This chapter focuses on the role that Adult Protective Services (APS) and related service systems play in protecting vulnerable older adults and adults with disabilities from abuse, neglect, and exploitation. It articulates policy issues connected to elder justice. The chapter also explores human rights issues related to elder abuse, aging, and disabilities, particularly how to balance rights to self-determination and safety when working with abused, neglected, and exploited older adults. APS operate within a continuum of services that challenge social workers in their efforts to respond effectively to elder abuse. In addition to knowledge of aging, disabilities, the dynamics of family violence and care giving, and community resources and skills in capacity assessment, working in multidisciplinary teams, advocacy, and systems navigation, social workers need commitment to values of self-determination and empowerment to guide their work in this system.

The authors of this chapter are tasked with reviewing the dos and don’ts of interacting with people with disabilities as human beings. A collection of suggested behaviors, a disability etiquette, has emerged from the collective experience of people with disabilities and is widely available in brochures and on the Internet. Although disability etiquette is an important read for anyone in the field, it is not a sufficient guide for the rehabilitation counselor. The authors are a value-driven profession. They share allegiance to the fundamental mission of full community inclusion for people with disabilities. They act with their clients and on their behalf to help individuals achieve standing in their communities and to advance a more inclusive world for all people with disabilities. Disability etiquette is only the superficial expression of professional values that have much deeper roots and higher aspirations.

This chapter describes the importance and need for interdisciplinary collaboration in forensic settings. It discusses how the evidence-based principles of risk, need, and responsivity (RNR) model can guide interdisciplinary collaboration with justice-involved individuals. The chapter highlights a treatment program for high-risk justice-involved males demonstrating interdisciplinary collaboration and specifically the role of the forensic social worker. Interdisciplinary collaboration is an essential core skill in evidence-based forensic social work practice. Interdisciplinary collaboration can be multidimensional, interactional, and developmental, and the following strategies have been identified as most important in achieving a best practice: preplanning, commitment, communication, strong leadership, understanding the cultures of collaborating agencies, and structural supports and adequate resources for collaboration.

Community-based rehabilitation (CBR) originated in 1978 as a strategy for improving rehabilitation services and outcomes for people with disabilities living in low-and middle-income countries who were not well served by traditional medical-model rehabilitation. CBR enlists and empowers the person’s social network from family to community to provide and sustain a network of care and support, create opportunities for participation, and remove physical and attitudinal barriers to inclusion. Guidelines for CBR practice are ensconced in the five key components of the CBR matrix: health, education, livelihood, social, and empowerment. Poverty and its consequences are a particularly central concern to CBR planning as a prerequisite to robust community health and health care. Empowerment is the starting point for CBR planning, acting as an organizing feature of the plan, and the source of its motivation for success.

This chapter describes a forensic practice framework using a human rights and social justice systems approach. It articulates the definition and theme-based strategies that distinguish forensic social work from social work practice as usual. The chapter then proposes an integrated theoretical perspective that the authors refer to as a human rights and social justice systems (HR-SJS) approach. This approach helps to visualize forensic social work practice in any practice setting. The chapter also reviews the history of forensic social work using the United States as the case example to illustrate how a two-pronged approached to practice was integrated throughout this specialized arena of practice. A review of forensic social work history shows that well over 100 years ago, social workers understood that government, as author and institutor of policy, can and should be an arena for reform.

This chapter is designed to provide social workers with an introductory overview to correctional health and psychosocial care with a focus on prison healthcare. It provides an introductory overview of the role of health and justice disparities as a mass incarceration driver and an overview of core themes of social work practice in a correctional setting. In addition, it presents examples of human rights instruments and laws that address health and criminal justice issues so that social workers can judge the extent to which correctional settings in which they work or may work are consistent with these standards. Also included is a review of relevant research and evidence-based practices for the justice population that can help guide the social work response. The chapter concludes with case studies and discussion questions to assist social workers to better understand practice, policy, and research issues significant for the future correctional healthcare delivery system.

Rehabilitation counseling (RC) recognized family impact on service outcomes decades ago (Power & Hershenson, 2003; Westin & Reiss, 1979), but failed to develop substantive research (Bryan, 2009), practice, or policy (Kneipp & Bender, 1981) on their behalf. The cursory overview of family counseling approaches presented in this chapter is informative as a gestalt of theories and as a collection of unique tools. From the Community-based Rehabilitation Counseling (CRC) perspective, the therapeutic tools of family counseling can be repurposed for inclusive community development outcomes through community processes in all of the nested and networked communities that populate our lives. Thinking about counseling in systems and inclusive community development provides the backdrop for a CRC consideration of the models and tools of family counseling. The chapter describes models that align with social justice and integrated author’s own thinking in the hypothetical discipline of the CRC.

The disability rights movement is the quintessential case study for empowerment and a window into rehabilitation counseling’s challenges in conceptualizing family practice. The political discourse between social power and disability exemplified in the disability rights movement is the space within which empowerment resides. Rehabilitation counseling must enter this politicized space to fully understand what empowerment means. The consumer-directed theory of empowerment (CDTE) provides an essential point of departure for clarifying empowerment in the context of families and community-based rehabilitation counseling. Psychological empowerment has affective, cognitive, behavioral, and relational dimensions that constitute people’s sense of empowerment. Empowerment in community development ranges from issues of self-advocacy and civic engagement in the most proximal of environments to mobilizing citizenry in community change at municipal, state, and global levels. The empowered client remains at the center of all service and maximally in control of planning, implementation, coordination, and evaluation.

Identity gives people a sense of constancy and centeredness across the sometimes-turbulent change that comes with living. This chapter presents the developmental concept of identity through its manifestations at different levels of community, revealing a complex and systemic context for rehabilitation counseling. Each level of identity such as personal, social, and collective, denotes a potential point of counseling exchange with the family. The chapter describes how the experience of disability challenges the family system and how that experience is inculcated at each level of identity for each participating member. It is important for a family-inclusive profession to contemplate the meaning of rehabilitation counseling in the context of family identity. The working alliance between the counselor and the family eschews the clinical for an intentional community of purpose that emerges from a joint common cause: full community inclusion for the person with a disability, and support for the participating family.

This chapter provides an orientation to the critical issues, history, trends, policies, programs, and intervention strategies of the juvenile justice system. It reviews the types, functions, and legal responsibilities of the various juvenile justice agencies and institutions. The chapter describes the case flow within the juvenile justice system. It also discusses systems of care in juvenile justice, and specialized assessment and treatment issues with adolescents, including sexually abusive youth. It explores the foundation and groundwork for the study of juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice system while delineating the legal definitions of juvenile status offenses and juvenile delinquency, examining the nine steps in the juvenile justice case-flow process. The chapter also gives attention to systems of care, the link between trauma and delinquency, as well as the assessment and treatment considerations for forensic social workers when addressing the specialized needs of juveniles in the justice system.