Child support and justice-involved military veterans.

The study examines and evaluates the effectiveness of a federal and county collaboration in Pennsylvania designed to help military veterans with child support arrearages in the criminal justice system. The study focused on the veteran participants (n=232) identified psychosocial problems, their range of justice involvement, strategies to mitigate, address barriers and legal dilemmas through the collaborative. The average age 40, majority male, Caucasian, divorced, enrolled in Veterans Administration (VA) healthcare, serving on supervised parole or probation, homeless episodes, and income <$500.00 per month. In general, the findings enhance the limited body of knowledge about military-veteran child support and provide strategies and specific insight into the problems veterans face on individual, familial, and societal levels.

The care of Filipino juvenile offenders in residential facilities evaluated using the risk-need-responsivity model.

According to the risk-need-responsivity model of offender, assessment and rehabilitation treatment should target specific factors that are related to re-offending. This study evaluates the residential care of Filipino juvenile offenders using the risk-need-responsivity model. Risk analyses and criminogenic needs assessments (parenting style, aggression, relationships with peers, empathy, and moral reasoning) have been conducted using data of 55 juvenile offenders in four residential facilities. The psychological care has been assessed using a checklist. Statistical analyses showed that juvenile offenders had a high risk of re-offending, high aggression, difficulties in making pro-social friends, and a delayed socio-moral development. The psychological programs in the residential facilities were evaluated to be poor. The availability of the psychological care in the facilities fitted poorly with the characteristics of the juvenile offenders and did not comply with the risk-need-responsivity model. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Measuring contract agency performance with administrative data.

This article uses administrative data to analyze the relative performance of contract agencies-those organizations under contract with a city child welfare agency to provide out-of-home care services to children placed in the custody of the public agency-by examining how long it took children placed in out-of-home care to return home to their families. The objective was to determine whether credible empirical evidence could show a relationship between length of stay and the agency providing care. Agency level reunification rates are widely distributed around the mean, indicating that contract agency performance differs and that "agency effects" leave an independent imprint on a child's out-of-home care experience.

Mediation in kinship care: another step in the provision of culturally relevant child welfare services.

With rising numbers of children entering the child welfare system and declining numbers of available foster homes, the foster care system has increasingly turned to placements with relatives to meet the needs of children removed from parental custody. Nowhere is this situation more evident than in the African American community. But the child welfare system did not invent the concept of kinship care. The foundation of current mediation practice can be traced to several ancient cultures, including African culture, where the kinship network often provided mediation services in the resolution of disputes. As an ethnocentrically designed child welfare system grapples with how to best incorporate kinship care into its array of services, conflicts between kinship caregivers and the foster care system have arisen. It is suggested that the application of mediation to conflicts in agency-kinship family relationships can serve as yet another step in social workers' efforts to provide culturally relevant child welfare services.

Fathers, divorce, and their children.

To minimize many of the negative consequences of divorce, it is beneficial to support a father's ongoing involvement in his child's life. Although the research literature isn't unequivocal on this point, it does strongly suggest that men who are "visitors" do not have as much impact on their children and that visits are a poor substitute for having a parental figure. The answer lies in creating meaningful roles for noncustodial fathers that elevate men's opportunities to contribute to their children's overall development. One of the most important messages parents can impart to children is that some commitments outlive change and that working together in the child's best interests is one of them.

Child maltreatment: the collaboration of child welfare, mental health, and judicial system.

The alliance of child welfare, mental health, and legal systems has received little empirical attention, despite the magnitude of its impact on children and families. We examined the congruence of child protection agencies legal positions, court clinic recommendations, and judicial dispositions in a sample of 59 contested child maltreatment cases. Placement recommendations/decisions among all three systems were highly correlated, although the relationship was not so strong as to undermine the independence of any one system. Where there was disagreement between successive evaluations, it was in the direction of enhancing family integrity and parental access rights. We advanced three hypotheses to account for our findings: (a) changes in successive recommendations reflect the increasing sophistication of the assessment process; (b) changes reflect increasing distance from the family's ecology and are therefore increasingly ill informed; and (c) the changes are purely probabilistic, reflecting a drift toward the societal status quo.