Richard P. Barth, Mark Courtney, Jill Duerr Berrick and Vicky Albert, From Child Abuse to Permanency Planning: Child Welfare Services Pathways and Placements. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994. $41.95 hardcover; $19.95 papercover

Combs-Orme, Terri

English

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The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare Volume 22 Issue 2 June Article 11 June 1995 Review of From Child Abuse to Permanency Planning: Child Welfare Services, Pathways and Placements. Richard P. Barth, Mark Courtney, Jill Derr Berrick and Vicky Albert. Terri Combs-Orme University of Tennessee Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw  Part of the Social Work Commons Recommended Citation Combs-Orme, Terri (1995) "Review of From Child Abuse to Permanency Planning: Child Welfare Services, Pathways and Placements. Richard P. Barth, Mark Courtney, Jill Derr Berrick and Vicky Albert.," The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare: Vol. 22 : Iss. 2 , Article 11. Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw/vol22/iss2/11 This Book Review is brought to you by the Western Michigan University School of Social Work. For more information, please contact wmu-scholarworks@wmich.edu. Book Reviews 133and how to promote dialogue and transfer practice innovationsamong countries.Overall, the book is humanistic in tone. The writers areable to criticize in scholarly and meaningful ways that are notderogatory, but on the contrary, invite the reader to creativelyexplore avenues to improve the profession. They also do notmerely criticize; they articulate alternatives, often a far morearduous exercise.There appear no demonstrable weaknesses, though this au-thor feels that social work's current emphases on clinical workappears mainly due to the availability of employment in thisarea, a point which generally, the authors do not seem to fullyappreciate. Perhaps social work professional and other orga-nizations ought to find ways to incorporate holistic, develop-mental, and other strategies to enhance social justice into jobdescriptions. Despite this apparent minor weakness, the bookis an excellent contribution and must reading for those wishingto understand and improve upon critical issues in social work.Joseph WronkaSpringfield CollegeRichard P. Barth, Mark Courtney, Jill Duerr Berrick and VickyAlbert, From Child Abuse to Permanency Planning: Child Wel-fare Services Pathways and Placements. Hawthorne, NY: Aldinede Gruyter, 1994. $41.95 hardcover; $19.95 papercover.Nora S. Gustavson and Elizabeth A. Segal, Critical Issues in ChildWelfare. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994. $17.95paperback.The timing is perfect for the publication of these books, aschild abuse reports and foster care placements continue to in-crease. Both books examine some of the critical issues facingchild welfare agencies, and thus the social work profession, inthe 1990s; but they represent very different perspectives on theissues.From Child Abuse to Permanency Planning examines the "stall"of the permanency planning movement in recent years and asks134 Journal of Sociology & Social Welfaresome questions that have not been asked as well before: Howdo children go from abuse reports to wards of the state? Whenchildren do enter care, what influences how long they remain?What explains differences in foster care experiences for childrenof different racial and ethnic backgrounds?The authors use several types of large California data sets,including a large survey of foster parents and agency personnel.Their use of administrative data (such as child abuse reports) ismost interesting, particularly when they combine child welfaredata with others, such as drug arrest and birth statistics. Theauthors make a good case for the use of such data, includingthe capability of using large samples and thus examining inter-actions that can seldom be tested with small clinical samples.Indeed, seldom before has child welfare research taken advan-tage of sophisticated statistical procedures, which have rich pos-sibilities when used with such large data sets. It is particularlynoteworthy that the authors have described their methods inways that most well-trained MSW-level social workers shouldbe able to understand.Barth et al. give us much to be alarmed about: high numbersof infants placed in group placements; fewer and less timelyadoptions for minority children; and the increasing use of kin-ship care without agency support and supervision, among otherissues. It is only through this type of empirical examination ofthe problems, however, that the profession can probe deeplyenough into such issues to be begin to understand and rem-edy them.Critical Issues in Child Welfare discusses a broad range of is-sues related to children. The first section covers the "status"of America's children on a broad range of fronts, including le-gal rights, health, and education. Certainly the challenge of anysuch broad-reaching text is to avoid over- simplifying issues thatare extremely complex. In many instances, this book fails to re-flect the complexity of the issues in an effort to cover a lot ofground. For example, the discussion of adolescent pregnancyneglects to mention the role and responsibilities of males inthe issue; the relative importance of early sexual activity as op-posed to contraceptive use; and the fact that the pregnancy rateBook Reviews 135is increasing among white adolescents and decreasing amongAfrican-Americans. Although this type of survey text certainlymust sacrifice some depth in the cause of breadth, some of theomissions here may lead the naive reader to misleading or evenmistaken conclusions.Moreover, there is some repetition among sections in dis-cussions of programs such as Medicaid and AFDC; this spacecould have been used to expand the discussion. Among the sig-nificant material that is missing is a discussion of the expansionsin Medicaid and the EPSDT (Early Periodic Screening, Diagno-sis and Treatment) program that have broadened coverage tomany working poor women and children in the last few years.It is interesting that Section 2 of the book on residual ser-vices uses some of the statistics shown by Barth et al. to befaulty at worst and misleading at best. Again, although it isnot possible for a text such as this to address all the many re-lated issues, some of this material is so over-simplified as topresent a misleading picture. For example, the section on fos-ter care and adoption over-emphasizes the extent of abuse byfoster parents (based on the amount of space devoted to it) andunder-emphasizes the critical role played by foster parents incaring for foster children, as well as the failure of child welfareagencies to fully support this vital resource for children.The third section deals with some of the contemporary is-sues that threaten children, including HIV, exposure to drugs,homelessness, and violence. Although again rather simplistic,this section presents some provocative material for the under-graduate social work student.It is in the last section of the book, which purports to linkresearch and practice, that the simplistic approach of the bookis most troublesome. The discussion of assessing infants andchildren in chapter ten, for example, briefly describes the use ofseveral well-known assessment instruments. Missing is a dis-cussion of the importance of standardization in the assessmentprocess, the meaning and role of reliability and validity, andthe consequences of poor assessment techniques.The authors list areas for future research in this section, butseem unaware of much of the existing research on some of these136 Journal of Sociology & Social Welfarevery issues. Indeed, the title of this section does not seem con-sistent with what has been presented, and much of it seems tobe repetitive of previous sections.In conclusion, although this book examines some importantissues for undergraduate students, in many areas it falls short ofdemonstrating the complexities of those issues. In pursuit of thelaudable goal of covering a lot of ground, the authors have over-simplified some complicated issues. If used as an undergraduatetext, the book should be accompanied by classroom discussionto fill in these gaps.Terri Combs-OrmeUniversity of TennesseeAnn Hartman Reflection & Controversy: Essays in Social Work,Washington, DC: National Association of Social WorkersPress, 1994, $21.95, papercover.Royal museums in foreign countries hold a certain fascina-tion for me. I am especially drawn to the crown jewel collec-tions. I am attracted not by the value of the individual gemswhich is usually enormous but rather by the history that thesecollections represent: the history of the country and its kingsand queens. I mention this because I was recently impressed byanother collection but this time the gems were literary ones. Iam referring to Reflection & Controversy: Essays in Social Work byAnn Hartman.Reflection & Controversy is a collection of essays: twenty-threeeditorials written by Ann Hartman during her four-and-a-halfyear tenure as editor-in-chief of Social Work and two essays com-missioned by Hartman, one by Caitlin C. Ryan on the role ofsocial work in AIDS; the other by Liane V. Davis on violencein families. The diversity of topics makes this book truly a col-lection of intellectual gems. As Carel B. Germain notes in theforeword: "The essays cover a wide range of issues from home-lessness to political correctness, from children in a careless so-ciety to aging as a feminist issue, from health care to war andpeace, from narrative theory to revolution and backlash in ourgay and lesbian communities" (p. viii). And the list of gemsgoes on and on.

Review of \u3cem\u3eFrom Child Abuse to Permanency Planning: Child Welfare Services, Pathways and Placements.\u3c/em\u3e Richard P. Barth, Mark Courtney, Jill Derr Berrick and Vicky Albert.

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Review of \u3cem\u3eFrom Child Abuse to Permanency Planning: Child Welfare Services, Pathways and Placements.\u3c/em\u3e Richard P. Barth, Mark Courtney, Jill Derr Berrick and Vicky Albert.

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