Child Protection Interventions Research Articles

Domestic Spaces and Child Protection at Home. Physical Hygiene As a Focus of Interventions by Social Workers in France

In the domestic environment, child protection interventions may incorporate young children's personal hygiene activities. Professionals refer to personal hygiene as a starting point or as a goal for their child protection interventions. However, this goal is mentioned as one among others in the activities of family support workers (FSW) and social workers, intervening at home at the request of a judge. Parents inadequate care for young children is often described as “neglect”. This article attempts to understand how social workers take the question of personal hygiene into account complex situations of families facing multiple difficulties in their daily lives. However, in situations of hardship, the ability of parents and professionals to ensure children personal cleanliness often relies on housing, an area in which child protection professionals rarely intervene. As such, children’s personal hygiene can illustrate the difficulty for child protection professionals to consider all the daily constraints that constitute the framework of parental activity.

The influence of caregiver depression on adolescent mental health outcomes: findings from refugee settlements in Uganda

BackgroundFamily-level predictors, including caregiver depression, are considered important influences on adolescent mental health. Adolescent depression and anxiety in refugee settings is known to be a significant public health concern, yet there is very limited literature from humanitarian settings focusing on the relationship between caregiver mental health and adolescent mental health. In the context of a larger study on child protection outcomes in refugee settings, researchers explored the relationship between caregiver depression and adolescent mental health in two refugee settlements, Kiryandongo and Adjumani, in Uganda.MethodsAdolescents between 13 and 17 and their caregivers participated in a household survey, which included measures of adolescent anxiety and depression, and caregiver depression. Analysis was conducted using multiple logistic regression models, and results were reported for the full sample and for each site separately.ResultsIn Kiryandongo, a one-unit increase in a caregiver’s depression score tripled the odds that the adolescent would have high levels of anxiety symptoms (AOR: 3.0, 95% CI: 1.4, 6.1), while in Adjumani, caregiver depression did not remain significant in the final model. Caregiver depression, gender and exposure to violence were all associated with higher symptoms of adolescent depression in both sites and the full sample, for example, a one unit increase in caregiver depression more than tripled the odds of higher levels of symptoms of adolescent depression (AOR: 3.6, 95% CI: 2.0, 6.2). Caregiver depression is a consistently significantly associated with adverse mental health outcomes for adolescents in this study.ConclusionsAdolescent well-being is significantly affected by caregiver mental health in this refugee context. Child protection interventions in humanitarian contexts do not adequately address the influence of caregivers’ mental health, and there are opportunities to integrate child protection programming with prevention and treatment of caregivers’ mental health symptoms.

Predicting child maltreatment: A meta-analysis of the predictive validity of risk assessment instruments

Risk assessment is crucial in preventing child maltreatment since it can identify high-risk cases in need of child protection intervention. Despite widespread use of risk assessment instruments in child welfare, it is unknown how well these instruments predict maltreatment and what instrument characteristics are associated with higher levels of predictive validity. Therefore, a multilevel meta-analysis was conducted to examine the predictive accuracy of (characteristics of) risk assessment instruments. A literature search yielded 30 independent studies (N=87,329) examining the predictive validity of 27 different risk assessment instruments. From these studies, 67 effect sizes could be extracted. Overall, a medium significant effect was found (AUC=0.681), indicating a moderate predictive accuracy. Moderator analyses revealed that onset of maltreatment can be better predicted than recurrence of maltreatment, which is a promising finding for early detection and prevention of child maltreatment. In addition, actuarial instruments were found to outperform clinical instruments. To bring risk and needs assessment in child welfare to a higher level, actuarial instruments should be further developed and strengthened by distinguishing risk assessment from needs assessment and by integrating risk assessment with case management.

Inequalities in English child protection practice under austerity: A universal challenge?

AbstractThe role that area deprivation, family poverty, and austerity policies play in the demand for and supply of children's services has been a contested issue in England in recent years. These relationships have begun to be explored through the concept of inequalities in child welfare, in parallel to the established fields of inequalities in education and health. This article focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and out‐of‐home care and child protection interventions. The work scales up a pilot study in the West Midlands to an all‐England sample, representative of English regions and different levels of deprivation at a local authority (LA) level. The analysis evidences a strong relationship between deprivation and intervention rates and large inequalities between ethnic categories. There is further evidence of the inverse intervention law (Bywaters et al., 2015): For any given level of neighbourhood deprivation, higher rates of child welfare interventions are found in LAs that are less deprived overall. These patterns are taking place in the context of cuts in spending on English children's services between 2010–2011 and 2014–2015 that have been greatest in more deprived LAs. Implications for policy and practice to reduce such inequalities are suggested.

Conditional openness: young people define practices for successful child protection interventions

Taking the reforms of child protection legislation that have occurred since the 1980s as a backdrop, this paper considers young people’s perspectives on the factors that facilitated their engagement with child protection services and the barriers they perceived to effective service delivery. Drawing on findings from a New Zealand study of young people’s experience of multiple service use (child protection, mental health, youth justice and remedial education), the paper identifies that that rather than being ‘resistant’ or ‘hostile’ to statutory child protection intervention, young people reported a ‘conditional openness’. This conditional openness was characterised by three themes: communication; continuity and consistency; and contextual and cultural responsiveness. Interventions with these characteristics activated this conditional openness allowing effective interventions to occur. Using a series of case studies, comprising interviews and agency case file records; the paper considers the experiences of 109 young people (12–17 years) as well as those of the ‘person most knowledgeable;’ an adult nominated by young people because they knew the young person’s situation well.

Parental health and psychosomatic symptoms in preschool children: A cross-sectional study in Scania, Sweden.

The aim of the study was to assess the association between parental self-rated health and recurrent abdominal pain (RAP) in preschool children. A questionnaire, including questions about sociodemographic and psychosocial factors, lifestyle, parental and child health, was sent to parents of all 4-year-old children in Scania, Sweden. The response rate was 43.6%. The outcome was RAP and the main exposure was parental self-rated health (SRH). Covariates included sociodemographic, lifestyle and psychosocial factors. Logistic regression analyses were used in a five-step model to estimate the odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) of parental SRH in relation to child RAP. Logistic regression analysis showed higher odds of RAP among children whose parents reported domestic violence, economic worries and poor SRH (mothers OR = 2.1 (95% CI: 1.6, 2.7) and fathers OR = 1.5 (95% CI: 1.1, 2.0)). Adjustment for sociodemographic, lifestyle and psychosocial factors reduced the OR for RAP in the children of mothers with poor SRH (OR = 1.6 (95% CI: 1.2, 2.2)) and fathers with poor SRH (OR = 1.2 (CI 95%: 0.8, 1.7)). Poor SRH was associated with less reading to the child as well as parental perceptions of insufficiency in the interaction with the child. Health professionals have a key position to prevent psychosomatic symptoms in childhood by identifying the living conditions of children with RAP and particularly, to pay attention to parental poor health to identify if support to the family and/or child protection interventions are needed. Health professionals meeting adult patients with poor health should identify whether they are parents and have children who might need information, support and/or protection.

Poverty, exclusion and child protection practice: the contribution of ‘the politics of recognition&respect’

ABSTRACTThe affective dimensions of poverty, including the impact of wider policy discourses and services that ‘other’ and shame people in poverty, are increasingly recognized. In response, Lister [(2013). Power, not Pity: Poverty and Human Rights. Ethics and Social Welfare, 7(2), 109–123] advocates for ‘a politics of recognition&respect’ that centralizes the voices, participation and lived experiences of those who live in poverty. This paper considers how applying Lister’s theory could improve child protection (CP) social work in England, from a human rights and social justice perspective. The paper draws on findings from an ATD Fourth World participatory research project aimed at updating the course content for a pre-existing social worker training module on poverty awareness. The project brings together families with experience of poverty and CP interventions, social work practitioners and academics.

High-Conflict Family Cases Involving a Child Protection Agency: Report on Experience of Child Welfare and Family Justice Professionals and Suggestions for Good Practices

Child protection agencies (CPAs) are increasingly becoming involved in high conflict custody and access cases. High conflict cases often involve a number of dynamics that place children at risk of harm. Allegations of domestic violence (DV), child abuse, and alienation are common in high conflict cases. This paper reports on information collected from interviews with 64 Ontario professionals who have experience with high conflict separations that involve CPAs. These professionals include judges, parents’ lawyers, lawyers from the Ontario Office of the Children’s Lawyer (OCL), OCL clinical investigators (CI’s), private custody assessors, mediators, as well as CPA workers, supervisors and lawyers. The paper concludes by offering some recommendations for the different professional groups who confront high conflict family cases involving child protection intervention.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Ethnic Inequalities in Child Protection and Out-of-Home Care Intervention Rates

This paper examines the interlocking roles of ethnicity and deprivation in producing inequities in the proportion of children who are subject to state child protection interventions. In contrast to the USA, ethnic inequities have had little attention in research or policy in the UK and across Europe, and administrative data are limited and methodologically weak. A study of over 10 per cent of all children on child protection plans or who were looked after in out-of-home care in England in March 2012 is reported. Children from ethnic minority categories were much more likely than 'White' children to be living in disadvantaged areas and this has to be taken into account when examining intervention rates. Controlling for deprivation and examining small subgroups of the broad ethnic categories radically alters the simple understanding that 'Black' children are overrepresented compared to White amongst children in out-of-home care, while 'Asian' children are underrepresented. While this study could not explain these patterns, it reinforces the importance of both socio-economic circumstances and ethnicity for understanding inequities in intervention rates. The evidence underlines the powerful moral and economic case for action to reduce inequities in powerful state interventions in family life, not only in England, but internationally.

Exploring Societal Norms on Child Sexual Abuse in Albania: A Pilot Study

Child sexual abuse is a complex public health problem with devastating outcomes for the child herself and the society at large. Decades of research attest to the high prevalence of these harmful acts toward children and their impact for overall individual and societal well-being. In Albania, a country with a relatively high young population, very little empirical research has been devoted to this issue, focusing mainly on the prevalence and incidence of the phenomenon. Furthermore, there is a paucity of data on societal and cultural norms contributing to the existence of child sexual abuse; whereas an in-depth understanding of these factors is necessary for any meaningful child protection interventions to take place. The current study attempts to offer helpful insights on societal norms surrounding child sexual abuse in Albania. It is a qualitative study, conducted in the region of Lushnja, involving discussions from focus groups with adult participants that are key figures in child protection; namely, parents, teachers and professionals working in the child protection area. Findings indicate that whereas child sexual abuse is perceived as being present in Albanian society, it remains hidden under a veil of secrecy due to the sensitive and taboo nature of the phenomenon. A thorough discussion of societal norms that contribute to the hidden nature of the phenomenon is provided along with an acknowledgment that there are protective factors within many Albanian families and society that should be strengthened and further developed in order to protect children. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n6p309

Parental Participation in Statutory Child Protection Intervention in Scotland

Parental Participation in Statutory Child Protection Intervention in Scotland

‘E kuchú ta korta mi’ versus ‘I cut myself with a knife’: Cultural Assumptions in Child Protection Intervention Processes

I conducted a longitudinal ethnographic PhD study between June 2009 and June 2012 to examine how intervention practices took place in 30 Dutch and Dutch-Curacaoan single-mother families with multiple problems, because interventions were often regarded as ineffective in 'multi-problem families'. Drawing on this study, this article aims to demonstrate that cultural assumptions, along lines of, among other things, gender, ethnicity and socio-economic class, play a major role in family care and child protection intervention processes in the Netherlands. I will provide different examples of both social work text and talk to illustrate underlying categorical presumptions. It will be seen how the culturally embedded social policy category ‘multi-problem family’ plays a role in Dutch social work policy and practice. I will then demonstrate how important cultural notions are (made) in social work encounters between the mothers and the institutional representatives in question through giving an insight into how cultural beliefs are mobilized in encounters. I argue that one should be more aware of how (essentialist) cultural notions are mobilized in child welfare and protection intervention processes in order to bridge the gap between the life worlds of the mothers and the professionals, as disconnection appears to lie at the core of why family care and child protection intervention practices are often flawed.

Saving Children, Controlling Families

This study shows that state efforts at child protection are structured by the policy regimes in which they are enmeshed. Using administrative data on child protection, criminal justice, and social welfare interventions, I show that children are separated from their families and placed into foster care far more frequently in states with extensive and punitive criminal justice systems than in states with broad and generous welfare programs. However, large welfare bureaucracies interact with welfare program enrollment to create opportunities for the surveillance of families, suggesting that extensive and administratively complex welfare states engage in “soft” social control through the surveillance and regulation of family behavior. The article further shows that institutionalization, a particularly restrictive form of foster care placement, is least common in states with broad and generous welfare regimes and generally more common under punitive regimes. Taken together, these findings show that policy regimes influence the interaction between families and the state through their proximate effects on family structure and well-being and through institutional effects that delimit the routines and scripts through which policymakers and street-level bureaucrats intervene to protect children.

Giving poverty a voice: families’ experiences of social work practice in a risk-averse child protection system

This article explores family members’ perspectives on child protection interventions within the current neoliberal and punitive policy and practice contexts. The material is drawn from the ‘Giving Poverty a Voice’ social worker training project, a collaborative project involving family members and activists from ATD Fourth World (the international anti-poverty organisation), academics in the field of social work and practitioners, including social workers, lawyers and ATD Fourth World team members.

Detection of unsafety in families with parental and/or child developmental problems at the start of family support.

BackgroundRisk assessment is crucial in preventing child maltreatment as it can identify high-risk cases in need of child protection intervention. Despite this importance, there have been no validated risk assessment instruments available in the Netherlands for assessing the risk of child maltreatment. Therefore, the predictive validity of the California Family Risk Assessment (CFRA) was examined in Dutch families who received family support. In addition, the added value of a number of experimental items was examined. Finally, it was examined whether the predictive value of the instrument could be improved by modifying the scoring procedure.MethodsDutch families who experienced parenting and/or child developmental problems and were referred by the Centres for Youth and Family for family support between July 2009 and March 2011 were included. This led to a sample of 491 families. The predictive validity of the CFRA and the added value of the experimental items were examined by calculating AUC values. A CHAID analysis was performed to examine whether the scoring procedure could be improved.ResultsAbout half of the individual CFRA items were not related to future reports of child maltreatment. The predictive validity of the CFRA in predicting future reports of child maltreatment was found to be modest (AUC = .693). The addition of some of the experimental items and the modification of the scoring procedure by including only items that were significantly associated with future maltreatment reports resulted in a ‘high’ predictive validity (AUC = .795).ConclusionsThis new set of items might be a valuable instrument that also saves time because only variables that uniquely contribute to the prediction of future reports of child maltreatment are included. Furthermore, items that are perceived as difficult to assess by professionals, such as parental mental health problems or parents’ history of abuse/neglect, could be omitted without compromising predictive validity. However, it is important to examine the psychometric properties of this new set of items in a new dataset.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12888-016-0715-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Family Engagement in Child Protection Social Work

Family engagement is key to the success of child protection interventions. Families can only benefit from the social work interventions they are committed to being involved with, and a multitude of factors act as barriers to effective family engagement with child protection interventions. Despite the importance of family engagement as a practice value there is a lack of specificity in the field regarding how we build engagement, how we identify when it is present, and how we concretely identify its positive results. This article first reviews successful family engagement strategies and examines facilitators of and barriers to effective engagement. A model is then presented that can guide social workers, supervisors, and evaluators by operationalizing the process of family engagement. The model first details actions child protection social workers can take to build engagement and proposes indications that effective engagement has been established. The model then details the increases in information, resources, and empowerment that result from family engagement. This model supports efforts of social workers and their supervisors to enhance engagement with families and assists evaluators in identifying whether engagement is present and has been applied in child protection, kinship, and wraparound practice settings.

Disabled Children and the Child Protection System: A Cause for Concern

Disabled children are more likely to be abused than their non‐disabled peers. Despite this heightened risk, the abuse of disabled children often goes undetected and under‐reported. This qualitative study investigated the specific issues faced by practitioners in Scotland in supporting disabled children at risk of significant harm. Interviews were held with participants from six local authority areas and across five different services, and five focus groups with child protection committees (total 61 participants). There were positive messages about putting the child at the very heart of child protection assessment and intervention, regardless of any impairment that a child may have. However, there was also concern that practice was at times parent‐centred. Some participants appeared to be ‘muddling through’ in practice and many practitioners lacked confidence when working with disabled children. Data from this study suggest that thresholds for disabled children may be higher than for non‐disabled children. Participants reported high levels of interagency working and saw this as inherently positive, although they recognised some failings and tensions. There is widespread commitment across the child protection system to putting the child at the centre. However, getting it right for every child does not mean treating every child the same. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.‘specific issues faced by practitioners in Scotland in supporting disabled children at risk of significant harm’Key Practitioner Messages There is significant evidence that disabled children are at greater risk of abuse than their non‐disabled peers. Practitioners are sometimes so concerned with keeping the child at the centre they may fail to account for the added complexities and vulnerabilities that impairment can bring. Equality does not mean treating every child the same.

Responding to child deaths: the work of Australia's Victorian Child Death Review Committee

The Victorian Child Death Review Committee (VCDRC) in Australia is a multidisciplinary Ministerial Advisory Committee established to review the deaths of children either currently child protection clients or known to the statutory child protection system. The Committee provides advice about each child death as well as insights into what are the surrounding patterns and issues. Key to this role is examining the contribution of the service sectors to the protection of children and the routine practices that are in place to respond to children and vulnerability. This paper provides a snapshot of the cases referred to the VCDRC and the key messages for practice drawn from them. What emerges is that often the threshold for when statutory child protection services must be involved in child and family matters can be ambiguous and that agreement about intervention, the level and nature of need or risk, and when cumulative harm and neglect require statutory responses are not always shared between agencies. It is clear that the lack of common frameworks about what constitutes child protection intervention challenges services. It is recommended that there be and used agreed definitions and frameworks to ensure shared understandings and collaborative responses across the service and legal systems.

Poverty and Decision Making in Child Welfare and Protection: Deepening the Bias–Need Debate

The influence of socio-economic background factors, such as poverty, on the risk of children to be disproportionately represented and placed in residential care has increasingly been the subject of international research. This article reports on the findings of a research project that focused on the relationship between poverty and child welfare and protection (CWP) interventions in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium). Using logistic regression models (N = 33,423), we examined which specific socio-economic risk factors in the total population of children enhances the risk of CWP interventions. The results show that all included socio-economic variables, except one, show an increased risk of CWP interventions. The results also reveal that a rather dominant social, cultural and historically rooted construction of middle-class family life seems to be an important ground for interventions. Based on these findings, it is argued that the current debate on bias might mask implicit assumptions within CWP decision making.

Child Protection in Sport: Reflections on Thirty Years of Science and Activism

This paper examines the responses of state and third sector agencies to the emergence of child abuse in sport since the mid-1980s. As with other social institutions such as the church, health and education, sport has both initiated its own child protection interventions and also responded to wider social and political influences. Sport has exemplified many of the changes identified in the brief for this special issue, such as the widening of definitional focus, increasing geographic scope and broadening of concerns to encompass health and welfare. The child protection agenda in sport was initially driven by sexual abuse scandals and has since embraced a range of additional harms to children, such as physical and psychological abuse, neglect and damaging hazing (initiation) rituals. Whereas in the 1990s, only a few sport organisations acknowledged or addressed child abuse and protection (notably, UK, Canada and Australia), there has since been rapid growth in interest in the issue internationally, with many agencies now taking an active role in prevention work. These agencies adopt different foci related to their overall mission and may be characterised broadly as sport-specific (focussing on abuse prevention in sport), children’s rights organisations (focussing on child protection around sport events) and humanitarian organisations (focussing on child development and protection through sport). This article examines how these differences in organisational focus lead to very different child protection approaches and “solutions”. It critiques the scientific approaches used thus far to inform activism and policy changes and ends by considering future challenges for athlete safeguarding and welfare.