خشونت خانگی و مسیرهای خدمات رفاه کودکان: یافته از سازمان ملی کودکان و نوجوانان بهزیستی

Domestic violence (DV) and child maltreatment co-occur in many families and this may lead to involvement with child welfare services (CWS). This study explores the role of domestic violence in CWS using data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being, a large, national probability sample of families investigated for child maltreatment. It relies on child welfare worker report of active DV or a history of DV to examine the association of DV with child maltreatment type, substantiation, and placement of children into out of home care. Maltreatment type classification was similar for children with and without exposure to DV. Families with active DV were substantiated for child maltreatment at higher rates than other groups, but DV was not a powerful contributor to the CWS decision-making process. Families with co-occurring DV and maltreatment often had high levels of cumulative risks, and children in families with the highest level of cumulative risk were 10 times more likely to be placed into foster care than children in families assessed with low levels of risk. The policy and practice implications of these findings are discussed.

Knowledge regarding the co-occurrence of domestic violence and child maltreatment has grown over the past several years. Strong evidence indicates that children exposed to adult domestic violence (DV) are at greater risk of also being maltreated with reviews of the empirical literature indicating that upwards to half of children of battered women are also physically maltreated (Appel & Holden, 1998, Edleson, 1999 and O'Leary et al., 2000). Co-occurring exposure to domestic violence and child maltreatment increasingly brings families to the attention of child welfare services (CWS). Yet, the involvement of CWS with caregivers exposed to DV is little understood. Available research indicates that CWS has contact with many children from homes where DV is also occurring or has occurred. Nearly a third of 74 randomly selected families with open CWS in one small Midwestern city were assessed by child welfare workers as also experiencing DV (Shepard & Raschick, 1999). Child welfare workers identified DV as a risk factor in 36% of 407 families referred for an investigation of maltreatment in New Hampshire (Kantor & Little, 2003) and again in 36% of 383 cases investigated in a large urban center in Minnesota (Edleson & Beeman, 1999). Finally, in a statewide study of child protection referrals, English, Edleson, and Herrick (this issue) recently found that DV was present in almost half (47%) of cases accepted for investigation and assigned a moderate to high level of risk.