This study examines the perceived preparation and self-efficacy among offenders in the Department of Correction and Rehabilitation who are incarcerated at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility in Montgomery County, Maryland and are participants of the reentry program. Eighty-nine (89) participants were selected for the probability sampling. The 89 survey participants were sentenced inmates who were within the last 90 to 120 days of incarceration. The respondents were males and females over the age of 18. Findings of the study revealed that there was a statistically significant relationship between perceived preparation and successful release of the offenders in the reentry program.

The problem: Risk and uncertainty are integral to child protection decisions because of the need to protect children from intrafamilial maltreatment, which is more common than abuse by strangers and occurs in the private sphere of the home. The problem of assessing intrafamilial risks to children following abuse and neglect referrals has received little attention in the UK compared with North America. Improved assessment of such risks would inform child protection plans, enabling risk reduction and improved safeguarding of children. There are currently no UK recommended valid and reliable risk assessment tools available for child protection teams, who rely on unaided professional judgement where information may be incomplete, expertise is variable and the process open to bias. Currently, UK child protection risk assessments are based on professional opinions about the range and weighting of factors associated with families where children have been abused or neglected. Study purpose: Selecting and weighting the most significant predictive factors of risk to children by using actuarial statistical methods is more likely to lead to yield accurate risk ratings. Whilst not perfect predictors, such actuarial tools categorise cases into low or high risk groups better than unaided professional judgements or consensus based assessments. Actuarial risk assessments have not previously been tested for UK child protection work, so this study selected and applied the best available North American tool. Method: The Michigan Family Risk Assessment for Abuse or Neglect (FRAAN) was selected on the basis of its published evidence base and applied to a cohort of UK Serious Case Review reports from Thirteen Counties (SCRs) to identify and rate pre-existing risks before the abusive event. Further analysis of risk factors singly and in combination was extended to compare the Thirteen Counties data with two large recently published SCR studies and one study of UK child homicide perpetrators. Findings: The FRAAN assessment scores correctly identified most cases as High or Intensive Risk. FRAAN performed adequately in identifying these very high risk cases (Sensitivity = 88%) but specificity could not be assessed using these exclusively high risk cases. Most frequent neglect risk factors were inadequate physical care of children, unsupported primary carers and their inability to prioritise the child’s needs over their own. Most frequent abuse risk factors were families not cooperating with a need for parenting improvement, prior abuse incidents, a youngest child aged <6 years and domestic violence. Comparing those cases where children died versus those where they survived, risk factor frequencies for Deceased and Survivor groups were strongly positively correlated, showing no statistical differences between the direction of scores for the two groups. Parental substance misuse was more common in the Deceased group, whilst households where a child had a disability or delinquency problems were both more common in the Survivor group. FRAAN risk scores could not effectively distinguish between fatal and non fatal outcomes. Comparisons between this Thirteen Counties study dataset and a UK study of child homicides and two major recent reviews of SCRs demonstrated no statistical differences between the ages and sexes of the children, the causes of death and parental characteristics, except for in the cases of men with convictions for violence, which were possibly under recorded in SCRs. Key risk factors in all the studies were parental mental illness, chaotic neglectful families and substance misuse. These factors appear to distinguish high risk families where there are further risks of fatal child abuse. Conclusions: The use of formal risk assessment tools is likely to help child protection teams identify cases where extra support, or substitute care, is required to protect children at high risk of further intrafamilial maltreatment. The use of such tools in low and medium risk cases was not tested in this study due to lack of access to a mix of cases. Policy, practice and further research directions are recommended to extend the testing of the FRAAN risk assessment tool.

<p> Female youth all over the world and in the United States are being trafficked for the use of labor or prostitution. Their experiences entail rapes, violence, abuse, and torture while their traffickers reap extensive monetary compensation. These adolescents often times cross the path of child social workers and go unnoticed or do not receive the appropriate level of care due to the lack of knowledge for the experiences of the youth. Therefore, this curriculum will provide awareness training on Commercial Human Trafficking (CHT) for child social workers. The thesis curriculum will offer an introduction to CHT, the trafficking underground system, the abuse and effects experienced by the youth, and the best practices to assist this population. In addition, a cultural competency is included.</p>

This is a study of common human needs as presented by 97 recipients of War Veterans’ Allowance^1 who during 1949 first applied to the Montreal District Office of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs^2 for supplementation from the Assistance Fund. The study is concerned with the way in which these needs have been determined, how the Assistance Fund was set up and how it bas been administered to meet them. Considerable change in public welfare principles, in Canada, United States, Great Britain and other western democracies, bas taken place during the last two decades. This transition has been away from the palliative type of public welfare which developed after the passing of the Elizabethan Poor Law and toward the ameliorative type of public welfare programmes which arose in these countries out of the 1930 depression. In Canada and the United States casework and social services have been incorporated in some public assistance programmes. In European countries the programmes were established earlier than in Canada and have created protection in many areas through social insurance. The trend there has been toward providing more social security through material assistance such as adequate housing, through public housing projects, and government sponsored medical facilities. During the depression era society could no longer refuse to recognize that some individuals were in necessitous circumstances through no fault of their own but through flaws in our economic systems [...]

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Research has indicated that social workers are more politically active than the general public (Wolk, 1981; Parker and Sherraden, 1991), but their effectiveness has been questioned (Mathews, 1982). There are differences among social workers, but explanations of differences between "very active" and "inactive" have relied primarily on practice setting or method. However, research in political science has shown that income, education, involvement in associations, and perceived political efficacy, are significant predictors of who does not participate (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, 1995). Five hundred certified social workers were surveyed regarding how often they engaged in political activities (e.g., voting and campaigning) between 1995 and 1997; 242 surveys were returned. Whereas 92 percent of respondents voted in 1996, fewer than 1 in 5 met with government officials or worked in a political campaign; only 3 percent testified before a legislative body. Information on each respondent's performance of specific political tasks was used to create a Political Participation Score (PPS). Scores range from 0 through 11, with higher scores indicating greater political activity. Six percent of respondents were "inactive" (3 or less), 88 percent were "active" ( 4 through 7), and 6 percent were "very active" (9 or more). The PPS was the dependent variable in ordinary least squares regression analysis, used to estimate the effect of political socialization, resources, perceived political efficacy, and involvement with professional associations on certified social workers' political activity. The significant predictors (p≤.05) were political efficacy (b=.237), recruitment to action by a social work association (b=2.34), interest in public affairs (b=.210) and activity in NASW (b=.165). Income and education were not significant predictors of the respondents' participation. The significant role of political efficacy suggests that strategies to increase social workers' perceived efficacy could increase their political activity. Greater performance of high-cost activities (e.g., testifying or meeting with government officials) could increase social workers' input into the development of social policy. Social learning theory (Bandura, 1978) is utilized to identify strategies for use by social work educators and professional associations to increase social workers' perceived efficacy and, therefore, the performance of higher-cost political acts.