By PAMELA JO GRUNDVIG
A BYU associate professor of social work is presenting research conducted from a $190,000 state grant in Jerusalem today at the international social work conference.
Elaine Walton’s program provides a variety of in-home services to strengthen families and avoid out-of-home placement in cases of child abuse and neglect.
The program was designed so that intensive family preservation services (FPS) combined with child preservation services (CPS) are able to make a more intelligent assessment of a family’s situation before removing a child from their home — a painful situation for both family and social worker.
During the investigation, an FPS worker investigates abuse and protection of the child. CPS workers try to figure out what is right with the family and how the child can remain at home.
The best way to protect a child is to help the parents, Walton said.
“From our research we learned that abusive parents are not necessarily bad people, they just don’t have very good parenting skills,” Walton said. “Instead of going in like a policeman saying,`You are a bad parent. We need to remove your children.’ We are going in saying, `What are the strengths here? What are the resources, as well as what are the potential problems in terms of child neglect and abuse?'”
In this program social workers spend an average of 14 hours with referred families as opposed to six hours typically spent on an investigation of a family.
“We take whatever time is needed in looking at the individual situation of the family and connect them with what ever resources will help them to become strong enough and supportive enough that the child will be safe,” Walton said.
As a result of this program, license clinical social worker for the division of child and family services, Cory Ruward said he has seen a decrease of children who are in the state’s custody.
“Numbers of out-of-home care continue to drop. Two hundred seventy children who were in the state’s care as of October 1997 are now at the 200 mark,” Ruward said.
“The program was very successful,” Family Preservation Worker Elsebeth Green said.
Instead of feeling like child protection services are just out there looking for dirt, Green said through the team effort of FPS and CPS workers, clients feel like they have more of a listening ear and someone is on their team.
The $19,000 state grant for this research was given on behalf of the western region of the division of child and family services.
Walton will present her research again in August to the advisory board for the Utah state department of child and family services. The board will then decide if the program will be implemented statewide.
