Social Media and Child Welfare Work

Background:  Digital technology and social media are increasingly becoming commonplace platforms for both communication and connection.  In the field of child welfare, social media can pose both significant benefits and risks.  With respect to worker’s privacy and protection, client contact, mining for connections for children in out-of-home care, finding missing parents and/or runaway youth, and ensuring child safety, there are many considerations to be made for the use of social media in child welfare.  Yet, there is little information in the literature about the ethical and effective use of social media in child welfare.  An exploratory study was undertaken to examine the extent to which states have adapted policies concerning the use of social media in child welfare work and the extent to which trainings are provided to child welfare workers concerning social media.   

Methods:  A variety of means were employed to identify state-wide administrators, directors, and/or coordinators for child welfare training in each state.  An email address for training personnel was located for 49 states.  An email was sent to the identified contact person in each state inviting them to participate in an electronic survey. 

Results:   From among the 49 training representatives, 15 responded.  This is a 31% response rate. While the low number of responses is a significant limitation to generalizing the results to the broader population of states, the results do point to some trends.  No state training representative identified that his/her state had a comprehensive policy that addressed whether, when, and how child welfare workers could use social media in their work.  Eight states (53%) provide training to staff on how to protect their privacy on-line.  Eight states (53%) provide training on searching for or communicating with clients on-line.  Six states (40%) provide training on talking with youth about their on-line activities.  Overall, state training representatives reported that there were more benefits than risks to children in out-of-home care using the internet and social media to obtain information and to connect with friends and family; and that there were more benefits than risks to child welfare staff using social media to pursue agency goals.  However, only two states spend two or more hours training on social media.    

Conclusions and Implications:  While social media can pose risks to staff who work in child welfare and to children and youth in out-of-home care, there appears to be little training available to child welfare workers on how to protect themselves and their privacy on-line and how to talk with youth about the potential dangers inherent in on-line activities.  Furthermore, while social media can offer benefits to children and youth in out-of-home care, there is little reported staff training on how to effectively utilize social media to find extended family, to re-engage children with important relationships, to connect children with family and friends, and to search for missing parents and runaway youth.  Further efforts need to be taken to develop and provide training to child welfare workers on the ethical and effective use of social media in child welfare work.