News Archive
Practice
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Social work and police work have more overlap than is commonly thought. Approximately 80% of calls to police are social service related. Police are also frontline responders addressing situations involving people experiencing homelessness, substance use or youth-involved crime and often find themselves striving to deescalate a disturbance or connect people with social services.
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Homelessness has become more than a serious issue affecting society. It is also a public health epidemic nationwide. In Los Angeles, the crisis is particularly acute, with more than 69,000 people experiencing homelessness in 2022. For most, the problem appears unsolvable and the best we can hope for is to mitigate it.
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The USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work was honored with a visit from Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon who met faculty and staff of our Trauma Recovery Center (TRC@USC), the first comprehensive victim recovery behavioral health clinic at USC. TRC@USC clients are referred by a variety of public safety agencies and community organization partners, including the District Attorney's Office.
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Over 20 million people in the United States were diagnosed with Substance Use Disorder (SUD) in 2019, yet only 10% of these people received treatment.
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The violent crime rate in California increased 6.7% in 2021. While remaining relatively low compared to historic highs in the early 1990s, that still suggests that over 1.8 million people across the state experienced a violent crime in 2021.
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One of the things we have learned from the pandemic is who our essential workforce is – the people who keep us healthy, stock our shelves with food, teach our children, and deliver the goods we cannot live without. But who is considered an essential or frontline worker, and is that definition keeping up with today’s health care models?
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As children and adolescents go back to school across the country this month, they face escalating mental health challenges. Clinical anxiety and depression among youth has doubled during the pandemic. Gun violence in the U.S. has reached an unprecedented level, and according to a June 2022 report by the National Center for Education Statistics, school shootings during the 2020-21 school year reached the highest number in two decades.
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On May 11, 2022, John Oberg walks the stage to receive his Doctorate in Social Work (DSW) from the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, a long-held goal for this self-described “Trojan for Life” whose grandfather, a surgeon, taught in the USC medical school and whose mother is a USC alumna. He began a pre-med undergraduate degree at USC and then his path led him elsewhere, in the process earning a BA and then an MBA with concentrations in management of technology, policy and planning.
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Laura Trejo came to Los Angeles from El Salvador at age eleven, speaking no English, and immediately set her sights on attending the University of Southern California, a goal she has now achieved in spades. Trejo is a triple Trojan, with a BA and MS in Gerontology and a Master of Public Administration (MPA), and is receiving her fourth degree from USC in 2022, a Doctorate of Social Work (DSW), making her among the elite few to achieve this distinction.
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As a child, Jennifer Weck always knew she wanted to work in a school. When other kids were pretending to be doctors or astronauts, she was pretending to be the school principal. Now, after a career in health and fitness and having two children, Weck has come full circle. She will complete her Master in Social Work (MSW), with an emphasis in school social work, in May 2022.