Research on Protective Service Workforce Policy

Abstract

In 2020, COVID-19 has profoundly changed people’s lives, and has still remained with a public health emergency imposed immediate as well as long term economic and social impacts which devastating effects on vulnerable groups. The pandemic has hit the vulnerable groups, especially for the children, elderly, disabled, and at-risk families disproportionately and is likely to exacerbate current inequalities. The COVID-19 outbreak acts as a contributing factor of abuse, maltreatment and violence. Although there is no comparative real-time data on the prevalence of abuse/violence among vulnerable groups in Korea, in some OECD countries, domestic violence services and children’s hot-lines reports increased levels of risk for vulnerable people. Thus, strengthening protection service workforce is essential to mitigate and to be resilient from the distress of abuse and violence among those vulnerable groups. Currently, protection service workforce takes an active role to help strengthen local protection system from all forms of violence, abuse, and neglect and to respond to both short and protracted crises related to those violence. The aim of this study is to systematic review on 5-different types of protection services workforce including relevant policies and regulations and the statutory frameworks related to their hiring, employing and training; and to the discharge of duties of protection services workforce using the DACUM technique. This study only focused on 5 different protection services from the Child Protection Agency, Protection Agency for the Elderly, Advocacy Agency for Persons with Disabilities, Counseling Center Against Family Violence, and the School Social Workers. To examine the validity of job description through DACUM, protection service workers were surveyed relative to importance, performance, and their perceptions of challenges and opportunities, including work environment, supervision, job satisfaction, and ongoing professional development. The web-based On-line survey was conducted September 14 ~ October 9, 2020. A total of 1,075 protection service worker-questionnaires and 116 organization-questionnaires were finally used in the analysis. Policy measures were suggested to clarify the presence, role and effectiveness of protection service institutions and the protection service workforce including statutory frameworks. In addition, this study suggested improvements of labor conditions of protection service workforce among different settings and professional development and continuing education opportunities including in service training incentives.