Protocol to investigate child abuse in foster care

Hennepin County Community Services, a large urban agency in the midwestern United States, developed specific procedures for investigating complaints of abuse and neglect of children in foster care in 1980. During the period from May 1980 through November 1981, approximately 125 complaints of abuse and neglect in foster homes were investigated. This article discusses the Protocol, including the institutional abuse meeting, investigation by an independent third party, and statements of finding. Factors that appear to be significant in abusing foster parents are marital status, if the foster parents had children of their own, length of time licensed, and presence of previous complaints. Victims were slightly more likely to be male, aged 4-12. Many victims appeared to have adjusted well to the foster homes. Information is presented on how the abuse was reported. Recommendations include: investigations conducted by an objective third person, commitment of the administration, and enlistment of legal personnel and foster parents during implementation. Also included are prevention of abuse through comprehensive screening and then training of foster parents, social workers' close contact with foster parents and foster children, avoiding high risk placement, forbidding corporal punishment, and sensitizing social workers to abuse-neglect of children in foster care.     

Bereavement and personal constructs: old theories and new concepts

This paper reviews several traditional and current theories regarding the nature of bereavement and argues that conceptualizing grieving in personal construct terms can clarify and extend existing work in this area. In particular, it is contended that a personal construct view of the importance of "core role" (self) structure helps explain Bowlby's theory of "defensive exclusion" of the reality of the death: because an individual's perceived relationship with a significant other helps define his or her core role, loss of the relationship through death directly challenges the most central dimensions of the bereaved person's construct system. Implications of this cognitive theory of bereavement are detailed, and several testable hypotheses are put forward.