Dual system involvement: A scoping review on the intersection of child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

A taxonomy of states' approaches to plans of safe care.

Evaluating the effect of a school-based material needs intervention on child maltreatment investigations in Michigan: A staggered interrupted time series study.

Objectives. To examine (1) the strategies regional public behavioral health boards employ to align county-based public social service agencies with private substance use treatment organizations, (2) regional variations in strategies, and (3) factors that affect community-board relationships. Methods. We conducted a multiple case study of 17 Ohio county-based systems implementing a cross-sector model to support parental substance use disorder (Ohio START). We applied template analyses to 48 small group interviews conducted in 2020-2021 with 104 staff from child welfare and behavioral health organizations and community boards. Results. Participants described direct and indirect ways that boards supported system alignment, funding, brokering of information and relationships, and planning. Reasons for boards not being involved included perceived needlessness and a lack of connection between the board and the community. Rural and Appalachian communities reported various forms of close integration of boards and communities. Conclusions. Behavioral health boards can support cross-system integration by reducing barriers to collaboration and enhancing community capacity to address complex public health issues, especially in resource-limited regions. Public Health Implications. Incorporating a centralized organization could mitigate implementation barriers and promote effectiveness in community collaborations, especially under resource constraints. (Am J Public Health. 2026;116(S3): S202-S209. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2026.308579).

Beyond "investigating" all survivors of intimate partner violence: When do agencies identify the need for ongoing protection services?

Problematic sexual behavior (PSB) among youth presents a persistent challenge within child welfare and multidisciplinary response systems. Because multidisciplinary responses shape investigation, referral, and service decisions, it is important to understand how professionals-including clinicians, law enforcement, child advocacy center staff, child welfare professionals, and prosecutors-perceive children who act out sexually on other children. This study examines how case and respondent characteristics jointly shape professional perceptions of PSB using vignette-based survey data from 363 multidisciplinary team members across Texas. Respondents assigned to vignettes involving a 14-year-old child displaying PSB were more likely than those assigned to a 10-year-old to agree the child was old enough to accept responsibility, knew the behavior was wrong, and should face criminal consequences. Political ideology, professional role, and geographic area of practice were each independently associated with these judgments. Mental health professionals and liberal-identifying respondents were less likely to endorse criminal consequences, while court/legal professionals and conservative-identifying respondents showed opposing patterns. Suburban practitioners were more likely than rural practitioners to endorse responsibility and knowledge of wrongdoing, while urban practitioners were less likely to endorse criminal consequences. Findings highlight the need for developmentally informed, coordinated approaches to training and intervention across multidisciplinary systems.

The evidence base for parent support groups in child welfare systems is limited but growing. Evaluation of such programs requires flexible and context-specific designs that capture both outcomes and mechanisms of change. This exploratory mixed-methods evaluation examined a peer-led support group program for parents who experienced child removal in a large Florida county to better understand how these programs operate and benefit parents working toward reunification. A total of 22 parents participated in weekly sessions facilitated by peer specialists with prior child welfare involvement. Quantitative assessments measured changes in psychosocial functioning and engagement in child welfare services, while semi-structured interviews (n = 8) explored participant perceptions of group processes and benefits. Significant decreases were observed in depression, trauma, and loneliness, alongside increases in perceived emotional support. Thematic analysis identified four interrelated themes that informed an empirically grounded conceptual framework describing the functions and benefits of support groups.This evaluation study demonstrates how mixed-methods approaches can yield actionable evidence from small scale community-based interventions and offers insight into the mechanisms that may inform future implementation and evaluation of peer-led models.

ABSTRACT Child welfare systems are increasingly adopting algorithmic decision-making (ADM) tools, but there has been limited work assessing the impact of such tools on people with disabilities. We address this gap by examining the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST) for disability-related bias. We obtained variables and coefficients used in the AFST from the Allegheny County Department of Human Services. We used data from the American Community Survey, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, and National Survey on Drug Use and Health to assess whether disabled parents and children would receive worse AFST scores compared to their non-disabled counterparts. Parents and children with disabilities were significantly more likely to be penalized by all elements of the AFST scoring we examined. These include socioeconomic indicators, healthcare utilization patterns, involvement with public benefits programs, and contact with the criminal legal system. Despite containing no explicit disability measures, the AFST effectively encodes disability status through proxy variables, potentially subjecting disabled parents and their children to disproportionate scrutiny and intervention. The AFST may reinforce rather than remedy historical biases against parents with disabilities, raising important questions about the role of algorithmic tools in public sector decision-making.

Europe occupies a powerful place in African migrant imaginaries as a site of economic redemption, social mobility, and structural stability. This paper interrogates the idea of Europe as a space of “better opportunities” for African migrants. While Europe offers measurable economic advantages; higher wages, social welfare systems, and remittance potential, these opportunities are unevenly distributed and embedded within racialized labour hierarchies and restrictive border regimes. African migrant narratives have increasingly challenged this long-held imagination of Europe. This paper examines how Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street and Helon Habila’s Travellers dismantle the myth of Europe by representing migration as a condition of prolonged exile, disillusionment, and existential unhomeliness. Drawing on the postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist thoughts, the paper argues that both novels reconfigure Europe not as a destination but as a liminal space of economic exploitation, bureaucratic violence, and psychic displacement. While Unigwe foregrounds the gendered commodification of African female bodies within sexual economies, Habila exposes the precarity of refugee masculinity and the endless temporariness of migrant life. Through close textual analysis, this study demonstrates that the migrant dream collapses into a crisis of belonging in which “home” becomes unattainable, fragmented, or reimagined beyond geography. The paper contributes to migration studies by reading exile as a shared yet gender-differentiated condition and by positioning contemporary African migrant fiction as a counter-narrative to Eurocentric fantasies of mobility and freedom.

Parental substance use in the child welfare system (CWS) is common, and collaboration between CWS and substance use treatment agencies is critical for parents' success. Research on the challenges to cross-system collaboration exists, but much of the published literature is dated despite recent efforts to improve cross-system collaboration. The current manuscript seeks to understand collaborative strategies used between child welfare and substance use treatment providers and their perceived effectiveness, identify facilitators and barriers to collaboration, and understand the impact of collaboration on child welfare system case and parent outcomes. Qualitative data analysis was conducted on semi-structured interviews, completed September 2023 - June 2024, with n = 31 CWS personnel (90.3% female; 96.8% White, Non-Hispanic) and n = 28 substance use service providers (96.4% female; 76% White) across Indiana. Collaborative strategies targeted facilitation of service referral and initial service connection between systems and ongoing care coordination. Beyond formal strategies, frontline personnel described informal efforts to improve collaboration. Facilitators to collaboration included positive attitudes towards collaboration and teamwork, such as understanding the importance of teamwork and respect for others' roles and responsibilities. Barriers to collaboration included workforce turnover and large caseloads, competing perspectives on how to address substance use (SU), and competing expectations (i.e., CWS focus on child safety versus SU provider focus on parent). Findings highlight the need for continued efforts to support collaboration between CWS and SU service agencies through organizational and broader policy and reiterate the benefits of collaboration on effectively supporting parents and families.

We propose a scalable framework that integrates a multi-output Random Forest classifier with a retrieval-augmented generation module to recommend government welfare schemes to citizens based on their demographic profiles. The system first applies a preprocessing pipeline that normalizes raw input features—such as age, income, occupation, and caste—using a fuzzy matching algorithm to resolve lexical inconsistencies in categorical variables. A multi-label Random Forest ensemble, comprising hundreds of decision trees, then predicts eligibility probabilities across all available schemes simultaneously, and a calibrated confidence threshold selects a candidate subset of schemes. To ensure factual accuracy in the natural language explanations delivered to users, we incorporate a retrieval-augmented generation component. This module embeds verified scheme descriptions into a high-dimensional vector space, retrieves the most relevant document chunks for the candidate schemes using cosine similarity, and feeds both the retrieved context and the user’s original query into an instruction-tuned large language model. The classification stage thus acts as a computational filter that narrows the retrieval search space, thereby improving both system efficiency and response precision. The primary contribution of this work lies in the novel coupling of an ensemble-based eligibility predictor with a retrieval-constrained generative model, which prevents hallucinated outputs while remaining adaptable to large-scale, heterogeneous citizen data. Experimental evaluations on synthetic datasets, designed to mimic real-world public records, demonstrate that the framework achieves high precision in eligibility prediction and generates coherent, evidence-backed recommendations. This approach has significant implications for making complex social welfare systems more accessible to underserved populations.

ABSTRACT The rapid expansion of the gig economy has raised growing concerns about the adequacy of social protection systems for workers engaged in non-standard employment. While many studies document the rise of platform-mediated work, limited empirical evidence examines how gig workers interact with formal welfare systems, particularly in developing countries. This study addresses this gap by analysing the determinants of social security coverage among gig workers in Indonesia. Using nationally representative microdata from the 2022 National Labour Force Survey, gig workers are identified as casual workers in non-agricultural sectors engaged in digitally mediated work activities. A probit regression model is employed to estimate the probability of accessing social protection, including health insurance, occupational accident insurance, or life insurance. The findings show that gig workers are significantly less likely to obtain social security coverage compared with workers in traditional employment arrangements, indicating a structural welfare gap associated with platform-based work. Furthermore, human capital characteristics such as education, training, and skills do not necessarily increase access to social protection among gig workers. These findings contribute by demonstrating how digital labour arrangements may reinforce welfare exclusion in developing labour markets and underscores the need for adaptive social protection policies in the evolving digital economy.

ABSTRACT Residential care is a key component of child welfare systems, particularly for adolescents with complex support needs. Trauma-informed care (TIC) emphasizes safety, predictability, and supportive relationships by recognizing the pervasive impact of trauma on development. While previous research has examined TIC extensively at the program level, less is known about how trauma-informed elements are represented in residential care service descriptions used in public procurement processes. This study examined how trauma-informed elements are represented in Finnish residential care service descriptions and how these elements relate to one another. A qualitative content analysis of documents, complemented by a co-occurrence analysis, was conducted on 84 anonymized residential care service descriptions. Following an abductive approach, the codes were refined into three trauma-informed elements: dyadic, systemic, and integrated. Trauma-informed dyadic elements, particularly key-worker meetings, were most frequently described. Systemic elements such as structured routines, youth and parent participation, and multi-professional collaboration were also widely described. However, explicit integration of these elements was rare. While dyadic and systemic structures supporting safety and participation were described, limited integration across elements suggests a need for more coherent and context-sensitive TIC models that bridge relational and organizational practices. These findings may also inform international discussions on how trauma-informed care can be operationalized and integrated within residential care systems.

ABSTRACT <italic>Background</italic> Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children with a disability are over-represented in child welfare systems worldwide. Despite this, little is known about their involvement with the Australian child protection system or their lived experiences. <italic>Method</italic> Led by Indigenous researchers and methodologies, qualitative findings from yarning sessions with 46 kinship carers across Western Australia informed this research. This research is part of the Indigenous Child Removals WA (I-CaRe WA) project. <italic>Results</italic> Difficulty accessing disability assessments and diagnoses for children resulted in a lack of access to disability support services and missed opportunities for early intervention. Priority areas for improvement included appropriate and accessible training for carers and practice support. <italic>Conclusion</italic> Urgent reform to account for the needs of Aboriginal kinship carers and children with disabilities in their care is required to improve their health and wellbeing.

The study investigated the relationship between off-campus residency and academic involvement of students from the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria who reside in the off-campus residences with administrative effectiveness as a mediating variable. This study was prompted by the concern around the growing numbers of off-campus students and how these experiences and institutional support systems might impact the academic engagement of students. A quantitative descriptive correlational research design was adopted for the study. The population comprised undergraduate students that lived off campus in the University of Ibadan, and 250 respondents was selected using purposive stratified sampling technique. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data and included the three scales: Off-Campus Residency, Administrative Effectiveness, and Academic Engagement. The instruments were highly reliable with the correlation coefficient of 0.78, 0.84 and 0.81 respectively. Descriptive data was used to describe the data, Pearson Product Moment correlation was applied to determine the correlation between the data, and mediation analysis was performed using Hayes' PROCESS Macro Model 4 at 0.05 significance level. The results indicated that there was a strong positive correlation between off-campus residence and academic involvement (r = .966, p &lt; 0.05). The correlation coefficient was relatively high, but off-campus residency was not treated as a residential category but instead as a multidimensional experiential construct that captures students' residential conditions, commuting experiences, issues of access and living environment. In addition, the study revealed a very high positive correlation between academic engagement and administrative effectiveness (r = .741, p &lt; 0.05). A mediation analysis also showed that the relationship between off-campus residency and academic engagement was partially mediated by administrative effectiveness (Effect = .0863; BootLLCI = .0523; BootULCI = .1178). The study found that residential status off campus and administrative effectiveness are important factors linked with academic engagement for off-campus students, and that administrative effectiveness partly explains how off-campus residency is linked to academic engagement. Based on the findings of this study, the university administration is recommended to consolidate the administration support system and institutional welfare system to off-campus students in order to improve the academic engagement of the students in the university.

This article examines how participants in the Norwegian Drug Court (ND) describe their everyday experiences of support, control, and motivation. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 15 men enrolled in the program, the study explores how participants contrasted ND with other parts of the welfare and justice systems. While correctional staff were described as supportive, respectful, and sometimes protective advocates, welfare institutions such as the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV) and health services were often experienced as stigmatizing and exclusionary. Through the lens of complexity theory, the findings suggest that motivation and hope did not arise from formal structures but from micro-level relational encounters that created temporary stability in otherwise fragmented systems. Yet these supports were fragile, contingent on individual professionals, and easily disrupted. The analysis argues that ND embodies a paradox: it offers care and continuity where other systems fail, but it does so within a framework of conditionality and control. Even in a strong Norwegian welfare state, rehabilitation remains dependent on the discretionary efforts of frontline workers, pointing to systemic vulnerabilities in how justice and welfare institutions respond to people with complex needs.

Many children who experience child maltreatment fatalities (CMF) or near fatalities (CMNF) are previously known to the child welfare system (CWS). Although in-home services and foster care (FC) are tools for preventing CMF/CMNF, relatively little research has examined how each is associated with subsequent CMF/CMNF. Using a nested case-control design and linked administrative data from Pennsylvania, this study examined how in-home services and FC following an initial CWS case were associated with the odds of future CMF and CMNFs (n = 171 cases and 777 controls). Relative to receiving no services, in-home services were not associated with reduced odds of CMF/CMNF (OR = 1.27, p = 0.201), whereas FC was associated with lower odds (OR = 0.54, p = 0.061), though this association did not reach statistical significance at p < .05. Relative to in-home services, FC was significantly associated with 58% lower odds of CMF/CMNF (OR = 0.42, p = 0.010). Although replication with larger samples is needed, findings suggest that FC, but not in-home services, is associated with reductions in CMF/CMNFs in the years following CWS involvement.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) care in Japan should be re-evaluated not simply as a matter of clinical choice but as a function of the public support system structure. In Japan, care is distinguished by a publicly funded model that supports home-based living and social participation following tracheostomy invasive ventilation. In contrast, Europe reflects a model centered on non-invasive ventilation and palliative care, and the United States reflects a system in which precision therapies are approved earlier but access remains highly unequal. Further, Canada reflects a model integrating multidisciplinary ALS clinics with Medical Assistance in Dying within a shared policy framework. These differences extend beyond treatment preferences and instead reflect broader social, institutional, and ethical configurations that shape the future of individuals with ALS. As access to emerging disease-modifying therapies increasingly depends on genetic testing, the central challenge in ALS care is shifting from end-of-life decision-making to the equitable distribution of precision medicine. Comparative reappraisal of national care models is therefore critical for understanding ALS not only as a neurological disease but also as a condition shaped by welfare systems, care infrastructure, and policy design.

Competing risk analysis of sociodemographic risk factors for child maltreatment among children in the legal custody of state of Illinois' child welfare system.

Kids count, or do they? The importance of accurate data for First Nations children in Canada's child welfare system.