends itself to the idea that an adult welfare system may in fact better serve everyone who is in need of support. The key words are: to better serve everyone.
The goal of a newly proposed adult welfare system is to keep the most effective aspects of today's child welfare system (such as the permanency found in adoptions), and to modify the purposes of foster care so that it is used as a means to get children adopted rather than being used merely for temporary placements. As such, and as one phase of adult welfare, foster adoption (see Appendix G, Phase V) becomes a blend of the benefits found in adoptions and reorganizes foster care. In adult welfare foster adoption is used in the most extreme cases when parents fail to rehabilitate and children must be permanently removed from their homes.
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