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Article
Fear Management: How Child Protection Workers Engage with Non-Citizen Immigrant Families
Children and Youth Services Review (2012)
  • Katrin Križ, Emmanuel College
  • Elspeth Slayter, Salem State University
  • Alyson Iannicelli, Emmanuel College
  • Jonathan Lourie, Emmanuel College
Abstract
Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a sample of 24 child protection workers in the northeastern United States, we analyze how workers engage with non-citizen immigrant families. Confirming findings from previous scholarship on immigrants' fears when interacting with Child Protection Services (CPS), workers reported encountering different fear factors—the organizations, events, or people that instill fear in immigrant families. These included fear of deportation, fear of CPS workers as the people who remove children, and fear of CPS as a potentially repressive government agency. We also found that workers seek to minimize or leverage these fears in the engagement process—we refer to this process as fear management. Most of the workers interviewed seek to minimize immigrant families' fears, and we show that they employ four strategies to do so: providing knowledge, brokering services, doing dignity and status work, and learning culture.
Keywords
  • Child protection,
  • Child welfare,
  • Client engagement,
  • Deportation,
  • Fear,
  • Immigrant families
Disciplines
Publication Date
January, 2012
DOI
10.1016/j.childyouth.2011.11.001
Citation Information
Katrin Križ, Elspeth Slayter, Alyson Iannicelli and Jonathan Lourie. "Fear Management: How Child Protection Workers Engage with Non-Citizen Immigrant Families" Children and Youth Services Review Vol. 34 Iss. 1 (2012) p. 316 - 323
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/elspeth-slayter/5/