Child Welfare

The most surprising thing for me from Melissa’s presentation was actually something positive. I did not realize that the state of Georgia ranked so well in the United States in our child welfare system. Since Georgia ranks so poorly in other areas like school performance, I assumed we ranked poorly in other areas as well. This was very interesting for me to learn about and refreshing to hear that Georgia does well compared to other states.

It was also refreshing to hear Melissa talk about the positive side of the child welfare system and all of the good work that they do in helping keep children safe. I think that we hear too often about the negative side of the system. As Melissa discussed, we often only hear about the death and the mistakes of the child welfare system. I think she made a really valid point that these stories are “outliers” and not the norm for our system.

I was not aware of the dramatic effects that these stories can make. For example, it was interesting to see how the rates for foster care dramatically rose after the case of Terrell Peterson. I knew that stories like these certainly can change the perceptions of the public, but it was interesting to hear about how the system was actually impacted as well.

This legislative session, I think a lot of things were at play. First of all, the session was really short and I think this certainly impacted the outcome of a lot of the legislation. The media and news stories also had an impact on the legislative session. The stories of the children who died after their abuse had been reported has an impact on the session and legislators used these anecdotes to capture the public.

The single most important thing we can do to improve the creation of social policy in the area of child welfare is to educate and advocate. I believe in education and making people more informed about the realities of issues. I think that child welfare hits home with a lot of people and can evoke emotional responses that may not be true for other issues. The more awareness we have about how hard social workers, case managers, and other people working in child welfare work every day to ensure the safety of children, the more support these people will have. As Melissa mentioned, a lot of the issues in the child welfare system comes back to overburdened and underpaid workers. The public needs to be educated on this reality.

3 thoughts on “Child Welfare

  1. Victoria, educating the public is definitely a way to lessen child abuse and other issues, but how do we go about doing so? Maybe a rally or getting news anchors to do more specials on the issues?

  2. Victoria,

    I do agree with you and Melissa’s statement on how the child welfare system comes back to overburdened and underpaid workers, but I don’t think the public would care to help out or do anything even if they were educated on this reality. The thing is, people already understand the reality and recognized social workers, case managers, and other people working in child welfare as hard workers. Every time I tell someone my degree, they’re like geesh that’s a lot of work with little pay, but in all actuality people should be saying, man I thank you for your service and the time you put into making our youth and society a better place. This country is more money hungry (as we all know) and bases everyone’s success off of what they earned in life. So, no matter what we educate the public about, they’re still going to be looking down on us saying you guys work hard, for so little pay, I wouldn’t want that job, I will rather focus on a different career that can pay me more and let you people focus on saving our youth.

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