October 2008Vol. 9, No. 8Assessing Child Safety Through Substantiation of Maltreatment Reports
ACTION for Child Protection recently posted "Child Safety and Substantiation of Child Maltreatment" as the August 2008 article in its series on child safety. The article describes typical child protective services practice in which workers are required to conduct investigations to substantiate, or confirm, that an act of abuse or neglect, as reported, did in fact occur. The article questions whether such investigations can reliably determine whether a child is actually safe and suggests that a broader safety assessment may be a more appropriate response to reports of suspected maltreatment.
View this article and the full archive of child safety articles on the ACTION for Child Protection website.