Not What I Expected: Training Social Work Students in Community-Based Child Prevention of Child Maltreatment
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Not What I Expected: Training Social Worker Students in Community-Based Child Prevention of Child Maltreatment Carmit Katz 1
& Jill
D. McLeigh 2 & Asher Ben-Arieh 3
Accepted: 8 July 2020/ # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Advances in our understanding of the influence of community factors on children’s safety support promoting community-focused public health approaches to child protection. Only limited attention, however, has been paid to what this means for social work in its mission to prevent child maltreatment. In particular, the literature lacks guidance on implementing opportunities for social work students to focus on primary prevention of child maltreatment. An exception is an effort in Tel Aviv, Israel, to implement Strong Communities for Children, a community-based child maltreatment prevention initiative first implemented in the USA. The local replication effort, led by Tel Aviv University faculty, differed from the initial trial in that social work students served as outreach workers instead of paid staff members. This article describes the local training model developed and presents a qualitative analysis of field journals maintained by three waves of students (n = 53). Three themes emerged from our analysis: reflections on the social work profession, experiences with partnership, and the impact of Strong Communities on the students’ lives outside the initiative. An overarching theme emerging from the qualitative analysis was the degree to which the experience was surprising for each student. The findings have important implications for social work education, among which are the value of reflexivity in praxis, the importance of modelling, and the significance of partnership. Keywords Community organizing . Social work education . Prevention of child
maltreatment . Strong communities . Fieldwork
* Carmit Katz [email protected]
1
Bob Shapell School of Social Work, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, 69978 Tel Aviv, Israel
2
The Kempe Center, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO, USA
3
Haruv Institute, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
International Journal on Child Maltreatment: Research, Policy and Practice
Introduction Protecting Children from Abuse and Neglect (Melton and Barry 1994), a book consisting of papers commissioned by the US Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect (hereafter, Advisory Board), provided insight into the role of various community attributes that affect the prevalence of child maltreatment. In particular, the book highlighted the roles of social support and material and sociocultural factors on child maltreatment rates. The contributions to the book and the emerging body of research on the influence of community-level factors on child maltreatment (e.g., Belsky 1980; Garbarino and Crouter 1978; Garbarino and Kostelny 1992; Garbarino and Sherman 1980) led the Advisory Board to recommended a new national strategy for protecting children focused on comprehensive community efforts to promote safe and healthy development. Advances i
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