Trauma Responsive Child Welfare Systems

This comprehensive reference offers a robust framework for introducing and sustaining trauma-responsive services and culture in child welfare systems. Organized around concepts of safety, permanency, and well-being, chapters describe innovations in child protection, violence prevention, foster care, and adoption services to reduce immediate effects of trauma on children and improve long-term development and maturation. Foundations and interventions for practice include collaborations with families and community entities, cultural competency, trauma-responsive assessment and treatment, promoting trauma-informed parenting, and, when appropriate, working toward reunification of families. The book’s chapters on agency culture also address staffing, supervisory, and training issues, planning and implementation, and developing a competent, committed, and sturdy workforce.

Among the topics covered:

• Trauma-informed family engagement with resistant clients.

• Introducing evidence-based trauma treatment in preventive services.

• Working with resource parents for trauma-informed foster care.

• Use of implementation science principles in program development for sustainability.

• Trauma informed and secondary traumatic stress informed organizational readiness assessments.

• Caseworker training for trauma practice and building worker resiliency. 

Trauma Responsive Child Welfare Systems ably assists psychology professionals of varied disciplines, social workers, and mental health professionals applying trauma theory and trauma-informed family engagement to clinical practice and/or research seeking to gain strategies for creating trauma-informed agency practice and agency culture. It also makes a worthwhile text for a child welfare training curriculum.