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This study examines the effectiveness of a legal advocacy program of the Gwinnett County Domestic Violence program. The legal advocacy program assists the victims to resolve their legal issues. This evaluation focuses on Temporary Protective Orders in the form of Child Custody, Restraining Orders and Possession of Property. The program setting is Gwinnett County, a residential facility that houses 32 women and their children. The sample consists of women who entered the shelter between July 2000 and July 2001. A secondary data analysis was used to collect data, as well as interviews with the legal advocate and the shelter director. Data was collected in the winter and spring of 2002 at the agency where it is maintained manually in the form of written files and records. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data, along with graphs and a Program Logic Model for a fine interpretation of results. The findings of this study revealed that most cases were resolved eventually. However, some cases were not resolved indicating the existence of barriers between systems.

The objective of this study was to examine what factors affect the level of commitment in intimate interpersonal relationships. To attain this objective, a survey was administered to 40 subjects: 23 were administered to parents or guardians who attended a Parents Teachers Association meeting at a high school in College Park, Georgia and 17 were administered to members of a community in College Park, Georgia. This study revealed that subjects who were in the regular dating category were not committed to their partners. However, subjects who were in the categories of married, engaged/or planning marriage and exclusive dating were committed to their partners. This study was an attempt to provide a clearer understanding of the maintenance of intimate interpersonal heterosexual relationships.

The overall objective of this study was to provide additional information as to the nature of the problem of eating disorders among the lesbian population, and to identify the role in which sexual abuse plays in the development of an eating disorder. To attain this objective, the following areas on eating disorders and sexual abuse were addressed by the researcher: a) eating disorders among women, b) DSM-IV criteria for diagnosis of an eating disorder, c) the relationship between sexual abuse and eating disorders, and d) eating disorders and the lesbian population. A self-administered questionnaire, consisting of 20 questions from the Eating Disorder Inventory 11 and 19 questions regarding sexual abuse from three different scales, was given to women who were self-identified as lesbians, and who attended one of several support groups in the Atlanta Metropolitan area. This study was an attempt to examine the relationship between eating disorders and sexual abuse, and to provide additional information to the social work profession as to the magnitude of the problem among the lesbian population. The results of the study showed a statistically significant correlation between eating disorders and sexual abuse among lesbians, using Pearson’s r with significance of p<.05.

This study explored the impact of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) on human service delivery. This study examines the effectiveness of TVPA, established in 2000 to halt human trafficking through law enforcement, prevention, and aid to victims. Through a review of the literature, this study examines how globalization has influenced human trafficking. The methodology for the study included interviews with social providers who provide services to victims of human trafficking living in the metropolitan area. Demographic and service data are obtained from the 2000 Trafficking Victim Protection Survey. The outcome measure identified gaps in services based on the availability of service to victims in the local area. The social systems theory constituted the conceptual framework for this study. The researcher found a need for increased and integrated services to victims of human trafficking. The implications of these findings for social work practice include establishing services and better interventions strategies for victims.

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.

published_or_final_version / abstract / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

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 [...]