Reproductive Justice

This landmark volume commemorates the fortieth anniversary of the Children's Defense Fund, which has been an uncompromising champion of American youth for all of those years. Yet the book looks not to the past but at our current circumstances - and at the challenges we must meet now and in the future on behalf of our young people. The book examines critical issues - prenatal and infant health and development, early childcare and education, school reform, the achievement gap, vulnerable children, juvenile justice, and child poverty - and highlights crucial practical and policy measures we need to consider and undertake if we are to better serve American children. An invaluable survey of the conditions facing American youth - and a call to action at the local, state, and national levels - Improving the Odds for America's Children is an urgent, informative, and inspired volume that addresses shortcomings and challenges we cannot afford to ignore.

Faced with rapidly changing social and economic conditions, service professionals, policy developers, and researchers have raised significant concerns about the Canadian child welfare system. This book draws inspiration from experiences with three broad, international child welfare paradigms - child protection, family service, and community healing/caring (First Nations) - to look at how specific practices in other countries, as well as alternative experiments in Canada, might foster positive innovations in the Canadian child welfare approach. Informing policy debates addressing child maltreatment and family welfare, this book will serve as a vital resource for managers, service providers, professionals, and students in the fields of social work, child and youth care, family studies, psychology, and special education.

In Poor Kids in a Rich Country, Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding ask what it means to be poor in a prosperous nation - especially for any country's most vulnerable citizens, its children. In comparing the situation of American children in low-income families with their counterparts in fourteen other countries--including Western Europe, Australia, and Canada--they provide a powerful perspective on the dynamics of child poverty in the United States. Based on the rich data available from the transnational Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), Poor Kids in a Rich Country puts child poverty in the United States in an international context. Rainwater and Smeeding find that while the child poverty rate in most countries has been relatively stable over the past 30 years, child poverty has increased markedly in the United States and Britain--two of the world's wealthiest countries. The book delves into the underlying reasons for this difference, examining the mix of earnings and government transfers, such as child allowances, sickness and maternity benefits, unemployment insurance, and other social assistance programs that go into the income packages available to both single- and dual-parent families in each country.

The story of foster care in the United States is the story of the failure of the social safety net to aid poor, largely black, parents in their attempt to make a home for their children. Shattered Bonds tells this story as no other book has before-from the perspective of a prominent black, female legal theoretician.The current state of the child-welfare system in America is a well-known tragedy. Thousands of children every year are removed from their parents' homes, often for little reason other than the endemic poverty that afflicts women and children more than any other group in the U.S. Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed legal scholar and social critic, reveals the racial politics of child welfare in America through extensive legal research and original interviews with Chicago families in the foster care system. She describes the racial imbalance in foster care, the concentration of state intervention in certain neighborhoods, the alarming percentages of children in substitute care, the difficulty that poor and black families have in meeting state's standards for regaining custody of children placed in foster care, and the relationship between state supervision of families and continuing racial inequality.

A substantial number of American children experience poverty: about 17 percent of those under the age of eighteen meet the government’s definition, and the proportion is even greater within minority groups. Childhood poverty can have lifelong effects, resulting in poor educational, labor market, and physical and mental health outcomes for adults. These problems have long been recognized, and there are numerous programs designed to alleviate or even eliminate poverty; as these programs compete for scarce resources, it is important to develop a clear view of their impact as tools for poverty alleviation. Targeting Investments in Children tackles the problem of evaluating these programs by examining them using a common metric: their impact on earnings in adulthood. The volume’s contributors explore a variety of issues, such as the effect of interventions targeted at children of different ages, and study a range of programs, including child care, after-school care, and drug prevention. The results will be invaluable to educational leaders and researchers as well as policy makers.

In this book, Duncan Lindsey, a leading authority on child welfare, takes a critical look at the current welfare system. He traces the transformation of child welfare into child protective services, arguing that the current focus on abuse has produced a system that is designed to protect children from physical and sexual abuse and therefore functions as a last resort for only the worst and most dramatic cases in child welfare. In a close analysis of the process of investigating child abuse, Lindsey finds that there is no evidence that the transformation into protective services has reduced child abuse fatalities or provided a safer environment for children. He makes a compelling argument for the criminal justice system to assume responsibility for the problem of child abuse in order for the child welfare system to be able to adequately address the well-being of a much larger number of children now growing up in poverty.This new edition of The Welfare of Children takes into account a major legislative change since the publication of the first edition: the welfare reform legislation of 1996. This legislation has fundamentally altered the public child welfare system as broadly understood, and Lindsey thoroughly examines its implications on policy and practice, refuting the claim that welfare reform has actually reduced child poverty.

This groundbreaking new book offers a history of welfare, an accurate portrayal of welfare recipients and an understanding of the diverse characteristics of lone-mother-headed families affected by welfare reform. Through detailed research, award-winning author Kenneth J. Neubeck offers a unique comparison of other industrialized nation's welfare policies compared to ours, and presents a new argument for curtailing the end of welfare as we know it: the case for respecting economic human rights.

A groundbreaking look at the history and politics of the American child welfare system, "When the Welfare People Come" exposes the system in its totality, from child protective investigation to foster care and mandated services, arguing that it constitutes a mechanism of control exerted over poor and working class parents and children. Applying the Marxist framework of social reproduction theory to the child welfare system, the author, an attorney who has practiced in the area of child welfare for more than twenty years, reveals the system's role in the regulation of family life under capitalism.