Preventing child protective services system involvement by asking families what they need

Abstract

In the mid-2000s, the Wisconsin Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board developed an intervention called the Community Response Program (CRP), intended to fill an important gap in the continuum of services to address child maltreatment. Specifically, families reported to child protective services (CPS) for alleged child maltreatment, but diverted (i.e., their cases were screened out at the hotline call stage or closed following an investigation), were offered voluntary case management services tailored to each family's unique circumstances and self-determined needs. The goal of CRP was to significantly reduce future contacts with the child welfare system within this population.Beginning in late 2016, seven CRP sites representing 16 Wisconsin counties participated in a randomized control trial to determine the effectiveness of the intervention for reducing CPS involvement. The sample involved families (N = 12,373) diverted from CPS across the program sites. Findings include that CRP staff were able to contact 38% of families in the treatment group, and 12% of families (32% of those contacted) enrolled in the program. CRP participants identified a range of service needs, but over half identified one or more economic needs as service priorities. Just over one-third identified needs related to parenting, and about one quarter identified mental and behavioral health needs. Among participants, over half attained at least one self-determined service goal, and approximately one-quarter attained all of their service goals.To address selection into treatment, we used propensity score matching techniques to conduct treatment-on-the-treated analyses. Results showed that in some program sites, modest to large declines in child welfare system involvement were observed for the treatment versus the control group, and these declines were much more pronounced and consistent in the subgroup that had a screened-out index report compared to those with an investigated index report. However, in some sites, increases in child welfare system involvement occurred in the treatment group relative to the control group, suggesting that the CRP intervention may not be equally helpful to all families, or requires modifications to enhance success in some sites. The implications of these findings for child maltreatment prevention are discussed.