Illinois, Cook County Public Guardian Pat- rick Murphy (1993) criticizes states for. ârewardingâ and âbribingâ abusive parents with services and money.
Amzrican Journal of Orthopsychiatry. 67(4). October 1997
CHILD WELFARE POLICY AND PRACTICE: The Myth of Family Preservation Leroy H. Pelton, Ph.D.
The family-preservation orientation of child werfare policy and practice is questioned, and the reasons why child rescue efSorts continue to grow are explored. Child placement rates are examined in historical context and compared to those of other countries. Thispaper argues that the child werfare system in the U S . has long been two “systems” and that, as currently structured, it is incapable ofpromoting family preservation.
R
ecent debate has called into question the supposed family-preservation orientation of current child welfare policy and practice. Amidst a relentless trickle of deaths attributable to child abuse or neglect, “get tough” advocates are in the ascendancy. In Illinois, Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy (1993) criticizes states for “rewarding” and “bribing” abusive parents with services and money. A Newsweek magazine headline proclaims: “Why Leave Children With Bad Parents? ...Is it time to stop patching up dead-end families?’ (Ingrassia & McCormick, 1994). In an interview with the Boston Globe, family violence researcher Richard Gelles asserts: “We need to think less about family preservation and more about child protection” (Grunwald, 1996). Newt Gingrich recommends a return to orphanages (Morganthau, 1994), while Hermstein and Murray (1994) suggest that we encourage single mothers (“where much of the problem of child neglect and
abuse originates” [p. 416J) to give up their children for adoption at birth. Indeed, they propose that single mothers be denied all rights and responsibilities in regard to their children, including the “legal basis for demanding that the father of the child provide support” (p. 545). Have family-preservation efforts gone too far, as these comments suggest? The prevailing wisdom is that the federal Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act (AACWA) of 1980 (PL 96-272) constituted a marked shift in child welfare policy in this country toward family preservation, and away from separating children from their parents and placing them in foster care. Later in the 1980s, as if to back up unprecedented new policy and rhetoric with resolute action, a crusade was launched to plant “family preservation” programs throughout the United States. Now, in the the 1990s, it is being suggested that a national increase in the number of child fatali-
A revised version of apaper submitted to the Journal in June 1996. The author is at the School of Social Work, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
0 1997 American Orthopsychiatric Association, Inc.
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ties attributable to abuse and neglect demonstrates the need for a change in policy away from an emphasis on preserving families. It is the thesis of this paper that this prevailing wisdom is mythology-as is a competing viewpoint, characterized by a nostalgia for the “good old days” before the 1960s, which holds that child welfare agencies then served economically disadvantaged families with benign, preventionoriented services on a voluntary-acceptance basis, with more emphasis on helping than on coercive intervention and child removal. WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS
the U.S. at the time, hereafter noted in parentheses) actually rose through the years of implementation of the mother’s pension laws, to about 243,000 by 1933 (5.8). After declining during the Depression and World War I1 years and into the 1950s’ it rose steeply from about 244,500 in 1961 (3.7) to 503,000 by 1977 (7.6), the highest number (and rate) yet recorded during the twentieth century (Pelton, 1989). By 1983, after a brief period of sharp decline, it was on the rise once again, reaching 300,000 in 1987 (4.8) and 462,000 by 1994 (6.8) (Tatara, 1995; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1995). Thus, despite all the recent attention paid to family preservation, we face the remarkable prospect of closing out this century with a considerably greater number (and rate) of children in foster care than at its beginning, perhaps even greater than in the previous record-breaking year of 1977.
The emphasis on family-preservation policy is by no means new or recent in the U.S. At least as far back as the 1909 White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, child welfare policy has focused on family preservation. The Conference concluded that children of parents of WHY CHILD RESCUE EFFORTS GROW There is no doubt that the children in fos“worthy” character, including single mothers, “should as a rule be kept with their par- ter care have come predominantly from iments,” and that “the home should not be poverished families, and that child abuse broken up for reasons of poverty, but only and neglect are strongly related to poverty for considerations of inefficiency or im- (Pelton, 1978, 1989, 1994). Yet, during the morality” (Bremner, 1971,p . 365). Even as 196Os, the rate of child poverty was almost early as 1887, the Massachusetts Society halved (U.S Bureau of the Census, 1983). for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Moreover, during the period from 1955 to stated that “we never take neglected chil- 1975, there was a fivefold increase in the dren by law from their parents, where the number of children covered by Aid to Famneglect arises from honest poverty alone” ilies with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits (“Current Operating Statistics, (Bremner, 1974, p . 853). Even from its early years, this longstand- 1985). In addition, federal spending for soing policy cannot be characterized as rhe- cial services, begun under the Public Weltoric wholly devoid of substance. Begin- fare Amendments of 1962 and 1967, grew ning with the mother’s pension laws en- more than twelvefold-from $194 million acted by most states between 191 1 and in 1963 to $2.5 billion in 1977 (Birby, 1981; 1920, the expressed intent of which was to Derthick, 1975). Why, then, did the foster care population avert the breakup of families for reasons of poverty alone (Thompson, 1919), a succes- expand, rather than decline, during the ? we sion of programs has been enacted with the 1960s and much of the ’ ~ O S Should intent of preserving impoverished families. not expect, as many child welfare experts Yet the national foster care population have believed, that a reduction in child (and rate of children in foster care per thou- poverty, along with a growth in the provisand children under 18 years old living in sion of benefits and services to impover”
LEROY H. PELTON ished families, would lead to a reduced foster care population? These questions may seem facetious in light of the by-now oft-recounted saga of the great child abuse crusade begun early in the 1960s and that continues into the present (Pelton, 1989).Reporting laws were initiated; public-awareness campaigns commenced; media attention grew; the amounts of money available for foster care placement increased; and public child welfare agencies expanded in size. Yet, exploration of the questions suggests that there have long been two child welfare “systems” in this country-me oriented toward preserving impoverished families through benefits and services, the other toward rescuing children from (mostly) impoverished families. Much of the first system (e.g., AFDC) has been administratively separate from the second, but to some extent (e.g., in public child welfare) they are intertwined. The casework challenge, already alluded to in the 1909 White House Conference statement, has been to distinguish between the “deserving” impoverished families, to be offered benefits and services, and the “undeserving” poor, whose children need to be rescued from them. This judgment has never been easy. It entails a distinction between poverty and neglect, between whose poverty is “honest” and “alone,” and whose is due to personal “inefficiency or immorality.” Yet, this is the judgment we have asked caseworkers to make. The child abuse crusade has sensitized agencies and their workers to “abuse and neglect” as opposed to “honest poverty alone,” and increased their fear of leaving children with their parents in marginal cases. Moreover, due to an unprecedented expansion of the rescue apparatus, the crusade increased the sheer number of cases in which, one way or the other, such judgments would be made. Indeed, foster care population trends are far more strongly related to the second system (child rescue) than they are to the first (family preservation), and this second system has overwhelmed the first; it virtually
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has a life of its own, quite apart from the first system, even though in practice the two are entwined. Perhaps the most surprising evidence of the lack of relationship between the extent of poverty and social welfare supports, on the one hand, and child placement efforts on the other, can be found in international comparisons. In contrast to the U.S., substantially lower child poverty rates have prevailed in Denmark, Finland, Germany, and Sweden (Pires, 1993; Smeeding & Rainwater, 1991), and their far more advanced status as welfare states is well known. Yet, these countries have had foster care rates that are, by and large, no lower than those in the U.S. (Olsson Hort, 1997; Poso, 1997; Pruzan, 1997; WovJ 1997). Although differences in definitions and categories of children being grouped in various statistics have yet to be teased out, the foster care rates are large enough (e.g., 7.6 in West Germany in 1989, 7.0 in Finland in 1987, 10.5 in Denmark in 1992, 8.5 in Sweden in 1993) to conclude that they would still be no lower than in the U.S. after appropriate statistical adjustments are made. Although the administrative and organizational arrangements of public child welfare agencies vary among these western European countries, they have one fundamental structure in common with the U.S.: Helpers have the role of investigating complaints against parents and placing children in foster care (Olsson Hort, 1997; Poso, 1997; Pruzan, 1997; Wolg 1997). These circumstances facilitate the expansionist tendencies of the rescue system. In police states, no such entanglements are necessary for the expansion of coercive systems. In democracies, however, coercive systems grow when special means are found for due process rights to be bypassed and justicesystem procedures to be circumvented. In these and other ways, the cover of helping can insidiously enlarge the domain of coercion. The fact that, outside of this framework, other social supports exist to help
THE MYTH OF FAMILY PRESERVATION
families is immaterial. The crucial point is that the coercive apparatus is coated with a helping facade. With the basic dual-system structure in place, these countries have been poised to import new American expansionist innovations, such as those embodied in the child abuse crusade. It has yet to be determined if the children in foster care in western European countries come from poor families to the same extent as they do in the U.S. Although the poverty rates in these countries have been far lower, there are no doubt always sufficient pools of impoverished families available to supply large numbers of children to the foster care systems. On the other hand, in the absence of any real checks on “benevolent” coercion, vague and idiosyncratic parenting standards used by workers and agencies may simply inch higher, eventually reaching into middle-class lives. In the U.S., the very same policies and programs that were designed to strengthen the first system, that of preventive services, have been implemented in a manner that has contributed to the growth of the second. A large proportion of the federal money spent under the Public Welfare Amendments of 1962 and 1967 went for foster care during the 1960s and ’70s (Derthick, 1975; Mott, 1976). Andthe AACWA of 1980 has channeled far more federal money into substitute care under Title IV-E than into preventive services under Title IV-B, despite the good intentions of its designers. Yet the net increase in the foster care population is due less to the shortchanging of preventive services than to the substantial funding of investigation, child removal, and foster care. Social-services money, for example, has contributed to increased child removal less because it was taken from the first system than because it was placed in the second system of investigation and foster care. While greater provision to the helping system can reduce harm to children living in poverty, it would do little to reduce child removal so long as the current struc-
tural arrangements that support a thriving rescue system are allowed to continue. Nor, as has been suggested above, is nostalgia for the more distant past warranted. The origins of the dual-role structure in child welfare in the U.S. go back at least as far as the formation of the Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCCs). These agencies initially focused on child rescue, but gradually, during the 19 10s and ’ ~ O S ,embraced the rhetoric of family preservation as well. At that juncture, the present-day child welfare system was born. The SPCCs brought their cases to the emerging juvenile courts, whose growing staffs of probation officers also played a dual role. Under these circumstances of entwined systems, and because there has never been a lack of poor children who could be judged as being in need of “better” homes, ups and downs in the rate of child removal have been largely dependent on agency staff size, i.e., on the sheer physical capacity to remove children. Although the sharp decline in the national foster care population in the US. between 1977 and 1982 was not attributable to any decrease in staff size during those years, neither was it due to any diminishment in child removal activity. There is no evidence that the number of children entering foster care declined. Rather, it was the median length of time children remained in foster care that dropped (Tatara, Shapiro, Portner, & Pettiford 1987). The thrust to return children as quickly as possible was a direct result of child welfare advocates’ alarm over the large numbers of children in foster care by 1977, and was embodied in the permanency-planning movement that spread throughout the country at that time. Indeed, if the child abuse crusade was to be maintained, putting pressure on caseworkers to remove children, the only way to reduce the foster care population would be by returning these children more quickly. However short-sighted this solution may have been, it was a way of eating one’s cake and having it too, at least temporarily.
LEROY H. PELTON The relentless tide of child abuse and neglect reports generated by the second system, together with periodic outcries over the death of a child, continued to induce states to hire more workers. By 1983, the foster care population was on the rise again, due to greater annual increases in the number of children entering foster care compared to those exiting (Tatara, 1993, 1995). WHY THE M Y T H S A N D THE STATUS QU-PERSIST
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paraged the poor and strengthened the hand of those calling for punitive AFDC reforms and for even greater numbers of children to be removed from their families, based on demonized images of the poor (Sidel, 1996). The recent welfare legislation (PL 104193, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996) is likely to contribute to increased child removal not so much because of the considerable likelihood that its cuts in family-support programs will deepen child and family poverty (there are already more than enough children in the “poverty pool” upon whom the rescue system can draw) than because the Act, not surprisingly, protects the funding of substitute care under Title IV-E. Perversely, although meeting pre- 1996 AFDC eligibility requirements will no longer insure a child’s eligibility for welfare assistance in a parent’s home, it will continue to qualify the child for federal foster care assistance in someone else’s home (Allen,
When it became apparent in the mid1980s that the foster care population was rising sharply once again, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, which had played a significant role in promoting permanency planning, endorsed the Homebuilders concept, a model that had in fact been around since the mid-l970s, although little used by most states (Adams, 1994; Kinney, Haapala, & Booth, 1991). Spurred by the Foundation’s influence and funding, intensive family preservation services (IFPS), modeled on the Homebuilders, proliferated. 1996). The “new” emphasis would be on family In recent years, we have enlarged the bapreservation. sic apparatus for coercing impoverished Although it has long been clear that a families. But the dual structure of that apwide range of supports and services is paratus has not changed; indeed, that is needed to help struggling poor families, what permits it to grow. Just by calling for child welfare advocates now defined fam- more workers, more training, better acaily preservation largely in terms of IFPS demic credentials, and the like, advocates programs. It was not difficult to predict that serve to maintain the status quo. Even radiwhen these programs, employed far be- cal critics have succumbed to the delusion yond their potential capacities, were able to that more of the same, albeit of better qualyield only mixed results in preventing ity, is what we need. The permanencyplacement or improving child welfare out- planning movement and IFPS programs comes, family preservation itself would be have also served to postpone change and dubbed by others as a failed strategy. Thus, allow business as usual. Although mainchild welfare advocates unwittingly con- taining a positive philosophy oriented totributed to the impression that family ward clients’ strengths, IFPS programs are preservation had been tried and had failed. captives of the child welfare system; they Yet, under the present system and amidst represent reforms that are easily digested the continuance of the child abuse crusade, by the system, while it grinds inexorably even a true family-preservation strategy on its way. would fail. Despite their transparent myth Ever since the 1850s, when Charles Lorof classlessness (Pelton, 1978), child wel- ing Brace and his New York Children’s fare advocates, through their zealous pur- Aid Society successfullymade the case that suit of child abuse, have inadvertently dis- the immigrant children wandering the streets
THE MYTH OF FAMILY PRESERVATION of that city’s poorest neighborhoods needed to be placed in foster homes “out West,” widely perceived social “crises” have served to enlarge the rescue system. Whether the nature of the crisis is defined by the ongoing child abuse crusade begun in the 1960s, the sexual abuse crusade that started in the late ’ ~ O S the , “crack epidemic” of the ’ ~ O S , or the increased reports of child maltreatment fatalities and the welfare repeal of the ’ ~ O S ,it serves to justify more resources and staff for the child welfare system. But even when they are gathered in the name of family preservation, these resources tend to enlarge the rescue system, given the dualsystem structure. Paradoxically, increased rhetoric about family preservation often seems to parallel increases in child removal. However ineffective it may be, the child welfare system persists and even thrives in its present form because it constitutes an expression of our concern for children that appeals to liberals and conservatives alike. After all, even during the Reagan era of social welfare cutbacks, resources for child welfare increased. Child removal is a way to serve “innocent” children without “rewarding” their “undeserving” parents. Although liberals may not believe that parents are undeserving merely because they are poor, we have managed to convince them that there are among the poor millions of abusive and neglectful parents whose behavior requires uninvited scrutiny and judgment. As a result, we now have a well-entrenched child abuse industry whose po*er resides in its ability to manufacture, by sleight of definition and encouragement of overzealous accusation, a continuous stream of statistics designed to horrify the public. It predicates its cries for increased fimding not on evidence of past success in reducing harm to children, but on the supposed growth of the problems themselves. WHAT IS NEEDED?
The Third National Incidence Study (Sedlak & Broadhurst, 1996) revealed an increasing readiness on the part of commu-
nity professionals to attribute child injury to abuse and neglect, and to confuse poverty with neglect. Indeed, while “abuse and neglect” are accusatory terms, the incidents they refer to, the bulk of which have been characterized as neglect, are mostly multiply caused, and not deliberate. Yet by labeling as abuse and neglect broad spheres of child welfare problems that families may be experiencing, we have helped to create the erroneous impression that many impoverished parents do nor care much about their children’s welfare. This assumption has, in turn, facilitated welfare repeal and reinforced the coercive approach to child welfare problems that guides our current system. Moreover, under present arrangements, the family-preservation rhetoric often serves as a cloak in which state coercion is shielded from the inconveniences of due process. We must change these arrangements. We need a system that helps more, rescues less, investigates serious abuse and neglect better, and affords due process. A restructuring of the public child welfare system that I proposed several years ago (Pelton, 1989) would limit definitions of child abuse and neglect to severe harm or endangerment resulting from clearly deliberate acts or gross abdication (deliberate or not) of parental responsibility. Reports would be received directly by law-enforcement agencies, to be investigated by the police. Such cases would then be referred to civil court for determination of whether or not child abuse and neglect has occurred under the law, and, if so, whether or not child removal is necessary. In rare instances, they may be referred to criminal court, but in no greater numbers than they are now. The foster care system would be placed under the civil court system, to be operated by specialized foster care workers. The public child welfare agency, stripped of its investigative and foster care functions, would then be transformed into a family-preservation agency, devoted solely to the provision of preventive supports and
LEROY H.PELTON services, largely to impoverished families, on a voluntary-acceptance basis. Subsequent proposals have failed to provide for the complete separation of preventive and child rescue systems that this analysis suggests is necessary. For example, the National Commission on Child Welfare and Family Preservation (1991) proposed a three-component system, the first two of which would offer services to families on a voluntary-acceptance basis, partly funded by local and private sources. However, the third component would greatly resemble the public child welfare agency as currently structured, and would thus perpetuate the very conditions that allow child rescue efforts to grow. Although Lindsey (Lindsey, 1994; Lindsey & Regehr, 1993) has joined me in proposing that the police, and not child welfare workers, investigate child abuse, he has emphasized the criminal prosecution of such cases. Moreover, although he set out to separate the helping from the coercive roles along a boundary between abuse and neglect, Lindsey (I 994, p. 167) ended up by extending criminal investigation-and the possibility of criminal prosecution-to most of what is now characterized, however vaguely or questionably, as child abuse and neglect. The domain of cases in which Lindsey (1994, pp. 180-182) suggested that the police conduct a criminal investigation and report to the (presumably, criminal) court includes “excessive” corporal punishment, “educational” neglect, parental involvement in criminal behavior or drug use, and “alcohol addiction.” Yet, without a narrowing of the grounds for coercive intervention, we risk merely exchanging criminal investigation for child welfare investigation in most current cases. Abuse as opposed to neglect turns out not to be Lindsey’s divide for separating investigative from helping functions. Nor is it mine; but under my proposal, the vast majority of incidents currently labeled as abuse and neglect would no longer be defined as such, and most in-
551 cidents currently labeled as neglect would be construed as unintentional injuries or dangers, to be addressed without coercion. Furthermore, Lindsey (I 994) would allow the child welfare agency to assist in investigations and make recommendations to the court, and would retain the foster care system within the public child welfare agency. Since police presently do carry out many investigations, with the assistance of agency caseworkers, this proposal, like the Commission’s, might resemble what we have now. However, because investigation and the foster care system are part of the coercive apparatus, such arrangements would impede justice and the protection of children; even so-called “voluntary” placements have often involved threats and coercion (Pelton, 1989). To insure that the child welfare agency plays no role whatsoever in influencing foster care decisions, the foster care system must be completely separated from it. CONCLUSION
Currently, there are two distinctly different child welfare systems in the U.S. Both target impoverished families, but one does so with the purpose of offering them aid and services, the other with the purpose of scrutinizing and judging them in order to determine whether or not their children should be removed. Only a segment of the first system is entwined with the second, but it is enough to gain entry into an expanded number of impoverished households in an extralegal manner and under the guise of helping, for the purpose of making judgments about child removal. No one is fooled by this masquerade, least of all impoverished parents, who are powerless to do much about it. In the context of current arrangements, delivery of certain services within the entwined systems can in fact reduce the number of placements among families whose children were already being considered for placement, by convincing caseworkers that dangers have been reduced. However, the
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overall growth of the foster care population has less to do with the growth or decline of poverty rates or services designed to ameliorate the effects of poverty than it does with the growth of the rescue system itself, and the number of families we decide to scrutinize for the abundant pitfalls of poverty that we may then elect to blame on individual parents. In order to reduce immediate harm to children, our first priority must be to reduce poverty and its resultant material hardships and dangers. The current structure of the child welfare system, which allows the growth of the rescue system, has neither promoted family preservation nor reduced harm to children. While the helping system has the potential to ameliorate the effects of poverty on children and reduce harm, it will not stop the flow of children into foster care so long as we allow the current dysfunctional structure to continue. The rescue system must be properly placed under our system of justice and be subject to the rules of due process. Under current arrangements, the more families we presumably try to preserve, the more child removals will result. REFERENCES Adams, P. (1994). Marketing social change: The case of family preservation. Children and Youth Services Review, I 6 , 4 1 7 4 3 1. Allen, M.L. (1996). The implications of the welfare act for child protection. Washington, DC: Children’s Defense Fund. Bixby, A.K. (1981). Social welfare expenditures, FY 1979. Social Security Bulletin, 44, 3-12. Bremner, R.H. (Ed.). (1971). Children and youth in America: A documentary history (Vol. 2). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bremner, R.H. (Ed.). (1974). Children and youth in America: A documentary history (Vol. 3). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Current operating statistics: Monthly tables. (1985, July). SocialSecurity Bulletin, 48, p. 74. Derthick, M. (1975). Uncontrollable spending for social services grants. Washington, DC: Brooking Institution. Grunwald, M. (1996, January 27). Abuse shows danger of birth-family bias. Boston Globe, pp. 1, 12. Herrnstein, R.J., & Murray, C. (1994). The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American lije. New York: Free Press.
Ingrassia, M., & McCormick, J. (1994, April 2 5 ) . Why leave children with bad parents. Newsweek, pp. 52-58. Kinney, J.M., Haapala, D.A., & Booth, C. (1991). Keeping families together: The Homebuilders model. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Lindsey, D. (1994). The weyare ofchildren. New York: Oxford University Press. Lindsey, D., & Regehr, C. (1993). Protecting severely abused children: Clarifying the roles of criminal justice and child welfare. American Journal o f o r thopsychiatry, 63, 509-5 17. Morganthau, T. (1994, December 12). The orphanage. Newsweek, pp. 28-32. Mott, P.E. (1976). Meeting human needs: The social andpolitical history of Title XX, Columbus, OH: National Conference on Social Welfare. Murphy, P. (1993, June 19). Family preservation and its victims. New York Times [Op-Ed page]. National Commission on Child Welfare and Family Preservation. (1991). A commitment to change. Washington, DC: American Public Welfare Association. Olsson Hort, S.E. (1997). Sweden: Towards a deresidualization of Swedish child welfare policy and practice? In N. Gilbert (Ed.), Combatting child abuse: International perspectives and trends (pp. 105-124). New York: Oxford University Press. Pelton, L.H. (1978). Child abuse and neglect: The myth of classlessness. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 48,608617. Pelton, L.H. (1989). For reasons ofpoverty: A crirical analysis of the public child welfare system in the United States. Westport, CT: Praeger. Pelton, L.H. (1994). The role of material factors in child abuse and neglect. In G.B. Melton & F. Barry (Eds.), Protecting children from abuse and neglect: Foundations for a new national strategv (pp. 131-181). New York: Guilford Press. Pires, S.A. (Ed.). (1993). International child welfare systems: Report of a workshop. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Poso, T. (1997). Finland: Child abuse as a family problem. In N. Gilbert (Ed.), Combatting child abuse: International perspectives and trends (pp. 143-163). New York: Oxford University Press. Pruzan, V.L.B. (1997). Denmark: Voluntary placements as a family support. In N. Gilbert (Ed.), Combatting child abuse: International perspectives and trends (pp. 125-142). New York: Oxford University Press. Sedlak, A.J., & Broadhurst, D.D. (1996, September). Third national incidence study of child abuse and neglect: Final report. Washington, DC: U.S. De-. partment of Health and Human Services. Sidel, R. (1996). The enemy within: A commentary on the demonization of difference. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 66,490-495. h e e d i n g , T., & Rainwater, L. (1991, September). Cross-national trends in income, poverw and dependency. Paper presented at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Conference on Poverty, Inequality, and the Crisis of Social Policy, Washington, DC. Tatara, T. (1993, August). U S . child substitute care
LEROY H. PELTON flow data for FY 92 and current trends in the state child substitute care populations. VCIS (Voluntaary Cooperative Information System)Research Notes (No. 9). Washington, DC: American Public Welfare Association. Tatara, T. (1995, August). U S . child substitute care flow data for FY 1993 and trends in the state child substitute care populations. VCIS Research Notes (No. 1 I ) , Washington, DC: American Public Welfare Association. Tatara, T., Shapiro, P., Portner, H., & Pettiford, E.K. ( I 987, June). Characteristics of children in substitute and adoptive care: A statistical summary of the VCIS National Child Werfare Data Base, bused on FY 84 data. Washington, DC: American Public Welfare Association.
553 Thompson, L.A. (Ed.). (1919). Laws relating to “mothers’ pensions” [Bureau Publication No. 63, Legal Series No. 41. Washington, DC: U S . Children’s Bureau. U S . Bureau of the Census. (1983). Current population reports (Series P-60, No. 140. Money income and poverty status of families and persons in the United States: 1982, p. 21). Washington, DC: Author. U.S. Bureau of the Census. (1995). Statistical absfrucf of the United States: I995 (115th ed.) [Table 14, p. 151. Washington, DC: Author. Wolff, R. (1997). Germany: A nonpunitive model. In N. Gilbert (Ed.), Combatting child abuse: Internationalperspectives and trends (pp. 2 12-23 1). New York: Oxford University Press.
For reprints: Leroy H. Pelton, Ph.D., Director, School of Social Work, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 4505 Maryland Pkwy, Las Vegas, NV 891 54-5032
