The incidence of reported child abuse is fast growing in the past few years. To identify a child abuse case, a reliable and valid risk assessment is pertinent for a child protection worker to make appropriate treatment decision. In 2011, according to the Control Yuan, a child protection worker, who once made inconsistent decision from risk assessment of possible harm after a child going home, was impeached for a child death incidence due to that worker’s negligence. The extant literature in Taiwan gave no valid information of how a risk assessment model could be effective to identify a child abuse case. This study aims to test predicting power of a proposed risk assessment model and examine how child protection workers would make inconsistent decision from their risk assessment. A data set provided by Tao-Yuan County Child Protection Team was used to do analysis. A particular form of risk assessment tool was completed by every child protection worker after investigation during 2011. A total of 2,142 cases reported were investigated in 2011, but only 2003 cases were risk assessed in forms. Due to statistical efficiency, a total of 607 cases were stratified randomly sampled from the sampled population. And a qualitative approach was used to collect data from four child protection workers regarding inconsistent decisions they made in risk assessment procedure. Results showed that almost eighty percent of the sampled cases assessed were rated as children with the lower risk and 86.3% were not substantiated for further treatment. In 20.4% of the sampled cases rated as children of higher risks, 61.2% were substantiated as child abuse cases for further treatment services, but the others did not receive treatment. In prediction, the indicators of global risk level, wounds of the body, frequency of the abuse acts, care and living conditions, degree of threat from the abuser, attitude and expectations towards the child, and economic stress were found to have prediction power on child abuse case substantiation. Since some cases with higher level assessed were not substantiated, four first line workers were in-depth interviewed to explain the inconsistency. Two sets of reasons were given regarding the technical issues related to assessing process (decision before filling the form of risk assessment) and the difficulties related to using the risk assessment tool (some concern for the validity). Implications about developing effective risk assessment models and promoting precision between investigation and decision-making are included.

資料來源:http://handle.ncl.edu.tw/11296/ndltd/32432451520806595113