Social Policy and Advocacy: Violence Prevention

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Children and Adolescents case study
Susana is a 15-year-old, Caucasian female who lives with her parents and younger sister in a middle-class suburban neighborhood. Her family has been involved with the county Child Protective Services due to a persistent problem with truancy attending public school during a 6-month period. The school principal requested the agency’s intervention because Susana had only attended school for 1 day during the fall semester. Her attendance the previous year was also poor, as she had missed a total of 64 out of 175 days.
As the social worker assigned to the case, I met with the school principal as well as with Susana and her parents. The principal reported that Susana, other than her recent persistent truancy, had a good school record. He said that her teachers never reported any unusual behaviors other than that Susana was somewhat quiet, shy, and kept to herself during both class and recess times. Her grades and test scores were above average during her elementary and middle school years until last year when she started to fall behind as a result of missing so many school days. In accordance with school policy and state law (which mandates that all children up to age 16 attend school), school personnel called her parents and met with them on at least three occasions about the excessive truancy. The parents were described as concerned and cooperative but told the officials that they were unsuccessful in motivating Susana to go back to school. Eventually, the situation progressed to the point that the parents were being assessed fines by local magistrates for the continued truancy, and the case was referred to county family court for further evaluation.
When I conducted a home visit, I found that the living conditions appeared good and that both parents seemed to have a calm and relaxed approach in their communication with each other and their two daughters. They said they had always had good relationships with their daughters and that neither had ever had serious disciplinary issues. They said that Susana had always been more reserved and less outgoing than her younger sister, who was 12 years old. The father worked in a white-collar job, and the mother did not work outside of the home. They reported no history of serious physical or mental health issues or significant traumas that might have prompted Susana’s recent pattern of staying away from school. Susana seemed polite but also seemed reticent to discuss why she did not want to go back to school. She had few friends, seemed to stay at home all the time, and appeared very much attached to her mother, especially when compared to most other teens the same age. In contrast, her younger sister was described as having many friends and being involved with multiple extracurricular activities.

Post the strategy you would use to address the Teen First director’s request if you were the social worker in the Bradley case. Then, describe a hypothetical situation in which an organization’s decision conflicts with your personal/professional ethics but remains within the law. Explain how you would respond to this situation, and why.
Support your post with specific references to the resources. Be sure to provide full APA citations for your references.

Sample Solution

Defined as “the sub-set of the selectorate whose support is necessary for the leader to remain in power”[20], the winning coalition, as shown above in Figure 3, is very important in determining whether a non-democratic regime can survive; the larger it becomes as a proportion of the selectorate, the greater the likelihood of the next most popular regime being able to take power. The size itself is mainly influenced by the type of authoritarian regime, and is particularly small in the case of monarchies, which, in the case of hereditary monarchies, only require the approval of a branch of the ruling family in order to survive. As explained by Bueno de Mesquita et al., “in autocratic systems, the winning coalition is often a small group of powerful individuals. [Thus] when a challenger emerges to the sitting leader and proposes an alternative allocation of resources, [the leader thwarts the challenge since he or she] retains a winning coalition”[21]; the size of which is in an inverse relationship with the likelihood of successful challenge, since fewer people must be ‘bought-off’. In fact, “the Selectorate Theory (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2005) theorises that it is the size difference between the selectorate and the winning coalition […] that is most important”[22] in influencing the survival of non-democratic regimes.

This theory has, however, received much criticism. Largely, the extent to which it is true, that having a small winning coalition is the most significant factor affecting the survival of non-democratic regimes, is dependent on how stable the regime appears to be, since “high political instability should reduce the effect of corruption, because actors have less incentive to bribe a government when it is unlikely to survive”[23], meaning the loyalty of the ruler’s winning coalition may become less effective. Thus, in reality, if a challenge to power did arise, the ruler may not be able to rely on his winning coalition if they were, in fact, more confident in the challenger overthrowing the incumbent, as in this circumstance it is highly likely that they would switch allegiances. Furthermore, Clark and Stone argue that Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s analysis “suffers from omitted variable analysis [which] can make the results appear stronger than they are. Once this error is corrected, the results are no longer interesting.”[24] This empirically undermines the foundations of the theory which Bueno de Mesquita et al. try to argue.

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