Risk Assessment

To be both effective and just, child protective services must balance children’s rights to be safe from maltreatment with families’ rights to raise their children without government interference. These are not competing rights. Strengthening and supporting families to safely care for their own children can uphold both.

The more fundamental question is, how much authority is needed to ensure a particular child’s safety, and what criteria do we use to justify more comprehensive and sometimes intrusive oversight, monitoring, and intervention?

Risk assessment technologies were researched and developed to inform these complex and challenging decisions. Yet, risk assessment is still not universally – or even widely – used in direct practice.

Our work explores the goals of risk assessment, compares the effectiveness of different approaches, and explains how risk assessment drives decisions throughout the life of the case.  We also address widely adopted language and concepts that have further confused rather than clarified this essential child welfare skill.