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California Voter |
Juvenile Justice in California
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| Addressing Issues Surrounding Child Abuse and Neglect | ||
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California Voter |
Juvenile Justice in California
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| Addressing Issues Surrounding Child Abuse and Neglect | ||
| The League of Women Voters of California | Fall 1999 |
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In this section... ADDRESSING ISSUES SURROUNDING CHILD ABUSE & NEGLECT  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Home visiting is not a new idea—public health nurses did it from settlement houses a hundred years ago—but it is one of growing importance in the past 20 years.
Home visiting is not a program, but a method of delivering services. The model most replicated is that of Healthy Start in Hawaii. Parents are interviewed for levels of stress or risk in the last trimester of the pregnancy or before leaving the hospital with a new baby. Home visits start within days of the baby coming home and continue until the child is three or until visits are no longer needed. Intensity of the visits is based on need. If a new mother rejects services, there is intense outreach, including visiting or calling at least weekly, dropping off literature or a small gift at the door and invitations to come to meetings with other new parents. In the first group of 241 high-risk families studied, there was not one case of child abuse or neglect after three years. The program now operates statewide.
When these results were made public in 1988, they attracted a great deal of attention. The program has been widely copied and adapted to different communities such as Healthy Families Indiana, Healthy Families America, part of a wider outreach in Hampton, Virginia, and some programs starting in California.
The most studied program started in Elmira, New York. This was a three-year clinical study with control groups. These families, all low-income single mothers, were studied for 15 years. At the end of that time the mothers receiving intense home visiting support had fewer additional children, were reported for child abuse half as often and spent a third or more less time on welfare. The children had far fewer emergency medical visits, tested higher for school readiness, spent less time in special education and had lower arrest rates. However, when the test period was over, when the special funding was gone and the program attempted to expand, with higher caseloads and fewer visits, the original staff left because they did not think they would remain effective. No funding for further evaluation has been found.
Another model comes from Missouri, where it is operated by the Department of Education. This program started in 1981, and is open to any family with a new baby. Results show many developmental delays overcome by the third birthday, higher school readiness test scores, less need for special education, higher grades through school and more parental involvement in participating families. The Missouri model is now operating at over 2,000 sites across the country and in six other countries.
In a recent publication from the Packard Foundation, Home Visiting: Recent Program Evaluations, the executive summary discusses the difficulties of importing or expanding programs without proper funding and careful adaptation for the local community.
"As many as 550,000 children are enrolled today in home visiting programs that serve pregnant women and families with young children. These programs have many goals, including the promotion of good parenting skills, the prevention of child abuse and neglect, the promotion of healthy child development and school readiness and, sometimes, the improvement of mothers' lives (for example, deferral of subsequent pregnancies and promotion of maternal education or employment). Despite their varied goals, these programs share a focus on the importance of children's early years, a belief that parents play a pivotal role in shaping children's lives and a sense that one of the best ways to reach families with young children is by bringing services to them, rather than expecting those families to seek assistance in the community.
"Results varied widely across program models, across program sites implementing the same models and across families at a single program site. Several home visiting models produced some benefits in parenting or in the prevention of child abuse and neglect on at least some measures. No model produced large or consistent benefits in child development or in the rates of health-related behaviors such as acquiring immunizations or well-baby check-ups. In most cases, research has not identified the key elements that would predict which families will benefit from a home-visiting model or which program sites will succeed.
"Most programs struggled both to implement services as intended by their program models and to engage families. Families received about half the number of visits intended, and between 20 and 67 percent of enrolled families left the evaluated programs before services were scheduled to end. Staff skills, training and turnover and the extent to which curricula are delivered to families as intended by the program model may all affect program outcomes.
"The wide variability in results indicates that benefits cannot be generalized from one home visiting program model to another. The results indicate how difficult it is to change human behavior, but they do not change the importance of continuing supports for families with young children. The popularity of parenting books, magazines and videos suggests that parents are hungry for information and support, and new research suggests that children's earliest years must not be ignored. The results suggest that change is necessary to improve the home visiting services that presently are in place and to adapt existing home visiting models, if hoped-for benefits are to be achieved by home visiting programs on a widespread or consistent basis."
Court Appointed Special Advocates
The Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program in California is a part of the Welfare and Institutions Code and is consistent with the guidelines of the National Court Appointed Special Advocates Association. These are adult volunteers, trained and appointed by the courts, who:
provide independent, factual information to the court regarding the cases to which they are appointed; represent the best interest of the children involved, and consider the best interests of the family; and at the request of the judge, monitor cases to which they have been appointed, to assure that the court's orders have been fulfilled.
Each CASA commits to one year of service to a case. At the end of a year, with court approval, the CASA may recommit for another year. Each CASA is an officer of the court, with relevant rights and responsibilities, and acts consistently with the local rules of the court pertaining to CASAs. The court determines the extent of the CASA's duties in each case. They have the right, with a court order, to inspect records of any agency involved in the case that pertain to the child, and are under the same rules of confidentiality as the courts.
CASA volunteers visit regularly with the children they serve, getting to know a child as an individual, not just as cases. Most often a child's CASA is the only person in the courtroom who has visited the child consistently and really understands the needs of the young person.
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