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THE CONCEPT OF CHILD AND FAMILY ADVOCACY. FEM 4123. DEFINITION. Family/Child advocacy is the work of pleading, defending, publicly recommending or raising one’s voice on behalf of children and their families in order to improve their health and wellbeing.
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DEFINITION • Family/Child advocacy is the work of pleading, defending, publicly recommending or raising one’s voice on behalf of children and their families in order to improve their health and wellbeing. • Refers to a range of individuals, professionals and advocacy organizations who promote the optimal development of children. They typically seek to protect children’s rights which may be abridged or abused in a number of areas. • Specialized program for intervention and treatment of children/spouse abuse as well as support and tools in many other areas e.g. parenting course, stress & anger management
Cont. • In the role of preventing and treating abused – provide services such as victim advocacy, shelter for abused victims. • Working to assure access to positive influences or essential services such as housing, health, child care, educational, welfare and legal. • Endeavors aggressively to change to better the ecologic setting for child rearing and to foster the development and functioning of adults and children. • At the policy level – aims at changing the policies of governments or even transnational policies. These advocates do lobbying, policy research, file lawsuits and engage in other types of policy change techniques. Many use internet based techniques to influence decision makers.
ADVOCATE • Advocate need not have a college degree, but must be effective people who have learned how to deal with children, adults professionals and bureaucrats in a range of institutions (Morse & Newberger, 1977). • Child advocates exist in school, community and home environments and works on individual, group or governmental level(s) to protect and nurture children. In most circumstances, mothers, fathers, family and teachers all advocate on behalf of children. • By working with parents around specific environmental and social problems, advocates help them to develop a renewed sense of personal efficacy and control and parents begin to see themselves not as passive victims but as active agents, better able to control their physical and psychological environment as well as their children.
PRINCIPLES OF ADVOCACY – KUITZER (1976) • Assumes that people have or ought to have certain basic rights. • Assumes that rights are enforceable by statutory, administrative or procedures. • Efforts are focused on institutional failures that produce or aggravate individual problems. • Inherently political. • Most effective when it is focused on specific issues. • Different from the provisions of direct services.
PRINCIPAL TOOLS USED BY THE ADVOCATE • Direct and intensive contact with the family at the time of referral. Goal: • to develop an open and trusting relationship with the family. • to define in conjunction with the family the goals and scope of the advocate’s involvement. • to establish a division of tasks such that the achievement of goals will represent a joint effort between the family and the advocate.
Cont. • Knowledge of people, policies and systems which are available to assist both the family and the advocates in resolving the problems which affect the family. • Data and information collected in the course of helping families which can be pooled and generalized in order to support broadly focused efforts for institutional and social change.
Cont. • While advocacy primarily oriented towards securing goods and services for people, advocacy also aims to provide families and individuals with technical and psychological resources to solve their own problems. • Experiential learning process for the family that may be applied to seeking solution to other problems.
Cont. • In the long run, what an individual learns about his ability to effect change in his own life may be far greater significance than the change itself.
DEVELOPMENT • The principal legislation governing child welfare has a built-in capacity to accord children and young peoples’ rights. However, these have been protective rather than participatory rights. Illustrated in Boyland & Boyland, (1998). • According to UNICEF (2000), child welfare has been minimally resourced and dominated by ‘best interests’ perspectives based on the assumption that adult define children’s welfare needs and how those needs should be addressed.
Cont. • A children’s rights approach to child welfare offers a potential way of overcoming the limitations of a ‘best interest’ approach. • Involving children in decision making about their own lives and promoting their participation in the design and delivery of services provides further opportunities for a cultural shift that accords value and recognizes children as services user rather than ‘an object of concern”.
Cont. • Advocacy is a potential force for change and has a role to play in the empowerment of young people. • Training implication - social workers, health visitors, teachers, police officers etc. need an awareness of children’s rights issues that impact on decision making in child protection.
Cont. • This new practice gives meaning to working in partnership with children and young people to accord them safety and respects their rights to a private and family life. • It can provide an opportunity to promote self-esteem.
Cont. • Eg., Staffordshire University in partnership with Boys and Girls Welfare Society and National Youth Advocacy Services – offering validating training programme in children’s rights and advocacy. • Open to a range of professional groups. Offers opportunity to develop knowledge base and build competence in the practice of advocacy and children’s right work.
Cont. • Develop an appreciation of the complicated legal, social and cultural context of child welfare work from the distinct perspective of children and young people’s right.
Advocacy & Social Work • Social workers are called upon to assist people in need. • Needs can be: physical, mental, social, or societal. • Social work education prepares social workers with a set of knowledge and skills that will enable them to help the clients.
Social workers are also trained to see the connections between problems that affects individuals and problems that affect larger number of people because of organizational or governmental policies. • Such problems impose costs, monetary and otherwise, on or deny services to people in need.
Social workers have in many cases adopted a problem-solving approach. • So advocacy is one of the approaches /techniques to solving problems. • All social workers should understand the principles and processes of advocacy.
Advocacy Practice • It is part of social work practice. • Social workers take actions in a systematic and purposeful way to defend, represent, or otherwise advance the cause of one or more clients at the individual, group, organizational or community level, in order to promote social justice. • The usual targets of advocacy practice are: 1. Decision makers who create and legitimize the laws, regulations, rules or 2. Decision makers who apply the policies created by others.
Abbott (1988) – social workers consistently rank higher than other professional groups in their belief in 4 important social work values: • 1. respect for basic rights • 2. sense of social responsibility • 3. commitment to individual freedom • 4. support for self-determination • The above finding underscores the importance of social workers engaging in advocacy practice because their belief and values are unique. • So, using advocacy to promote social justice is every social worker’s responsibility.
Once the issue is understood, the next step in the advocacy practice approach is to actually plan the advocacy effort.
Conclusion • Social work practice is frequently understood as a problem-solving process. • Its core component is labelled as “generalist practice” because it can be used with all types of clients and at different levels of intervention, from individual to international. • Knowledge is the power – knowledge of how to engage in structured approach to advocacy will lead to successful advocacy, thus great for social justice.
