Assessing the risk of child sexual abuse in litigious families in the family court

Abstract

This chapter discusses assessment of the risk of child sexual abuse in litigious families in family courts. Although there is not much reliable data available in Western Australia, in 1994 approximately 6% of all allegations of child abuse occurred within child custody disputes before the Family Court. Despite being influential and fundamental, there is no standard procedure as to how risk assessments in child abuse allegations in divorcing families are conducted. This is problematic as these matters are complex due to the nature of allegations of abusive behaviour, family systems, situations, and variation in available resources. Research consistently indicates that professional decision-making in child protection is subject to bias, and varies significantly even between expert clinicians. Due to such problems, child protection decision-making has been criticized as inappropriate and inconsistent. In the civil domain it is not possible to rely on traditional sexual risk assessment devices such as the STATIC-99 or even comprehensive risk measures such as the SVR-20. Static or actuarial measures assess a small number of historical factors shown on the basis of research to predict recidivism over a period of years. The Children's Research Center (CRC) have developed both actuarial instruments to assess risk of abuse including sexual abuse (The Family Risk of Abuse and Neglect: FRAAN) and structured assessment devices (e.g., Family Strengths and Needs Assessment: FSNA). Although the CRC have not gone so far, as yet, to produce their FSNA device as a fully structured risk assessment, in research reported by Bolton and Lennings, the FSNA does lend itself quite well to a structured risk assessment device for child abuse. These two devices will briefly be described in this chapter. To manage the uncertainty and bias a structured decision system is required. Part two of this chapter reviews the risk assessment structure for allegations of sexual abuse within Family and Children's Court settings. Part three reports on the development of a structured decision making system that combines the risk assessment tools and risk assessment structure in Family and Children's Court domains.