Alice is an Aboriginal woman in her 40s, with a number of health issues including diabetes. She has recently been admitted to hospital after a suspected heart attack. She lives in an overcrowded run down house, along with her 4 children (she has 2 sons and 2 daughters) and 2 young grandchildren (aged 18 months and 3 years). She is caring for her grandchildren because her 19 year old daughter, Jill, the mother of the children, developed a heroin addiction following experiencing serious sexual assaults and abuse in her childhood. Jill is currently working as a sex worker, so she works most of the night and she spends most of the day sleeping. Alice has not seen her ex husband for a number of years due to his violence. He is interstate somewhere. The father of Jill’s children died of a drug overdose but he was also reportedly violent towards her as well. One of Alice’s sons is a convicted drug dealer and is currently in jail. Alice’s oldest son Jim is working in a government job and helps Alice financially because she is not receiving adequate financial support to care for the children from Centrelink (her daughter Jill receives this payment and Alice rarely sees any of it). Recently, Alice did not attend a Centrelink appointment as she was feeling unwell and her Centrelink benefit has been cut off. Alice’s oldest daughter Mary is 22. She is unemployed, living at home and is unable to bring herself to look for work because she feels that “no-one will employ her”. She rarely goes out and spends most of her days in her room listening to loud rap music and caring for her sister’s children. She cries throughout the day for no apparent reason and on occasion she has self harmed by cutting her wrists with razor blades. She has disclosed thoughts of suicide to Alice but refuses to see anyone about this. Alice is worried about Mary her oldest daughter being so withdrawn and would like her to find work, socialise more and be able to talk to someone about her problems. When her cousin visits once in a while, they do spend time together and go out to the movies and the beach. Child protection services became involved with the grandchildren a year ago due to allegations of abuse and neglect. They placed the children in the care of their grandmother. The children were allocated a case manager but she rarely saw the family due to a lack of resources and staff turnover. The service was planning to discharge the case because they had not received any further allegations of abuse or neglect. You are working as the new case manager in the child protection service. You have received a referral from the intake team. They have received an anonymous telephone call, which you suspect is from Alice’s neighbours, alleging that the 2 young children are regularly seen wandering around the edge of the road unsupervised. The caller explained that they were worried about the children because their parents are ‘drug addicts’ and the grandmother is too sick to care for them. The intake team has assessed this situation as requiring further investigation.

OR

CASE STUDY 2
Natasha, a 13 year old girl, has been referred to child protection services by the school counsellor, who reports that she has been being sexually abused by her mother’s 19 year old half-brother. There are two other girls in the family: Emily aged 10 and Tara aged 8. Tara is doing well at school. Emily has been doing quite well, especially with music and netball, but her behaviour has started to deteriorate lately. Emily is starting to become rebellious at home and school as well.There has been a lot of conflict between Natasha and family members in the last 12-18 months. Natasha was a high performer in primary school, but has become very rebellious and difficult at school recently. Her grades have declined considerably over the last two years, and she only just scraped into year 9 this year. She is not handing in her homework and is suspected of truanting on a number of occasions. She is also behaving in a very sexualised manner with other students and teachers. Her father (Kevin, 39) has a very demanding job, and is frequently away from the family on business. When he is home, he is distant and detached from the children, and seems preoccupied with work. Mother (Julie, 36) works part time in a city restaurant, mostly during the day, but gets called in to take occasional night shifts. She also goes out with friends about once every two weeks, for company while her husband is away. She has a 19 year old half-brother who lived with the family for 6 months from the beginning of last year when he started at University. It is understood the abuse started during this time, and continues when he visits and when he baby-sits while Julie is out or working late and Kevin is away.

CASE STUDY 3
Kaela’a husband was killed in Somalia, as were her sister and mother. She has no relatives in Australia and has little social contact. Kaela has been suffering from depression since immigrating to Australia with her three children (aged three, five and nine). Kaela has a number of appointments during the week and leaves her nine year old daughter in charge of the younger children as she has no one else to care for the children. Kaela came into contact with the child protection system after reports were made concerning her three children being left alone for extended periods of time. A neighbour also reported that Kaela’s two younger children have been found wandering the streets on a number of occasions and that they have asked for food a few times.

Reference: Arney, F & Scott, D (eds) (2013) Working with Vulnerable Families, Cambridge University Press, Australia, Chapter 5, Lewig, K, Arney, F, Salveron, M &Barredo, M, Parenting in a new culture: working with refugee families p.101

Answer the following questions in your case study analysis:

Policy, legal, ethical issues

Briefly discuss the national policy framework relevant to the case study (e.g. National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children 2009-2020)
What legal implications are evident in the case study (e.g. using state based child protection legislation- South Australia Children’s Protection Act 1993)?
What social work ethics, knowledge and values support the intervention (e.g. AASW Code of Ethics)?

Social work practice approach

Identify the key issues in your assessment of the case study.
What social work practice approach will you use and why (e.g. culturally sensitive, strengths, solution focused etc)?
What intervention plan, options and steps would you consider and which one will you choose first/prioritise? How will you determine if the intervention is effective?
How might you collaborate with the client/s? Consider issues of power, gender and culture in the case study.

Feedback on this assessment will be provided on the Feedback Sheet uploaded on course homepage.

A minimum of 15 references is required.