Out Of Harm S Way

Jack Thompson is on a mission to protect children from violent and obscene video games, music lyrics, shock jock radio shows, and television programs. He chronicles his spiritual journey from bystander to activist and offers the sociological, medical, scientific, and legal evidence that will motivate Americans to get involved.

Out of Harm’s Way chronicles the career of a woman who has dedicated her life to animal rescue, describing her participation in rescue efforts at the scene of such disaster as the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, and outlines ways to prepare pets for disaster situations.

The moving and remarkable story of the wartime evacuees who were sent abroad by their families.

Despite many well-intentioned efforts to create, revise, reform, and establish an effective child welfare system in the United States, the system continues to fail to ensure the safety and well-being of maltreated children. Out of Harm's Way explores the following four critical aspects of the system and presents a specific change in each that would lead to lasting improvements. - Deciding who is the client. Child welfare systems attempt to balance the needs of the child and those of the parents, often failing both. Clearly answering this question is the most important, yet unaddressed, issue facing the child welfare system. - Decisions. The key task for a caseworker is not to provide services but to make decisions regarding child abuse and neglect, case goals, and placement; however, practitioners have only the crudest tools at their disposal when making what are literally life and death decisions. - The Perverse Incentive. Billions of dollars are spent each year to place and maintain children in out-of-home care. Foster care is meant to be short-term, yet the existing federal funding serves as a perverse incentive to keep children in out-of-home placements. - Aging out. More than 20,000 youth age out of the foster care system each year, and yet what the system calls "emancipation" could more accurately be viewed as child neglect. After having spent months, years, or longer moving from placement to placement, aging-out youth are suddenly thrust into homelessness, unemployment, welfare, and oppressive disadvantage. The chapters in this book offer a blueprint for reform that eschews the tired cycle of a tragedy followed by outrage and calls for more money, staff, training, and lawsuits that provide, at best, fleeting relief as a new complacency slowly sets in until the cycle repeats. If we want, instead, to try something else, the changes that Gelles outlines in this book are affordable, scalable, and proven.