Professor Thea Brown

Senior Lecturer

Profile

Professor Thea Brown was appointed as Professor of Social Work in 1988, serving as Head of the Department, the Director of International Programs and Deputy Head and now Professor, Research.   Prior to this she worked as a social work manager in health services in NSW, in health and local government in Victoria, and as an academic in Social Work at Melbourne University.

She has had a long interest in social work education.  At Monash she established the first Distance Education Degree in Social Work internatioanlly, the on campus and distance education coursework MSW and the BSW and MSW degrees accredited both in Australia and in Singapore and delivered in Singapore.  She has written for and edited the Australian journal "Advances in Social Work and Welfare Education"; she has undertaken accreditation of undergraduate and post graduate Social Work courses including those in Hong Kong and Malaysia;  she has contributed to international conferences on Social Work Education. 

Her most recent research focus has been on separating parents and their children, on family violence and parental separation and divorce and on services supporting separating parents.  She has served on a number of governmental committees in the family law policy area.  Her work has been published in Australian journals, Children Australia, Family Matters, Trends and Issues in Criminology and overseas journals, Social Services Journal (Singapore), Child Abuse Review, (UK), Kinder Mishandling, (the Netherlands), Family Court Review, (USA) and Child Abuse and Neglect: the International Journal (USA).  Her most recent book publications are a chapter in "New Interventions in Child Abuse and Domestic Violence" edited by Catherine Humphreys and Nicky Stanley, Jessica Kingsley, 2005, and her book co-authored with Renata Alexander, "Child Abuse and Family Law", Allen and Unwin, 2007.