Protecting vulnerable children from harm is a shared responsibility for everyone in the community, officials stress — but the tip of that spear continues to be the social services workers who screen serious allegations, visit often-chaotic homes and make what can be life-or-death recommendations.
Consider this almost terrifying job listing for a Children’s Social Services Practitioner III in Riverside County:
“… performs difficult child welfare casework of an advanced nature dealing with complex individual and family problems where abuse and neglect is a factor; plans, organizes, implements, searches out and assesses personality and character structure underlying individual behavior; participates in consultations with other team members; plan, organize, and implement case plans and services for voluntary and/or court mandated customers; prepare documentation for use in legal matters….”
Master’s degree in social work, social welfare, social or behavioral sciences, or social/ human services “may be required.”
Essential duties include: assessing the family environment; evaluating the safety and welfare of children in the household; implementing interventions with families where needed; taking immediate action to remove children from unsafe environments and transporting them to appropriate placements; searching for runaway children; creating detailed long-term or short-term case plans “to address family functioning and child safety, including conducting regular field visits, outside of the office and potentially at long distances;” preparing and maintaining case records; and writing reports for, and testifying at, court proceedings.
That’s a dizzying level of responsibility. In California, the pay is much better than in many places — ranging from about $70,000 to $111,000 per year, and averaging some $95,000 in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties — but it’s an enormously taxing and even dangerous profession.
A survey of the child welfare workforce by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that 62% of child welfare workers had been threatened on the job. Another 5% had actually been assaulted.
Child protective services professionals “have exceedingly difficult jobs
and provide a critical public safety service,” a national commission noted a decade ago. “They are often overworked and highly stressed … high caseloads, frequent turnover and not enough time to adequately engage families. Shortages of workers, funds, and training may mean that inexperienced workers are tasked with making life-or-death decisions with insufficient preparation or support.”
These workers are overwhelmingly women. Almost half reported elevated levels of “secondary trauma and trauma-related symptoms,” while 37% said that their job interfered with their family life to a great or very great extent, the HHS survey said.
Workers stay on the job for a median of just 1.8 years, and annual turnover ranges from some 20% to 40%, national studies have found.
“Child welfare agencies today operate under chronic vacancies and persistent frontline turnover,” wrote Michael Cull, who leads the technical assistance team at the National Partnership for Child Safety and works with several California counties, in the Substack Child Welfare Wonk. “Documentation and administrative requirements consume substantially more of a caseworker’s time than contact with children and families. At the same time, public and political expectations for safety continue to rise.
“Those expectations are legitimate. But each tragedy resets the standard on the same depleted system, widening the distance between what we ask of the workforce and what we provide it.”
It’s incredibly challenging to hire good people and keep them, Cull said. Child welfare caseworkers don’t have to be licensed. There’s no national organization governing conduct. There are no degree requirements specific to the work.
And the specially designed assessment tools that social workers use, which aim to objectively measure risk, aren’t great crystal balls. “They’re not about establishing objective truth,” he said. “They’re about supporting a decision. You still need a good decision maker.”
After a tragedy, it’s easy to second-guess why children remained with troubled parents. “You may be thinking: Some of the cases look so obvious,” said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, a fierce critic of America’s approach to child protection. “But how did it look at the time to the caseworker juggling a gigantic caseload, with little expertise, forced to make snap judgments where the decisions can be, literally, life or death?
“Maybe the worker never had time to read the prior reports, or was just about to when another emergency came up that, at that moment, looked worse. That’s why, while reducing entries into foster care doesn’t guarantee fewer such mistakes, it’s the essential prerequisite for creating a system that makes fewer mistakes — in all directions.”
While better cooperation and coordination among all agencies that interact with families has been a focus for better outcomes, social workers bear the brunt of blame when things go wrong. They may lose their jobs and even face criminal probes. A social worker rep said she wished that the other agencies charged with keeping kids safe — especially the courts, and the policies that shape the system — would receive similar scrutiny.