Bringing dignity to the assessment of safety for children who live with violence

Abstract

Fear dominates women and children’s experience of domestic violence. Fear of harm, and the consequences of others finding out, can mean mothers are reluctant to seek help. Ironically, these survival behaviours can be understood as non-protective by child protection practitioners. This article describes research undertaken in New South Wales (NSW) Australia to determine the impact on child protection practitioner perceptions of child safety when Response-Based Practice (RBP) questions are combined with the standard NSW Structured Decision Making (SDM) safety assessment. RBP reflects core social work values through questions that explore how victims respond to, resist and manage violence. A vignette experiment with a between-subjects design was used to compare child safety assessments by practitioners who watched an interview guided by SDM alone and practitioners who watched an interview using the combined ‘treatment’ (SDM+RBP) approach. Participants (N = 1,041) were randomly assigned to SDM and treatment groups. Participants who watched the treatment approach were significantly more likely to assess the mother as cooperative and protective and significantly less likely to indicate that the children would be taken from her care. Thus, the results demonstrate that understanding how women manage violence changes practitioner views about maternal protectiveness and child safety.