From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia.
A caseworker is a person
who is employed by a government
agency or a private organisation
to take on and individual's case
and provide them advocacy,
information or other services.
Caseworkers are employed by a
large number of organisations in
the
UK, especially in the
voluntary and public sectors. In
the
United States, most government
agencies that provide social
services to children in poor or
troubled familes have a staff of
caseworkers, each of whom is a
assigned a proportion of the cases
under review at any given time. In
Australia, caseworkers are
predominantly assigned to work
with
Aboriginal children.
As of
2004, there were approximately
"876,000 child welfare caseworkers
in the United States. Seventy-two
percent are women,and their mean
salary is $30,590. Caseworker
turnover is high; every year, an
estimated 20 percent of public
caseworkers and 40 percent of
private caseworkers leave their
positions.:[1]
Because of the delicate
position of responsibility in
which they are placed, caseworkers
are often blamed when things go
wrong with a family that they have
been assigned to work with.
In one case that received
national media attention, the
caseworker for
Rilya Wilson, a
Florida child whose
1999 disappearance was not
discovered until
2002, faced termination for
purportedly falsifying reports
that she had continued to visit
with the family to check on the
child's condition.
