Radha Jagannathan and Michael J. Camasso
This book proposes what, to many professionals in the child welfare field, will appear a radically different explanation for our society's decisions to protect children from harm and for the significant drop in substantiated child abuse numbers. At the center of this conceptual and analytic
approach is the contention that social outrage emanating from horrific and often sensationalized cases of child maltreatment plays a major role in CPS decision making and in child outcomes. The ebb and flow of outrage, we believe, invokes three levels of response that are consistent with patterns of
the number of child maltreatment reports made to public child welfare agencies, the number of cases screened-in by these CPS agencies, the proportions of alleged cases substantiated as instances of real child abuse or neglect, and the numbers of children placed outside their homes.
At
the community level, outrage produces amplified surveillance and a posture of "zero-tolerance" while child protection workers, in turn, carry out their duties under a fog of "infinite jeopardy." With outrage as a driving force, child protective services organizations are forced into changes that are
disjointed and highly episodic; changes which follow a course identified in the natural sciences as abrupt equilibrium changes. Through such manifestations as child safety legislation, institutional reform litigation of state child protective services agencies, massive retooling of the CPS
workforce, the rise of community surveillance groups and moral entrepreneurs, and the exploitation of fatality statistics by media and politicians we find evidence of outrage at work and its power to change social attitudes, worker decisions and organizational culture. In this book, Jungian
psychology intersects with the punctuated equilibrium theory to provide a compelling explanation for the decisions made by public CPS agencies to protect children.
1. Child Welfare Reform as Anger Management
2. A State of Perpetual Outrage
3. The Risky Business of Risk Assessment
4. Agency Operations in an Outrage Era
5. Societal Factors Affecting Child Welfare: Poverty, Income Support and Race
6. CPS Decisions and the Role of Outrage:
An Empirical Test
7. An Outrage Management Strategy for CPS
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Radha Jagannathan is an Associate Professor in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. Michael J. Camasso is a faculty member in the Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics at Rutgers University.
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