Out of Harm's Way

Creating an Effective Child Welfare System

Richard Gelles

Identifies four fundamental issues in the child welfare system, and gives clear solutions - an approach that is likely to be controversial as there are deeply held views on both sides of each issue.
Employs unique approach to identify each problem's center and then leverage it to effect a positive change without requiring a complete systemic overhaul.
Written as a broader follow up to the author's previous book, The Book of David (Basic Books, 1996), which was cited as a deciding factor in the passage of The Adoption and Safe Families Act in 1997.

Out of Harm's Way

Creating an Effective Child Welfare System

Richard Gelles

Description

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.

- 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.

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.

Out of Harm's Way

Creating an Effective Child Welfare System

Richard Gelles

Introduction: Child Welfare is Not Brain Surgery; It's Much for Difficult

Part I: Tragedy and its Aftermath

Chapter 1: In an Ideal World

Chapter 2: In the Real World

Chapter 3: System Reform: Rounding up the Usual Suspects, Lawsuits, and Policy Changes

Part II: Centers of Gravity

Chapter 4: Who Is The Client?

Chapter 5: Portals, Gates, and Decisions

Chapter 6: Follow The Money: The Perverse Incentive of Federal Foster Care Funding

Chapter 7: Aging Out

Chapter 8: It Takes a Village...

Out of Harm's Way

Creating an Effective Child Welfare System

Richard Gelles

Author Information

Richard J. Gelles, PhD, Former Dean (2001-2014) and Joanne T. & Raymond H. Welsh Chair of Child Welfare and Family Violence, University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice; Co-Faculty Director, Field Center for Children's Policy, Practice, and Research; Founding Director, Evelyn Jacobs Ortner Center on Family Violence.

Contributors:

n/a

Out of Harm's Way

Creating an Effective Child Welfare System

Richard Gelles

Reviews and Awards

"Drawing on a depth of practical experience that few scholars bring to the table, Richard Gelles offers a vivid account of the dismal failures that have long plagued the American child welfare system and a keen analysis of how to fix it. An impassioned plea for fundamental reform based on a hard-nosed, data-driven blueprint for change, this is a must-read for everyone concerned about the protection and well-being of our most vulnerable children." - Neil Gilbert, PhD, Chernin Professor of Social Welfare and Co-Director of the Center for Child and Youth Policy, University of California, Berkeley

"A thoughtful, insightful, and incisive dissection of the continuing failure of the Child Welfare System to protect our children. Like the boy who cried 'the emperor has no clothes,' Richard Gelles has pointed out that unless children are the central focus of Child Welfare, it will continue to fail them." - Richard D. Krugman, MD, Distinguished Professor, University of Colorado School of Medicine

"Richard Gelles offers a compelling perspective on the need for child welfare reform. Characterizing much of child welfare casework as a series of consequential decisions, Gelles reframes the nature of child protection efforts with important implications for staff training. The foundation of his proposals - to put children at the center of the child welfare system - will be seen as highly controversial. But this book and the message it contains should be digested and debated if we hope to improve child welfare services." - Jill Duerr Berrick, PhD, MSW, Zellerbach Family Foundation Professor, University of California, Berkeley

"Finally, a hard-nosed, no-ideological-agenda dissection of our child protection system, by an expert with deep knowledge and sophisticated understanding of the politics and laws that shape the system. Richard Gelles reveals the weak links in the chain of responsibility for children's welfare that breaks apart far too often, and he advances new, effective, and politically realistic solutions. With this book, a new conversation begins." - James G. Dwyer, PhD, JD, Arthur B. Hanson Professor of Law, William & Mary School of Law