I began doing research on the social welfare system’s policies and practices out of curiosity and found some interesting information. As the system is growing, the agencies are failing to meet the demands to provide the services needed. The Child Welfare Information Gateway says that the “system was never intended to serve the vast numbers of children and families that are involved in the system today” (Chibnall et al., 2003). The number of children that are being neglected and abused are increasing each year.
With the child welfare system not being able to fulfill the needs of the number of children who are neglected and abused, children are suffering and dying. The system needs to find a solution and provide better practice due to them reaching their capacity of the children they can help. I believe more policies must be put in place to better the chances of more children being helped. The Child Welfare Information Gateway believes that the difficulty working for the agencies plays a role in the issues of the system (Chibnall et al., 2003). The system needs to be further looked into and given more attention for them to better their agencies.
If the system got more attention, I believe the policies and practices could be much improved. A possible policy that could help better the system is having improvement on the ability for relatives to care for the children. This would allow for less children to enter into the system and be taken care of by relatives that they may already know. This would also benefit the children because it would make them more comfortable and in a less intimidating environment.
Works Cited
Chibnall, Susan, et al. “Children of Color in the Child Welfare System: Perspectives from the Child Welfare Community.” Implications for Policy and Practice - Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2003, https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/otherpubs/children/implications/.
Your key point is that we do not put enough public attention on the situation in DCFS, or child welfare and child protection services in general. Yes, the people of Illinois essentially have custody of the 19,000+ children in foster care within Illinois. These are our children. And, we should all be concerned that we have problems attracting and retaining child protection and child welfare workers. I wonder how we can make more citizens care about this issue? How would public concern manifest? Would public alarm lead to an increase in funding for DCFS so that that agency would be staffed with 3,400 social workers instead of 2,900, and salaries would increase and caseloads would decrease to make the work more attractive? Could DCFS hire 100 specialized child carers to act as foster parents for children who have such extreme behavior problems that only specialized and highly trained persons should serve as foster parents to these children? I wonder what the target should be for improving the child welfare system in Illinois, and more widely throughout the nation.
There are some good resources for finding some facts about the child welfare system.
First of all, since you mention children dying and suffering, you should consult the most recent Inspector General's Report on child deaths in Illinois. Last year (2022) had a huge spike in children dying while being involved with DCFS. There were 171 such deaths, but 134 of those were just the normal deaths attributable to disease and accidents that you would expect anyway. However, in 37 cases, the child welfare system did something wrong that may have contributed to the situation. Between July 2021 and June 2022 the DCFS examined 97 child deaths in Illinois and found that 18 of those children were murdered and 30 died in accidents. By the way, the state spends about $1.5 billion on DCFS, and the agency has approximately 2,900 employees.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation seeks to maintain its strong reputation for having good information about indicators of children's well-being in the United States, and you can examine the situation in each state. I see that their most recent count of children in foster care showed 376,926 children in foster care in 2021. That is the lowest number since 2012, so the trend is for fewer children to be in foster care (in 2017 there were 428,133 children in foster care). We're back down to about 1 in every 200 children in our society living in foster care.
https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/6242-children-ages-birth-to-17-in-foster-care?loc=1&loct=2#detailed/1/any/false/2048,574,1729,37,871,870,573,869,36,868/any/12985,20455
The Children's Bureau at the Administration for Children & Families hosts the website you mentioned: the Child Welfare Information Gateway. It doesn't have so many statistics and facts and figures, but you can find many reports on children welfare services and protective services.
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