Child welfare professionals' responses to domestic violence exposure among children

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Child welfare Domestic violence Child exposure to violence Child welfare professionals are expected to promptly assess the current safety and future risks of children reported to them. Developing more accurate assessment methods has been a growing concern in child welfare. The presence of domestic violence and children's exposure to it are factors that have been included in many current risk assessment models used by child welfare professionals. An online survey of 152 child welfare professionals was conducted in twenty counties in one midwestern state. Professionals reported on the importance of (a) types of violence in a child's home and (b) the child's level of involvement in that violence; they also responded to how two hypothetical scenarios of child exposure to and involvement in violence would affect their decision making. The results provide insight into how child welfare professionals assess child exposure and involvement in domestic violence as a perceived risk and guidance on the training needs of these professionals. Child welfare agencies are expected to promptly assess the current safety and future risks of children reported to them. Developing more accurate assessment methods has been a growing concern among child welfare agencies. This has led to the development of several highly structured and widely used assessment tools but also concerns about the depth of assessment regarding specific issues in families and how assessment information is applied. 1.2. Adult domestic violence in the child welfare caseload One specific assessment area on which the attention of child welfare agencies has focused in recent years is the degree to which children in their caseloads have been exposed to adult-to-adult domestic violence. A recent national survey found that 16.3% of American children of all ages have been exposed to domestic violence over their lifetime. Among children 14 years or older, more than one in three (34.6%) report lifetime exposure to domestic violence (Finkelhor, Turner, Ormrod & Hamby, 2009). Exposure to adult domestic violence is also thought to co-occur frequently with child physical abuse in many of these families A number of studies indicate that child welfare agencies have contact with many children from homes where adult domestic violence is occurring or has occurred. For example, nearly a third of 74 randomly selected families with open child protection cases in one small midwestern city were assessed by workers to also be experiencing domestic …