Children's experiences and needs in relation to domestic and family violence: Findings from a meta‐synthesis

Domestic and family violence is a significant issue experienced by many children that can have severe detrimental impacts to their health, development, and well‐being. Despite the significance of this issue, it is only recently that children have been included in research that seeks to understand the impacts that domestic and family violence may have on their lives. This paper reports on the findings of a meta‐synthesis, which explored qualitative research about children's experiences of domestic and family violence. Thirty‐two studies, including from the United Kingdom, North America, and Australia were included for review. The meta‐synthesis found that children describe domestic violence as being a complex, isolating, and enduring experience that often results in disruption, losses, and challenges to their significant relationships. Children's common feelings of fear, worry, powerlessness, and sadness were also uncovered, in addition to the strategies they employed to try and facilitate the safety and emotional well‐being of themselves and their family. Children's wants and needs are also highlighted. The findings demonstrate that despite the increasing interest in children's experiences of domestic and family violence, qualitative research remains limited, with many gaps evident. Implications for research, policy, and practice are considered.     

Crafting Child‐friendly Cities: Evidence from Biratnagar Sub‐metropolitan City,Eastern Nepal

Our cities are increasingly becoming the sites where children socialize, observe, and learn how society functions and many local and global activities have impacted children's health and well‐being. The Child‐friendly Cities initiative, launched by the United Nations Children's Fund and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme in 1996, draws in diverse stakeholders to place children at the center of the urban agenda. Based on social work research, this article analyzes the acclaimed status of Biratnagar Sub‐metropolitan city, Eastern Nepal, as a child‐friendly city. Despite its efforts, the city of Biratnagar is yet to meet the required criteria to claim itself as a child‐friendly city. Further improvements by the city administration in achieving children's participation in decision‐making, child‐friendly legal environment, and code of conduct are essential. Based on the evidence, the authors advocate for bottom‐up approaches that include children's voices and their real participation in city governance and a strong political will to craft child‐friendly cities, not as a policy rhetoric but for real. Enabling children to fulfill their potential as equal participants in crafting child‐friendly cities will require adults to relinquish some of their hegemonic powers of decision‐making on behalf of children.     

Decentring the NHS: A Case Study of Resource Allocation Decisions within a Health District

The aim of New Labour's health policy is to shift more of the balance of power and responsibility for services to the local level. But, while the government proclaims a new decentralized NHS, doubts exist about the extent to which the reality on the ground matches the tone of policy. This article reports empirical work examining the level of autonomy purchasers have over budgetary allocation. A case study analysis of purchasing within a single district was undertaken for the financial year 2001/2 which included semi‐structured interviews with key officers responsible for budget allocation. Purchasers approach a new financial year with a starting position that matches the previous year's allocation—the “baseline”, this is adjusted for inflation and, as has happened over the last few years, increased further in real terms by “growth funds” for service modernization and government initiatives. The analysis shows a clear dissonance between policy and practice; although purchasers have complete control over their “baseline budgets”, the study found that this does not “ring true” at the local level. Only about a fifth of growth funds were at the discretion of purchasers as most are taken by national priorities and pay and price inflation. Further decentralization is planned, which includes transferring more control of funds to primary care trusts by 2004, the extent to which these measures will change the perceptions of those working in the service remains to be seen—only then will the government be able to claim a truly decentred service.     

Mothers at the Service of the New Poverty Agenda: Progresa/Oportunidades, Mexico's Conditional Transfer Programme

This article considers some of the changes and continuities in social protection in Latin America through a focus on the ways in which motherhood is positioned as key to the success of the new anti‐poverty programmes that have followed structural reform. It examines a flagship cash transfer programme known as Progresa/Oportunidades (Opportunities) established in Mexico in 1997 and now being widely adopted in the region. Characterized by some commentators as a quintessentially neo‐liberal programme, it is argued that Oportunidades represents a novel combination of earlier maternalist social policy approaches with the conditional, co‐responsibility models associated with the recent approaches to social welfare and poverty relief endorsed by international policy actors. In the first section, the gendered assumptions that have governed Latin American social policy are described; the second outlines social policy provision in Latin America and identifies the key elements of the new approaches to poverty; and the third critically examines the broader implications of the Mexican programme's selective and gendered construction of social need premised, as it is, on re‐traditionalizing gendered roles and responsibilities.     

Children and Poverty Why their experience of their lives matter for policy

Children's poverty has long been a central concern for policy makers and policy researchers. The body of extant research conducted and the range of programmatic interventions undertaken by successive governments in this and other countries is extraordinary. Nevertheless, children remain in poverty. Clearly there are many reasons for this, not least of which is the maintenance and intensification of market capitalism with its attendant blatant inequalities. Even so, the moral, political, social and economic imperatives for developing workable responses to children's poverty remain. This paper argues that we, in Australia, should adopt an approach increasingly taken in the UK. Drawing on, among other things, the new sociology of childhood, this approach begins not with the expertise of adult researchers and policy makers, but with that of children. In doing so, the case is made for why children's perceptions and experiences of poverty are key concerns for policy. The paper outlines in theoretical terms why children's voices matter. Invoking the new sociology of childhood and the sociology of identity, a conceptual framework for understanding why policy scholars and makers should carefully attend to the voices of their subjects is sketched – in this case, the subjects are children. Finally, some methodological implications of this for undertaking policy research informed by this approach are outlined.     

Dashed Hopes,Dashed Selves? A Sociometer Perspective on Self‐esteem Change Across the Transition to Secondary School

The transition from primary to secondary school challenges children's psychological well‐being. A cross‐transitional longitudinal study (N = 306; mean age = 12.2 years) examined why some children's self‐esteem decreases across the transition whereas other children's self‐esteem does not. Children's expected social acceptance in secondary school was measured before the transition; their actually perceived social acceptance was measured after the transition. Self‐esteem and Big Five personality traits were measured both pre‐ and posttransition. Self‐esteem changed as a function of the discrepancy between children's expected and actually perceived social acceptance. Furthermore, neuroticism magnified self‐esteem decreases when children's ‘hopes were dashed'—when they experienced disappointing levels of social acceptance. These findings provide longitudinal support for sociometer theory across the critical transition to secondary school.     

The Impact of Presidential Speeches on the Bureaucracy*

Objective. Scholars have long held that presidents use various tools to control the federal bureaucracy. Yet, despite their importance to presidents in achieving their policy goals in Congress, few scholars have examined the impact of presidential speeches on bureaucratic activity. This article analyzes the impact of both positive and negative policy signals on civil rights policy in the bureaucracy. Method. I test this hypothesis using speeches coded from the Public Papers of the Presidents and their impact on criminal cases filed by the Civil Rights Division over time. Given heteroskedasticity in the dependent variable, log‐linear time‐series methods are appropriate. Results. The president's positive speeches increase the number of criminal civil rights cases filed in U.S. District Court. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 also has had a significant, positive impact on bureaucratic activity. Conclusions. In part because bureaucrats have discretion to resist presidential preferences that oppose an agency's core task, negative signals do not affect the implementation of civil rights policy. Yet, positive presidential speeches are available to presidents who may wish to influence the bureaucracy.     

Working with managers to improve services: changes in the role of research in social care

The setting of specific objectives for children's services and the identification of key outcome indicators, together with the development of a core information specification for children's services with its practical application in the implementation of the Integrated Children's System, all mean that substantially more data are now available to child welfare agencies. Not so long ago in the UK it was the role of research teams to collect and analyse such data. Now that so much of it is already available to agencies, are researchers who work in this area of applied social policy research becoming redundant? Using data from the cohorts of looked after children being studied at the Centre for Child and Family Research, Loughborough University, the paper demonstrates how researchers can work in consultation with the managers of child welfare agencies to make better sense of the data at their disposal. It considers three issues: what additional variables need to be explored to help agencies better understand their performance; how groups of children could be identified who follow predictable pathways through social care; and how qualitative information is necessary to gain a true picture of what is happening. All of these examples demonstrate a fundamental role for researchers in working with social services personnel to identify how services can be improved.     

A Joined-up Approach to User Participation in Public Services: Strengthening the "Participation Chain"

Participation has emerged as a key theme for social policy and administration in the UK. Public service providers are often keen to consult users, and users themselves want to make their voices heard. Despite this, however, there is a perennial problem in getting people to participate, and participation is often better supported in principle than in practice. The motivations of key actors are crucial, but are often poorly understood. This article attempts to build a more detailed understanding of the motivations to participate of one key group: service users. Using Mutual Incentives Theory, it shows the extent to which users are motivated by individualistic or collectivistic concerns. These “demand side” factors are then combined with others on the “supply side” in a model we call the “participation chain”. This model provides a systematic framework for understanding what makes public service users participate, and seeks to demonstrate that, while the question of participation requires a combination of answers, it is a combination that can be predicted, planned for and acted upon.     

After the tax revolt: Why Medicare matters more to middle Australia than lower taxes

The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003 gives new insights into the public's increasing preference for more social spending and their willingness to pay more taxes to fund services. This paper profiles the new electorate and discusses factors driving this trend in public opinion. Multivariate analysis allows us to identify the key demographic, political and policy variables that predict support for spending. All the usual factors matter: being older and more educated, and identifying as Labor, Green or Democrat all predict support for higher spending. But we find that policy perceptions matter as well: believing that health and Medicare and/or public education have declined in the past two years brings major support for increased spending. We also find that the Australian public supports modest tax increases to fund spending on health and education and that the Australian electorate is more open minded about tax rises than conventional wisdom holds. Our main conclusions are that support for social spending over reduced taxes has increased over the past two decades, and especially after the election of the Howard Government, and that dissatisfaction with health and Medicare, and public education, are reshaping the fiscal preferences of the Australian electorate.     

From walls to homes: Child care reform and deinstitutionalisation in Ghana

In 2006, the Ghanaian government, in partnership with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), began to reform the child welfare system. The main aim of this reform was to provide a sustainable and culturally appropriate system of care for children without parental care by shifting from an institutional‐based model to a family and community‐based one. Drawing on existing peer‐reviewed and grey literature, this article provides an overview of the major components of the reform, including reintegration with the extended family, foster care and adoption. In addition, the article discusses the prospects and challenges involved in achieving the reform's intended component. Key Practitioner Message: ● Use community development techniques to raise the resources needed to provide family support services for vulnerable families; ● Social work practitioners partner with non‐governmental organisations to train community members as para‐social workers; ● Social workers, especially in developing countries, understand the challenges they face when embarking on deinstitutionalisation.     

Marital Conflict and Children's Adjustment: Parental Hostility and Children's Interpretations as Mediators

The associations between marital conflict, maternal and paternal hostility, children's interpretations of marital conflict, and children's adjustment were examined in a sample of 136 school‐aged children and their parents. Observational measures were collected from videotapes of marital interaction and family interaction. Self‐report data were collected from parents and children. Results showed that mothers’ and fathers’ hostility mediated the association between martial conflict and children's internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. Children's feelings of being to blame for marital conflict and being threatened by it mediated between marital conflict and children's internalizing problems but not their externalizing problems.     

What are Children's Centres? The Development of CC Services, 2004–20081

Children's centres are intended to be a mainstream, universal service. They began in 2004 and their origins are diverse. Some replaced various forms of local provision, most notably Sure Start programmes; others were established from scratch. Issues for exploratory empirical work have been identified from the guidance issued by central government. Using interview data from three urban local authorities, this article explores the nature of the ‘core offer’ that centres are expected to provide and the way in which they have pursued the goal of integrating staff and services. The article highlights the problems of balancing a focus on the child and on the parent; of reconciling childcare provision as part of the employability agenda and as a means to educational achievement for the child; of permitting local variation while achieving consistency; of the role of monitoring in relation to developing good practice; and of achieving integration in a mixed economy of care. We find that despite the greater specification of the core offer for children's centres compared to that for Sure Start, there are substantial differences between children's centres in terms of services, while the mixed economy of provision poses considerable challenges to the goal of integration.     

Evidence-based Engagement in the Voluntary Sector: Lessons from Canada

The shift towards governance and greater reliance on third parties in the design, implementation and evaluation of policy has created new pressures to ensure that policies are designed and delivered in a consistent and effective manner. In the interest of improving transparency, accountability, effectiveness and efficiency, governments in Canada and in the UK, as in many industrialized countries, have begun to emphasize the need for evidence‐based policy‐making. As a result, knowledge and research have become key assets in the production of policy. Yet, with their current capacity and knowledge base wanting, governments have increasingly relied on the knowledge and information of external actors and have afforded greater authority to them on this basis. This has created a situation in which evidence‐based inputs are given greater weight. This shift has particular implications for voluntary sector organizations whose basis for intervention has lain historically with the interests that they represent. Already, in the Canadian case many national organizations have seen their focus shift to research activities under the impetus of new funding initiatives explicitly encouraging activities grounded in knowledge and policy analysis. Moreover, policy guidelines have been elaborated in order to enhance the sector's capacity to contribute to the development of policy in a depoliticized manner. Using a series of interviews conducted with representatives from national voluntary organizations in Canada, this article explores the implications of such a shift for the voluntary sector in Canada, and asks whether the Canadian case holds some lessons for voluntary sector–state relations in other jurisdictions.     

From Street‐level Bureaucrats to Street‐level Policy Entrepreneurs? Central Policy and Local Action in Lottery‐funded Community Cancer Care

Recent contributions to the policy implementation literature have applied Kingdon's model of ‘policy windows’ to the implementation of policy on health inequalities in the UK, and have identified the key role played by ‘policy entrepreneurs’ at local as well as national level. Despite this, the picture that emerges is of frustration of central policy intentions at the local level, alongside frustration of local aspirations by the centre. This article explores the relationship between central policy and local implementation in the context of a Lottery‐funded initiative to develop community cancer care in the UK. We examine the relationships: between the BIG Lottery Fund and central government; between BIG and the cancer care projects it funded; and between the projects and their local economy of cancer care. We found evidence of success both in vertical cascading of policy and in local policy innovation; 83 per cent of projects succeeded in obtaining continuation funding at the end of their Lottery funding. We suggest that this was due, in part, to two features of Lottery funding and accountability that combined to differentiate it from the other policy initiatives studied. They meant that projects were ‘buffered’ not just from national policy churn, but also from competing local priorities. In the ‘protected space’ that was thus formed, ‘street‐level policy entrepreneurs’ played a key role in developing cancer care innovations for adoption by mainstream funding agencies.     

Responding to child maltreatment: Comparison between the USA and China

A recent study estimated that over one‐fourth of Chinese children have suffered maltreatment (Fang et al., 2015 ). However, the current child welfare policy in China is limited to orphans, abandoned children, and children with disabilities. Also, there is very little comparative research in China on Chinese and other countries’ child welfare systems. The purpose of this study was to analyze applicable US and Chinese child welfare policies, identify gaps in Chinese policy regarding child maltreatment, and make recommendations for a policy agenda for improving child welfare in China based on cultural values and existing policy structures. Results show that China has considerable capacity to make improvements in child protective services, foster care, and adoption policies. Based on the results of this study, several implications are provided to develop China's child maltreatment policy to increase children's outcomes of well‐being, safety, and permanency. Key Practitioner Message: ? To understand the background and system of current Chinese child maltreatment policy; ? To review US child maltreatment policy and its implementation to identify gaps in the Chinese child maltreatment system; ? To provide policy suggestions to develop Chinese child maltreatment policy and provide recommendations for social work education and practice in China.     

How socialization goals and peer social climate predict young children's concern for others: Evidence for a development shift between 2 and 4 years of age

Children's concern for others is shaped through socialization, but current theories make different predictions as to how and when in development this socializing occurs. Here we found that mothers' prosocial socialization goals (SGs) predicted concern for others in 2‐year‐old (n = 804) and 4‐year‐old (n = 714) children. In contrast, preschool teachers' SGs predicted concern for others only for 4‐year‐old children. In addition, a positive social climate among classroom peers predicted 4‐year‐olds' prosociality. These results suggest that the nuclear family environment impacts toddlers' concern for others before the broader social environment shapes their prosociality at preschool age.     

Full Responsibility with Partial Citizenship: Immigrant Wives in Taiwan

The interrelationship between increased ageing and declining fertility is facing many developed countries with challenges, risks and policy debates around care, reproduction and women's rights. This article demonstrates the special case of cross‐border marriages and the lives of immigrant wives in Taiwan, with a view to identifying their social needs and hence their prospects for social inclusion. It considers the extent to which these immigrant wives have managed to fulfil the dreams of their own native families and/or satisfy the reproductive demands of their ‘in‐law’ families. Issues of women's social and reproductive role, gender discrimination and the unfulfilled rights and ‘partial citizenship’ of immigrant wives are discussed. The author argues that immigrant wives carry full responsibility but possess only partial citizenship. The ideology of the spousal sponsorship regime, which makes the application for naturalization extremely difficult, not only increases the vulnerability of immigrant women but violates their human rights.     

Pathways to Problem Behaviors: Chaotic Homes, Parent and Child Effortful Control, and Parenting

Guided by Belsky's and Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad's heuristic models, we tested a process model with hypothesized paths from parents' effortful control (EC) and family chaos to indices of parenting to children's EC, and finally children's externalizing problem behavior. Parents reported on all constructs and children ( N = 188; M age = 9.55 years) reported on their EC and externalizing problem behaviors. Consistent with expectations, parents' EC promoted their positive (and inhibited negative) reactions to children's negative emotions. In addition, high levels of family chaos predicted low levels of parental positive reactions to children's emotion. Children's EC was predicted by high levels of positive reactions and low levels of negative reactions. As expected, children's externalizing problem behaviors were negatively related to their EC. Results clarify possible family processes by which children's EC is enhanced and problem behaviors are reduced.