title: Child maltreatment: the collaboration of child welfare, mental health, and judicial system.
abstract: The alliance of child welfare, mental health, and legal systems has received little empirical attention, despite the magnitude of its impact on children and families. We examined the congruence of child protection agencies legal positions, court clinic recommendations, and judicial dispositions in a sample of 59 contested child maltreatment cases. Placement recommendations/decisions among all three systems were highly correlated, although the relationship was not so strong as to undermine the independence of any one system. Where there was disagreement between successive evaluations, it was in the direction of enhancing family integrity and parental access rights. We advanced three hypotheses to account for our findings: (a) changes in successive recommendations reflect the increasing sophistication of the assessment process; (b) changes reflect increasing distance from the family's ecology and are therefore increasingly ill informed; and (c) the changes are purely probabilistic, reflecting a drift toward the societal status quo.
authors.affiliation: Family Court Clinic, Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Butler
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Atkinson
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Magnatta
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Hood
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002649:Child Abuse / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D002651:Child Advocacy / Q000592:standards; D002655:Child Custody / Q000458:organization & administration; D002669:Child Welfare / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003657:Decision Making; D005192:Family Health; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007373:Interinstitutional Relations; D008297:Male; D008605:Mental Health Services / Q000458:organization & administration*; D009864:Ontario; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D012189:Retrospective Studies