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Out of Harm's Way: Creating an Effective Child Welfare System
Despite many well-intentioned efforts to create, revise, reform, and establish an effective child welfare system in the United States, the system continues to fail to ensure the safety and well-being of maltreated children. Out of Harm's Way explores the following four critical aspects of the system and presents a specific change in each that would lead to lasting improvements.
- Deciding who is the clien t. Child welfare systems attempt to balance the needs of the child and those of the parents, often failing both. Clearly answering this question is the most important, yet unaddressed, issue facing the child welfare system.
- Decisions . The key task for a caseworker is not to provide services but to make decisions regarding child abuse and neglect, case goals, and placement; however, practitioners have only the crudest tools at their disposal when making what are literally life and death decisions.
- The Perverse Incentive . Billions of dollars are spent each year to place and maintain children in out-of-home care. Foster care is meant to be short-term, yet the existing federal funding serves as a perverse incentive to keep children in out-of-home placements.
- Aging out . More than 20,000 youth age out of the foster care system each year, and yet what the system calls "emancipation" could more accurately be viewed as child neglect. After having spent months, years, or longer moving from placement to placement, aging-out youth are suddenly thrust into homelessness, unemployment, welfare, and oppressive disadvantage.
The chapters in this book offer a blueprint for reform that eschews the tired cycle of a tragedy followed by outrage and calls for more money, staff, training, and lawsuits that provide, at best, fleeting relief as a new complacency slowly sets in until the cycle repeats. If we want, instead, to try something else, the changes that Gelles outlines in this book are affordable, scalable, and proven.
- Deciding who is the clien t. Child welfare systems attempt to balance the needs of the child and those of the parents, often failing both. Clearly answering this question is the most important, yet unaddressed, issue facing the child welfare system.
- Decisions . The key task for a caseworker is not to provide services but to make decisions regarding child abuse and neglect, case goals, and placement; however, practitioners have only the crudest tools at their disposal when making what are literally life and death decisions.
- The Perverse Incentive . Billions of dollars are spent each year to place and maintain children in out-of-home care. Foster care is meant to be short-term, yet the existing federal funding serves as a perverse incentive to keep children in out-of-home placements.
- Aging out . More than 20,000 youth age out of the foster care system each year, and yet what the system calls "emancipation" could more accurately be viewed as child neglect. After having spent months, years, or longer moving from placement to placement, aging-out youth are suddenly thrust into homelessness, unemployment, welfare, and oppressive disadvantage.
The chapters in this book offer a blueprint for reform that eschews the tired cycle of a tragedy followed by outrage and calls for more money, staff, training, and lawsuits that provide, at best, fleeting relief as a new complacency slowly sets in until the cycle repeats. If we want, instead, to try something else, the changes that Gelles outlines in this book are affordable, scalable, and proven.
- GenresFostering
200 pages, Hardcover
Published March 1, 2017
About the author
Richard J. Gelles
28 books6 followersDr. Richard J. Gelles is Former Dean (2001–2014) of the School of Social Policy & Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also holds the Joanne T. and Raymond H. Welsh Chair of Child Welfare and Family Violence. He is Director for the Center for Research on Youth & Social Policy; Co-Faculty Director of the Field Center for Children's Policy, Practice, and Research; and Founding Director of the Evelyn Jacobs Ortner Center on Family Violence.
Dr. Gelles is an internationally known expert in domestic violence and child welfare and was influential in the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. His first book, The Violent Home (1974), was the first systematic investigation to provide empirical data on domestic violence. More recent books, such as The Book of David: How Preserving Families Can Cost Children's Lives and Intimate Violence in Families, Third Edition, have also made a significant impact in the study of child welfare and family violence. He is the author of 24 books and more than 100 articles, chapters, and papers.
Dr. Gelles is an internationally known expert in domestic violence and child welfare and was influential in the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. His first book, The Violent Home (1974), was the first systematic investigation to provide empirical data on domestic violence. More recent books, such as The Book of David: How Preserving Families Can Cost Children's Lives and Intimate Violence in Families, Third Edition, have also made a significant impact in the study of child welfare and family violence. He is the author of 24 books and more than 100 articles, chapters, and papers.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 5, 2021
Great overview of the CW system! Written by a former Penn prof and former dean of my program, so there were a number of Pennsylvania-specific anecdotes that were helpful and relevant. Definitely biased towards the child-centered rather than family-centered child welfare model, but I tend to agree with this model in most cases.
September 24, 2018
Read this over a year ago. Came across it again today, and looking over the table of contents, I realize how much it shaped my approach to thinking about the 'big problems,' especially Chapter 6: Follow The Money: The Perverse Incentive of Federal Foster Care Funding. I can't tell you how often I find myself using the term 'perverse incentives'--not that I'd never strung those two words together before this book, but the way he explained the shaping of policy and budgets was (apparently) pretty influential to how I've started looking at other issues (affordable housing, public education, etc.).
December 11, 2023
I was shocked by how good this book was due to the low rating. This book captures so much about foster systems. Underrated.
May 23, 2025
read this for my internship and it provides a really comprehensive overview of the child welfare system
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews