Australian Social Work Vol. 59, No. 1, March 2006, pp. 86 /98
Risk Assessment in Child Protection: Problem Rather than Solution? Philip Gillingham
Risk assessment in child protection services has been promoted as the most reliable way to ensure that maltreatment to children is prevented and has become central to practice with children and families. However, recent research in Australia has suggested that children are being left in unsafe situations, leading to further maltreatment, by the very agencies responsible for their protection. The present article explores the reasons why child protection has become central to child protection practice and presents a wide ranging critical appraisal of risk assessment and its application. It is argued that risk assessment is a flawed process and, as a central tenet of practice, is implicated in any problems that children’s protective services face. Consequently, any future reconfiguration of services for children in need of protection needs to include a re-evaluation of the efficacy of risk assessment. Keywords: Child Protection; Risk Assessment Introduction Risk-assessment instruments have become central to practice in child protection (Parton et al., 1997) and are increasingly being used in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US and the UK (Parton, 1998; Goddard et al., 1999). However, recent research in child protection practice has shown that some children at risk of maltreatment in Victoria are not being protected by professionals employed by the state; they are being left in situations where their safety and well-being is in jeopardy. The scale of this problem is hinted at by the statistic that in Victoria in 2002 2003, in 40% of cases where abuse/risk of abuse was substantiated, previous abuse or neglect (or risk thereof) had already been substantiated (Department of Human Services, 2003): in short, children were being re-abused/neglected. In the present article, it will be argued that risk assessment in child protection practice is a flawed process and that, because of its centrality to practice, it is /
Correspondence to: Philip Gillingham, School of Health and Social Development, Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences, Geelong, Vic. 3217, Australia. Email:
[email protected] ISSN 0312-407X (print)/ISSN 1447-0748 (online) # 2006 Australian Association of Social Workers DOI: 10.1080/03124070500449804
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implicated in the current problems that children’s protective services face. A wideranging critical appraisal of risk assessment and its application will be presented to explain and explore the problems of an uncritical acceptance and application of risk assessment to child protection practice. The discipline of sociology will be drawn upon to account for why and how risk assessment has become central to child protection practice. Critiques of risk assessment as a practice will then be explored and this will be further problematised by drawing from research about how decisions about action are made in Child Protection. Social Context of Child Protection: The Risk Society (Beck, 1992) In 1992, Ulrich Beck introduced the term ‘risk society’ to describe the dominance of the discourse of risk in current society. Although Beck claims that we now live in a ‘risk society’, this is not to say that life is now more risky than it was before; rather, that a concern with risk and its management has become central to everyday life (Ferguson, 1997). In the present section, the wider social context of the ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992) will be explored and the influence it has had on social policy and the organisation and practice of child-protection services will be examined. Changes in the meaning of the word ‘risk’ can be traced to specific periods in history and the current meaning of risk has its roots in the rise of science and mathematics, in particular the language of probability. In modern thinking, rationality and scientific knowledge have been combined with a belief that the natural world can be measured, controlled and predicted (Kemshall, 2002) and this has been extended to produce the belief that the social world can be similarly controlled (Lupton, 1999). The implication of a rationalised discourse of risk is that risk is ultimately controllable, as long as expert knowledge can be properly brought to bear on it (Lupton, 1999). Because the modern notion of risk presupposes that a decision can be made regarding how it is possible to avoid a hazard or danger (Joffe, 1999), liability and accountability have become key features of risk: when an event occurs resulting in adverse consequences, someone must be held to account (Douglas, 1992). In this way, failure to negotiate a risk adequately is constructed as an individual failure rather than understood as a result of social processes outside the individual’s control (Kemshall, 2002). Social problems become reconstructed as individual choices and responsibilities and, consequently, governments are able to avoid risk to themselves by displacing responsibility onto the individual or, as a last resort, on the mediating professionals within the agencies of social welfare provision (Kemshall, 2002). Therefore, ‘risk society’ has a tendency to become a ‘scapegoat society’ (Beck, 1992). As the concept of risk and its management has become central to life, notions of high risk and risk assessment have become central to child protection practice (Ferguson, 1997; Parton et al., 1997). The language and concepts of risk assessment
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have also found their way into the practice of agencies that deal ostensibly with family support rather than child protection (Spratt, 2001). This new discourse of risk in child protection practice has changed the nature and focus of social work with children and families, affecting the relationships between practitioners and clients and the organisation of practice (Parton, 1998). Formalised assessment and bureaucratic risk management systems have become a key response to the uncertainty of risk (Kemshall, 2002) and this has been mirrored in child protection practice as it has become increasingly prescribed by bureaucratic procedures, risk assessment tools and the use of information technology (Howe, 1992; Ferguson, 1997; Goddard et al., 1999). The specific implication of the modern discourse of risk for child protection practice is that harm to children can be prevented (Lupton, 1999). This implication is crucial to understanding both how and why risk assessment has become so accepted in child protection practice. The agenda for the assessment and treatment of abuse was set by the medical profession because it was doctors who ‘discovered’ child abuse (Goddard & Carew, 1993) and perhaps it was doctors who also set the agenda for the role of risk assessment in Child Protection. For example, Kempe and Kempe (1978, cited in Goddard & Carew, 1993) claimed that they could predict, with remarkable accuracy, those families at risk of abusing their children. Understanding how the concept of risk and its management has become a dominant and pervasive discourse in ‘Western’ society is essential to understanding why the use of risk assessment tools in child protection practice has been so readily and uncritically accepted by practitioners (author’s observation). Although it has been argued that risk assessment has provided child protection practitioners with the opportunity to manage risk better and prevent child maltreatment (Ferguson, 1997), there has, at the same time, been a growing critique of the application of risk assessment to practice. This critique ranges from social constructionist perspectives that challenge the application of a positivist epistemology to a socially constructed problem to empirical research about how risk assessment is used to construct the phenomenon of child abuse and guide the decisions of practitioners. In the next section, this critique will be explored, starting with concerns about the research that underpins risk assessment. Risk assessment in Child Protection Practice Because there is no clear definition of what constitutes child abuse, research about child abuse has been hard to interpret and, consequently, it has been hard to identify strategies to deal with it (Parton et al., 1997). What constitutes abuse and risk of abuse in one jurisdiction may differ considerably from another, making comparative studies very difficult (Bromfield & Higgins, 2003). Methodological problems also arise over definitions of the substantiation of abuse and risk of abuse. Concepts such as risk of harm and actual harm are, in practice, used interchangeably, as are categories of maltreatment, such as physical and neglect (Bromfield et al., 2003b).
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Since child abuse was ‘discovered’ by the medical profession, much of the research on child abuse has followed the medicoscientific model of causation (Goddard & Carew, 1993; Parton et al., 1997). In summary, this model of causation has directed researchers to identify factors and characteristics associated with abuse, to assume that these are qualitatively different from the rest of the population and are in some way related to the cause of the problem. Identifying these causative factors should then lead to the identification, prediction and prevention of abuse (Parton et al., 1997). However, much of the research into child abuse has only been drawn from children who have been reported to child protection agencies, no control groups have been used and, so, it is not known whether the factors identified by such research are specific to this group or not (Parton et al., 1997). Indeed, the findings of such studies have been inconsistent and contradictory, ‘. . . while alcohol and drug abuse are often cited as principal risk factors in child abuse, the evidence is very uncertain’ (Parton et al., 1997, p. 53). Child abuse has been defined as a social rather than a medical problem and, from this, it follows that child abuse can be considered a social construction (Dingwall, et al., 1983; Parton et al., 1997). However, in the process of constructing a definition of child abuse in the practice of child protection services, the existence and nature of social problems cannot be separated from the values of those who would identify them (Dingwall et al., 1983). The same process of construction applies to research about child abuse, where it must be acknowledged that the researcher brings his or her own values and beliefs to the research (McDermott, 1996). The reliability of risk assessment tools in child protection agencies in predicting future harm to children has also been questioned and claims as to its predictive ability have been greeted with scepticism. As Besharov notes, ‘. . . in the rush to do something about a long ignored problem, they have sought to protect children in possible danger from future maltreatment, as if this were even remotely possible’ (Besharov, 1985, pp. 339 40). Child protection practice in the UK rarely exceeds 70% in accuracy of predictions in protecting children from future abuse (Anglin, 2002, cited in Leschied et al., 2003). Although some research has shown that actuarial models of risk assessment may have the greatest potential to improve decision making in child protection practice, it has been argued that they are also limited in their usefulness because they are derived from statistical generalisations believed to be predictive of the behaviour of groups of like individuals (Goddard et al., 1999). However, child protection services are not concerned with groups of individuals; they are expected to make predictions about individual children in families (Parton et al., 1997; Goddard et al., 1999). A particular problem that arises is that practitioners may be lulled into a false sense of security in believing that generalisations about behaviours automatically apply to specific cases and are therefore reliably predictive (Reder et al., 1993). Although the identification of various risk factors associated with the abuse of children may assist in informing policies concerning priorities in the allocation of resources, because of the complexity of child abuse, they cannot be used to predict with any accuracy who /
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(individually) will or will not be abused (Parton et al., 1997). Even the validity of such generalisations about factors that predict the likelihood of abuse is questionable: a review of 10 decision-making/risk-assessment models in the US found that there was no apparent consensus on what should be considered as the most important abuse-related criteria (DePanfilis and Scannapieco, 1994, cited in D’Cruz, 2004). The difficulty of predicting the behaviour of individuals is demonstrated by research on the Washington State Risk Assessment Matrix, which showed that the matrix exhibits high levels of measurement error and increasing instability over time, which limits its capacity to predict new allegations of abuse (Camasso & Jagannathan, 2000). Actuarial models of risk assessment are seriously flawed by the number of false negatives they produce (failing to identify children who go on to be abused) and the number of false positives that are mistakenly included (children who will never be abused; Parton et al., 1997). Research has also drawn attention to the way that risk-assessment tools are applied in practice. The use of risk-assessment checklists may limit the assessment of a child’s situation by leading practitioners to focus their assessment only on the factors it contains (Reder et al., 1993). Practitioners may resort to a mechanical check down the list of risk factors rather than processing their information and observations, when it may the interaction between factors rather than just their existence that is significant to the prediction of future harm (Reder et al., 1993). Focusing on combinations of risk factors, or even the interactions between them, has serious implications for the way that workers practice. Practice no longer takes the form of face-to-face relationships between the professional and client; rather, it resides in managing and monitoring a range of abstract factors deemed liable to produce risk for children (Parton, 1998). The consequent lack of contact between practitioners and clients may result in the thoughts, feelings and words of children not receiving sufficient attention (Goddard et al., 1999). In trying to predict the future for a child, the meaning of a particular episode of abuse that has already occurred may be ignored and harm that they have already suffered becomes minimised (Goddard et al., 1999). The effects of cumulative harm to a child, by a series of episodes of abuse or chronic neglect, may also be ignored by focusing on what may happen to a child in the future (Victorian Child Death Review Committee, 2002). The accountability of practitioners for decisions and actions that arises from the use of risk-assessment instruments has also emerged as an important issue in practice (Parton, 1998). It has been suggested that risk assessment instruments are being used by bureaucratic, managerialist organisations to protect themselves from blame when tragedies occur (Goddard et al., 1999). Having found individual practitioners to blame for tragedies, a wider agenda is served in that the basic social order remains unchallenged (Hallett, 1989, cited in Reder et al., 1993). The concept of blame, arising from the construction of responsibility, using risk assessment, also applies to the parents of children (Bromfield et al., 2003a) as parents become pathologised (Thorpe, 1994). A consequence of blaming individuals is that no consideration is
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given to the process of socialisation that leads adults to harm children, or to social values that sanction a power imbalance between men, women and children or to the harsh and depriving conditions in which many families live (Hallett, 1989, cited in Reder et al., 1993). This overview of risk assessment has served to illustrate the limitations and possible dangers to children of its uncritical application in child protection practice. The main contention of the present paper also concerns how risk-assessment instruments are applied in practice and to suggest that their application is as problematic as their conceptualisation. An example that illustrates this point is research into the use of the Illinois CANTS-17B risk-assessment tool that showed that staff deliberately inflated initial scores of cases in order to get clients to accept child protection services (Lyle & Graham, 2000). To provide some context for the use of risk-assessment tools in practice, research about how decisions are made in child protection services will be considered in the next section. Decision-making in Child Protection In the mid 1990s, there was serious concern that practice in child protection services was not well informed by research and more research was required to inform decision making about children suffering or at risk of suffering significant harm (Department of Health, 1995). Evidence-based practice has been promoted as the new direction for social work and child protection services in particular (Department of Health, 2000; Webb, 2001), but there has been increasing interest in how such ‘evidence’ is applied in practice in response to the growing awareness that this is not a straightforward and unproblematic process (Sheppard et al., 2000). This has profound implications for the use of risk-assessment tools in child protection practice. In this section, the efficacy of using risk-assessment models in Child Protection will be problematised by presenting research about how knowledge is applied and decisions are made in practice. Research has shown that people are not rational thinkers who have occasional lapses; rather, they create rules that reduce difficult judgemental tasks to simpler ones by restricting the amount of information they consider (Munro, 1999). These cognitive short-cuts to aid decision making, known as heuristics, may take different forms and may be combined together in use (Vaughan & Hogg, 1995). A particular example is the ‘availability’ heuristic, which guides decision making about the likelihood of an event occurring according to how quickly similar instances or associations come to mind. Another is the ‘false consensus effect’, in which people tend to see their own behaviour as typical and assume that, under similar circumstances, others would behave in the same way (Vaughan & Hogg, 1995). Such theoretical constructs, borrowed from the disciplines of cognitive and social psychology, may account for some of the observations of researchers in child protection practice. Munro (1999) made the following observations of the way that information was used to make decisions in child protection practice. Practitioners were found to be
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uncritical of new information about a child or family if it supported their view of the family and, conversely, they tended to be sceptical about new information if it conflicted with their view. This led to practitioners being very slow to revise their judgements about families and to focus on a narrow range of information about a family. This phenomenon was also found by Reder et al. (1993) and these authors referred to this restricted consideration of information about cases as ‘automatic thinking’. Along with ‘automatic thinking’, the authors also identified two categories of ‘fixed views’ in practitioners about families: (1) sociopolitical attitudes (e.g. differentiated views about how people should behave according to class status); and (2) strong personal or professional views. Munro’s (1999) research also supported the notion that facts are more memorable if they are vivid, concrete and emotive and the most recent information comes to mind more easily. For practitioners, this led to a preoccupation with what was happening now in a case, again narrowing the perspective taken of the case. This preoccupation prevented practitioners from standing back from the case and considering patterns of behaviour and cumulative factors in chronic abuse and neglect. This finding is supported by observations that the application of riskassessment tools to practice tends to minimise the effects of abuse on children and ignore cumulative harm (Goddard et al., 1999). Dingwall et al. (1983) found that the actions and decision-making of practitioners was affected by what they termed the ‘rule of optimism’. In applying this ‘rule of optimism’, practitioners tended to view the behaviour and intentions of families in the most favourable light. The ‘rule of optimism’ is made up of two cognitive devices. ‘Cultural relativism’ refers to the tendency to try not to be judgemental about how other people live and stems from the belief that all cultures are equally valid and that all ways of rearing children may be similarly valid. ‘Natural love’ refers to the belief that all parents instinctively love their children and want the best for them, despite how they may go about achieving this. Support for the application of the ‘rule of optimism’ and the selective ways in which practitioners recall information has been demonstrated by research that has shown that practitioners tend to underestimate the levels of violence present in the families they deal with when asked to recall such information from memory (Stanley & Goddard, 2002). Dingwall et al. (1983) expand their critique of decision making to cases where they observed the phenomenon of ‘defensible decision making’. This refers to a rationale for making a particular decision that can be promoted as the best decision, sometimes because it is presented as the only decision that could have been made. ‘Defensible decision making’ adds a new influence to the process of decision making in the form of accountability. Accountability and its influence on decision making is not straightforward because there may be a tension between who or what the decision maker feels more accountable to (the client or the organisation). In an organisation that is perceived to be overloaded, the decision not to take action may be the more defensible because it means the commitment of scarce resources does not have to be justified. On a more individual level, the decision to take no action in a case where
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parents are likely to be very hostile means that managers do not have to justify to staff why they may be placing them in situations that pose a risk to their safety. The proposal by Stanley and Goddard (2002) that practitioners in Child Protection may also be behaving like hostages in the face of actual or potential violence adds another important dimension to the range of influences on decision making in child protection services: workers may make decisions for action/inaction in order to avoid or appease their ‘captor’. In summary, practitioners tend to use information selectively when making any assessment or decision for action and they may be subject to influences that are not readily apparent to themselves or an observer. Although it may be argued that the application of standardised risk-assessment tools may serve to identify and counteract the ‘flaws’ that arise in decision making in child protection practice, it is argued here that these ‘flaws’ exist within, and are even masked by, the application of riskassessment tools. These ‘flaws’ exist within the practice of risk assessment for two reasons. One reason is that, as Sheppard et al. (2000) point out, the application of knowledge in practice, however strong its claim to being empirical in the positivist sense, is not a straightforward process and is contingent on human agency. The second reason relates to the imposition of a positivist epistemology to a problem that has its causes in the less easily rationalised domain of the ‘social’ rather than the ‘physical’ world (Parton, 1998), as Webb (2001) illustrates in his critique of evidencebased practices (which includes risk assessment). Such ‘flaws’ are masked by risk assessment because of the current dominance of the risk discourse in Western societies and the elevation of positivist epistemologies, as represented by evidencebased practice in social work practice (Webb, 2001). So far, it has been argued that risk assessment is flawed both in its conceptualisation and application in child protection practice. In the next section, a recent development in child protection practice that sought to address some of the unintended consequences of risk assessment will be explored. A Recent Development in the Application of Risk Assessment A recent development in the way that risk assessment has been applied in child protection practice is the shift to identifying the source of protection (safety factors) for a child as well as the source of harm. A tendency to privilege safety factors has been noted in practice and has been referred to as ‘risk insurance’ rather than a serious attempt to predict the future behaviours of parents and carers (Parton, 1997). However, approaches to child protection practice that use risk assessment to identify (and strengthen) sources of protection have emerged from strengths-based approaches, offering ‘solutions’ that go beyond the monitoring of potentially abusive factors. This section will offer a critique of these approaches as the new direction for the application of risk assessment in child protection practice. An example of a strengths-based approach to child protection practice is Turnell and Edwards (1999) ‘signs of safety’ approach. This approach to child protection
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practice emerged as a response to concerns that practice had, in focusing almost exclusively on the deficits of parents and carers, led to adversarial and non-productive working relationships with parents (Turnell and Edwards, 1999). The ‘signs of safety’ approach is a development from risk assessment rather than an alternative; Turnell and Edwards (1999) state very clearly that their approach should be underpinned by ‘sound’ risk assessment. The authors warn that just looking for ‘signs of safety’ could lead to naı¨ve practice that does not adequately protect children and stress that the focus on safety in their approach should not be considered as ‘. . . an avoidance of the issue of danger and harm, but as a mechanism for finding a way forward that will resolve the problem’ (Turnell and Edwards, 1999, p. 38). Although an approach to practice that recognises the importance of working with parents to promote positive change is very welcome, practice approaches that rely on risk assessment, such as Turnell and Edwards’ (1999) strengths-based approach, also rely on an idealised form of decision making that, as demonstrated by research presented in an earlier section of the present paper, does not exist in practice. Such reliance undermines the promise of the approach to provide ‘solutions’ that protect children. The new emphasis on safety factors in risk assessment can also be harmful to children because it can potentially shift the focus of practitioners away from the factors that place children at risk of harm, as evidenced in critiques of the gendered nature of child protection practice. The tendency in child protection practice of focusing attention on the source of protection for children, namely mothers as responsible for protecting their children from potentially abusive males, has been strongly criticised in research (e.g. Stanley & Goddard, 1993; Farmer & Owen, 1998; D’Cruz, 2002; Scourfield, 2002). By focusing attention on the mothers of children, child protection agencies have failed to engage with the men in children’s lives and, by doing so, have failed to address the real problem of the relationships between men and children (Hood, 2001). The children in such situations are only given short-term protection because the real issue of why men can be violent towards them (and their mothers) has not been addressed (Hood, 2001). In summary, risk assessment has been applied to identify the sources of possible protection for children as well as the sources of harm. Although it could be argued that both the sources of harm and protection should be foci for action by childprotective services, there is evidence that, in practice, this shift has led to an overemphasis on the source of protection. This over-emphasis has led to mothers being held entirely responsible for the protection of their children, with resources being directed to monitoring their behaviours as ‘safety factors’, to the exclusion of addressing the real threats to the safety of children, namely the behaviour of the perpetrators of abuse to children. Focusing on the behaviours of individuals (be they a source of harm or protection) does not, however, address the structural or social factors that contribute to the abuse of children, as outlined in the section above that outlines the discourse of the ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992).
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Discussion Following the cues from the wider social context, the practice of Child Protection has embraced risk assessment as the most appropriate way to decide when and how to protect children. However, combining critiques of risk assessment and research that focuses on how risk assessment is used to inform decision making in child protection practice demonstrates that risk assessment may be a seriously flawed practice. So far, the present paper has focused on the micro practices of risk assessment in child protection practice. An examination of the context in which risk assessment is practiced reveals that there are systemic factors that also affect the operationalisation of risk assessment. The number of reports or notifications to protective services has risen markedly over the past decade in the developed nations and it has been suggested that risk assessment has been used as practice in order to ‘gatekeep’ the allocation of limited resources by identifying the most vulnerable children (Parton et al., 1997). Notifications to protective services in Victoria have also increased markedly and although the rate of increase may have slowed, the number of notifications rose 20% between 1996 1997 and 2002 2003 (from 31 707 to 37 967; Department of Human Services, 2003). Over the same time period, the number of children subject to legal protective orders rose from 7034 to 7687 (Department of Human Services, 2003). One positive conclusion that can be drawn from these statistics is that more children are being protected, but the figures also point to the fact that protective services are becoming overloaded and this, in the absence of a corresponding increase in resources, creates pressure to reduce demand. Risk assessment can become the means by which demand is reduced (or regulated) by, as Parton et al. (1997) point out, directing resources to the most vulnerable children. However, a major problem in how demand is being regulated is evidenced by the fact in 40% of cases where abuse/ risk of abuse was substantiated, previous abuse had already been substantiated (Department of Human Services, 2003). It may be that working definitions of what constitutes ‘risk’ and ‘safety’ are therefore influenced by the pressure of demand, rather than having any fixed meaning that arises from an evidence-based approach to practice. Although the present paper has so far presented a dim view of the practice of child protection in Victoria, this is not its purpose: the purpose is to highlight that the practice of risk assessment is problematic and is worthy of further research. The Department of Human Services in Victoria has, in recognition of significant problems in its child-protection system, taken some very positive steps to improve its services. In 2002, the Department of Human Services published An Integrated Strategy for Child Protection and Placement Services, which provided detailed analysis of statistical data relating to the demand for protective services and clear strategies for the prevention of abuse and neglect. In 2003, the Department of Human Services published Protecting Children: The Child Protection Outcomes Project, which was a detailed analysis of research about the efficacy of protective services in Victoria. The /
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report proposes that ‘. . . Victoria’s child protection system does well what it was set up to do’ (p. vi) but, in short, proposes that the system needs to change by adopting a broader approach in developing interventions to improve the welfare of children and families. It is also pertinent to note that significant funding has also been made available to develop the strategies proposed by each of the reports. The content of these reports is not the focus of the present paper but. rather, their omission. Both reports are constructively critical of the operation of the child-protection service in Victoria and propose solutions, yet neither explores how risk assessment, which is central to the operation of the service, may be implicated in the problems they identify. This omission is indicative of the uncritical acceptance of risk assessment in child protection practice, explained by the dominance of the discourse of risk in the context of the ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992). However services are reconfigured in the future, research is required that, in opposition to what has been identified as the dominant discourse of risk, critically evaluates how risk assessment is applied in practice to inform any process of service improvement. The approach taken in the present paper in terms of theorising about the application of risk assessment in child protection practice, although drawing from academic literature, is grounded in the experience of a practitioner. It is an attempt by a practitioner to make sense of observations made ‘in the field’ and, as a process, has included both ‘reflection in action’ and ‘reflection on action’ (Schon, 1983). It has also been a critical approach, attempting to uncover the assumptions that pervade the application of risk assessment in child protection practice. The actual development of this process also owes much to the post-modern concept of reflexivity in social work practice, which proposes that we question not only what we know, but how we know in that our own knowledge claims become an object for scrutiny (Taylor and White, 2000). Conclusions In the present article, the centrality of risk assessment to child protection practice has been explained and the application of risk assessment has been critiqued to demonstrate that it is potentially a flawed process that may not live up to the promise that risk to the safety and well-being of children can be predicted and managed. It has been argued that risk assessment is implicated in the problems that children’s protective services currently face and that any reconfiguration of services needs to include a re-evaluation of the efficacy of risk assessment (in its current form) as a central tenet of child protection practice. Acknowledgements The author acknowledges the help and support of Dr Heather D’Cruz (Deakin University) and Ms Leah Bromfield (Child Protection Clearing House) in the conceptualisation of this article.
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